Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
The lead-off article in the lead-off 1989 issue of the U.S. Establishment’s premier journal Foreign Affairs was titled “Reagan’s Foreign Policy”, written by Robert W. Tucker, professor of American diplomacy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and co-editor of The National Interest, and so this article quintessentially represented the institutionalized viewpoint of the U.S. Government, at the very moment when the Presidency of G.H.W. Bush was starting. It said:
The Reagan Doctrine, qua doctrine, proclaims a new international order in which the legitimacy of governments will no longer rest simply on their effectiveness, but on conformity with the democratic process. Governments that have come to power without fulfilling the requirements of that process are to be regarded as illegitimate. Against such illegitimate governments, and particularly against Marxist-Leninist governments, there is a right of intervention. The Reagan Doctrine asserts America’s “moral responsibility” for aiding popular insurgencies against communist domination.
Reagan was “particularly against Marxist-Lenininist governments” even though the United States had been allied with them (or it) during WW II against the fascist Governments, and even though the Soviet Union had essentially won that war for the Allies, as both FDR and Churchill had acknowledged. Near the beginning of FDR’s lengthy fireside chat to the nation on 28 April 1942, he said: “On the European front the most important development of the past year has been without question the crushing counteroffensive on the part of the great armies of Russia against the powerful German Army. These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies — troops, planes, tanks, and guns — than all the other United Nations put together.” (NOTE: He was already using the phrase “United Nations” with the objective in mind for all of the world’s nations to view themselves as having been saved by the U.N. that FDR was intending ultimately to replace all empires and to be the sole source of international laws.) Near the War’s end, on 19 September 1944, Churchill telegrammed to Stalin “that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine and is at the present moment holding by far the larger portion of the enemy on its front.” As the History Channel’s article “Operation Barbarossa” summed-up: “On 22 June 1941, German forces began their invasion of the Soviet Union, … the most powerful invasion force in history, … 80% of the German army … [plus] 30 divisions of Finnish [Finland was on the Nazi side] and Romanian [Romania was on the Nazi side] troops. … By the time Germany officially surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, 80% of its casualties during WW2 had come on the Eastern Front [the Soviet Union].” Wikipedia’s “Operation Barbarossa” said “The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich.” So: without what Reagan insisted were heinous “the Marxist-Leninist governments,” there would have survived from that world war only governments that either are, or else accept the global dominance of, not only fascist governments (which are bad enough), but even of supremacist-racist-imperialist fascist government(s), and, specifically, of a world that is dominated by the Nazi Party and by Nazi Germany.
What had happened that led to this is that immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the U.S. CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the U.S.S.R. was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the U.S.A. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the U.S. itself. It brought them to America whenever the U.S. regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the Soviet Union. Right away, the U.S. was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the U.S. conquer the Soviets. The Cold War secretly started in the U.S. as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the U.S.S.R.)
Journalist Eric S. Margolis headlined on 9 June 2018, “Thank The Red Army For D-Day Victory” and well-encapsulated the reality:
Most Americans, British and Canadians believe that D-Day was the decisive stroke that ended WWII in Europe. But this is not true.
Germany’s mighty Wehrmacht, which included the Luftwaffe, was destroyed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Red Army claims to have destroyed 507 German divisions, 48,000 German tanks, 77,000 German aircraft, and 100 divisions of Axis troops allied to Germany from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland.
Few Americans have ever heard of the Soviet Far East offensive of 1945, a huge operation that extended from Central Asia to Manchuria and the Pacific. At least 450,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, wounded or captured by the Red Army, 32% of Japan’s total wartime military losses. The Soviets were poised to invade Japan when the US struck it with two nuclear weapons.
Of Germany’s 10 million casualties in WWII, 75% were inflicted by the Red Army.
On 9 May 2018, Michael Jabara Carley bannered “The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West)”, and he wrote:
The everyman in Europe and the United States knew very well who had carried the load against the Wehrmacht.
No sooner was the war over than Britain and the United States started to think about another war, this time against the Soviet Union. In May 1945 the British high command produced Operation “Unthinkable”, a top secret plan for an offensive, reinforced by German POWs, against the Red Army. What bastards, what ingrates. In September 1945, the Americans contemplated use of 204 atomic bombs to destroy the Soviet Union. The godfather, President Roosevelt, had died in April, and within weeks American Sovietophobes were reversing his policy.
On 8 June 2014, the French blogger Olivier Berruyer posted the files of a prominent French polling firm (IFOP — French Institute of public opinion) that had scientifically sampled French public opinion in May 1945, May 1994, and June 2004, on “Which nation contributed the most to the defeat of Germany” in WW II? In 1945, by nearly 3-to-1, the Soviet Union was named more often than U.S.; UK even less than that. By 1994, U.S. was named twice as much as the Soviet Union. By 2004, U.S. was named nearly three times as often as Soviet Union. Clearly, the U.S. regime’s propaganda has enormously warped the ‘reality’ that its, and its vassals’, publics see. History has become ‘history’, within the U.S.-run world.
Against the Japanese, UK General Bill Slim won the battle of Kohima in India, and against the Germans, Soviet General Georgy Zhukov won the battle of Kursk in Russia. But FDR had just died, and so Truman and Churchill (in the ensuing myths) handed the War’s ‘victory’ to U.S. and UK.
The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WW II, but the post-FDR U.S., which had suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the U.S. regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were within its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime, instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy, as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the U.S. regime (because of Truman and Eisenhower) was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and after the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the U.S. rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually?
The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him. Ronald Reagan was — and all U.S. Presidents after FDR have been — leading America within the tradition not of the anti-fascist anti-imperialist FDR, but of the imperialist fascist Truman; and, so, the military-industrial complex took over the U.S. Government.
Truman started in 1947 not only the permanent-war U.S. “standing army” that America’s Founders had abhored and swore would never exist here, in his Defense Department replacing the Founders’ War Department, but also the illegal imperialistic CIA, which replaced FDR’s legal OSS.
As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair documented in their classic 1998 WHITEOUT: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (p. 134), “From the moment of its inception, the CIA held to the same policies of its progenitors in keeping gangster organizations in business. By 1947 the Agency was backing heroin producers in Marseilles, Burma, Lebanon, and western Sicily.” Organized crime is often essential to the CIA’s “Special Operations.” Organizations such as the Mafia are valuable assets of the CIA. They are experts at getting things done secretly. And such operations are less likely than any other to ever be exposed as having been CIA operations. Organized crime is thus a terrific asset to international intelligence agencies — especially to America’s CIA, which promotes itself as representing a ‘democracy’, even though it represents, instead, a fascist-imperialist regime.
Two years before the CIA got into protecting the heroin trade, U.S. President Harry S. Truman was, on 26 July 1945, persuaded by his top general, Dwight David Eisenhower (hypocritical inventor of the PR phrase he used against the Establishment — which he actually always supported — “military-industrial complex”) that if the United States wouldn’t conquer the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union would conquer the United States, and so the suckered-by-Eisenhower Truman launched the Cold War on that date; and, on that basis, he turned America’s most essential WW II ally, the Soviet Union, into an enemy, and the Cold War secretly remains U.S. policy till this very day.
The first CIA coup (these coups were done by their “Special Operations” division) was in Thailand in the second year of the CIA’s existence, 1948, and it was done in order to take over the opium-heroin trade in southeast Asia (including Burma — now Myanmar) and to use it for providing essential off-the-books finance to the CIA in order for the CIA to do its part of the job of conquering Russia, “Special Operations.” As WHITEOUT (p. 136) put it:
This was the modus operandi of the CIA for the next fifty years. Though Truman was pressing for the secret operations [Special Operations], his signature was on no compromising document. The authority for the operations was given by the National Security Council. There was no congressional appropriation, so funding came from private sources inside the U.S., through a network of proprietary front organizations, millionaires, and criminal enterprises.
That was how the “The Buck Stops Here” President, Truman, actually functioned — as a gangster operation.
WHITEOUT also noted (p. 138) that,
CIA officer Miles Copeland wrote twenty-five years later that had it not been for the Mafia the Communists would have been in control of Italy, so crucial had the criminal organization been in murdering labor organizers and terrorizing the political process.
Furthermore,
The CIA’s financing mechanisms for these abuses of its charter came in the form of large subventions from American businessmen among whom Allen Dulles and Forrestal passed the hat at New York’s Brook Club, getting contributions from fearful millionaires such as …
And (p. 225),
General Phao had been made director of Thailand’s national police after the CIA-backed coup of 1948 led by Major General Phin Choohannan. Phao’s 40,000-member police force, the Police Knights, immediately engaged in a campaign of assassinations of Phin and Phao’s political enemies. These troops also assumed control of Thailand’s lucrative opium trade. … Phao’s control of the opium trade was directly abetted by the CIA, which had funnelled him $35 million in aid. Thailand would thereafter become the CIA’s main base of operations in the region.
In the 1950s the CIA backed General Phao in a struggle with another Thai general for monopoly of control of Thailand’s opium and heroin trade…Backed by squads of CIA advisers, Phao set about the task of turning Thailand into a police state. The country’s leading dissidents and academics were jailed. … Phao also cornered the country’s gold market, played a leading role on the top twenty corporate boards in the country, charged leading executives and businessmen protection fees and ran prostitution houses and gambling dens. Phao became great friends with Bill Donovan, at that time U.S. ambassador to Thailand.
So: that was the CIA’s first coup, and it happened in 1948, to Thailand: this operation was aimed at reducing the amount of off-the-books funds for U.S. intelligence “Special Operations” that needed to come from America’s aristocrats. Such Special Operations are crucial to the illegal, treasonous (anti-Constitutional), control over the U.S. Government, by the Deep State (the aristocrats — America’s hundreds of billionaires who finance the bulk of successful political campaigns for federal office; these are the individuals who determine who will and who won’t be able to become a serious contender for Congress, the Presidency, and judgeships). Not all of the money to fund Special Operations comes from the billionaires. An unknown percentage of it comes also from organized criminals — violators of laws, instead of writers of laws. America’s billionaires (via their paid agents, including gangsters) are the ones who write the laws. Organized criminals aren’t that powerful, because they can only violate the laws. And when a gangster serves a billionaire, only the billionaire is standing above the law.
One of the more recent U.S. coups was Obama’s carried out in February 2014 in Ukraine but which his Administration had had in the planning stages by no later than June 2011, and which started the war in Ukraine that Russia finally responded to on 22 February 2023.
All of the perhaps a hundred U.S. coups met the U.S. Establishment’s condemned category of “Governments that have come to power without fulfilling the requirements of that process are to be regarded as illegitimate. Against such illegitimate governments, and particularly against Marxist-Leninist governments, there is a right of intervention.” (Again, note the U.S. regime’s assumption that communists pose a bigger threat to U.S. national security than do imperialistic racist fascists — such as the people who control the U.S. Government.) Instead, the U.S. Government itself has been the Government that’s doing this. Under “The Reagan Doctrine, qua doctrine,” the U.S. Government itself must therefore be overthrown. Who will do it, in this country that is controlled by supremacist racist fascist imperialists? How can what Truman did be undone?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.