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News and Views About the United States
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Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
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By Tafataona P. Mahoso
November 6, 2005
The
Sunday Mail of Zimbabwe - Original Article (English) 
Progressive leaders within the African Union and elsewhere are calling on those that work toward U.N. reform to first form themselves into a global resistance movement against Nazi-like imperialism, which is led today by U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But in order for this global movement against imperialism to succeed, it must understand the Nazi elements of the new unilateralism, and prepare to face new and truly vicious forms of intervention, far different from the liberal interventions that prevailed between 1945 and 1975.
The first thing to keep in mind is the continuity between liberal imperialism and rightwing imperialism. The Nazi-like "elements" that came out into the open after the collapse of the former Soviet Union were recruited, nurtured and even deployed during the liberal years. Therefore it should come as no surprise that one of the hotbeds of White liberal activism in the 1945-1975 period - the Scandinavian countries - has turned out to be among the most reactionary, rightwing and racist collaborators with North American unilateralism. Rightwing imperialism is merely reaping what liberal interventionism sowed.
In my PhD thesis in the mid-1980s, I concluded that one of the purposes of White liberal activism in Africa was to capture and groom the future leaders of Africa on behalf of imperialism. What was not clear in the mid-1980s was that the new right-wing would reap the benefits of White liberal activism, and then demobilize the liberal activist movement altogether, replacing it with NGOs dependent on right-wing financial support.
But what do we mean when we say that the new right-wing is reaping what White liberal activism has sown? We mean that the Nazi-like ideas of the new unilateralism of George Bush and Tony Blair have been there for the last 50 years, waiting for the right moment to emerge. The global capitalist crisis after the 9/11 bombings in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, gave these "elements" the courage to come out and operate openly.
To understand the open tendency toward fascism in Anglo-American imperialism, we must begin with its foundation. The North American empire was built on slavery, colonialism and racism, on a vast continent cleansed of natives through genocide. The White Anglo-Saxon population was supplemented by heavy doses of East European and German immigrants.
At the end of the Hitler wars, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the heavily populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly to force Imperial Japan to surrender, but in reality to send a message to the Soviet Union. The bombs were not necessary to secure victory, because Japan was already prepared to surrender. But the history of the Nazi-like "elements" in the U.S. becomes most vivid if we turn to the events in Europe and the relationship between the U.S. and its most important ally in the fight against Nazism: the Soviet Union.
American leaders treated their alliance with the Soviet Union as a marriage of convenience, just a tactical move on the way to U.S. supremacy. Their objective, as soon as Hitler was out of the way, was to turn the anti-fascist mobilization into an anti-communist, anti-Soviet mobilization. How do we know this?
First, we know because U.S. President Harry S. Truman deliberately sabotaged the United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration's (UNRRA) efforts to support the countries that had suffered devastation during the war. The Soviet Union was the most deserving country for aid, but was quickly cut off. Instead the U.S. moved quickly to strengthen and rehabilitate European empires against Africans fighting for their liberation, arguing that the Soviet Union's solidarity with those movements made them a threat to Europe and America.
[Editor's Note: The United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the international agency that the author claims was "deliberately sabotaged" by Harry Truman, was the agency responsible for displaced persons at the end of World War II. Truman's Directive disbanding the UNRRA explains that the aid for displaced persons would be better delivered directly, rather than through an international organization. In 1947, a new organization called the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took over the work. READ: Truman's Directive]
If we take, for example, U.S. assistance to the embattled British empire up to 1948, we see that it totaled $28 billion, $20 billion of which was actually written off.
But the Soviet Union received the very opposite treatment. After moving away from the financial credits and reconstruction aid that had been promised through the U.N., Washington actively recruited surviving elements of Hitler's regime to use against the Soviet Union. In other words, by 1947 Washington embarked on a program of sanctions and destabilization against its most important ally in the war against Hitler.
According to American historians themselves, the United States hired over 1,000 ex-Nazi spies, giving them new names and identity cards and deployed them against the Soviet Union. Nazi engineers and scientists were also recruited, many of whom were later instrumental in developing the U.S. nuclear weapons program and its program of space exploration. The Belgian historian Ludo Martens concludes his account on the roots of United States Imperial Fascism as follows:
"Even before the war against the fascists was over, a number of U.S. generals dreamed of a shift in alliances so that they could attack the Soviet Union. For this adventure, they intended to recruit the [surrendered] Nazi army, purged of Hitler and his entourage."
Martens cites U.S. General George S. Patton speaking to General T. McNarney: "We're going to have to fight them [the Soviets] sooner or later. Why not now [in 1945] while our army [in Europe] is still intact and we can kick the Red Army back into Russia. We can do it with my [Nazi] Germans … they hate those red bastards."
One of the over 1,000 Nazi spies recruited by Washington was Lieutenant-General Reinhard Gehlen. He had served as Nazi Germany's head of intelligence inside the Soviet Union, so his experience was considered invaluable. Gehlen was one of many Nazi war criminals that should have been tried for crimes against humanity, but was smuggled into the United States. On August 22, 1945 he was introduced to top U.S. military and intelligence officials. His assignment was to set up an intelligence organization to spy on the Soviet Union and its communist neighbors.
Martens writes that his sources indicate that all told, over 10,000 Nazi war criminals were smuggled into the United States at the end of the Hitler wars. Martens also says that former President Truman's family confirmed from their own conversations with him that the purpose of dropping nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to prove U.S. practical military superiority over the Soviet Union.
In addition to war criminals and spies, the Washington also recruited and imported over 100,000 ready-trained civilian doctors, scientists, writers and professors, mostly from Eastern Europe.
These policies and activities fit very well with the expressed desires of both President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill's position was that communism was a worse threat to capitalism and imperialism than Fascism and Nazism. Throughout his premiership, Churchill believed that the ultimate objective of imperialism was to destroy the Soviet revolution that it had failed to destroy at the beginning.
In recent decades, the reactionaries imported into the United States from Germany and East Europe have risen to prominence, not just in the military and intelligence establishment, but in government and politics. The most notorious have been former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, under President Bill Clinton, was prominent in the anti-Yugoslav wars and in the crippling of Iraq prior to its invasion by the Bush Administration. Even current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is African American, is said to have learned politics and international affairs under the tutorship of a reactionary East European Professor, who also happens to be Madeleine Albright's father.
East European reactionaries and their intellectual descendants and allies in North America are credited with the eventual destruction of the Soviet Union in 1989. The people and their allies have tried to extend to Africa and Latin America the same strategies and tactics that were used against the Soviet Union. This is why Zimbabwe, for instance, has been subject to "regime change" rhetoric and "transition" politics, borrowed from Eastern Europe. Progressive Africans must understand why almost the entire White world, from Norway to New Zealand and from Canada to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), have rightwing regimes.
Presidents Castro of Cuba, Chavez of Venezuela and Mugabe of Zimbabwe have fired the warning shots in the resistance against this global apartheid. Iran is already in the trenches.
The United Nations is going to be one of the stages for this emerging struggle. South African and Nigerian leaders seem to have misread the emerging trends. The Nazi-Fascist trends in the new imperialism will be resisted worldwide.