Origins of the Cold War pt. 2

   The Cold War and It’s Origins Part 2 1950-1960

    The Russian Revolution of 1917 terrified the capitalist world. In my last article based on the first volume of D.F. Fleming’s classic “The Cold War and It’s Origins 1917-1960” I traced the story of the attempt to destroy the world’s first communist revolution. 14 Nations attacked the Soviet Union attempting to carve out territory and crush the revolution. They also launched a massive wave of repression at home. Then they attempted to isolate the USSR while they built up Hitler’s Germany as a bulwark against Communism. This lead to World War 2 and an alliance between the USSR, Britain and the US. The Soviet Union managed to almost singlehandedly defeat Nazi Germany. However before World War 2 had even ended “the cold war” had already begun with the British allying with fascists in Greece to crush the Communist lead partisans in late 1944. And America allying with Japan to crush the Hyuk Resistance in the Philippines. During the war Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin made a deal carving Europe into spheres of influence. Greece was in the British sphere of influence it was key to their control of the mediterranean. Thus the Soviets did nothing to aid their Greek comrades while the British waged a brutal war on the country. In exchange the Soviets were granted most of eastern Europe. This deal was formalized at Yalta in the Crimea during the war in a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The United States wanted to bring Russia into the war against Japan and the Soviets already controlled eastern Europe which they had liberated from the Nazis. 

   However Roosevelt died and his new Vice President Truman who had replaced the more pro-soviet Henry Wallace at a rigged convention the year before became president. The day after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union back in 1941 Senator Truman had declared “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible. He quickly abandoned Roosevelt’s efforts to maintain friendly relations with the Soviets. Instead Truman and his hawkish advisers decided to attempt to destroy the Soviet Union which had suffered huge losses during the war with 27 million dead and thousands of factories, villages, farms, hospitals and schools destroyed. The United States was largely undamaged, had the worlds largest economy and had developed the atomic bomb. They hoped to force the Soviet Union to abandon control of Eastern Europe and to eventually destabilize and destroy the USSR itself. Thus a massive propaganda scare campaign was launched attempting to convince the world that the Soviet Union was out to conquer the world. This propaganda campaign completely turned reality on it’s head. The soviets wanted only to rebuild their country not plunge themselves into another war especially since the United States had the Atomic bomb and they didn’t. At the same time the soviets were being falsely branded aggressors they were actually the victims of a covert war waged by the west using Ukrainian SS veterans and other fascists managed by British and American Intel through their German proxy Reinhard Gehlen. In Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Albania and other countries the west would wage a secret war against the soviets largely unknown to this day.  Another red scare was launched on the home front crushing dissent against this aggressive policy and purging Communists both real and imagined from the government, labor unions academia, and the media. Anyone questioning this propaganda campaign anyone working for peace, or for an end to America’s “Jim Crow” apartheid system, anyone trying to improve the lives of everyday Americans was likely to be labeled a communist and blacklisted. Fascist war criminals and collaborators on the other hand had their records whitewashed and received prominent positions in the government, the churches, the media, corporations. They were hailed as freedom fighters by the media.

  The Soviet Union was under constant threat of nuclear attack and were also targeted with covert and psychological warfare. They countered these dangers by tightening their control over Eastern Europe to guard against these destabilization schemes by what would become the CIA and the OPC which later merged. This tightening of control was portrayed in the media as if it were an invasion the steady march of communism across Europe ignoring the fact that they already controlled these countries as a result of their victories during World War 2. Even today this cold war propaganda is parroted as if it was history. One has to read a book like D.F. Fleming’s to learn the actual story. At the same time the Soviet Union was frantically working on developing nuclear weapons of it’s own. The west was shocked in 1949 when the USSR finally succeeded in building it’s own nuclear weapon. Now it was not merely the Soviet Union that faced destruction but potentially the world. America and Britain’s aggressive policies had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war where it remains today. Ironically America was so arrogant that it had refused to share their nuclear secrets with even their close allies Canada and Britain whose help had been invaluable in the creation of the atomic bomb. Britain which was so instrumental in starting the cold war was forced to develop the bomb on it’s own playing catch up to the Russians. 

  The Truman Doctrine pledged not only to encircle and destroy the Soviet Bloc but to prevent revolution anywhere in the world. Thus what is commonly called the “Cold War” quickly evolved into what I prefer to call World War 3 a war on the entire third world. For centuries the countries of Western Europe had conquered the world turning the entire planet into colonies and semi-colonies and killing hundreds of millions of people in the process. Their imperial  rivalries  had lead them into World War 1 and they had been forced to bring in recruits from through out their empires to help them fight. Now in 1945 exhausted after two World Wars and having unleashed nationalist forces around the world their empires were on the verge of collapse. Truman had basically pledged to wage war on the entire planet to prevent this inevitable process from occurring. Africa and Asian countries had already begun to fight for their independence and the United States was now on the side of colonialism and counter-revolution around the world. The Philippines, China, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, would be the scene of incredibly bloody and brutal wars aiming to either preserve old empires or bring them into the newer American empire. It would be an empire of bases, an empire of corporations and an empire of US imposed military dictatorships. It would stretch across the world from Latin America long under US domination to Africa and Asia. The US allied with the fascists of Italy, Germany, Japan, plus fascist exiles from places like Croatia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania. At the same time the former imperial powers of western Europe like Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, France,  and Britain quickly became little more then pawns of the Americans, terrified that their insane new American masters would embroil them in a Nuclear War.

   D.F. Fleming begins his second volume with an event equally shocking to the explosion of the Soviet “A-bomb” to the west that occurred that same year of 1949. This was the victory of the Chinese Revolution which meant the liberation of China after more then a century of foreign domination. The empires of Europe the British, the French, the Germans, and Russians along with the Americans and Japanese had all invaded China at will carving out spheres of influence and demanding humiliating concessions. China once the richest and most powerful nation on the earth had become poor and helpless under the brutal imperialists. Of course the full history of China’s revolution is too complicated to fully explain in a short article although Fleming does a masterful job of trying to condense the story into a single chapter. He traces the origins of the Chinese revolution back to the 1851 Taiping rebellion, through the fall of the Ming dynasty and the declaration of a Chinese republic which was still under foreign domination and which quickly broke down into warlordism. It was World War 1 that was to prove a pivotal event fueling economic growth and modernization in China. World War 1 lead to the Russian Revolution and many around the world especially in China were inspired by this event. The soviets declared their opposition to Colonialism and Imperialism Lenin and Stalin realized that in the wake of World War 1 the western empires hold on the rest of the world would begin to slip. Faced from hostility from the west they turned to the global south both to make new allies and to cause trouble for their enemies. As a friendly gesture to the Chinese they renounced their Russian empires holdings in China. The Chinese nationalists the KMT formed an alliance with Russia and with the Chinese communist party. Up until 1927 this alliance was a success the tiny Chinese communist party grew rapidly and increasingly became independent of their soviet advisers.  It is a lesson all successful revolutionaries must learn they cannot simply imitate the last revolution but must adapt what they learn to entirely different conditions. Of course this is what makes one of the most beloved myths of the cold war so absurd Revolutions could not be directed from Moscow because to be successful they had to be locally directed only the Chinese understood China. 

    This lesson was brought home in 1927 when the KMT grew frightened of the rise of communist influence. The KMT base of support were the landowners and big Chinese capitalists. The communists were organizing labor unions and undertaking land reforms. Chiang Kai-Shek the head of the KMT who had Ironically trained in the Soviet Union decided to make an alliance with the British, the French and the Americans against both the Chinese communists and the Russians. The Russians had tried to prevent a break and this only contributed to the coming disaster. Chiang’s forces were marching to take Shanghai the people were mobilized by the communists to support his advance with strikes and protests. Chiang deliberately delayed his advance so they could be crushed then when he finally arrived he used his KMT forces in alliance with drug dealing gangsters to massacre the communists. This was the start of the Chinese civil war. It was also the start of the massive heroin empire the KMT would use to get rich, buy weapons, wage war, and buy American politicians eventually bringing them into alliance with the CIA. It discredited those Chinese communists close to Moscow and led to the rise of Mao Tse Tung who began his long march to escape the KMT. Under the able leadership of Mao Tse-Tung the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) concentrated their efforts on winning control of the countryside. The Chinese peasants lived under even worse conditions then the Russians. Landlords had total control over their lives and they were virtual slaves kept in ever growing debt. They could not even marry without the landlords permission and their wives and daughters were forced to endure their landlords lusts without complaint. Hunger, disease and ignorance reigned. The Chinese communists brought land reform and the rule of law winning them the love of the people. The KMT on the other hand made themselves hated wherever they seized control with their corruption and cruelty. In addition to this Civil War China was soon to face a new threat as the Japanese set out to conquer China. However the KMT viewed the Communists as the real danger further discrediting themselves in the eyes of the Chinese people. 

   China was hugely important to a large sector of Americans. As Europe’s power declined these Americans believed that all of China would soon fall under their control. Many future top level OSS and CIA officers had been recruited out of the families of American missionaries who had served in China. American Gangsters also had close ties to the KMT who supplied America’s heroin. Many west coast businessmen relied on the China trade. There were also media figures like Edward Luce owner of Time and Life Magazines. These forces would coalesce into the “China Lobby” and overlapped strongly with those Americans allied to the fascists. They strongly backed the KMT which began to receive huge amounts of money and weapons from the US. Claire Chennault would supply the KMT with a private air force the AVG  which would evolve into CAT and later Air America both infamous for their role in heroin smuggling. This aid would escalate once America was at war with Japan as well after Pearl Harbor on  December 7 1941. However the KMT remained determined to avoid fighting the Japanese and concentrated on trying to destroy the Communists. Their American adviser General Stillwell got so fed up he tried to arm the communists and force reforms on the KMT but instead he was fired. The Communist Guerrillas on the other hand fought constantly to liberate their country. They fought with arms captured from the KMT and the Japanese. The role of these Chinese communists in waging a massive Guerrilla warfare campaign against the Japanese is even more completely ignored by most histories then the Russian Role in winning World War 2. Also forgotten is the massive suffering and murder that imperial Japan unleashed in China killing at least 20 million people. Most infamous was the Rape of Nanking in which a whole city was systematically raped, looted and slaughtered hundreds of thousands dying in a manner of days. The KMT made a secret deal with the Japanese during the war and many openly joined the Japanese side. The deal was to protect the Japanese war criminals and the Chinese traitors after the war. 

   The people of China had a choice between the KMT corrupt, brutal, and treacherous or the communists who promised land reform and who had heroically resisted the Japanese. When the war ended in part due to the Red Army’s crushing defeat of the Japanese in Manchuria America hoped it could by supporting the KMT achieve their dream of gaining control of China. Of course as usual they were completely ignoring the will of the Chinese people who for obvious reasons preferred the communists  and certainly had no desire to become America’s colony under General Chiang Kai-Shek. Still the US did everything it could to prop up Chiang  and his KMT. They flooded the country with money, but the KMT stole most of it since they were already planning their exile. They flooded the KMT with weapons but the KMT sold them to the guerrillas to make cash. The Americans had 100,000 troops and a huge air force it used to try to help the KMT seize control of communist held areas but the Communists fought on. The American troops began to complain about being stuck in the middle of a Chinese civil war long after World War 2 had ended. When the KMT forces began to collapse in the face of a long series of communist advances the Americans and the KMT were forced to flee the country. Mao was victorious and the American empire and the China Lobby were in a state of rage. They demanded to know how China could be “lost” and decided it could only be explained by communist treachery within the government. For decades they would foolishly attempt to take back China nearly embroiling the US in a nuclear war on several occasions. In the media it was implied that somehow the Russians had managed to conquer China rather then admit to the painful truth that America had failed to conquer it. Of course even if the U.S. had poured all of it’s resources into trying to hold China it would probably have brought a catastrophic defeat upon itself as the war in Vietnam would later prove given China’s much greater size and population one can imagine how much more disastrous this attempt would have been. For decades they would refuse to recognize China instead claiming that the island of Formosa was the “real China” a former Japanese Colony that the KMT had brutally conquered with a Massacre in 1947 after it’s people rebelled against their corrupt rule. Formosa would become known as Taiwan and the United States is still willing to wage a nuclear war to keep China from taking back it’s island. 

    The “loss” of China would lead the next year to a massive escalation of the war in Korea. Most people believe that the Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded South  Korea. This is another example of cold war propaganda becoming enshrined in mainstream history. In reality South Korea (spurred on by the Dulles brothers, General Macarthur and the China Lobby) probably attacked North Korea in 1950 provoking a North Korean counter attack. South Korea had been launching military offensives against North Korea aimed at seizing a foothold and also sending small bands of terrorists to wreak havoc. More importantly however the Korean War actually began in 1945 when the Americans were permitted to occupy the Southern Half of the country. For a thousand years Korea had been a unified and independent country until it was conquered by Japan and used as a springboard for the invasion of China. Koreans like Kim Il Sung had gone to join the Chinese Guerrillas fighting the Japanese. Others stayed in Korea and fought the Japanese occupiers. Others choose to serve the Japanese fighting in their army and forming a Japanese run police force. However by the time the Americans arrived Korea was unified and liberated. It was ruled by people's committee’s combing nationalists and Communists. America decided to crush these people’s committees and put those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese in charge. They brought in Syngman Rhee who had lived in exile in the US for 20 years and installed him as a dictator. They cancelled plans to reunify the country. To suppress the people’s committees they unleashed a brutal counterinsurgency war on the South Koreans. Long before 1950 they turned south Korea into a massive war zone as peasants often armed with nothing more then bamboo spears tried to resist this illegal occupation of their country. Even South Korean troops began to join the rebellion sick of being used to slaughter their own people. Thus the Korean War began long before North Korea counterattacked and Rhee’s unpopularity and the poor morale of the troops explains why the South Korean Army nearly collapsed making a panicked retreat south when the North Koreans entered the war. This effort by the North Koreans  to liberate and reunify their country has absurdly been termed an invasion. The invaders were the Americans.

   In North Korea on the other hand the Russians allowed the people’s committees to remain in power and the war hero Kim Il Sung became the leader. He was fiercely independent and the Russians maintained a hands off policy until withdrawing their troops. Contrary to myth the Soviets were caught completely by surprise at the start of the Korean War and did not order “the invasion” as the American press pretended to believe and as historians continue to repeat. They had supplied no extra weapons to the DPRK and were boycotting the UN when the war began over it’s failure to recognize China. Instead like I.F. Stone before him (who Fleming admired) Fleming  sees the war as a product of a scheme by Rhee,MacArthur, John Foster Dulles, and Chiang Kai-Shek to provoke a war in order to save both Rhee and Chiang’s tottering regime. John Foster Dulles (brother of future CIA director Allen Dulles) who would later become Secretary of State under Eisenhower is the major villain in Fleming’s second volume with his insane brinksmanship nearly leading the world into Nuclear war time and again.  MacArthur like Dulles was a central figure in American fascism. It has since been revealed that if not for the outbreak of the Korean War Chiang would have been toppled by an American backed coup. Rhee had just suffered a humiliating electoral defeat and his people were in open rebellion. By starting the war Rhee brought in 250,000 American troops to his side while Chiang on Formosa was suddenly being protected by the US 7th fleet. Because the Soviets were boycotting the UN the US were able to label North Korea the aggressor and the whole thing was done under UN cover to disguise the imperialist nature of the war in defense of what amounted to an American colony. Most of the troops were Americans along with the British and America’s fascist allies Turkey, Greece, and the Philippines.

    The war was one of dramatic reversals first the South Korean forces made a panicked retreat. American troops were transferred in from Japan but they also were soon in a panicked retreat. The North Korean army was tough, disciplined, and highly motivated they pushed the US and Korean forces back towards the southern tip of Korea the “Pusan Perimeter.” However the UN forces were soon flooding into the south and the North Korean advance slowed as their supply lines stretched out. America controlled the sea and the air they were able to bomb the North Koreans at will and bombed the South Koreans for good measure. They massacred refugees fleeing south since they worried some of them might be communists. The Americans continued their war on the South Koreans throughout the war and in reality it continues to this day. Using their Naval superiority MacArthur staged a landing at the Port of Inchon leveling the city and unleashing Rhees troops and fascist death squads on the survivors. The North Korean army was forced to retreat or risk being cut off. Now the UN forces decided to invade North Korea and reunify the whole country under Rhee’s dictatorship. They advanced steadily but the North Korean forces were actually regrouping far to the North as well as setting up a guerrilla army behind UN lines. MacArthur was deliberately attempting to provoke the Chinese he hoped to expand the war into China. He hoped that backed up by a nuclear attack on China Chiang would be able to retake China. He even went so far as to conceal a Chinese counter attack and lie to Truman personally afterwards claiming he believed China would not enter the war when they already had. 

   Myth has it that Truman fired Macarthur over his reckless desire to use Nuclear weapons. In  reality both Truman and later Eisenhower would both threaten to use Nuclear weapons in the war. Instead Macarthur was fired for insubordination and for plotting with Truman’s political rivals. As the UN forces neared the Chinese border the North Koreans resupplied and rested and the Chinese launched a massive counter attack dividing the UN forces. Many of the forces that were believed to be Chinese at the time were actually North Koreans who had been stationed in China so it should be remembered that this was a joint counter-attack. Now they pushed the UN forces back to the 38th parallel and beyond recapturing the capital Seoul for a second time. It was a humiliating defeat for the American empire and a glorious moment for the North Koreans and the Chinese. It was watched with secret joy all over the third world. However through massive airpower and artillery the UN forces managed to halt their advance. The war ground on in a stalemate for a year and a half. The Americans delayed the end of the war in the most cynical manner possible. They claimed that Korean and Chinese prisoners must be given a choice whether they wished to return. Then they tortured the prisoners into saying they wanted to go to Taiwan or remain in South Korea. Eventually the POWS staged a series of massive rebellions and the Americans sent in tanks and artillery to attack them. The war was incredibly brutal 3 Million Koreans were killed and the US carpet bombed and Napalmed the entire country as well as employing torture and death squads as is their standard practice. They also used Germ Warfare on both North Korea and China. Half a million North Korean Soldiers died in the war.  1 Million Chinese soldiers died defending North Korea. 2 Million North Korean civilians were killed and 1 million South Korean civilians were killed often at the hands of their own or UN forces.  54,000 American soldiers and 47,000 South Korean soldiers died. Only 686 British troops were killed 3,194 UN allies total. Truman became the most unpopular president until George W. Bush. 

   At the same time as the Korean war the French with massive US assistance were fighting a loosing war in Indochina what is today Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Britain was waging a more successful but equally brutal war in Malaysia at the same time.  D.F. Fleming has a wonderful chapter on Vietnam which was still a covert CIA war when the book was published. If only people at the time had paid attention to D.F. Fleming the world would have avoided a genocidal bloodbath for the Vietnamese and a humiliating defeat for the American empire. He describes the history of Vietnam and it’s long struggle for independence against first the French, then the Japanese during World War 2 when they were allied to the US and saved many American airmen. After the war the US would ally with the Japanese and the French against Vietnam attempting to help France regain control over their colony. The arrogant french colonists began the war as french civilians massacred the Vietnamese in an attempt to “put them in their place”. Soon the French army was bombing and shelling the Vietnamese sections of their cities. The Vietnamese who had been prepared to wait patiently for independence and even maintain friendly relations with France afterwards were thus provoked into immediately beginning their war for independence again. They were tough and well organized under the able leadership of Ho Chi Minh. They would teach the arrogant french a lesson inflicting a humiliating defeat on the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French had set up a massive base there believing it was impossible to move artillery into the surrounding hills. Through sheer determination using bicycles and their own bodies the Vietminh managed to move in artillery and force the base to surrender. The US paid for this whole french war on the people of Vietnam and even offered to use nuclear weapons to help the french at Dien Bien Phu. D.F. Fleming pleads with his readers not to get involved in a war in Vietnam and debunks the insane “ Domino theory” that argued that if Vietnam were allowed to go communist first Asia and then America itself would inevitably follow ignoring the Pacific Ocean and America's mighty Navy that it still uses to bully the planet. This domino theory also of course ignores the fact that the Vietnamese only wanted to free their country and had no plans to try to invade and conquer Asia and the United States. The Whole Domino Theory was an absurdity believable only to a brainwashed public raised on decades of anti-communist propaganda on the myth of Communist plans for world conquest. Nonetheless the Americans would manage to embroil themselves in Vietnam violating their Agreements made at Geneva in 1954 which called for elections and reunification the US sent in the CIA to set up yet another pro-American fascist dictator Diem who’s forces they trained to torture and massacre his people igniting a revolution that US troops would attempt to crush themselves in 1964.  LBJ sending their military to occupy the country bombing napalming and killing 4 million people, poisoning the land with the chemical weapon agent orange which causes cancer and deformity. They expanded the war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia with disastrous effects. The CIA managed to massively expand the global heroin trade. The US would be defeated in 1975 as South Vietnam collapsed and Vietnam was finally reunified and liberated  after almost 90 years of struggle by the heroic people of Vietnam.

   That victory still lay far in the future however when Fleming published his book. Instead let us turn our attention to a completely forgotten war that nearly lead to a Nuclear war. The US had used the entry of China into the Korean war to expand their covert war of revenge for “the loss of China.” The CIA used the KMT to wage a proxy war on China just as they would later use Cuban exiles against Cuba, and like they were already using fascist exiles in Europe. The KMT were airlifted into Burma using CAT the CIA/KMT airline starting another infamous chapter in the CIA’s role in the global drug trade. From Burma they launched unsuccessful attacks into China although the KMT were more interested in terrorizing the Burmese and smuggling Heroin. Ironically Burma would later be forced into alliance with China to eject the KMT one of many examples of CIA meddling backfiring as it would in Laos and other places. The CIA also used the KMT in Taiwan to wage war on China using boats and planes to bomb Chinese coastal cities. When Eisenhower became president John Foster Dulles Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles CIA director they escalated this covert war encouraging the KMT to seize more Chinese islands like Quemoy and Matsu less then 5 miles from China’s shores. They used these islands to attempt to blockade China and launched more attacks. After the end of the Korean War the US came close to Nuclear War over their right to these tiny stolen islands terrifying even US allies like Britain and France. With typical American arrogance they claimed that the islands were vital to America’s national security and of course completely ignored the right of China to it’s own territory as well as it’s right not to constantly be attacked by land sea and air by commandos, ships, and planes. Today America is still ready to plunge the world into a Nuclear War in order to prevent China from regaining Taiwan or controlling it’s own waters. Instead the Chinese are constantly menaced by American ships threatening to start a war over the South China Sea. The Quemoy and Matsu crisis were the Cuban Missile crisis of the 1950’s so it is amazing how all memory of it has been erased since. The “China Lobby” nearly destroyed the world. America repeatedly threatened a nuclear first strike and just like today were dying for a chance to test out their tactical nuclear weapons a scheme the Neo-cons revived as part of their plans for a war on Iran during the Bush II years. A war that could also have escalated into a Nuclear war just like the wars in Ukraine and Syria could today.

   It was this constant tension over Nuclear war that began to discredit the US in the eyes of the world. Back then people still remembered the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and only American politicians and Generals were insane enough to hope for a Nuclear War. Of course they were not quite as crazy as was believed at the time because they had greatly exaggerated the size of the Soviet Nuclear forces and because of their U2 flights knew that they could still destroy the Soviet Union. However this fact was a closely guarded secret when Fleming wrote his book and even Presidential Candidate John F. Kennedy had no way of knowing that the supposed bomber and missile gaps were complete frauds meant to justify massive military spending. This is also why the Military was so enraged about loosing the chance to start a Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile crisis. What they didn’t know was that the Cuban missiles were installed and fully operational and America would have lost some of it’s cities on the east coast in the process. However for the Nuclear war planners a hundred million dead Americans was a small price to pay for the complete destruction of the Cuba, Soviet Union and China which would have killed 1 billion people in a day.

  In the Soviet Union meanwhile Krushchev an incompetent opportunist had risen to power. He would send the Soviet Union on the road to ruin before being overthrown. He reintroduced market forces, shifting focus from heavy industry to consumer goods which while popular in the short term would lead to technological backwardness. Gorbachev would complete what Krushchev started but of course that all lay in the distant future as Fleming wrote. However the Krushchev years would provide a sort of preview of the collapse when the CIA would take advantage of the chaos caused by his infamous “Secret Speech” attacking Stalin to support a more independent Poland on the model of Yugoslavia. They also attempted to launch a fascist counter-revolution in Hungary which Krushchev was forced to crush after provoking the whole thing with his bungling management of the country. After the Quemoy and Matsu crisis Cold War tensions had relaxed as the world rebelled against the insane Dulles policy of brinksmanship. Hungary would heat things back up and the failed Hungarian proto-color revolution would be used to demonize the soviets for years despite the fact that it was far less bloody then the wars in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, and an ever growing list of countries destroyed to “save” them from communism. The fascist character of the Hungarian Counter-Revolution has been intentionally white washed just as it would later be in Ukraine’s fascist Maidan Coup. 

    These early cold war years would also see the seeds of the wars in Iraq and Syria planted long ago. This time it was the bungling brinksmanship of John Foster Dulles to blame and yet again a nuclear war was nearly provoked. Dulles goal was to bring the entire world into alliance against the communist bloc. As usual he completely ignored what the people of the world wanted. For most of the world the goal was preserving their newly won independence or in  fighting to win it. Thus a non-aligned movement was born at the famous Bandung conference in 1954. They wanted the right to maintain friendly relations with both sides and included China as a member which enraged the Americans. The CIA tried to assassinate Chou En-Lai the Chinese foreign minister and failed. Instead Chou En-Lai was a huge hit at Bandung and America’s puppets who argued that the NAM (non-aligned movement) should instead focus on “Soviet Imperialism” were completely ignored. They knew full well that it was the so called “free world” France Britain, the Dutch, that had slaughtered and enslaved them not the soviets. The Bandung conference instead condemned Israel to the joy of the Arab world. 

   Thus by the time of the Suez crisis in 1956 the empire could no longer ignore the forces of national liberation that were sweeping the globe. However for Dulles Neutralism was almost as bad as communism and he continued to attempt to force the world into his anti-communist alliances. In Europe of course there was NATO in Asia SEATO was created. In the middle east their was the Baghdad Pact. This plan would backfire badly in the middle east where the enemy was seen as Israel a US ally rather then the USSR. By attempting to force Syria and Iraq into becoming American puppets instead Dulles provoked nationalist coups. In Syria this began their alliance with the Soviet Union. Dulles had caused what he hoped to prevent Soviet influence in the middle east. Actually back then the CIA formulated plans for regime change in Syria using the muslim brotherhood. Plans they would try out in the 70’s and 80’s and begin to put into effect again back in 2003 culminating in the 2011 war that continues to this day. Ironically yet again this CIA meddling would produce the opposite result.  Their goal was to eliminate Syria Russia’s only ally in the region and turning the Mediterranean into a NATO lake.  Instead they provoked a Russian intervention in Syria massively increasing Russian influence in the region. As for Iraq the CIA hired a young Sadam Hussein to attempt to assassinate Iraq’s new nationalist president Qassem beginning the rise to power of their future ally turned enemy. Both these coups were the result of the US invasion of Lebanon to protect their puppet against his own people an invasion that would be repeated in the 1980’s with disastrous consequences.

   However events in Syria and Iraq were little noticed at the time. Instead it was the Suez crisis that caught the attention of the world. It was the result of Dulles brinksmanship against the neutralist Nasser. Nasser’s rise to power had actually been secretly backed by the CIA and the Gehlen organization. However tensions began to rise when the US refused to sell him the arms Egypt needed to battle Israel. Then Dulles decided to cancel funding for the Aswan dam project to teach Nasser a lesson for being too independent. With his hatred of neutralism Dulles basically forced Egypt into the soviet camp. Nasser decided to buy weapons from the Soviet Bloc. To pay for the Aswan dam he decided to nationalize the Suez canal. This enraged Britain, France and Israel. However it electrified the Arab World and Nasser a charismatic speaker became a superstar for defying the imperial powers which had only recently been ejected from the region after slicing it up into it’s current borders. Nasser hoped to unite the entire Arab world. Israel, Britain, and France decided to launch a war on Egypt so Britain could take back the canal and Israel could take the Sinai peninsula. The Americans pretended to be surprised though of course they knew about it advance. Strangely because of Nasser’s popularity in the Arab world and the forces unleashed at Bandung the US was forced to side with Nasser who was already becoming a soviet ally against their own allies the British, French and Israelis who were forced to withdraw. Although Nasser had faced military disaster he now achieved an enormous political victory becoming more popular then ever. He was so popular that for a time Syria voted to unite with Egypt and they became a single country. It was another disaster for Dulles’ diplomatic brinksmanship as Egypt was soon solidly in the Soviet camp. Plus America’s allies Britain and France were furious about the perceived betrayal for years.

  Aside from Krushchev’s disastrous economic policies which would destroy soviet agriculture his other main goal was to achieve peace with the west. This was of course completely impossible for as we have seen the Soviets had always wanted peace and at the end of World War 2 had hoped to remain friendly with their allies. Instead before the World War 2 had even ended Truman launched the Cold War inviting Molotov over and then attempting to bully and insult him into abandoning control of eastern Europe especially Poland. The Soviet union was soon encircled with American nuclear bomber bases and was embroiled in a huge covert war across eastern Europe with Fascist exiles working for British, French, and German intelligence. Then after Stalin died in 1953 the Soviet Union once again tried to make peace but in the cold war insanity of the time any offer of peace was considered even more dangerous then threats of war. All soviet peace moves were talked about as if they were cynical propaganda moves meant to influence public opinion and get the west to drop it’s guard so they could lunch a sneak attack. Thus was coined the term “the peace offensive.” Still after 11 years of “Cold War” which had repeatedly brought the world to the brink of war over West Berlin, Korea, Taiwan, Quemoy and Matsu, the Suez Canal, as well as flocks of birds, and suspicious looking clouds. Accidents nearly ended the world many times during this era we would later find out. In any case the world could no longer take the tension and had noticed that the Soviets were always talking of Peace while the Americans were always threatening war. Krushchev began to become a popular figure worldwide although he would end up driving China into America's arms by trying to make peace while China was still being occupied and attacked by America and it’s KMT proxies while being excluded from the UN. Mao also foresaw how Krushchev’s reforms would lead to corruption. China supplanted Russia as the chief opponent of imperialism and the chief promoter of Revolution. Thus it is ironic that it was China not the Soviets who would later ally with the US in the 1970’s. Now because of America’s endless bullying China has been forced back into alliance with Russia from a geo-strategic perspective this was America’s greatest blunder of World War 4 (the war that began as soon as the cold war ended) and China is already on the road to once again becoming a revolutionary and anti-imperialist force in the world. Thankfully unlike Russia, China was never foolish enough to actually trust their American allies and so were spared having to suffer a Yeltsin.

   But let us return to the end of the 1950’s and the popularity of Krushchev’s calls for peace. America was forced to counter with their own peace offensive and Eisenhower toured the world talking of the dangers of Nuclear war and the possibility of peaceful coexistence. John Foster Dulles had died and the world hoped that sanity might finally prevail. The only problem of course is that the last thing the Americans actually wanted was peace or arms reductions. They were busy stockpiling nuclear weapons and were still planning a surprise Nuclear attack on the Soviets and the Chinese. Of course Fleming didn’t know about the surprise attack part but he does point out that the US constantly raised their demands whenever the soviets offered concessions. However the peace talks ended in disaster when the CIA intentionally sent a sabotaged and stripped down U2 flight into the Soviet Union which was shot down when it’s engines failed and it dropped out of high altitude. Krushchev was humiliated especially when the US claimed it had a right to violate soviet airspace, supposedly to detect a soviet surprise attack, but in reality to map out targets for their own surprise attack. When Fleming was writing the CIA role was still unknown. In any case the Soviets were forced to threaten to attack any base that launched planes into it’s area sending America’s allies into a panic and making neutralism popular even in Europe. This was the context for Eisenhower’s infamous farewell remarks about the dangers of the military industrial complex which were both prophetic and hypocritical given Eisenhower’s role in the military buildup.

   This was the situation in the world when John F. Kennedy was elected. Fleming’s book extends only to the spring of 1960 he was hoping Adlai Stevenson would win. John F. Kennedy was a fierce anti-communist but actually understood third world nationalism. Contrary to myth he did not order the assassination of Patrice Lumumba but was instead heartbroken when he heard the news. He had visited Indochina during the French war and had witnessed first hand what a bad idea it would be to intervene there. On the other hand he was elected in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution which had sent the US into yet another Counter-Revolutionary crusade. what if Castro should inspire revolutions in Latin America long part of America’s empire where people were kept in grinding poverty so American corporations could make massive profits.  Thus JFK continued the covert war on Cuba begun under Eisenhower. He agreed to the disastrous bay of pigs invasion. Then he authorized the CIA to continue the covert war on Cuba. Krushchev decided to send missiles to Cuba to defend the country which had been forced to ally with the Soviets by America’s hostility. The world was brought to the brink of Nuclear War. All Kennedy’s advisers wanted to attack they had been planning this for years and hoped to wipe out Cuba, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea all at once. During the missile crisis the us attacked a soviet nuclear sub and it was only their unwillingness to retaliate that saved the world from Nuclear war. Krushchev was forced to back down but war was averted. 

  JFK was forever changed by the experience and finally began to act on Krushchev’s offer of peace. He also made plans to remove the advisers he had sent to Vietnam with his national security memorandum 263. He spoke for the first time since FDR’s era of the Soviets as human beings not monsters bent on world conquest. “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” he warned. Within months he was dead shot in broad daylight in Dallas Texas by forces within America bent on continuing the cold war. Within days of his death plans were made to escalate the war in Vietnam millions would die. The cold war, the deep state, the military industrial complex were too powerful to be kept in check by even the imperial presidency. America would undergo a decade of resignations, soft coups and assassinations. Even Nixon and Kissinger’s attempts at detente would lead to their downfall as would Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rein in America’s fascist allies. With Ronald Reagan the Cold War would return with full force. Then came the disaster of Gorbachev who thought he could buy America’s friendship by giving them everything they had ever wanted he abandoned eastern Europe he destroyed socialism they overthrew him anyways and put in Yeltsin. 

   Yet even with their own puppet Yeltsin in power in Russia the US couldn’t resist continuing the cold war. Gorbachev thought he was making peace but the Americans more accurately  saw it as a complete surrender. Throughout the 1990’s they directed a disastrous series of “reforms” which aimed to destroy Russia turning it into a third world country hoping to balkanize it. They funded fascists and separatists throughout Eastern Europe and the former soviet union. They expanded NATO breaking all their false promises. They destroyed Yugoslavia and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Serbs from their fascist ally Croatia. The Serbs who had lived there for hundreds of years were portrayed as invaders in the media. It was the same trick they would use during the current war in Ukraine portraying the ethnic Russians resisting the fascist coup as a Russian invasion. Which brings us to our own time and cold war 2.0. The Hysteria is so laughable that the President is portrayed as a Russian spy, the entire alternative media most of whom are Americans are portrayed as Russian propagandists and destroying the world is portrayed as the only way to save the world from nonexistent “Russian imperialism”. The dangers of Nuclear war are completely forgotten and people seem to think that a war with Russia will be another cake walk. This is insane since because of the US plans for star wars and anti-ballistic missile shields the Russians have developed hypersonic nuclear missiles and nuclear torpedoes that can travel thousands of miles underwater and are both unstoppable. Even if Russia was unable to fire back the amount of Radioactive fallout from trying to destroy Russia and China would doom the entire world. Nuclear winter and radiation poisoning would be all the survivors could look forward to. Sadly our only solace is that the empire of chaos has always been insane and yet haven’t destroyed the planet yet.

  We must end this current hysteria but of course I am already preaching to the converted. Still we must find some way for the tiny minority of people who actually know what is going on in the world by reading internet sites like this one to wake up the complacent TV watching majority. The majority of the west who only ever half pay attention and seemingly instantly forget events of last month let alone years ago. The world is sleepwalking towards nuclear disaster seemingly completely oblivious. Nearly 60 years ago Fleming wrote his book attempting to avert Nuclear war. Once there were massive marches demanding nuclear disarmament  and Peace the whole world was aware of the dangers. We must revive these efforts to bring the world back from the brink of disaster before it is to late.

Sources

My main source was of course “The Cold War and it’s Origins 1917-1960 Volume 2 1950-1960”  By D.F. Fleming which is a masterpiece. It should be immediately brought back into print.

I also read “Korea: The Unknown War” by Jon Halliday & Bruce Cumings which gives a horrifying portrayal of the war in words and pictures. 

I also re-read sections of “The CIA a Forgotten History” by William Blum which was later updated and republished under the title “Killing Hope” a book I’ve mentioned many times and often reread as it was very much my inspiration. In rereading the introduction I was struck by how influential Flemings book was on Blum. Hunt down a copy of this book it is a must read for anyone wanting a history of the empire.

I wrote a trilogy on Vietnam

The Origins of the Wars in Korea and Vietnam (Based on Peter Dale Scott’s The War Conspiracy and I.F. Stone’s classic The Hidden History of the Korean War)

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/03/wars-in-korea-and-vietnam.html

The Phoenix Program based on Doug Valentine’s definitive “The Phoenix Program”

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-phoenix-program.html

Genocide in Vietnam based on “The Perfect War” By James William Gibson

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/04/genocide-in-vietnam.html

Operation Condor based on J. Patrice McSherry’s excellent “Predatory States”

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/04/genocide-in-vietnam.html

Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (on the end of the 1st cold war and the start of the new one)

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2014/06/russia-from-gorbachev-to-putin.html

    

   

The Plot to Scapegoat Russia

We live in dangerous times. A panic has gripped the American media over Russia. Anyone daring to question the anti-Russian hysteria is risking their careers and reputation. Thus Daniel Kovalik is a heroic man simply for writing his book "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia." However the media seem oblivious of the dangerous situation they are creating by pushing the US towards a war with Russia which has the potential to end life on the planet with a push of a button. Kovalik is best known for his work on the dirty war in Colombia has described the insanity of that war in which the US has armed and trained drug dealing death squads (and their sponsors in Colombia's corrupt drug dealing political and military elite) all in the name of fighting drugs.Needless to say this policy has predictably resulted in a massive 300% increase in the amount of Cocaine arriving in the US from Colombia while also causing untold misery to the people of Colombia where 100,000 have been killed and 9 million refugees have been created as part of a massive land theft. Naturally this "Plan Colombia" has been hailed as a massive success in America.
    Kovalik's book is full of stories like this from america's recent history. Chances are you will be extremely shocked to discover what he reveals. His book is about far more then Russia. He writes in the hopes of reminding us what many seem to forget. The American empire is far more dangerous to the world then Russia. Kovalik's book is also a personal account of his own political awakening. Like many americans he was raised on a steady diet of cold war mythology. The belief that America is a "global force for good" is drummed into it's citizens heads not only by the propaganda that masquerades as news and history but also in the entertainment we consume the movies, tv, books. Equally the idea that Russians are the villains has become an article of faith in much of the world after 100 years of cold war propaganda which began in 1917 with the original "red scare". Of course Russophobia began centuries before that justified on racist (they were asiatic), and religious grounds (Both Protestants and Catholics hated the Orthodox church) and motivated by Russia and Britain's imperial rivalry. The point is after centuries of demonization it is easy for westerners to see Russians as inherently evil and bent on world domination. An objective view of 20th/21st century history shows that they were mostly acting defensively after having been invaded twice once by 14 countries including the US during  the Russian Civil War and again when Hitler invaded in 1941 and killed 27 million soviets as well as destroying thousands of farms, Villages, factories, hospitals, and schools along with millions of homes. Thus during the Cold War it was always an absurd lie to claim that the Soviets were planning to invade western Europe at any moment. They were focused on rebuilding after the war while America completely undamaged had a monopoly on the Atom-Bomb prior to 1949 and would maintain nuclear dominance throughout the cold war.
    However the US needed an excuse to keep it's military industrial complex running and the Cold War provided a convenient excuse to silence critics, smash labor unions and intervene everywhere on the planet that US corporations felt their profit margins might be threatened by some third world president seeking to improve the lives of his or people. Kovalik gives many of the highlights of this war on the planet Guatemala where 200,000 people would die over the decades as a result of a CIA coup. Iran where democracy was destroyed and the Shah installed  to prevent the people from benefiting from the oil revenues. The horrifying wars in Korea and Vietnam which killed millions of people. It was in the 1980's that Kovalik had his political awakening during the war on Nicaragua where Reagan was arming drug dealing death squads to terrorize the Sandinista government for daring to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship and attempt to improve the lives of their people.  Kovalik went down to Nicaragua to see for himself what was going on there and has ever since tried to oppose the wars the US wages in Latin America.

   This was probably the last time the US would have a strong anti-war left. Although there was a brief resurgence during the Bush II years this would largely fade with the coming to office of Obama. Thus most Americans have no idea what their empire has actually been up to lately. The news media has become ever more propagandistic because America's foreign policy has become ever more insane. Kovalik's book will bring you up to date on what has actually been happening. In Libya the US backed Al Qaeda terrorists with the full military might of NATO destroying this tiny socialist country where everyone received a share of the oil revenues under Gaddafi. Instead Libya is now ruled by racist al Qaeda warlords who fight for control who have waged a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign against black Libyans. In Syria a similar strategy has been pursued Syria was nearly destroyed by terrorists armed by the US, the Saudis, Israel and NATO and seeking to turn the country into a chaotic wasteland. In Ukraine the US backed a fascist coup that sparked a civil war.
   It was the war in Ukraine that lead to our current cold war 2.0 Since most people would be shocked to learn that the US was backing a government full of "neo-Nazis" everyone who pointed this fact out was labeled a Russian propagandist. America's alliance with fascists is one of it's dirtiest cold war secrets Hundreds of thousands of fascist war criminals were settled across the US, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. They were kept active producing cold war propaganda and were used as secret armies to wage war on the Soviet Union in the early days of the cold war. They were funded and kept active through the World Anti-Communist League which united fascists, terrorists, and drug dealers from around the world. a scandal that emerged during the Iran/Contra era. Anyways this is one of my private obsessions so I couldn't resist tossing it although Kovalik doesn't discuss WACL he does discuss the history of the OUN-B the Ukrainian Fascists who committed horrifying war crimes during World War 2 and are now worshipped as heroes in post-Maidan Ukraine.
    Of course the Russians are not exactly angels and Kovalik attempts to provide a balanced account of Russia's recent history as well. Russia's history since the fall of the USSR has been utterly disastrous in many ways. Thus the book is by no means a one sided account but it will hopefully help the reader to understand what has happened in Russia during and after the cold war. It also provides an account of this new Cold War which really began in the 1990's with the massive NATO expansion, the War in Yugoslavia, and the disastrous economic policies the west imposed on the former socialist world with catastrophic effects.
   Since 2014 the level of Anti-Russian Hysteria has only increased which is why Dan Kovalik is a brave man for writing this book. Despite all the topics and history it covers it is an easy read and has a wonderful heartfelt quality rare in books on these topics. Buy two copies one for yourself and one for a friend or family member who is in the grip of anti-Russian fever or who is unaware of recent history. Whether you are new to topics like these or if you are thanks to the internet and books like this one aware of what is actually going on you will certainly learn something by reading this book. I hope it will awaken in people a desire to search for the truth, think critically, and to fight for peace and justice. We live in dangerous times if you want to do something about it please read this book.

The Origins of the Cold War

    The Cold War and It's Origins Part 1 1917-1950



    The media is currently in the midst of an anti-Russian hysteria that many have dubbed Cold War 2.0. Of course the first cold war never really ended as the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and even Afghanistan were aimed at Russia as was the relentless NATO expansion. This manufactured panic is a form of psychological warfare that went into high gear during the Sochi Olympics in 2014 as the US was working to launch a fascist coup in Ukraine. Since most ordinary people would be shocked to discover that Nazis had been installed in power in Ukraine an anti-Russian hysteria was launched to discredit and intimidate any possible critics of this criminal policy. Of course this was also the moment that I decided to launch my blog for the purpose of exposing the history and methods of the American Empire from the "Cold War" (or World War 3) to World War 4 (which goes by many names.) The fascist coup in Ukraine resulted in a genocidal civil war when the people of Novorossia (the Donbass region of Ukraine) seceded from Ukraine and to the amazement of the world managed with Russian assistance to smash the NATO backed Ukrainian army and their fascist death squad allies attempt to crush the Novorossiyan revolt. Four years later the new cold war has only intensified and frankly gotten so absurd I feel as if I am living in a satire. Only a few courageous voices like Robert Parry have dared to question the current madness. For a discussion of this new cold war I recommend the excellent "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia" by Dan Kovalik.


    This article however will examine the origins of the first "Cold War." I will be relying on a forgotten classic on the topic "The Cold War and It's Origins" By D.F. Fleming which he wrote to oppose the madness of his own time which like today threatens to plunge the world into a nuclear war which it is unlikely anyone will survive. His book was published in 1961 shortly before the Cuban missile crisis nearly ended the world and also shortly before John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the national security state in broad daylight in front of cheering crowds in Dallas Texas. JFK's crimes were to avoid a nuclear war over Cuba, resisting a massive escalation in Vietnam, and attempting to halt the cold war with Russia. D.F. Fleming actually began writing his monumental work as the post-world war 2 cold war was starting in the late 1940's and was doubtless risking career suicide for daring to write an objective account of events at the height of McCarthyism. Thus it is my pleasure to rescue his name from obscurity. The Myth of the Cold War is that the Soviet Union was attempting to conquer the world while freedom loving America was forced to stop them. Yet as we shall see the last thing the Soviet Union wanted was another world war they had suffered 27 million dead during world war 2 and their only goal was to rebuild after the enormous destruction the nazis wrought. America on the other hand was undamaged save the 250,000 soldiers they lost in the war (7 million Soviet soldiers were killed) and they had just acquired the atom bomb. Far from defending freedom America was busy allying with every fascist it could find and would overthrow countless democracies installing brutal military dictators in the years to come. America's main goal was to stop the people of the world from doing anything to combat the terrible poverty and oppression they lived under. America fought on the side of the rich against the poor and dared to call this democracy despite the fact that the poor are the vast majority of the world and the rich a tiny minority of the planet.

   The myths of the original cold war live on and are accepted as true despite the mountains of evidence discrediting these myths. Americans prefer to remember the comforting lies rather then to face the awful truths of their own history. The cold war was in retrospect one of the most successful psychological warfare campaigns in history it aimed to crush dissent at home and revolution abroad. It unleashed fascism at home and abroad. By purging communists from American society it did great damage to the labor, peace, and civil rights movements and created a toothless cowardly american left that slowly but inevitably lead to the completely bankrupt politics of today where no one in the public eye dares to oppose capitalism, imperialism, or even fascism. A world where al Qaeda terrorists receive oscars and Ukrainian fascists are celebrated as champions of democracy.


   But let us turn our attention to the origin of this "Cold War" D.F. Fleming begins his history not with the end of World War 2 but much earlier in Tsarist Russia in the years before 1905. He outlines the utter misery and ignorance that the vast masses of Russians were forced to live in. The dirt, the disease, the crowding, the cruelty of those times is difficult for us to imagine. Most Russians had no access to health care or education. Any attempt to demand better pay or working conditions was met with brutal reprisals. Unions were illegal. A spirit of revolution born of utter desperation began to spread. Lenin had only recently split his Bolshevik faction off from the other marxists because he foresaw that only a tightly organized revolutionary party would stand a chance against the Tsar's secret police. The Tsar's expansion of his empire into China  and Korea lead to a war with the expanding Japanese empire. The Russian government was so corrupt the troops supplies never seemed to arrive and the war resulted in a humiliating defeat. The secret police created their own fake opposition so that they could control it. However conditions were so bad one of their agents a priest Father Gapon was forced to disobey orders and lead a massive demonstration begging the czar for help in a petition. Instead of help the Tsar ordered a massacre. This sparked the 1905 Revolution. Western "Democracies" sent the Tsar Billions in loans so that he could brutally suppress this revolution since they owned much of the Russian economy and didn't want Russia's people interfering with their profits. The Tsar unleashed his proto-fascist  "Black Hundreds" death squads who massacred the workers and the peasants along with any jews or "subversives" they could lay their hands on. The Tsar was forced to allow a parliament but broke most of his promises for democratic reform. On the eve of world war 1 nearly ten years later revolution again threatened as the country was paralyzed by massive strikes. However the Tsar foolishly entered the war despite the fact his regime was already tottering.


   World war 1 was a disaster for Russia it had some success against the Austro-Hungarian empire but was no match for the crack German troops. The Germans with their modern artillery were able to obliterate the Russian armies their guns were so powerful they could bury the Russians alive from a distance and millions of soldiers perished. The Russian Officers were so cruel to their men that mutiny was rampant. Again because of corruption and industrial backwardness they were ill trained and poorly supplied. Despite this they did make an important contribution to the allied victory but by 1917 Russia was facing a complete collapse. The women of St. Petersburg sparked a revolution when they marched demanding bread and instead of massacring the people the troops mutinied. However this initial revolution was quickly hijacked by the new provisional government although the Tsar was forced to resign. The people of Russia desperately needed peace and some relief for their incredible poverty. The new provisional government was committed to continuing the war and delayed putting any socialist reforms into place. It also faced competition from the "Soviets" which meant councils of soldiers workers and peasants. Lenin newly returned from exile saw an opportunity to turn Russia's liberal democratic revolution into a communist revolution willing to carry out the will of the people. He won over the Russian people with the slogans "Land, Peace, and Bread" and "All power to the Soviets" Even many in his own party thought this was impossible but of course by November 7 of 1917 only a few months later the Russian October Revolution had succeeded in seizing power.


    This is when the cold war began both their former enemies the Germans and their former  allies Britain, France, and the US along with 10 other countries were now bent on destroying the Russian Revolution. Luckily for Lenin World War 1 was still ongoing and the Germans main priority was to make peace with Russia so that it could send it's forces to the western front. They knew Russia was weak and so demanded a large amount of Russian territory in exchange for peace. Thanks to Trotsky's bungling they were also able to seize huge amounts of extra territory that had belonged to Russian empire in the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine which the Germans seized after Trotsky told them he would neither make peace nor war with them. Russia was forced to make peace with the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Britain and France were momentarily distracted but provided funding to a series of would be fascist Russian dictators or "White Generals" as they were then called. Men like Generals Denikin and Kolchak They committed horrendous atrocities and also brought untold disaster and suffering to the men under their command when each of them failed in turn. To give only one example imagine the disaster faced by the men who were forced to retreat without supplies back into Siberia. Once World War 1 Ended the whole world was free to unite in attempting to destroy Socialist Russia. They not only hoped to destroy the Revolution each also sought to balkanize the country and seize huge territories as loot. The Japanese sought to seize Siberia. France sought to seize Odessa and Crimea. Britain Sought to seize the rich oil fields in the black sea region near present day Chechnya. Germany installed fascist puppets in the Baltic. Poland seized a huge portion of Russian territory. Encircled and invaded on every side amazingly the communists were victorious and regained control of most of their territory. It was one of the most glorious victories in human history.


    I hope to revisit the topic of the Russian "Civil War" later this year. For now I'll merely point out that the Cold War began with the imperialist world invading and attempting to conquer what would become the Soviet Union. Nor did the west seem very concerned about freedom and democracy when they gave the Tsar billions of dollars to unleash his secret police and death squads on his own people in the failed revolution of 1905. Yet thanks to myth people believe that it is the Soviets who were out to conquer the world. For daring to withdraw from the war and for daring to build a new type of society that would benefit the vast majority of Russians the Soviet Union was targeted for destruction. Their people were massacred their factories burned. American troops were part of this invasion and yet most americans have no idea that their country ever invaded Russia. This is because not only was a conventional war declared but also from the start a psychological war a propaganda war. Newspapers printed the most absurd lies about the Soviet Union such as that all women were shared in common. The bolsheviks were portrayed as insane and sadistic killers and the papers were full of fake atrocity stories. The media also constantly portrayed the Soviet Union as being in complete chaos and on the verge of collapse. Thus one of the most amusing parts of D.F. Fleming was a discussion by Walter Lippman (who coined the phrase the "Manufacture of Consent") in 1920 printed in the New York Times discussing the terrible failure of the press to provide accurate news on events in Russia calling the coverage a disaster and admitting that the paper had wrongly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union 91 times since November 1917. Yet of course this coverage was no accident but rather the result of the fact that the western media is owned by rich capitalists who always portray every revolutionary as an insane and cruel madman. The difference being that today they don't even bother to apologize for their blatant lies.

    Not only did America wage war on Russia it also waged war on itself shocking even the reactionary europeans. American Capitalists were equally terrified of the majority of their own population who lived in dire poverty not to mention the indians whose children they were kidnapping and brainwashing while the adults lived in concentration camps. They were especially terrified of the blacks kept under brutal apartheid rule and targeted at will by american fascist death squads like the KKK. They were also suspicious of the new immigrants many who were catholics or jews and brought dangerous foreign ideas like socialism, anarchism, and communism. Thus in conjunction with their anti-Russian hysteria they launched a brutal attack on labor unions, blacks, and immigrants. People were held without charges like after 9/11 and many immigrants were deported for the crime of dreaming or organizing for a better world. Full scale war was launched on black communities who were forced to take up arms to defend themselves. These were part of a long pattern of "Race Riots" one of the most brutal was in St Louis in the summer of 1917 where thousands of blacks were murdered before the Russian Revolution had even occurred. Lynch mobs were unleashed on catholics, jews, and of course blacks and even union members. Prior to world war 1 the Media had been organized to wage a massive propaganda war to convince people of the necessity of entering World War 1. Now with the start of the cold war the media would wage an unending propaganda war that continues to this day. Inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution the american communist party was formed demonized by the press erased from history they would play a vital if forgotten role in the creation of the civil rights movement, the passage of new deal social reforms, the creation of the 1st racially integrated unions, the fight against fascism, war, and imperialism. They would be imprisoned, beaten, tortured, murdered and blacklisted. American prisons are still full of communist political prisoners from the 60's, 70's, and 80's.


   After many humiliating and disastrous defeats the imperial powers were forced to give up their war on the Soviet Union. Their own war weary people demanded an end and staged strikes to halt the war. The next strategy the west pursued was one of demonization and isolation. They refused to recognize the new government for years. The Soviets were desperate to rebuild their society. During the war they had built a form of "War Communism" but Lenin believed socialism must make a temporary retreat and trade restored. The era of NEP began and Russia was even willing to allow foreign trade to resume and foreign investment. Yet not even the prospect of being allowed to exploit the USSR's rich natural resources could convince the west to relax tensions. The US and UK refused to even recognize the government let alone resume trade. This turned out for the best since the soviet union would instead once again move the country towards socialism and a planned economy. In 1924 tired of being isolated by the west the Soviets signed instead a deal with the Germans  who were also still isolated after loosing the war and being forced to pay massive reparations. Russia received vital industrial equipment in exchange for raw materials. It would be a faustian bargain which while helping the Soviets industrialize also helped the Germans to re-arm. However the British and Americans would soon be funneling billions of dollars into Germany to build up Hitler to attack the Soviet Union.


    It was with the rise of Hitler and also the great depression that the next major phase of the cold war would begin. In America Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized the USSR in 1933 because the US now needed any potential trade and as a counter-balance to Hitler. In the Soviet Union they immediately recognized the danger Fascism posed and would try desperately to unite  with the imperialist democracies to oppose this new threat. D.F. Fleming spends a whole chapter on Litvinov's repeated attempts to create an alliance to oppose wars of aggression  to keep the peace. Yet as D.F. Fleming demonstrates at great length the west would turn down the Soviet Union's offers of alliance again and again. The British hoped that Hitler would smash the Soviet Union and it's policy of appeasement was meant to clear the path east for Hitler while evading it's treaty commitments in Eastern Europe. During these same years the Germans and Italians invaded republican Spain in aid of the fascist  General Francisco Franco who fought to seize power. The west including FDR banned the shipment of weapons to aid the Spanish loyalists resisting these fascists. It was the Soviet Union alone that sent weapons troops and advisers to preserve democracy in Spain. The USSR also encouraged communists and anti-fascists from around the world to volunteer to aid Spain. The US and Britain on the other hand prosecuted these volunteers as criminals. American newspapers demonized the Spanish republic just as it had demonized the Russian Revolution. Many papers openly supported the fascists. France doomed Spain by barring Russian weapons or supplies from entering the country. The west deliberately insured a fascist victory in Spain and seldom is the Spanish civil war even mentioned in discussing the origins of World War 2.


    The fall of Spain was greeted with horror and disgust in Russia. It was increasingly clear that the west would do nothing to stop the march of fascism. Despite this obvious fact the Soviets continued to try to form an alliance against Hitler at every step of the wests appeasement. It offered to fight to defend Czechoslovakia the UK on the other hand rejected this offer and forced the Czechs to surrender. It offered to send troops defend Poland (which had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1935) Poland denied them permission. The UK attempted to get the USSR to sign a unilateral defense agreement with Poland while turning down their offer of a mutual defense pact. This would have embroiled the USSR into war with Germany as soon as they invaded Poland. In the final months before war began the British and French did their best to delay forming an alliance and insult the soviets by sending low level negotiators with no power to make a deal. American and British capitalists had spent billions of dollars arming the German war machine. Germany was poised to invade Poland. Thus Stalin was forced into his brilliant but infamous gamble of the non-aggression pact with Germany. With this move he forced Britain and France to enter the war against Germany. He also managed to regain the Russian territory Poland had won during the "Russian Civil War" and got a free hand to take back the baltic. Of course from a geo-political perspective it was a smart move but politically it was an embarrassing disaster. Communists around the world had been at the fore front of the fight against fascism and were now in the embarrassing position of having to explain this devils bargain. It would be used to blacken the reputation of the Soviet Union until our own time despite the fact that the west had already signed similar deals with Hitler long before. However it bought the Soviet Union one year in time and a valuable buffer zone that would prove vital in managing to survive the war. It should be remembered that Russia stopped the Germans less then 16 miles from Moscow without this non-aggression pact they could easily have lost the war.


    Stalin had hoped Hitler would be bogged down for years on the western front. Unfortunately many in the french military feared communists and socialists far more then Fascism of which they were openly sympathetic. Thanks to their treachery France would collapse quickly and the British would be forced to flee back to Britain. The Nazis forces were the best trained and equipped in the world. They were masters of tactics and strategy. Hitler had always dreamed of conquering Russia enslaving and massacring it's people and seizing it's valuable natural resources. He dreamed of the conquest of Eurasia. Thus June 22 1941 he launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. If he had been delayed an extra year he would have faced a much harder war because the soviets were just starting to mass produce their next generation of tanks and planes. Most Soviet forces were armed with obsolete equipment in 1941 and were no match for the battle hardened germans in the first months of the war. It was only in 1942 that the Soviets famous T-34 Tanks and Illuyshin bombers would be produced in enough numbers to give the Soviet Union a fighting chance.


   The Soviets suffered defeat after defeat and the world doubted it would survive more then a couple months. Luckily Stalin managed to transfer the more experienced troops from the east in time to save Moscow under General Zhukov's command. For the first time the Nazis were not only stopped but pushed back hundreds of miles. It was the winter of 1941 and the Americans had finally entered the war making it an ally. Churchill who had been in charge of waging war on Russia during the civil war seemingly put his hostility on hold and allied with Russia. However as D.F. Fleming make clears this change was only an illusion and Churchill would play a sinister game during the war. FDR promised Stalin a second front against Hitler in 1942 to take the pressure off Russia. Churchill instead manipulated them into invading North Africa and then Italy. America and Britain would play an only minor role in the war. Instead it was the Soviets who did the vast majority of the fighting and dying. 90% of German troops died on the eastern front. Sadly thanks to textbooks, hollywood and the media  the average American doesn't even realize Russia fought in World War 2 let alone that they nearly single handedly won the war.


   In 1942 Hitler launched his summer offensive to capture the Baku oil fields the British had once tried to steal (and nearly bombed at the start of the war which would have insured a Nazi victory.) However the Nazis had to cover their flank by taking Stalingrad and in the most epic battle in history met their doom. Against all odds the Soviets refused to surrender the city which German bombers quickly reduced to ruins. The Soviets defended every house every block to the death. While the Germans were bogged down in the city; Stalin once again moved in reinforcements from the east the Germans didn't even suspect existed. Under General Zhukov's able leadership they launched a counter attack smashing thru the Romanians assigned to guard the german lines. Soon the Germans were completely surrounded and were forced to surrender. It was the the most decisive victory in the war. The Summer of 1943 Hitler Gambled on one last major counter-offensive at Kursk. It was the greatest Tank battle in history and the soviets managed to smash the germans. Now the Red Army began the massive task of liberating eastern Europe. It was only in 1944 that the Western Allies finally opened a second front. Even then Churchill had wanted to invade the Balkans to counter the Russians instead of landing at Normandy. The Soviets had to race the allies to liberate Berlin. A secret deal had been cut and the Germans were offering only token resistance in the west while fighting to the last man on the eastern front against the soviets. Finally after an epic battle the Red Army finished off the nazis in the battle of Berlin. As D. F. Fleming points out the Russians saved countless american and British lives by taking the brunt of the fighting. They suffered untold suffering at the hands of the Germans. Americans who have not known any real war or invasion since the war of 1812 have no idea what it is like to suffer a war let alone what Russia suffered at the hands of Germany. They had no sympathy for the Russians just like they have no sympathy for the Yemenis, Iraqis or the Syrians. America will never understand the horror and folly of war until the instant it is  obliterated in a nuclear war by which time their will be no one left to understand anything.


   Thus with the arrogance born of their spoiled ignorance America wasted no time after the end of world war 2 to claim the Russians were the new nazis. They choose to ignore the huge debt it owed Russia in defeating Fascism. It was of course the American fascists like the Dulles brothers who would shout loudest about this absurd claim. The Dulles brothers had represented the nazi business interests (a fact Fleming only dares hint at) and Allen Dulles cut a secret deal with the Nazis. They would go to work for the american empire. While the Soviets were still fighting hard against fascism during the war the British were already fighting on the same side as the Fascists. Churchill was at it again in one of the most disgraceful chapters of the war. Greece had long been a de facto British colony. Before World War 2 It's newly returned corrupt king King George II would appoint a fascist dictator General John Metaxas earning the king the hatred of the greek people. While a fascist Metaxas was allied to Britain and so resisted an Italian invasion before dying. The British sent troops to help but were forced to flee and a pro-german fascist puppet was installed. However in one of the heroic chapters of the War the greek people fighting under communist leadership of EAM-ELAS were able to singlehandedly liberate their country. British troops returned and were greeted with cheers they did not have to do any fighting as the greek guerrillas had already won the war. Churchill however wanted his colony back he also wanted to reinstall the king who was hated for installing the Metaxas dictatorship. In December 1944 Churchill ordered the British to protect and reorganize the fascist death squads while ordering the greek Guerrillas of the  to disarm. Stalin had made another devils bargain with Churchill. Stalin was promised control in eastern Europe in exchange for British control of Greece they would divide Influence over Yugoslavia (The British broke their deal and Yugoslavia would later become a secret NATO partner ironically Yugoslavia would become NATOs first victim after the cold war and has ceased to exist) Here were the seeds of what would become the cold war. Stalin kept his end of the deal allowing the British to wage a brutal war on the Greeks without coming to their aid. This war was the beginning of the cold war and Britain allied with the fascists against the greek republicans many who were not necessarily even communists but merely fighting against monarchy and fascism. Ironically the British would basically loose this war. FDR had been disgusted by Churchill's treacherous treatment of his Greek allies who were massacred (some while chanting FDR's name) or sent to prison camps on remote islands or to north Africa. However Truman would use the greek civil war as the excuse to launch his Truman Doctrine which committed America to a constant encirclement of and covert war upon the soviet union. More importantly it committed the US to battle any revolution anywhere in the world which shocked D.F. Fleming but confirms yet again the brilliance of Gerald Horne's discussion of the Counter-Revolution of 1776. In Greece the US would back fascist death squads as they terrorized the greeks while the American's napalmed the people of Greece in the name of freedom and democracy a pattern that would repeat from Korea, to Vietnam, to El Salvador, and scores of other unlucky countries.

   The soviets were always being accused of being untrustworthy and as a result could be overzealous in fulfilling their promises and Greece was one of the most tragic examples of this. At Yalta they made the deal with Churchill Official and the Americans signed on as well. They agreed to install democracies but as we shall see and as D.F. Fleming points out rather brilliantly the soviets had their own view of democracy. For the soviets democracy was impossible so long as the old elites dominated society. History has proved them correct as in America we are given a choice solely between evil billionaires never in it's history has an ordinary person been allowed to become president of The United States and run things for the benefit of ordinary americans. To become a politician one must first sell oneself to rich backers. Yet strangely even though everyone knows this everyone forgets everything they know about this corrupt system whenever someone begins to praise the blessings of democracy and the need to murder millions to bring it's benefits to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Ukraine or Russia. Even if what is labeled democracy is obviously genocidal terrorism or fascism. Thus even today when discussing the cold war or the Truman doctrine no one dares mention that we installed fascism not democracy in Greece. Truman was also backing the Fascists of Turkey who were planning to ally with the Nazis if they had won at Stalingrad. Nor do they seem to mention that the Soviets were actually providing no support instead people parrot the lie that america intervened in Greece to stop soviet "expansionism" As if this wasn't bad enough once Greeks returned to democracy the CIA backed a fascist coup there in 1967 20 Years after Truman had sent in the troops to Napalm the entire country Greece would suffer at the hands of yet another fascist dictatorship. Today Greece is a poster child for the undemocratic nature of the EU.


    However before turning our attention to the postwar Cold War we should discuss the soft coup that took place in the United States. In 1944 FDR's pro-Russian vice president Henry Wallace was forced off the ticket in a rigged convention and replaced by the racist Russia hater Harry S. Truman. On  April 12 1945 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would die. D.F. Fleming is convinced that had FDR lived the Cold War could have been avoided. In my view it could at most have been delayed. However by replacing Wallace with Truman the corrupt forces that stage manage our democracy insured that whatever Roosevelt had accomplished in winning the trust of the Russians would quickly be completely reversed. The people of Russia mourned FDR far more then then many in the US where he was hated and constantly red-baited by the Capitalists and many media outlets. Truman was a lot like  George W. Bush stupid arrogant and always trying to act tough. Both Presidents would leave office with the lowest approval ratings in history having embroiled their countries in lost wars that would nonetheless kill millions of Koreans (Truman) and Iraqis (Bush II). Both would unleash hysterical panics destroying the very freedoms they claimed to be fighting for (McCarthyism & the Patriot Act.) Both men were put in power undemocratically.


    Now to turn to the causes of this second Cold War that began in 1945. The Soviets were motivated by one single goal security. Having suffered two catastrophic invasions in less then 30 years, as well as suffered constant economic and political warfare they required neighbors who were not hostile and would not join the next potential invasion of their country. Initially they installed popular front (an alliance of communists and socialists) governments in Eastern Europe contrary to myth these governments were democratically elected. However once they realized the west was intent on breaking their Yalta agreements they installed communist governments. In Hungary for example there was a danger that the fascists would come back into power democratically. They openly conspired being arrogant aristocrats and were foiled by the soviets. They decided to install a Communist government in the process killing one person and imprisoning a couple hundreds. This was long after Churchill's war in Greece had killed tens of thousands and locked hundreds of thousands of people in prison camps on isolated islands or even in the North African desert. Still what happened in Hungary was blasted across the headlines as an example of monstrous Communist Tyranny while when George Polk wrote critically about the Fascist government in Greece he was murdered by Greek Fascists and his death was blamed on the communists. In Czechoslovakia the Communists seized power when it looked like they were loosing influence in the Government they mobilized the masses and forced the government to resign. This was after after Truman declared his Truman Doctrine allowing him to wage covert war on the USSR while waging war on revolutionaries worldwide whether they were nationalists or communists. However these defensive moves by the Soviets were hyped by the politicians and the media as proof that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. I should mention that the Soviets greatly improved the lives of the people in their zones of influence where huge feudal land owners had brutally oppressed and murdered their people. They carried out land reform, provided free education, free health care and guaranteed employment. Food and housing were subsidized to make them affordable. Western visitors at the time to these countries often joked that they could see no iron curtain and people seemed free and happy.


   In reality of course it was the United States that was out to conquer the world. It hoped to force the Soviets out of Eastern Europe and was waging a covert war with exile armies of fascists to destabilize the governments and roll back communism. George Kennan who was in charge of this program and was the architect of the Truman Doctrine of "Containment" called it Counter-force. The Massive Propaganda campaign was waged as part of the effort to force the soviets out. It was not fear of the Soviet Union as myth would have it but rather their knowledge of how damaged the Soviet Union was that motivated the empire. America had the Atom Bomb. It had turned the former fascists of Germany and Japan into it's proxies ready to wage war. Britain and France with their mighty empires had become American pawns desperate for loans and America was confident it would inherit their empires. In the meantime it funded the British and french in their anti colonial struggles. Back then it also dominated the UN.

   Above all it had invented the Atom Bomb. It timed the dropping of this bomb for the day before the soviet union was due to join the war with Japan which Stalin had agreed to launch three months after. Thus almost no one remembers the crushing blow the Red Army dealt Japan in Manchuria which would have caused a Japanese surrender without the A-Bomb being dropped. It was done to send a message to the Soviets. Luckily the Soviets had spies within the American Nuclear Program but as D.F. Fleming points out this only sped up their nuclear program by a few months. With the Atom Bomb the US thought it could threaten the USSR into abandoning Eastern Europe. It Surrounded the USSR with bomber bases. American papers openly boasted about plans to launch a pre-emptive Nuclear War. Thus this was the beginning of that arrogant hubris that has characterized the American attitude ever since. The Richest and most industrialized country on the planet with the former great powers as it's pawns and a monopoly on the Atom Bomb it saw no reason why it should honor it's Yalta Agreements simply because the Red Army had managed to singlehandedly liberate eastern Europe.

   I Call the Cold War World War 3 and view it as primarily a war on the Third World. America's cold war planners were from the start far more worried about the inevitable collapse of the european empires. There was a danger that newly liberated countries might seek to fight poverty and exploitation threatening the profits of western corporations. However the US saw that by hyping up the soviet threat it could label any liberation movement or even mild reformers as communists or tools of the kremlin. Thus America's aggressive war on the planet could be sold as defensive. Revolutions and Anti-colonial struggle would be blamed on communist subversion and western publics were trained to believe that they had to battle communism everywhere in the world. Guatemala, Iran, The Congo, the list went on and on of Nationalist governments overthrown and replaced by brutal dictators. In Guatemala alone 200,000 people would be killed as a result of one of these fascist coups sold in the name of anti-communism. As the Cold War began in 1945 the US was already waging war in The Philippines, Korea, and China. Fascist coups would occur in the 1940's in Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru. The US was already defending fascist governments in Spain and Argentina.

   In West Germany America was allowing most of the Nazi deep State to hold onto power and had formed an alliance with Reinhard Gehlen which terrified the Soviets and was used to run armies of fascists from Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia and all of eastern Europe. The US was helping fascist war criminals escape justice all over eastern Europe from places like Croatia, Hungary, and Romania. These fascists would settle in the US and Canada seize control of their ethnic communities often violently and throughout the Cold War would lobby constantly for the need to "liberate" not just eastern Europe but the soviet union as well. The western Media trumpeted these fascist war criminals as heroic freedom fighters never telling the western public about their well documented crimes and atrocities. This pattern remains to this day of course from Syria's genocidal terrorist death Squads aka the "moderate rebels" to newly reinstalled Ukrainian Fascists both are sold as heroic freedom fighters to the gullible western public. These fascist exiles would form the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of nations along with the "white" Russian exiles the  (ABN) branch of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) which I wrote about last year.

   Of Course the Cold War had domestic causes as well. The American capitalists hated the "New Deal" reforms that cut into their profits. During World War 2 America had the greatest number of strikes in it's history. The Capitalists feared the power of the labor unions and this new red scare offered them a chance to crack down on the unions who were forced to expel all real or suspected communists often their most radical and committed members. Unions became tools of organized crime and the CIA. Southern Segregationists also had long been the chief actors in the anti-communist witch hunts which they used to attack enemies of Jim Crow like Paul Robeson or later Martin Luther King. The NAACP expelled it's founder W.E.B. Dubois as part of this new red scare. A permanent climate of fear and self censorship survives to our own day. Needless to say any peace movement in the West was also viewed solely as dangerous communist subversion. Some of America's most brilliant journalists were forced into silence for contradicting the cold war hysteria or for exposing fascists. Honesty became a crime lies became sacred, propaganda became history. Above all daring to dream of a better world became a crime. Tens of thousands of civil servants, teachers, union members lost their jobs. People were forced to shun old friends lest they be labeled communist as well. The FBI collected every rumor and slander they could find into secret files. Even high level state department officials could be hounded into retirement especially if they had spoken honestly about America's corrupt Chinese fascist ally Chiang Kai-Shek who's "China Lobby" was funded by heroin profits and owned Joe McCarthy (he was also backed by the nazis) who was used to carry out their vendettas on their critics in the US state department. Obsessed with rooting out Russian influence in America no one cared that tiny Taiwan had been allowed to completely corrupt the American political process (which was already corrupt enough ) Just as today the west is in a panic about Russian influence but cares little about the stranglehold the Israel lobby has over American, French, and British middle east policy.

 
   These were the early years of the Cold War. The public were told that the Soviets would invade western Europe at any moment even though this was utter nonsense. When Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech in Truman's hometown with Truman in the audience, Churchill was actually stealing nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels phrase.  Everywhere there were anti-communist witch hunts. The American military were eager to nuke Russia and were only restrained by the danger that the Red Army might wreak a terrible revenge and by the practical details of occupying the radioactive waste land of the soviet union after it had been bombed to smithereens. They planned to parachute in their fascist exile armies and seize control but realized that might be impossible in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where every major city had been destroyed. Thus D.F.  Fleming ends Volume One of his monumental book with the explosion of the Soviet Bomb in 1949  which may have saved the USSR from annihilation. The west thought it was impossible until at least 1951 but yet again the USSR had surprised the world.  America would continue to threaten nuclear war for decades but were now restrained by the Soviet Nuclear capability. Fleming writes of the hopes that America would seize the moment for diplomacy but it refused. Within nine months the Korean War broke out and the "Cold War" turned "hot" although it had been hot all along in places like Greece and even in Korea itself. I will discuss the Chinese Revolution, Korean War and the origins of the Vietnam War in my next article dealing with Volume 2 of D.F. Fleming's "The Cold War and It's Origins" The same west that had harshly criticized the Soviet Union for taking relatively mild steps to insure their control of eastern Europe would proceed to murder millions of people to prevent Communist governments from coming to power democratically worldwide.


Sources

My main source was of course the classic "The Cold War and It's Origins 1917-1960 Volume 1 1917-1950" By D.F. Fleming. However it was written at a time when the history of the CIA was largely unknown, so I also recommend "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War" By Christopher Simpson. For a discussion of Cold War 2.0 read "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia" by Dan Kovalik. I also rewatched America's Hidden History by Oliver Stone which is a powerful documentary but also fails to question certain crucial cold war myths about Stalin and the USSR.



My article on Lenin and the Russian Revolution

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/07/lessons-of-russian-revolution.html

My Article on Black Bolshevik which contains a vivid discussion of the Red Scare and the racist  violence of the times as well as the role Communists played in the struggle for Civil Rights

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/11/black-bolshevik-harry-haywood.html


My Article on Stalin and the Soviet Union from the Revolution to World War 2 and the "Cold War"

       http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/08/understanding-stalin.html


America's alliance with Nazi's was a major reason for the "Cold War" based on Christopher Simpson's excellent book "Blowback"

       http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2014/06/nazis-and-cia.html


America allied with nearly every fascist group on the planet as part of the World-Anti-Communist League

     https://www.sott.net/article/323037-Beyond-the-Iran-Contra-Affair-Part-3-The-World-Anti-Communist-League

                               

Empire of Hopelessness

    Empire of Hopelessness: Targets Venezuela and Syria



    The US is escalating it's war on the planet. In Venezuela the fascists have escalated their war on the country committing gruesome murders, and attempting to burn down government buildings. In Syria the US continues to expand it's invasion from the south and the north bombing Syrian forces and shooting down a Syrian jet as part of their campaign to steal as much Syrian territory as possible. In better news Brazil a victim of a soft coup last year that deposed the democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff the new puppet president Temer is on the verge of falling from power. In the Philippines the US is doubtless behind a sudden uprising by ISIS. The middle east is in chaos with Saudi Arabia turning on it's frequent ally and fellow terror sponsor Qatar. Obviously it is difficult to decide which of the two is worse although their current conflict is due to Qatar's monarchs being slightly less insane then the megalomaniacal Saudi monarchs. Now Saudi Arabia has had it's own soft coup elevating a war mongering prince Mohammed bin Salman aka the "Butcher of Yemen"  to the role of heir apparent Crown Prince to the senile current monarch. In Yemen the blood bath and starvation continue. Iran suffered a major ISIS attack and the CIA have launched another attempt to topple the government. Across the planet World War 4 rages from Mexico to Colombia, to DRCongo, England, Afghanistan, a war without boundaries or borders bringing poverty, misery, death, and destruction, fear, sadness, tragedy and sheer horror. Billions of people struggle to survive in our doomed world. Wherever there is hope or heroism the empire of chaos moves in to try to destroy it.


    Venezuela is a beacon of hope to the world. In 1989 Gorbachev was destroying the socialist world to the applause of the west who declared an end to history. The people of Venezuela, the people of the slums, the poor, the desperate rose up, demanding a better future. They were brutally massacred between 300-1500 people were killed. However in response to this horror and to the cries of the people that revolutionary genius Hugo Chavez began to make his plans and after a failed attempt to seize power  he would by 1999 be elected president of Venezuela. Hugo Chavez would set about transforming Venezuela forever. He gave hope not just to Venezuela but to all of Latin America, in fact to the whole world. He was killed by the CIA but his revolution would live on. Venezuela has been constantly targeted for destruction since Hugo Chavez came to power. For the empire of chaos it is criminal to dream of a better future and still worse to inspire others to dream.

   Thus the war on Venezuela has been escalating. Spoiled rich kids have received paramilitary training so that they can wreak havoc on their country. Among their most memorable recent crimes was the murder of Orlando Figuera who was stabbed six times and burned alive for being a black man and hence a likely Chavista. I was reminded of the CIA's war on black Libyans who were massacred by racist al Qaeda death squads incited by "human rights groups" like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to carry out genocide against black Libyans and African guest workers with their "African Mercenaries" propaganda campaign. I was also of course reminded of the US itself where the police and even fascist hate groups still murder blacks with utter impunity. Ines Esparragozza Orlando's mother a maid was fired by her rich opposition supporting employer for daring to denounce the horrific murder of her son on national television. The murder of Orlando Figuera had been part of the oppositions Ukraine inspired tactics as earlier a Telesur journalist had been doused with gasoline and nearly set on fire.  Arson is a favorite weapon of the Venezuelan fascists who had already tried to burn down a maternity ward full of premature babies. Since torching poor Orlando alive they have attempted to burn down the Venezuelan Supreme court for resisting their coup plots and the housing authority for the crime of building new homes for 1.5 million Venezuelans.   To make matters worse Colombian death Squads are still operating in Venezuela murdering Chavistas. The CIA/Media which are practically inseparable have waged propaganda warfare on the country. Apparently Venezuela is guilty of trying to put a stop to this violent and murderous rampage which no state would tolerate. Venezuelans will never surrender to this attack on their country aiming to destroy all they have dreamed of and worked for in the 30 years since they first rose up.

   Syria the most heroic nation on the planet has been a target for even longer. As Stephen  Gowan's explains in his excellent new book "Washington's Long War on Syria" Syria has been a target of the american empire since at least the 1950's. Syria's crime was daring to dream  of true independence from the old colonial powers and their new american heirs. Syria attempted to achieve economic and political independence. Syria resisted the settler colonial state of Israel. Syria refused to throw it's people into poverty so that western billionaires could get a little richer. As result Syria was targeted for destruction. An attempt was made to destroy the country using the muslim brotherhood as proxies in the 1980's funded by the CIA, Israel, the Saudis and Syria's many other enemies. Thankfully this genocidal terror campaign was successfully crushed. Sadly the US would launch a far more ambitious war on Syria in our own times.

    The suffering the Syrian people have undergone since 2011 is incalculable. The economic war using sanctions has been even more destructive then the terror campaign the west has unleashed. The two work together sanctions prevent Syria from importing vital medicines while the NATO death squads blow up pharmaceutical factories, destroy hospitals and murder doctors. Then when terrorists explode a bomb Syrian civilians die or suffer unnecessary amputations because there are no antibiotics to treat infections. A simple trip to the dentist becomes a nightmare because there is no anesthetic. Sanctions put people out of work while terrorist recruiters offer huge salaries. Children starve or die from easily preventable diseases. Millions have lost everything, millions are homeless. 300,000 people have died but millions have lost love ones, suffered traumas and tragedies most people cannot even imagine. Yet even amidst all this horror and suffering Syrians have refused to surrender. They have refused to give up their dignity their humanity. Syria's civilians are the unsung heroes of this war every day is a struggle to survive. The criminal sanctions on Syria must be lifted.


   Which is why it is so horrifying to see the empire of chaos doing everything in it's power to prolong this war as long as possible. Syria has suffered more then enough. The tide of the war has shifted in Syria's favor forcing the US to intervene directly in order to prop up their terrorist allies. First however I must deal with that heroic city Deir Ezzor. The US seems determined to enable an ISIS victory. Deir Ezzor was the victim of  repeated waves of huge ISIS attacks aimed at capturing the city leaving 100,000 Syrian civilians in ISIS merciless grip and massacring the cities heroic SAA defenders who have managed to resist ISIS for years despite being completely surrounded. The US has been deliberately trying to herd ISIS fighters out of Raqqah and towards Deir Ezzor and Palmyra which they hope to seize a third time. The SAA have been trying to close this gap in southern Raqqah which the americans kurdish mercenaries have deliberately left open. The latest attack on Deir Ezzor was enabled by these criminal schemes although of course ISIS would never have become one of the most powerful and well funded death squad armies without the support of the CIA. This fact was made blatantly obvious when ISIS popped on the other side of the world to destabilize the Philippines which is pursuing friendly relations with China against the empire's wishes. Hence it is clear the US was also behind the massive ISIS offensive at Deir Ezzor which they hope will give them an excuse to seize Deir Ezzor using their Marines and kurdish proxies in the north of Syria and their terrorist forces in the south of Syria. ISIS managed to make some dangerous advances seizing vital strategic parts of the city and the fate of Deir Ezzor was in doubt for a few days. Thankfully the heroic SAA defenders were able to stage a counter attack and Deir Ezzor was saved. Deir Ezzor has become an important symbol to Syria and the world as a symbol of Syria's determination to liberate their country. Deir Ezzor surrounded by enemies  a symbol of Syria's  heroic resistance against the US-Israel-NATO-GCC Axis of Chaos. We can only hope that the cities brave defenders can hold out against ISIS long enough for the siege to be lifted and the cities people to be saved. The US has launched a horrific white phosphorous bombing in the area that killed 30 civilians.


    The liberation of Deir Ezzor has long been a goal of the SAA but recently a new battle to preserve Syria's sovereignty has begun in the south where the US invaded a couple months ago in support of their terrorist allies and set up a base at al Tanf.  When Syria and it's allies sent a force aimed at ejecting the invaders the US bombed them repeatedly. The US then set up yet another base in southern Syria. They are moving kurdish mercenaries to reinforce al Tanf. They have recently sent an advanced rocket launching system to defend this stolen territory. Luckily Syria and it's Iraqis allies were able to outflank these bases opening a border crossing between Iraq and Syria. Syria is doing everything in it's power to contain this invading force without giving the americans an excuse to further escalate their attacks. Unfortunately America needs no excuses since it is run by pathological liars. In Northern Syria the SAA are trying to cut off the ISIS escape routes and trying to prevent the Americans from stealing more Syrian territory for their kurdish puppets. In support of this mission a Syrian jet was bombing ISIS near Rasafa when the US shot it down aiming to halt Syrian advances in the North which are also aimed at setting the stage for the liberation of Deir Ezzor. The US lied and claimed the plane had been bombing their kurdish puppets. The US may have gone too far this time as the patience of Russia has finally run out and it is threatening to target any NATO or Israeli planes flying into Syrian airspace. Only the future will show wether they carry through on these threats.

    Thus unfortunately after suffering years of tragic war it may be years before the war in Syria ends because the vindictive empire cannot stand to be humiliated at the hands of the heroic Syrians. It is all just a board game to the imperial planners in Washington no matter how many millions they kill they seem completely immune to any remorse. If Syria had been destroyed and millions were slaughtered they would have celebrated. They dream of a world without heroism a world without hope where we have forgotten how to dream and would never dare to resist. A world where greed is the only value, lies are held to be sacred truths, and where mass murder and slavery are viewed as liberation.

   Opposing them are the millions of Venezuelans who have taught the world to dream, to hope again. Opposing them are the heroic people of Syria who have reminded the world that however powerful the empire it can be defeated so long as we resist.







Sources

I read two great books recently which I highly recommend "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia" By Dan Kovalik (I've often relied on his work on Latin America) attempts to expose the horrifying crimes of the american empire as well as explain why Russia has been targeted by this insane propaganda campaign. I also recommend "Washington's Long War on Syria" By Stephen Gowans which explains Syria's modern history as well as analyzing the current war on Syria and debunking much of the propaganda surrounding this war. Both Books are must reads.

An Analysis of the current situation in Syria

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/06/syria-summary-us-attack-fails-to-disrupt-push-to-deir-ezzor.html

Fascists in Venezuela continue their rampage

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/venezuelan-supreme-court-torched-as-jailed-opposition-leader-urges-coup/

Comparing the Fascist Tactics used in Ukraine and Venezuela

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/plaza-altamira-venezuela-plaza-maidan-ukraine/

Another Side of Venezuela

 https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/venezuela-stories-from-the-peoples-struggle/

The Murder of Orlando Figuera

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13170