The Coors Connection, Old Nazis, The New Right and The Republican Party: Fascist Lobbies in America
Fascism is on the rise across the planet. However this is not necessarily a new phenomenon. As Russ Bellant reveals in in his classic books “The Coors Connection” and “Old Nazis, The New Right, and the Republican Party” fascism has always been an active force in American politics. Bellant’s books also offer clues to the rise of fascism in places like Ukraine. Not only did the United States and Britain recruit fascist war criminals during and after World War 2 they actually invited them to immigrate to the United States, Canada, Australia, and South America. As if that wasn’t shocking enough instead of these fascist war criminals hiding out and keeping a low profile they were instead incorporated into America’s Republican party and became a powerful lobby both during and after the cold war. They became a key element in the CIA psychological warfare campaign against the Soviet Union. Worse as the Soviet Union was being destroyed the CIA and the NED funded the return of these fascists to their homelands to recreate fascist parties. In the case of Croatia and more recently Ukraine they were with the help of the CIA and NED allowed to seize power. They were allowed to shape America’s Policy through lobbies like the American Security Council. They were part of a global network of fascist exiles, terrorists, death squads and drug dealers that made up the infamous World Anti-Communist League or WACL that I discussed in two earlier articles.
However the power of America’s fascist lobbies did not only affect those living in Eastern Europe. As Russ Bellant discusses in the Coors Connection America’s home grown fascists were the true motor behind the Reagan Counter-Revolution of the 1980’s which sent America and the rest of the world on the path to the economic disaster we all face. One wealthy German-American family the Coors were able to reshape the entire country in the image of their own racist and reactionary views. Since the 1980’s New Deal reforms have been steadily rolled back, free market Fundamentalism has taken over world wide. Joe Coors and his rich friends had backed Ronald Reagan’s political rise since 1968 and was rewarded by becoming one of Reagan’s personal advisers becoming part of the “Kitchen Cabinet.” Of course there was more involved then just the Coors Family, and one could of course write equally shocking accounts of other infamous wealthy families, like the Rockefellers or the DuPonts. Democracy is a sham because the views of the rich no matter how backwards or bigoted will always count for far more then the broad masses of the public. Indeed wealth allows them to shape the minds of the public through, the media, lobbies, politicians, and think tanks. Today George Soros and the Koch Brothers have become infamous for their political influence world wide. In the 1980’s it was the Coors Family that became the architects of the Reagan Counter-Revolution. They were a key force in a vast right wing network that included both mainstream politicians, christian fundamentalists and out-right fascists.
The rise of the Coors family began in 1872 when German immigrant Adolph Coors set up a brewery in Golden, Colorado. In 1929 his son Adolph Coors jr. took over the company after his father “fell out of a window”. In 1970 Joe Coors and his brother William took over the company and it is with this era that Bellant’s book deals. Joe Coors and his children would fund an ever expanding number of lobbies, think tanks, political pressure groups, cults, racists, and media outlets to remake the world in their image. What were the political views of this dynasty? They were sexists, female family members were excluded from any role in managing the company instead they were expected to marry well. Thus the Coors family funded a number of groups that opposed the Equal Rights Amendment which barred gender discrimination. They funded groups that wanted to ban abortion and birth control. They saw feminism as a conspiracy to destroy western civilization.
The Coors family were also racists who wanted to destroy the gains of the civil rights movement. They desperately tried to resist hiring any black workers even attempting to mobilize their all white work force to resist. They funded groups closely tied with the KKK attempting to resist desegregation. They gave “Scientific Racist” Roger Pearson (a future WACL head) a key role in editing their journals and running their lobbies. They funded racist scientists through the Pioneer Fund in an attempt to prove blacks were racially inferior. Shockingly during the 1990’s the mainstream media would heavily promote the results of this pseudo-science in the form of the book “The Bell Curve.” They also hated immigrants especially Latinos and funded anti-immigrant groups. They even donated a Helicopter to the Denver police to help them terrorize the Latino community They hated unions and managed to destroy union after union in their plants. They also funded the “Right to Work” movement to work to destroy the power of Unions nationwide with disastrous effects for American Workers.
They were fundamentalist christians and helped create the Moral Majority of the 1980’s and laid the ground work for the George W. Bush years. They went further funding Christian “shepherding” cults like The Word of God that wanted to abolish democracy and bring in theocracy and who controlled every aspect of their members lives. They even worked closely with the non-christian moonie cult who worshiped the Reverend Sun Myung Moon as a messiah and would be world dictator. The moonies were controlled by the Korean CIA and the Japanese Yakuza they had enormous lobbying power through bribery of politicians and providing them sexual favors opening them to blackmail. The Moonies owned the Washington Times which they used as a propaganda vehicle to support Reagan’s foreign policy. Again and again Coors network lobbies intertwined with Moon controlled groups like CAUSA. The Coors family even had close ties to new age cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant. Needless to say the Coors family hated gays and lesbians and funded efforts to prevent them from achieving equal rights. They even required their employees to take lie detector tests with detailed questions on the employees political views and sex lives meant to prevent homosexuals or even liberals from being hired. They funded groups that wanted to criminalize or even wipe out the gay community. They opposed environmental regulations and managed to poison a whole towns water supply. They wanted to destroy the public school system. They even tried to keep poor students from attending Universities. They funded groups like Accuracy in Media to harass and attempt to destroy those few journalists willing to report critically on the empires many crimes.
I could go on the Coors family opposed any form of progress and seemed to exemplify that other America that liberals tend to ignore. Unfortunately the Coors family and their allies were so successful in reshaping america’s political life and moving it to the right that the liberals of today are actually imitating the right wing fringe of the 1980’s with this new Russia-Gate fiasco and it’s talk of active measures and paranoia over russian spies although the roots of this madness of course go back to the Joe McCarthy era and even further back. Back in the 1980’s it was the Nuclear freeze movement , opposition to fascist death squads in Latin America, and opposition to Apartheid South Africa that could get you labeled a KGB dupe by any number of Coors family funded pressure groups. Today it is opposition to the wars in Ukraine or Syria or even to police shootings that will get one labeled a tool of Russian disinformation. After Bush the Clintons continued the Reagan-Bush era policies of unlimited endless war and unfettered neo-liberal capitalism, just as Obama would later continue the Bush II era policies of total surveillance, drone assassination and ever expanding war. The lunatic fringe has become the american political center which helps to explain the madness of the Empire of Chaos although of course the empire has always been insane and engaged in endless wars. The main change has been that for a time standards of living were rising within America but since the 1970’s they have steadily declined.
The Coors family was able to reshape American politics through a vast interlocking network of NGO’s with interlocking boards of directors with recurring names like Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie . Each NGO constantly spawned new NGO’S. Often they were single issue groups. You’ll have to buy Russ Bellant’s book to get a complete list as there were hundreds of groups with an alphabet soup of names often with innocuous sounding names like the Mountain State Legal Fund or the Federation for American Immigration Reform. For every new issue a new lobbying group could be formed. One Coors family associate compared their strategy to a tugboat instead of achieving a drastic change all at once instead they would nudge the debate year after year decade after decade a strategy that proved terrifyingly effective. Many of these NGOs and think tanks focused on foreign policy issues and were closely linked to both the CIA and the fascist groups tied to WACL like the Free Congress Foundation, the American Security Council and the Committee for Peace Through Strength. One of the most important is the Joe Coors founded Heritage Foundation from whose ranks Trump recently recruited many members to serve in his administration. British Nazi Roger Pearson was given a key role in the Heritage foundation. When Reagan came to power in 1980 the Heritage Foundation would write the blueprint for the new administration with it’s “Mandate for Leadership”. The Reagan Administration would recruit a number of this reports authors into the government. Two thirds of the reports thousands recommendations were put into law in the first year of the Reagan Administration. The Mandate for Leadership called for huge cuts in social spending and huge increases in defense spending. It also argued for a massive increase in covert warfare or low intensity warfare as they were calling it back then. They supported the exact same foreign policy goals as the CIA and General John Singlaub of WACL. Back in the 1980’s this meant supporting the fascist regimes of El Salvador and Guatemala in their wars on their own people as well as funding the fascist terrorist group the contras in Nicaragua. In Africa they supported Apartheid South Africa and it’s terrorist death squads RENAMO and UNITA which they along with the CIA were using to wage covert war on Mozambique and Angola. It also meant supporting the birth of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The Heritage Foundation would control a presidency another Coors created group would attempt to control the congress. This was the Free Congress Foundation headed by Paul Weyrich. It opposed civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. It helped create the Moral Majority headed by Rev. Jerry Fallwell. It recruited ambitious would be congressman via it’s leadership training program offering key campaign support from the Coors network in exchange for loyalty to the Free-Congress Foundation agenda. It would go on to play a key role in spreading fascism to eastern europe since Weyrich like the Coors family had close ties to the WACL network of fascists especially to Laszlo Pasztor of the Hungarian Arrow Cross. The Free Congress foundation was given an NED grant to expand into eastern europe helping to set up capitalist puppet states for the American empire and was also caught funneling money to revive fascist groups across eastern europe. They were closely linked to the drunken Russian puppet Boris Yeltsin and helped him seize power. Another key Coors backed group is the Council on National Policy founded by Tim LaHaye of the Moral Majority and later run by Tom Ellis an aide to Jesse Helms who also ran the racist Pioneer Fund. It was backed by Texas Billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt another key figure in the funding of American fascism. Oliver North and John Singlaub were on the board which interlocked closely with the Free Congress Foundation. It’s activities are all top secret but of course pursues the same racist, fundamentalist, and war mongering agenda as the rest of the Coors network. One board member was is in the KKK another was convinced rock music was a communist conspiracy, another leads the group of escaped Nazi war criminals DANK. The Council on National Policy was created to be the John Birch Society answer to the Council on Foreign Relations.
This is only scratching the surface of the Coors network but as we have seen it played a major role in shaping the Reagan Administration and hence the history of the world. Less influential but more shocking are the groups outlined in Russ Bellant’s other book “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party” Thousands of fascist war criminals were brought to the US after World War 2 and were given help seizing control of their ethnic communities. The history of some of these groups like the White Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Germans actually went back to World War 1. America has mostly forgotten the German American Bund which used to parade through American cities in Nazi uniforms get into brawls and terrorize jewish neighborhoods. They were allied to the much more influential America First committee backed by wealthy patrons like Gen. Robert A. Wood chairman of Sears Roebuck. General Wood would go on to found the American Security Council. The Ukrainians were active as well engaging in espionage, sabotage, and terrorism on behalf of German intelligence. The white Russians brought with them the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was soon translated into english and sold across the country. Of course there were plenty of home grown fascist movements as well like the Silver Shirts. The problem grew far worse however after World War 2 when American and British intelligence absorbed the surviving SS and the members of the Nazi puppet governments as allies in their covert war on the Soviet Union. They had committed untold atrocities and carried out genocide. However they were immediately branded as brave freedom fighters and even as crusaders for human rights. Just like today anyone who dared to expose them was simply labeled a Russian propagandist or a communist dupe. In fact they would be closely involved in orchestrating the whole McCarthyite red Scare movement and Joe McCarthy himself defended the SS who were tried for killing their american prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge known as the Malmedy Massacre. The names of suspected communists Joe McCarthy used was provided by Col. John V. Grombach and his network of spies called the pond who were mostly SS men being run by SS General Karl Wolff. As I’ve often said the secret alliance between British and American intelligence with fascism is the key to understanding “The Cold War” yet has been largely suppressed from history despite being an open secret for decades. As Russ Bellant points out one of the major side effects of this alliance is the censorship of history and even worse the complete corruption of history. For example it is almost completely impossible to find an accurate account of World War 2 on the eastern front and the crimes of the Waffen SS. On the other hand history books are filled with lies about the soviet union as these escaped war criminals became the major source for cold war propaganda masquerading as the history of the Soviet Union. The crimes of fascists are covered up while the crimes of socialist countries are wildly exaggerated.
In part this falsification of history was both to protect these fascist allies and the empire that now employed them. This censorship has increased rather then decreased in the post Cold War era. For example when John Loftus book the Belarus Secret was published in the 1980’s it created a media firestorm but when it was republished a few years ago in uncensored form as America’s Nazi Secret it received a complete press blackout. This was because America was working with the children and grandchildren of these fascists all over eastern europe especially in Ukraine as we have since seen. The tremendous ignorance of the general public of the role of these fascists in World War 2 where they carried out horrific genocides of Jews and other ethnic groups as well as carrying out brutal massacres of their own people who were resisting the nazi occupation allowed the press to pass off a fascist coup in Ukraine as a democratic revolution. This is how the new cold war began and just like the first one fascist play a major role. Groups like the Atlantic Council and the alliance for securing democracy work closely with Ukrainian fascists in stirring up anti-russian hysteria today. In Canada the Christina Granddaughter of a Ukrainian fascist even became a foreign minister and anyone who points out this embarrassing fact is accused of being part of a russian disinformation campaign. Canada became home to one of the largest groups of escaped Ukrainian war criminals and Freeland’s appointment shows that America is not the only country where these fascist émigrés were encouraged to amass immense domestic political power.
In the United States a huge number of escaped fascist war criminals were resettled in the United States. They had played a vital role during the Holocaust helping the nazis round up and execute Jews, Communists, Serbs, Gypsies, Poles, and Russians. In exchange they were rewarded with political power becoming mayors, policemen, and often joining the Waffen SS. The Ukrainians of the OUN-B for example joined the 14th Waffen SS division the so called Gallician division. It was technically illegal for them to enter the country but Frank Wisner of the OPC made a secret deal with the immigration service ( The “Office of Policy Co-Ordination” run by Frank Wisner which carried out covert operations, coups and psychological warfare and was later incorporated into the CIA becoming a CIA within the CIA answering to Nazi collaborator Allen Dulles) It was Wisner who helped create the myth that the OUN had fought both the Nazis and the Soviets when in reality they had joined the SS en masse and carried out a brutal genocide, they were infamous for their habit of sawing their victims in half. The Republicans had expected to win the 1948 elections and blamed the Truman win on the democrats strong jewish support. They decided to counterbalance this support by settling fascist emigres across the country in key voting districts. They even helped them seize power. For example Bishop Valerian Trifa of the Romanian Iron Cross violently seized control of the Romanian church with the help of the FBI. Richard Nixon would have him offer the opening prayer for the senate in 1956.
Three future presidents would work closely with these Nazis Richard Nixon was in charge of the Republican Heritage groups in 1952 and would make them a permanent fixture in 1968 as a reward for his election victory. He would appoint Hungarian Fascist Laszlo Pasztor of the Arrow Cross to head it and Pasztor would still be around 2 decades later during the 1988 elections. Pasztor worked closely with Paul Weyrich of the Fee Congreess Foundation. Ronald Reagan would work closely with these groups during the 1950’s as the spokesman for the Crusade For Freedom a massive illegal CIA propaganda campaign aimed at the american public utilizing these fascist war criminals who hoped the US would put them back in power. After being elected President Reagan would continue to maintain friendly relations with these fascists sending warm letters to Ukrainian Fascist Yaroslav Stetsko of WACL telling him “your dream is our dream.” and even to “scientific racist” Roger Pearson. Reagan even paid his respects to the SS as president claiming that they were victims too. Finally of course there was George H. W. Bush his father Prescott Bush had worked with the Nazis. Bush would be in charge of the Republican Heritage Groups Council “Ethnic Outreach”program that employed these nazis as RNC chair during the 1970’s. Bellant would create a tiny scandal when his book was published showing the many nazis working on the Bush presidential campaign in 1988. Of course as a lifelong CIA man this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Bush’s fascist connections. The CIA needless to say was interlocked closely both with many of the groups that made up the Coors network which were often staffed by notorious “Ex” CIA men like Ray Cline and John Singlaub as well as with all the nazis of the Republican Heritage Groups Council or RHGC and of course the American Security Council and WACL. Future president Bush had the ardent support of both the CIA and the Nazis. Needless to say Trump is hardly the first fascist minded american president but is rather continuing with tradition by appointing the Fascist Sebastian Gorka as his adviser.
You’ll have to read Bellant’s book for a full account of the different fascist branches that made up the republican heritage councils. Of course one shouldn’t believe that the majority of these ethnic groups shared these fascist views. This is what makes the story so scandalous the GOP could easily have set up a perfectly respectable ethnic outreach program but instead choose to put the tiny fraction of hard core fascists in charge. Each group had it’s own separate branch except for blacks and jews both to avoid offending the nazis and for fear they might blow the whistle on this scandalous operation. In 1988 the groups were all still headed by fascists. Thus there were the Romanians of the Iron Cross like Valerian Trifa and Florian Galdau. The Hungarians like Laszlo Pasztor of the Iron Cross. The Bulgarians like Radi Slavoff. The Cossacks like Nicolas Nazarenko. The Slovaks like Method Balco whose dreams would come true when Czechoslovakia was split up in the aftermath of the cold war. For Belarus there was Walter Melianovich. There were the Croatians of the Ustahe as well who were so secretive Bellant couldn’t find much info on them and who were already plotting their return to power in Croatia which lead to the break up of Yugoslavia.
He had much better luck digging up info on the Ukrainian fascists of the OUN-B lead by Yaroslav Stetsko. They had the Ukrainian Congress Committe of America as a front part of a global network of Ukrainian fascists. The Ukrainians were among the most powerful groups in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations or ABN the WACL branch that united all the eastern european fascists world wide and which was headed by Lev Dobriansky whose daughter Paula Dobriansky was on Reagan’s National Security Council. Yaroslav Stetsko was invited to the White House to meet Reagan and Bush for a photo op. Both would also travel to pay homage to the Bodhan Fedorak and his Ukrainain cultural senter in Michigan. All were ardent fascists. Asian Americans were represented by the infamous Anna Chenault of the “China lobby” for KMT drug lords and whose husband had helped found what became Air America one of the most scandalous chapters in the history of CIA drug trafficking. Italian Americans were represented by an equally dubious character Philip Guarino who had ties both to the Mafia and to the fascist P-2 Lodge the CIA backed free masonic lodge founded by Licio Gelli. P-2 was part of a vast scandal involving GLADIO false flag terror attacks, attempted coups, massive banking scandals, the vatican, the mafia, Italian Intelligence, drug dealing, and arms deals that has inspired a number of books and was tied to both watergate and Iran-Contra. This was the sinister cast of charachters that would help elect Nixon Reagan and George Bush I.
These fascist groups did more then just help elect presidents. They were actually brought in to help shape policy this was through such groups as the American Security Council a fascist think tank founded by Nazi sympathizer General Robert A. Wood of the America First committee. Originally it’s purpose was to keep files on Americans deemed “subversive” which in the 1950’s included anyone interested in reform, labor rights, civil rights or peace. They were run by Ex-FBI men and their files came from the House Un-American Activities committee and from Nazi Harry Jung’s American Vigilante Society a notorious anti-semite. Soon however the ASC became the leading warmongering think tank designing America’s foreign policy. It was funded by the Military Industrial Complex and boasted it was “The Heart of the Military Indutsrial Complex” and the “Cold War Campus.” It was full of military men, CIA veterans and Fascists. It was not just a think tank but a powerful lobby. For example it Organized the defeat of those senators who had opposed the Vietnam war like George McGovern. They also helped Senator Frank Church get defeated plastering his home state with adds claiming he was a traitor.
The American Security Council created the powerful lobby and propaganda outfit the Coalition For Peace Through Strength or CFPTS as I’ll refer to it. The CFPTS was a massive umbrella group uniting everyone in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. It was founded in 1978 doubtless part of the scheme to get Reagan and Bush into the White House. Among the many groups it was made up of were all the fascist branches that made up the republican heritage councils. It also united all the WACL groups and the Moonies and was part of the Coors network. Needles to say peace was the last thing it was interested in. Instead it advised massive increases in covert war across the planet. Thus the Fascist influence went far beyond eastern europe. Of course this was nothing new WACL united the fascists of the entire world and hence was involved in wars across the planet in Asia in places like Korea and Vietnam where the ABN fascists were closely tied to the asian fascists of APACL (The Asian People’s Anti-Communist League that would form the core of WACL). The ABN was also extremely close to Latin American Fascists and their death squads in both South America where WACL conferences were used to plan Operation Condor strategies and in Central America where ABN was worshipped by CAL and the leaders of death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador who murdered hundreds of thousands of people in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The American Security Council was also directly tied to the carnage sending future WACL head and CIA/Special Forces veteran General John Singlaub and General Daniel Graham of the DIA to meet with the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran Oligarchs to tell them that Reagan would back them and to start killing more people. They funneled a fortune in illegal campaign contributions to the Reagan Campaign and the numbers of people being kidnapped tortured and murdered immediately began to skyrocket after the ASC visit. In Africa both WACL and the ASC supported apartheid South Africa and the terrorist death squads it was funding with the CIA. These were UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique both of whom murdered hundreds of thousands of Africans to destabilize the socialist governments there. WACL was also close to the Saudi Monarchs who donated a fortune to fascists around the world. The Saudis, the Pakistanis (who were also influential in WACL) ASC and WACL backed the terror campaign against socialist Afghanistan that would give birth to Al Qaeda. This would of course later make the ASC’s Military Industrial Complex backers a fortune after the 9/11 attacks as trillions were spent supposedly in the name of fighting the very group they had created and that the CIA and it’s allies still control.
Thus this network of fascists and right wing lobbies was not merely some bizarre scandal but has actually shaped world history. The roots of todays wars in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other conflicts lay in the machinations of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Fascist lobbies not only wreaked untold destruction on the third world they helped bring untold misery to the first world. In the third world and the former socialist bloc countries it was even more catastrophic with tens of millions dying in eastern europe alone while across the third world the results were even more catastrophic. For 40 years the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. Conveniently this increase and poverty and misery helps increase the appeal of fascism. This is a legacy of the policies pursued by the Coors family and their many allies. The mere fact that the Republicans were able to publicly maintain a decades long alliance with nazi war criminals without anyone in the press reporting it aside from a couple small newspapers shows how controlled the corporate press always have been. If anything the problem has only grown since the end of the cold war. No one dared report the fact that Croatian Fascists had seized power instead the media reported on the war in Yugoslavia as if the Serbs who had always lived there had suddenly invaded the country. The same script would be repeated 20 years later during the war in Ukraine where the war on the people of Novorossiya (the Donbass) was reported in the press as a “Russian Invasion” despite the fact that the Russian speakers had always lived there since the region only became part of Ukraine because Lenin hoped they would be a counter to the fascists of west Ukraine who had actually begun their genocidal murder spree during the Russian Civil War and who would carry out an even worse one during World War 2 killing almost a million people. Thanks to the CIA they are now being given yet another opportunity to wage a genocidal war and weapons are flooding the country from NATO as the war is heating up once again. To understand the world today we must continue to uncover and expose these fascist networks. Russ Bellant’s two books are an invaluable contribution to this effort.
Sources
Russ Bellant’s books are a must read packed with far more detailed information then I could include in this article.
The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism By Russ Bellant
Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and their effect on U.S. Cold War Politics by Russ Bellant
I also Recommend America’s Nazi Secret by John Loftus which deals with escaped Belorussian and Ukrainian Fascists in America and their crimes during the War
Covert Action Information Bulletin The CIA in Eastern Europe with an article by Russ Bellant on the Free Congress Foundation in Eastern Europe
Russ Bellant on Ukraine
My Guide to the Covert Wars of the Reagan era
My first article on World Anti-Communist League
My second article on the World Anti-Communist League
Christopher Simpson on the CIA, the Nazis and Joe McCarthy
A history of Fascism in Ukraine
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