Who Won World War 2?

If you are a typical product of American education, you might state with some degree of accuracy that the Allies won World War 2. Unfortunately such a shallow answer would most certainly be wrong.

I am certain that those with a knee jerk patriotism, especially those who fought in the war, would utter indignities against the supposition that the Allies, and certainly the United States, did not win the war. Indeed, did not the occupation of Germany and Japan prove that the Allies won? Did not the Nuremberg Trials demonstrate the guilt of the perpetrators? Did not the rollback of Nazi forces vindicate the victors?

Of course the Allies won the military victory, but this overlooks the larger realities of the war and the world order which had established itself with the advent of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913 at the hand of the repugnant Woodrow Wilson and his racist hatreds.

The Federal Reserve Board allowed a cabal of men to more tightly control world finance, although always for our “safety.” This new power enabled the already powerful banksters of Wall Street to finance the century’s most ghastly wars.

Indeed, as Antony Lewis demonstrated, Western banksters, particularly those of Wall Street, financed the Russian Revolution and propped up a series of foul dictators to strip the country of its natural wealth, while bringing the citizens under the iron clad control of central powers.

Hilter was another experiment in terror for Wall Street banksters who saw the continent as their rightful property and who wished to avenge the various people’s revolts and revolutions of the last and current centuries. No one, but no one, would interfere with their properties or deprive them of their patrimonies.

The Sherman Anti-trust Act was an odious infringement upon their free enterprise. Since these plutocrats were wealthy and successful, they deemed that Providence had bestowed upon them the right to rule and subjugate. After all, wasn’t more than 25% of the world’s territory under Anglo-American control, testifying infallibly to superior intellect and Providential favor bestowed upon this 1%?

And wasn’t eugenics needed to control the riff raff of society? Indeed the Rockefellers and their many plutocratic compatriots were ardent – even militant – supporters of eugenics and sought to establish various sterilization programs for whom they considered the stupid and undeserving. It was, after all, for our "safety."

Did not Hitler adopt a vigorous form of eugenics – a practice taken from the Western elite, one of whose leading proponents was the founder of Planned Parenthood?

Hitler owed more to the West than ideological innovation. The Bushes lead a syndicate of banksters who financed his armies and rise to power. The Rockefeller Standard Oil of New Jersey, under the tutelage of the Rockefeller grandsons and William Farrish financed the German military industrial complex which established the wicked concentration camps throughout Europe. The German people, for their part, applauded the mass murders even as the stench of rotting human corpses wafted over their homes.

Immediately after the war, the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) recruited Nazis under the excuse that a former Nazi was to be preferred over a current Communist. However, the OSS was made up of the same Ivy League elite who went to Wall Street to finance the Soviets and the Nazis – thus the fondness the OSS men had for the Nazis.

The OSS, through various levers of power, released, pardoned, and hid thousands of leading Nazi officials and scientists under Operation Paperclip which brought them to the United States where they assumed positions of power and prestige, especially in the vast bureaucracy of Washington and the Pentagon.

The OSS, which morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency, quickly began infiltrating American government and deposing foreign leaders who sought to bring independence and dignity to their peoples by overthrowing the imperial powers of subjugation represented by the Wall Street and London titans of finance.

Indeed, the two camps coalesced into one during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as American royalty married into British royalty in order to save the latter from financial disgrace.

The American plutocrats proceeded to eliminate one of their own who seemed a bit difficult to control – a certain John F. Kennedy - using part of Operation Northwoods which was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff under General Lyman Lemnitzer’s signature. We must recall General Butler's affirmation that all of the American military - and its gruesome force - was deployed not to protect the people, but to advance the imperial and economic designs of the plutocrats.

Other American leaders would be destroyed or murdered through the workings of the CIA. As the years progressed, the agency developed powerful capabilities with MK Ultra, a mind control program which was successfully used to murder Robert Kennedy.

But MK Ultra had better applications than murdering presidents. It was the perfect crime where the murderers could, “Who, me? I wasn’t even there. What are you talking about?” MK Ultra was used to murder John Lennon and the many hundreds of people caught in mass killing sprees, of which we have seen a resurgence in Colorado and Wisconsin. These are not the acts of individuals. They are the acts of men under the control of brainwashing by the CIA.

The goal of the violence is to condition people to sacrifice freedoms for their own “safety.” It is thus that the Wall Street plutocrats and their fellow travelers in academia and religion have created a culture of fear and violence in order to justify the tyrannical protections which they provide through innocuous sounding shams such as the Transportation Security Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and other Nazi minded power centers.

The Third Reich lives and has been a spectacular success. Yes Germany was militarily defeated but it was a creature of the plutocrats and intellectuals who see themselves as masters of the universe. Wall Street and their minion politicians won World War 2 and they are completing their subjugation of the United States.

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Western Civilization is an Oxymoron

Just as with military intelligence, so with Western Civilization, we are confronted with an oxymoron of puzzling dimensions. After considering the works of three diverse authors covering the imperial aggression of corporate America, we can no longer consider western achievements as anything more than rapacious conquest of weaker peoples.

But, you may say, the West gave us democracy, technological innovation, Christianity, and the American Dream. These are theoretical ideas for the 1%, but meaningless charades for the rest. Three unrelated authors, Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Klein, and John Perkins have spelled out the brutality which American plutocrats have visited upon the world, a brutality baked to perfection with the basic recipes of their European counterparts.

Lest you think that we are resurrecting the assault on Western civ which started in the Ivy League schools a generation or more ago, let me point out that Genghis Kahn, the Qing emperors, and the Japanese warlords could be equally ruthless.

A cursory study of American management labor relations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries should assure the benighted reputation of plutocratic behavior, even for the man often credited with the most good will – the viciously anti-Semitic Henry Ford whose legacy was Adolph Hitler and concentration camps in Europe co-founded by Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) prior to World War 2.

Chalmers Johnson notes the destructive plague of British misrule on the Indian subcontinent. After subduing its many kingdoms and factions, the British proceeded to demolish Indian manufacturing which for at least a couple of centuries had far surpassed that of Western Europe. The reason of course was to promote the fortunes of the British East India Company and other plutocrats engaged in the raping of India.

But the British were only an excursis for Johnson who pointed out that the Americans were only following the British pattern of political and economic conquest.

Naomi Klein, in Shock Doctrine, shows how the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman used its warped ideas of laissez-faire to subjugate Latin America for such industrial giants as Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and United Fruit Company, just to name a few. The physical brutalities which were visited upon the impoverished workers of Brazil and Argentina by Ford should keep any decent person away from its products for the company has never admitted its complicity in brutality.

Klein shows how the MKULTRA psychological assault weapons of the CIA were used to demolish most of South America culturally, economically, and politically all for the benefit of corporate America. To extend Johnson’s idea of blowback, we can completely understand why Venezuela despises America  in general, and its plutocrats in particular.

John Perkins’ landmark Confessions of an Economic Hit Man shows in detail how corporate interests were frequently used by the CIA and US government to advance American foreign policy in an incestuous relationship which President Eisenhower called the military-industrial-complex.

One of the more sickening stories Perkins tells in his follow-up book is that of sportswear giant Nike’s slave labor camps in Indonesia where the company paid its workers, at the time of publication, 1.25 USD per day. Anyone who buys Nike products is a slave owner.

A team of reporters attempted to document the atrocities of Nike, but the company ran them off with death squads when they returned for a second visit to the camp.

The American Dream is nice living if you can get it, but it is limited increasingly limited to the few who have avoided the ravages of stemming from the planned economic enslavement of America’s fast disappearing middle class. Perkins shows how the politics of debt is used to shackle the Third World countries in perpetuity, while we would note that that the same techniques are used at home.

Perkins was deeply troubled by the fact that most nations which had fallen into the hands of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and American economic powers never prospered – except, that is, the elite 1%.

The West in general and America in particular, have been a plague and blight on humanity.  Its elite and privileged – the top 20% - bathe themselves in sumptuous luxuries obtained on the backs of millions of people whose labor is stolen for their leisure.

Just as decorated USMC General Smedley Butler recognized that the Marines were nothing but the military branch of the plutocrats, It is time for us to turn from such evil and to give  back these people their lives and dignities - even if it means a demotion of our standards of living.

References

Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
[Various Works], Chalmers Johnson

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

The Tyranny of Imperial American Democracy

The United States, despite its conceit and propaganda, is as brutal and menacing as any empire which has preceded it - and in some ways more so. For those Americans who think that their country is not an empire, we present some contradictory evidence and note that the republic is long dead.

Much of the information on which we draw comes from Chalmers Johnson (1931 – 2010) who wrote an unlikely trilogy of best sellers on the American empire, spurred perhaps in part due to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by the CIA. He was professor at the University of California Berkeley and San Diego from 1962 - 1992, and was widely regarded as a leading expert on Far Eastern affairs.

Johnson was also well known as a Cold Warrior which probably made him quite a minority at UC Berkeley during his consulting days for the CIA from 1967 – 74. But as he considered the end of the Cold War, he realized that the much ballyhooed peace dividend would never be disbursed because those in the military industrial complex (MIC) had already set their eyes on the next contrived conflict.

We have expressed our opinions elsewhere on the nature of the MIC and its central coordinator, the CIA. We would further our observations by stating that the CIA is an independent sovereign state within a state with absolutely no accountability to official or elected government. Its branches of government are the plutocrats, the intellectuals, and the MIC. This viewpoint contradicts Johnson’s view that the agency is the private arm of the president, a view which we consider naïve in the light of its removal of at least two presidents: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, to say nothing of its attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. The CIA then is the servant of the plutocrats.

Johnson noted in the mid 00s that defense spending was at least 1 trillion USD, a number camouflaged by budgetary classifications, of which the Department of Defense is only a fraction of the total. For example, foreign military bases have a separate budget category apart from DOD. He also reports the number of known US bases at 737, but this too vastly understates the case since many US installations operate under foreign flags as in the case of the United Kingdom Air Force. Other bases are simply not reported on the Base Structure Report for so-called national security reasons. More than likely, the actually number of American military bases is closer to 1500 – 2000 which is indeed an enormous global foot print.

This aspect of American militarism forms the central theme of Johnson’s characterization of the American empire. For rather than being a classic example such as France or Rome, where the occupying state formally administers the political organs of government, the US exercises hegemony over the presence of its host by occupying bases in the host country which preserves a patina of sovereignty but which in fact is a delusion of the client state for domestic political purposes.

The enormous military expenditures – and they can hardly be called defensive except in the Soviet style paranoia sense of the term – have broad political support, even from erstwhile liberals such as California’s two state senators. Johnson terms this military Keynesianism because it has taken on the specter of large public works programs in which vast segments of the American population depend on it for jobs. Base closings are anathema as political suicide as much as Social Security cuts are. Thus it is highly unlikely that Americans would repudiate its empire at the ballot box.

American imperialism began in 1898 with its victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War, the splendid little war which plutocrats were anxious to start in order for America to take its proper place among the great powers. No self respecting nation with its country’s great wealth and unbridled ambitions could have any self respect without conquering foreign nations. Indeed American imperialism was an extension of Manifest Destiny which was the pretext for wiping out millions of American Indians.

Both World Wars further propelled American imperial adventures, but its big break came with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 which left the United States the uncontested super power – not just militarily, but economically and culturally. Interestingly enough, the CIA claimed not to see the Soviet economic meltdown which, if taken at face value, would indicate that the agency was completely incompetent in all matters related to intelligence. However, its time was spent toppling foreign governments and propping up brutal tyrannies, one reason of which was to condition Americans to accept totalitarianism at home.

But for Johnson this raises one of the great paradoxes of empire – it can only exist under the aegis of militarism which perforce eliminates the possibility of freedom, civil liberties, and republican government. He points to the example of republican Rome, upon whose example the United States was conceived, as a state whose empire cost it its liberties. When Julius Caesar was murdered in a desperate attempt to preserve the republic, it spawned a series of events accomplishing exactly the opposite. The string of emperors following Augustus was brutal and barbaric in the extreme.

The cost of empire is expensive. Not only are its fiscal costs enormous but so are the collateral costs of lost good will and economic opportunity costs. Empire represents a perpetual drain on the treasury, a cost which the racist British eventually acknowledged as it liquidated its once sprawling empire in some of the most brutal acts of retrogression of any colonial power, Kenya and  the Mau Mau uprising being an egregious example. However, in the United States, the point of economic bankruptcy has not been acknowledged, and given the troglodytic mentality of the neo-cons – both liberal and conservative – retirement of the empire will never happen as they have committed to “full spectrum dominance” over the world over.

But the costs are not limited to domestic exactions as Johnson notes. He documented the criminal behavior at American bases, using an example from 1995 at Okinawa where the US keeps 27 bases with 17,000 service men and women on an island home to 1.3 million second class citizens of Japan. Two marines and a sailor abducted, beat, and raped a 12 year old girl before killing her. The Okinawans were incensed but General Richard Meyers stepped in to sweep it under the rug as a rare and exceptional event which bore no relation to the rank and file military. Unfortunately for the deceptive Meyers, this is typical behavior for there are an average of two courts martial per month at American bases worldwide related to sexual offenses.

The military’s transgressions are not limited to individuals and civilians – the US military and CIA specialize in genocide as well. Johnson reports that the aftermath of the Guatemalan coup of 1954 engineered by the CIA resulted in 200,000 Guatemalans brutally killed by the US backed dictator.

On this point Johnson concurs with Smedley Butler, on whom we have previously reported, who stated after his long and illustrious Marine career, that the military was the private enforcement arm of American corporate giants in their quests to rape foreign countries of their natural resources. In the case of Guatemala the United Fruit Company asked the CIA for the coup because of modest land reform measures proposed by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the president of the country.

Of all the prosperity blossoming in the Pacific Rim, the Philippines singularly has not shared in that progress, a damning indictment of American administration and tutelage which continues down to the present time.

The various philosophical reasons advanced by American propaganda to justify its interminable foreign interventions have nothing to do with truth. The British and Americans seem to have an innate ability to weave stories about how they intervene to bring civilization, order, economic prosperity to the backward natives. And in the case of America, it stands ready with an M-16 to shove democracy down the throats of any peoples not sufficiently obsequious to the American plutocracy.

The litany of American interventions is unending – Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba, Philippines (1956), Congo (1961), Vietnam (1963), Indonesia (1965), Greece (1967), Chile (1973), Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan (1988 ff), Iraq (1997 ff), et, al. – but Americans do not understand that most of these interventions were CIA operations with untold miseries and brutal reprisals resulting in the deaths of millions of people. That anyone of these impoverished nations ever posed a threat to the United States is the most laughably arrogant and preposterous lie ever foisted outside of the Warren Commission Report.

These CIA misdeeds result in retaliation without visible cause known as blowback. Johnson cites the 9/11 attacks as a perfect example, for which there exists plausible justification. Unfortunately, he is uninformed about the true cause of the attacks, most notably the fact that a cruise missile – not an airplane – hit the side of the Pentagon, a subject which we shall address in another posting. The cruise missile attack was well beyond the capabilities of the US funded Al qaeda.

Nevertheless, Johnson is absolutely correct about the consequences of the CIA’s misdeeds. Because these incursions were stealth operations, Americans have been bewildered about why they are reviled and distrusted nearly everywhere. Furthermore, Americans are held in contempt for their dumb bunny perspicacity regarding their vast unfathomable ignorance concerning the operations of the CIA.

Johnson identifies militarism, necessarily consequent to empire, as the lethal threat to the republic. The severe unconstitutional rescission of civil liberties as embodied by the misnamed Patriot Act – an example of Orwellian doublespeak – was the casualty of militarism. General Tommy Franks approvingly warned that the next 9/11 event would result in a military coup of the US government.

Johnson opined that the disappearance of the American empire would be greeted with as many tears as were shed at the collapse of the USSR. We could not agree more. We would like to think that the CIA state would go quietly into the night, be we know that such hopes are delusional. As Lord Acton remarked, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Reference
Conversations with History: Chalmers Johnson, University of California Berkeley (interview)
Chalmers Johnson - Speaking Freely, Chalmers Johnson (video)
Chalmers Johnson - The Coming End of American Empire (video)
Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.