In part 1 of this series Fact Checking the Fact Checkers, the question was posed “why does Ukraine seem to have so many Nazis nowadays?” In that paper we were led to the further question “is the United States and possibly NATO involved in the funding, training and political support of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and if so, for what purpose?” It was concluded that in order to answer such questions fully, we would have to look at the historical root of Ukrainian nationalism and its relationship with U.S. Intelligence and NATO post-WWII. It is here that we will resume.

The Historical Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism

The birth of Ukrainian Nationalism as it is celebrated today has its origins in the 20th century. However, there are a few important historical highlights that should be known beforehand.

Kievan Rus’ was a federation in Eastern-Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century and was made up of a variety of peoples including East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic, and was ruled by the Rurik dynasty.

Today’s Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all recognize the people of Kievan Rus’ as their cultural ancestors.

Kievan Rus’ would fall during the Mongol invasion of the 1240s, however, different branches of the Rurik dynasty would continue to rule parts of Rus’ under the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia (modern-day Ukraine and Belarus), the Novgorod Republic (overlapping with modern-day Finland and Russia) and Vladimir-Suzdal (regarded as the cradle of the Great Russian language and nationality which evolved into the Grand Duchy of Moscow).

The Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia was under the vassalage of the Golden Horde during the 14th century, which was originally a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate originating as the northwestern section of the Mongol Empire.

After the poisoning of Yuri II Boleslav, King of Galicia-Volhynia in 1340, civil war ensued along with a power struggle for control over the region between Lithuania, Poland and its ally Hungary. Several wars would be fought from 1340-1392 known as the Galicia-Volhynia wars.

In 1349, the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia was conquered and incorporated into Poland.

In 1569 the Union of Lublin took place, joining the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which ruled as a large and major power for over 200 years.

From 1648-1657 the Khmelnytsky Uprising, also known as the Cossack-Polish War took place in the eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which led to the creation of a Cossack Hetmanate in Ukraine.

Under the command of Khmelnytsky, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, allied with the Crimean Tatars and local Ukrainian peasantry, fought against Polish domination and against the Commonwealth forces; which was followed by the massacre of Polish-Lithuanian townsfolk, the Roman Catholic clergy and the Jews.

Khmelnytsky to this day is a major heroic figure in the Ukrainian nationalist history.

By 1772, the once powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had too far declined to further govern itself and went through three partitions, conducted by the Habsburg Monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire.

From the first partition of Poland in 1772, the name “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” was granted to the Habsburg Monarchy (Austrian Empire, which later became the Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1867). Most of Volhynia would go to the Russian Empire in 1795.

By 1914, Europe would be dragged into WWI. In March 1918, after two months of negotiations with the Central Powers (the German, Austria-Hungary, Bulgarian, and Ottoman Empire), the new Bolshevik government of Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceding claims on Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as the condition for peace (Note: the Bolshevik Revolution began in March 1917). WWI would officially end on November 11th, 1918.

As a result of the treaty, eleven nations became “independent” in eastern Europe and western Asia, Ukraine was among these nations. In reality, what this meant was that they were to become vassal states to Germany with political and economic dependencies. However, when Germany lost the war, the treaty was annulled.

With Germany out of the picture and the dissolution of both the Austria-Hungary and Russian Empire; Poland and Ukraine found themselves in a position to establish their independence.

During the Habsburg’s rule, due to their leniency toward national minorities, both Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements developed, and both were interested in claiming the territory of Galicia for their own. Western Galicia at that point, with the ancient capital of Kraków had a majority Polish population, whereas eastern Galicia made up the heartland of the ancient Galicia-Volhynia and had a majority Ukrainian population.

The Polish-Ukrainian war was fought from November 1918 to July 1919 between the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian forces (consisting of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Ukrainian People’s Republic). Poland won and re-occupied Galicia.

The Polish-Soviet war would be fought between February 1919 and March 1921. This coincided with a series of conflicts known as the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921) which fought to form a Ukrainian republic.

By 1922, Ukraine was divided between the Bolshevik Ukrainian SSR, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The Second Polish Republic reclaimed Lviv, along with Galicia and most of Volhynia, the rest of Volhynia became part of the Ukrainian SSR.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929 in East Galicia (located in Poland at the time) and called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine.

From the beginning, the OUN had tensions between the young radical Galician students and the older military veteran leadership (who grew up in the more lenient Austria-Hungary Empire). The younger generation had only known oppression under the new Polish rule and underground warfare. As a result, the younger faction tended to be more impulsive, violent and ruthless.

During this period, Polish persecution of Ukrainians increased and many Ukrainians, especially the youth (who felt they had no future) lost faith in traditional legal approaches, in their elders and in western democracies who were seen as turning their backs on Ukraine.

The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried and convicted in 1936 for Pieracki’s murder, were OUN’s Stefan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Both escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.

Support for the OUN increased as Polish persecution of Ukrainians continued. By the beginning of WWII, the OUN was estimated to have 20,000 active members and many times that number in sympathizers in Galicia.

In 1940 the OUN would split into the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnyk, and OUN-B headed by Stefan Bandera which made up most of the membership in Galicia and consisted mainly of youth.

In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Poland. Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were reunified with Ukraine, under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded western Ukraine, there were many western Ukrainians who welcomed the invading Nazis as their “liberators.” It should be noted here that this was not a sentiment predominantly shared by the rest of Ukraine, who fought in or alongside the Russian Red Army against the invading Nazis.

Both the OUN-M and OUN-B would spend much of the war collaborating closely with the Germans. They had no issues with the Nazi ideology for they too believed that a solution was found in returning to a “pure race.” In the case of Ukraine, this pure race consisted of a somewhat romanticised concept of “ethnic Ukrainian,” based on the golden age of Kievan Rus’.

The OUN believed that the “pure ethnic Ukrainian race” were the only true descendants of the royal bloodline of the Rurik dynasty that ruled Kievan Rus’. And rather than looking at Belarusians and the Russians as their brothers and sisters who shared the same ancestry, the OUN viewed them more so as “ethnic impostors” so to speak of this pure bloodline.

This can be seen today with Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups attacking Ukrainian ethnic Russians for the past 8 years in Ukraine. An issue that is almost entirely ignored in the West. See part 1 of this series.

It was believed that if the purity of the bloodline were returned, greatness would once again be bestowed on Ukraine (which had never really existed as a fully independent region).

It was for this reason that the OUN and the SS Galician division believed that exterminating tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and any other non-ethnic Ukrainian was justified. The SS Galician division (which had an overlapping membership with the OUN) were notorious for their extreme cruelty, including acts of torture and mutilation on par with Japan’s Unit 731.

To give an idea of the level of support in western Ukraine at the time for a “pure Ukrainian race,” the SS Galician division recruited 80,000 Galician volunteers in one and a half months.

The trident symbol, known also as tryzub, is an important symbol for Ukrainians, since it comes from the days of Kievan Rus’ and its earliest use was during the rule of Vladimir/Volodmyr the Great, about 1,000 years ago.

However, it is also most unfortunately why the OUN chose the tryzub for both their emblems and flag, to signify their desire to return to those glory days, which was thought could only be achieved through ethnic cleansing.

The above OUN-B flag (also used by their paramilitary unit UPA) is known as the “Blood and Soil” flag. The “Blood and Soil” nationalist slogan originated in Nazi Germany to express its ideal of a racially defined national body (blood) united with a settlement area (soil).

It is also why Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups that formed from 1991 onward (after Ukraine’s independence from the USSR), more often than not, also use the tryzub.

Image above shows flags of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today. In the Azov flag shown above, there is a combination of the Wolfsangel and Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS.

In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.

A research group was put together to compile and organise key elements of this massive newly declassified database, the result was the publication of “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” in 2005, and “Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War” in 2011, both published by the National Archives, and which will be used as a key reference for the rest of this paper.

Richard Breitman writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (1):

“What must be the earliest history (or mini-history) of the extermination of the Jews in Lvov [Lviv] was prepared on June 5, 1945. The ten-page document pointed out that, as soon as German troops took Lvov, Ukrainians in the city denounced Jews who had cooperated with Soviet authorities during the period of Soviet occupation, 1939-1941. Those Jews were arrested, gathered near the municipal building, and beaten by the Germans and local inhabitants. Later, local inhabitants, especially from the villages nearby, ravaged the Jewish quarter and beat Jews who stood in the way of their robbery. Starting on July 1, a pogrom was organized; German police, soldiers, and local Ukrainians all took part. Many of those arrested were tortured and killed… More than twelve thousand Jews were killed in the first weeks of the German occupation of Lvov.” [emphasis added]

Norman J.W. Goda writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (2):

“In its work to destabilize the Polish state, the OUN’s ties with Germany extended back to 1921. These ties intensified under the Nazi regime as war with Poland drew near. Galicia was allotted to the Soviets under the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the Germans welcomed anti-Polish Ukrainian activists into the German-occupied General Government. In 1940 and 1941, in preparation for what would become the eastern campaign, the Germans began to recruit Ukrainians, particularly from Bandera’s wing, as saboteurs, interpreters, and police, and trained them at a camp at Zakopane near Cracow [Kraków]. In the spring of 1941, the Wehrmacht also developed two Ukrainian battalions with the approval of the Banderists, one code named ‘Nightingale’ (Nachtigall) and the other code named ‘Roland’.”

What showcases the youth, and unfortunately ignorance, of the OUN-B, is that the “blood and soil” slogan originating with the Nazis, to which they chose for their own OUN-B flag, was also tied to the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and enslaving the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost. Thus, these Ukrainian nationalists were never considered worthy of sharing in this vision of Nazi Germany but had been regarded as the ultimate slaves for the new German empire from the very beginning.

The OUN-B would learn this lesson the hard way. Eight days after Germany’s invasion of the USSR, on June 30th, 1941, OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State in the name of Bandera in Lviv and pledged loyalty to Hitler. In response, the OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned or killed outright by the Gestapo (approx. 1500 persons). The Germans had no intention of even allowing a semi-independent Ukraine to form. Stefan Bandera and his closest deputy Jaroslav Stetsko were initially kept under house arrest and then sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp (a comparatively comfortable confinement to the other concentration camps).

Mykola Lebed was able to slip through the German police net and became the de facto leader of the OUN-B leadership, also known as the Banderists.

On July 16th, 1941, the Germans absorbed Galicia into the General Government. In October 1941, the German Security Police issued a wanted poster with Lebed’s photograph.

The Germans transferred administrative and senior auxiliary police positions in western Ukraine to Melnyk’s group, OUN-M. (3) German security police formations were ordered to arrest and kill Bandera loyalists in western Ukraine for fear that they would rise against German rule, though this order was eventually revoked.

The following year Lebed would become the leader of the underground terror wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which continued in function until 1956.

Image to the left: Stefan Bandera. Image to the right: Mykola Lebed

Eastern Ukrainians later claimed that Mykola Lebed as leader of the OUN-B, took over the UPA by assassinating the original Ukrainian leaders. (4)

The OUN counted among its enemies those that had denied Ukrainian independence (including Poles and Soviets), those in the Ukraine who had failed to assimilate (Jews) and at times when it suited them the Germans. They also regarded the Jews as the primary support and “spreaders” of Bolshevism.

Breitman and Goda write (5):

“When the war turned against the Germans in early 1943, leaders of Bandera’s group believed that the Soviets and Germans would exhaust each other, leaving an independent Ukraine as in 1918. Lebed proposed in April to ‘cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918. Ukrainians serving as auxiliary policemen for the Germans now joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)… On a single day, July 11th, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities killing… 10,000 Poles…The Banderists and UPA also resumed cooperation with the Germans.” [emphasis added]

This was all done under the command of Mykola Lebed.

By 1943, aware that their situation was becoming increasingly insecure, the OUN tried to re-centralise their forces. However, infighting occurred between the OUN-B against the OUN-M and the UPA unit of Taras Bulba-Borovets (of the exiled Ukrainian People’s Republic) who in a letter accused the OUN-B of among other things: banditry, of wanting to establish a one-party state, and of fighting not for the people but in order to rule the people.

In their struggle for dominance in Volhynia, the Banderists (OUN-B) would kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians for any link to the networks of Bulba-Borovets or Melnyk (OUN-M). (6)

By September 1944 German Army officers in northern Ukraine told their superiors in Foreign Armies East that the UPA was a “natural ally of Germany” and “a valuable aid for the German High Command,” and Himmler himself authorized intensified contacts with UPA. (7)

Norman J.W. Goda writes (8):

“Though UPA propaganda emphasized that organization’s independence from the Germans, the UPA also ordered some young Ukrainians to volunteer for the Ukrainian SS Division “Galicia,” and the rest to fight by guerilla methods. Lebed still hoped for recognition from the Germans.” [emphasis added]

The SS Galicia Division existed from April 1943 to April 15th, 1945. Germany surrendered on May 7th, 1945.

In September 1944, the Germans released Bandera and Stetsko from Sachsenhausen.

The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement Post-WWII: Bought and Paid for by the CIA and served à la Lebed

“[Lebed] is a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans” (9)

– 1947 Report by The U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC)

In July 1944 Mykola Lebed helped form the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR), which would claim to represent the Ukrainian nation and served as an underground government in the Carpathian mountains, in opposition to the Ukrainian SSR. The dominant political party in UHVR was the Bandera group and the UPA, which from that point on served as the army of UHVR and continued to fight the Soviets until 1956.

A feud erupted in 1947 between Bandera and Stetsko on one side for an independent Ukraine under a single party led by Bandera himself vs. Lebed and Father Ivan Hrynioch (chief of the UHVR Political Section) who were against Bandera being head of state.

At an August 1948 Congress of the OUN Foreign Section, Bandera (who still controlled 80% of the UHVR) expelled the Hrynioch-Lebed group. He claimed exclusive authority on the Ukrainian national movement and continued terror tactics against anti-Banderist Ukrainian leaders in Western Europe and maneuvered for control of Ukrainian émigré organizations. (10) However, Lebed who had become close with the Americans at that point was recognized, along with Hrynioch as the official UHVR representation abroad.

With the war lost, Lebed adopted a strategy similar to that of Reinhard Gehlen – he contacted the Allies after escaping Rome in 1945 with a trove of names and contacts of anti-Soviets located in western Ukraine and in displaced persons camps in Germany. This made him attractive to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) despite their above admission in their 1947 report.

In late 1947, Lebed who it was feared would be assassinated by the Soviets in Rome, was smuggled along with his family by the CIC to Munich, Germany in December 1947 for his safety.

Norman J.W. Goda writes (11):

“By late 1947, Lebed had thoroughly sanitized his prewar and wartime activities for American consumption. In his own rendition, he had been a victim of the Poles, the Soviets, and the Germans – he would carry the Gestapo “wanted” poster for the rest of his life to prove his anti-Nazi credentials…He also published a 126-page booklet on the UPA, which chronicled the heroic struggle of Ukrainians against both Nazis and Bolsheviks, while calling for an independent, greater Ukraine that would represent the human ideals of free speech and free faith. The UPA, according to the booklet, never collaborated with the Nazis, nor is there any mention of the slaughter of Galician Jews or Poles in the book. The CIC considered the booklet to be the ‘complete background on the subject.’ The CIC overlooked the fact that under its own watch an OUN Congress held in September 1947 had split, thanks to Lebed’s criticism of the creeping democratization of the OUN. This was overlooked by the CIA which began using Lebed extensively in 1948…In June 1949…the CIA smuggled him [Lebed] into the United States with his wife and daughter under the legal cover of the Displaced Persons Act.” [emphasis added]

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began investigating Lebed and in March 1950 reported to Washington that numerous Ukrainian informants spoke of Lebed’s leading role among the “Bandera terrorists” and that during the war the Bandersists were trained and armed by the Gestapo and responsible for “wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [sic]…In all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important leaders.” (12)

In 1951, top INS officials informed the CIA of its findings along with the comment that Lebed would likely face deportation. The CIA responded on October 3, 1951, that all of the charges were false and that the Gestapo “wanted” poster of Lebed proved that he “fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks.” (13)

INS officials as a result suspended the investigation on Lebed.

In February 1952, the CIA pressed the INS to grant Lebed re-entry papers so that he could leave and re-enter the United States at will. Argyle Mackey, Commissioner of the INS, refused to grant this.

On May 5, 1952, Allen Dulles, then Assistant Director of the CIA wrote a letter to Mackey stating (14):

“In connection with future Agency operations of the first importance, it is urgently necessary that subject [Lebed] be able to travel in Western Europe. Before [he] undertakes such travel, however, this Agency must…assure his re-entry into the United States without investigation or incident which would attract undue attentions to his activities.”

Above image is the original document of the Dulles letter to Mackey on behalf of Mykola Lebed.

What was in West Germany? General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence, who had been conveniently allowed to re-enter West Germany to establish his Gehlen Organisation which would later form the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany) in 1956 .

Dulles also wanted Lebed’s legal status changed to that of “permanent resident,” under Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949. The INS never investigated further after Dulles’ letter and Lebed became a naturalized U.S. citizen in March 1957.

Bandera would also be stationed in West Germany with his family after the war, where he remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations as well as with British Intelligence. (15) At this point Bandera had become too much of a liability and there were multiple attempts, by both the Americans and British starting in 1953, to get Bandera to step down and for Lebed to represent “the entire Ukrainian liberation movement in the homeland.” Bandera refused and went rogue.

It is said that Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by a KGB agent in Munich, however, one cannot help but note that it was excellent timing and extremely beneficial for the Americans that Bandera was taken out when he was, considering what they had planned for Ukraine’s future…

Among the declassified records are that of Hoover’s FBI, who had a small trove of captured German General Staff documents from 1943 and 1944, which revealed German appreciation of the UPA’s work while mentioning Lebed by name. (16) It appears this was never shared with any agency or institution, other than the CIA, despite requests from the INS during their investigation of Lebed.

Interestingly, Goda writes (17):

“The full extent of his [Lebed’s] activities as ‘Foreign Minister’ [of the UHVR] may never become known, but FBI surveillance of him gives some idea. Partly, Lebed lectured at prestigious universities such as Yale on such topics as biological warfare used by the Soviet government in the Ukraine.” [emphasis added]

The following is an indication as to what Dulles may have been referring to as the urgent need for Lebed’s re-entry into Western Europe.

Breitman and Goda write (18):

“By 1947 some 250,000 Ukrainians were living…in Germany, Austria, and Italy, many of them OUN activists or sympathizers. After 1947 UPA fighters began crossing into the U.S. zone, having reached the border on foot through Czechoslovakia.”

However, Lebed was not only urgently needed in Europe, but also within the United States. Once in the United States, Lebed was selected as the CIA’s chief contact/advisor for AERODYNAMIC.

Breitman and Goda write (19):

“AERODYNAMIC’s first phase involved infiltration into Ukraine and then exfiltration of CIA-trained Ukrainian agents. By January 1950 the CIA’s arm for the collection of secret intelligence (Office of Special Operations, OSO) and its arm for covert operations (Office of Policy Coordination, OPC) participated [author’s note: the Allen Dulles rogue faction of the CIA]…Washington was especially pleased with the high level of UPA training in the Ukraine and its potential for further guerilla actions, and with ‘the extraordinary news that…active resistance to the Soviet regime was spreading steadily eastward, out of the former Polish, Greek Catholic provinces… [However] By 1954 Lebed’s group lost all contact with UHVR. By that time the Soviets subdued both the UHVR and UPA, and the CIA ended the aggressive phase of AERODYNAMIC.

Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian study group under Lebed’s leadership in New York under CIA auspices, which collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints. To avoid nosey New York State authorities, the CIA turned Prolog into a for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch [Hrynioch], Prolog maintained a Munich office named the Ukrainische Geseelschaft fur Auslandsstudein, EV. Most publications were created here.

Prolog recruited and paid Ukrainian émigré writers who were generally unaware that they worked in a CIA-controlled operation. Only the six top members of the ZP/UHVR were witting agents. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over Ukraine by air[,] and radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for Ukrainian consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing campaigns to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré contacts in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere. The newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine. These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism…” [emphasis added]

The CIA bought and paid for a brand of Ukrainian Nationalism à la Lebed. One of the most horrifying butchers of OUN/UPA was given reign to shape the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people around their nationalist identity, an identity as defined by the OUN. It is also shaped historical and cultural interpretation such as to further romanticise the concept of the great Ukrainian race of Volodomyr the Great, encouraging a further sense of superiority and further divide between themselves and Belarussians and Russians.

One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and…there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” (20)

Breitman and Goda continue:

“…Prolog [also] influenced [the next] Ukrainian generation…Prolog had become in the words of one senior CIA official, the sole ‘vehicle for CIA’s operations directed at the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and [its] forty million Ukrainian citizens.’

Lebed overtly distanced himself and the Ukrainian nationalist movement from the overt anti-Semitism of his Banderist days…More to protect the name of Ukrainian nationalism, he publicly condemned the ‘provocative libel’ and ‘slanderous statements’ against Jews, adding in a particularly forgetful note that, ‘the Ukrainian people…are opposed to all and any preaching of hatred for other people.’…Former Banderists…now attacked the Soviets for anti-Semitism rather than with it.

Lebed retired in 1975 but remained an adviser and consultant to Prolog and the ZP/UHVR…In the 1980s AERODYNAMIC’s name was changed to QRDYNAMIC and in the 1980s PDDYNAMIC and then QRPLUMB. In 1977 President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the program owing to what he called its ‘impressive dividends’ and the ‘impact on specific audiences in the target area.’ In the 1980s Prolog expanded its operation to reach other Soviet nationalities, and in a supreme irony, these included dissident Soviet Jews. With the USSR teetering on the brink of collapse in 1990, QRPLUMB was terminated with a final payout of $1.75 million. Prolog would continue its activities, but it was on its own financially.

In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed’s name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed.” [emphasis added]

Mykola Lebed died in 1998 under the protection of the CIA in New Jersey at the age of 89. His papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

And there you have it, the true story of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in its form today, bought and paid for by the CIA. Thus, it is no coincidence that the OUN ideology is inextricable from the western Ukrainian nationalist identity today, nor that several neo-Nazi groups have formed since 1991 (since Ukraine’s independence from the USSR) who all view the OUN and Stepan Bandera as the Father of their movement.

[Shortly to follow, Part 3 will discuss NATO and the Gehlen Organization and how this ties into the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and neo-Nazism in Ukraine today.]

The author can be reached at cynthiachung.substack.com 

(1) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 65
(2) Ibid. pg. 249
(3) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 74
(4) Ibid. pg. 74
(5) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 75-76
(6) Timothy Snyder. (2004) The Reconstruction of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press: pg. 164
(7) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 250
(8) Ibid pg. 250
(9) Ibid pg. 251
(10) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 78
(11) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 251
(12) Ibid. pg. 252
(13) Ibid. pg. 252
(14) Ibid. pg. 253
(15) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 81
(16) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 254
(17) Ibid. pg 254
(18) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 76
(19) Ibid. pg 87
(20) Ibid. pg. 89

These here contiguous tribes already
Have long been feuding up to now;
Each party, be it ours or theirs,
Bent under gathering storm clouds.
Who’ll stand the ground when odds are heavy:
A haughty Lech? A faithful Russ?
The question is if Slavic floods will ever
Blend in the Russian sea or it’ll reduce.

Leave us alone: you’re unacquainted
With suchlike bloody sacred tablets;
This family, domestic feud
Is alien, obscure to you;
For all you care, Prague or Kremlin;
Instead, you’re foolishly entranced
By daring courage of a melee –
And, frankly, you are hating us…

Why? On the grounds that, on the ashes
Of blazing Moscow, we refused
To buy the power of the brash, who
You trembled underneath, subdued?
Respond: because we sent the idol,
Who’d been predominating kingdoms, to abyss,
Thus having paid with our lifeblood
For Europe’s freedom, state and peace?..

To hear you talk, you’re tough; then test yourselves in action!
As if an aged hero, calm in relaxation,
Can’t fix his Ismailian bayonet to a gun;
As if the word of Russian tsar is but a trinket
Or brawls with Europe any different
Or Russians out of form to overcome.

As if we’re few; as if from Taurida to Perm reels,
From ardent Caucasus to Finnish chilly skerries,
From Kremlin, shaken to the core,
Up to the walls of quiescent China
The Russian soil will never rise up
And scintillate with her steel thorns.

Then send your bellicose  descendants,
Defamers, over to our place!
There’s room enough, in Russian grasslands,
Among deserving of them graves.

Alexander Pushkin, 1831

Cuba’s request for USSR protection from U.S. imperialist interventions was not unfounded. Only the year before, in April 1961, the U.S. had suffered a spectacular defeat at the Bay of Pigs, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded paramilitary operation to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution was thwarted in less than 72 hours and 1,200 mercenaries were taken prisoner by the Cubans.

The plan was carried out by the Kennedy administration, although concocted by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration. Following the U.S. defeat, Kennedy proposed social and economic aid for Latin America under the Alliance for Progress programme – a plan which the U.S. hoped would bring the region under increased dependence on Washington and possibly prevent other socialist revolutions in Latin America.

As Fidel stated in his autobiography, “He [Kennedy] realized that social and economic factors in the region could well lead to a radical revolution across the continent. There could be a second Cuban Revolution, but on a continent-wide scale, and perhaps even more radical.”

Fidel’s acceptance of having medium-range missiles in Cuba was, in his words, “a measure meant to protect Cuba from a direct attack and simultaneously strengthen the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp.

The missiles were detected by the UN on the night between the 14^th and the 15^th of October 1962, with the then U.S. President John F. Kennedy  warning that the Soviet Union should withdraw the missiles or face a nuclear war. Kennedy also imposed a naval blockade on Cuba, preventing the installation of further missiles on the island.

A declassified U.S. document following the discovery of the missiles on Cuban soil warned, “I assume you will recall that President Kennedy said a year and a half ago that only two points were non-negotiable between the Western Hemisphere and Cuba – the Soviet tie and aggressive actions in Latin America.”

The U.S. threat was renewed on September 13 by Kennedy: “If at any time the Communist build-up in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way… or if Cuba should ever… become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”

On October 25, the U.S. proposed withdrawing its missiles from Turkey, which posed a threat to the Soviet Union, in return for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba. Notably, the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey was kept secret, in an attempt to twist the outcome as a U.S. victory over the USSR during the Cold War.

Fidel considered the compromise as diverting attention away from the issue of Cuba’s sovereignty and the right to defend itself against U.S. imperialist interventions. One major reason for the political discord on behalf of Fidel would have been the agreement being reached without consulting the Cuban government.

For his part, Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy reiterating that the Soviet Union’s installation of missiles on Cuban territory was done “because Cuba and the Cuban people were constantly under the continuous threat of an invasion of Cuba.” Khrushchev also outlined that the Soviet Union’s actions were defensive not offensive – the latter being the U.S.’s misrepresentation.

Letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Fidel indicate that the Soviet Union sought guarantees that the U.S. “not only will not invade Cuba with their own forces, but will not allow their allies to do so.” However, Khrushchev warned, “Since an agreement is in sight, the Pentagon is looking for a pretext to thwart it.”

A reversal of roles in the current scenario between Russia and Ukraine has NATO and its allies escalating hostile diplomacy. On what grounds is guarding a nation’s borders from NATO violence a security threat?

Since Russia’s decision to militarily intervene into Ukraine, a darkness that had long remained in the shadows has been brought to the surface. This darkness took the form of an intention that could no longer hide behind the veneer of “plausible deniability” or self-congratulatory devotees of a ‘liberal rules-based international order’ that has been repeatedly blared like a broken record onto the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Rather than continuing to play by the rules of those who wish all evidence to militarily contain Russia with a NATO-controlled Ballistic Missile Shield targeting Russian defenses, it was decided that a new approach was needed and the game was called out.

Was it the evidence of the bioweapons facilities in Ukraine long treated as conspiracy theory, though now admitted to having existed by Victoria Nuland as the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was it the evidence of an immanent assault led by neo-Nazi forces onto Donbass and Crimea that had been the deciding factor? Some speculate that it was Zelensky’s February 19 call for Ukraine to break the 1994 Budapest Treaty and adopt nuclear weapons.

In truth, we may never know the specific cause of Putin’s decision, but one this is sure.

A war was NOT begun on February 24 2022. The war against Russia was actually launched on February 22, 2014 when the USA finalized its regime change on the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych and began what some have termed a slow-motion Operation Barbarossa over a prolonged 8-year period with one objective in mind: The total destruction and subjugation of the Russian Federation as outlined in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard in 1997.

With the shadow creatures having been forced to the surface, it has become increasingly clear that the virtuous image projected by the western alliance is anything but peaceful, or democratic. Rather than capturing the many obvious opportunities to resolve the crisis diplomatically over the past eight years, the USA, UK, and Kiev have instead chosen only the path of sabotage, slander, and economic war via unilateral sanctions.

So what is to be done?

I honestly don’t know if today’s USA is too far gone for its better constitutional foreign policy traditions to be revived, but I do know that if this history continues to remain buried as it has for the past several generations, then any small chance to save the republic and preserve world peace will certainly be destroyed.

The Strategic Significance of 1776 on International Affairs

Although many have been fed the myth that the USA was a nation bred for global imperial ambitions at its birth, the truth is far different. Certainly, it was never a utopic bastion of liberty untainted by hypocrisy or corruption that some romantic historians have painted over years, but inversely it was never a unidimensional evil slaveocracy as cynical Critical Race Theoreticians maintain. The USA should rather be understood as an unfinished symphony of sorts, whose practical performance too often fell far short than its sound constitutional ideals.

For starters, it is important to appreciate the fact that America’s founding documents (the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and 1787 Constitution) were the first examples in history of a form of government premised on the idea that all people were made equal, endowed with inalienable rights with no mention for race, creed, gender or class. Additionally, the notion that the legitimacy of a nation’s laws arose from the consent of the governed, and mandated to support the general welfare both in the present and long into posterity, was a profound break from the previous notions of Hobbesian law of ‘might makes right’ that had governed hereditary institutions for eons.

The practical expression of these principles to foreign policy were discussed at length by President Washington who warned the young nation of avoiding the dual evils of foreign entanglements externally and party politics domestically when he asked his fellow citizens during his outgoing address of 1796:

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?”

President Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart featuring his right hand resting on the Constitution

During this speech, Washington explained that IF the USA were to survive, it would be due to an international policy of “extending our commercial relations, to have with them [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible.”

Some have slandered Washington’s call for reduced political enmeshment with other nations as isolationist, but he always promoted international commerce driven by mutual benefit. It was merely imperial operations, intrigue, deceit and the new age of color revolutions starting with the Jacobin Terror during Washington’s presidency which the great leader saw as an poisonous mess that would destroy the young republic if it became enmired in foreign escapades.

John Quincy Adams and the Anti-Imperial Origins of the Monroe Doctrine

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) extended these ideas further still by drafting the Monroe Doctrine during his stint as Secretary of State from 1817-1825 which he knew could only work if America ventures “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

President John Quincy Adams with his hand resting on a sketch of Washington

That is to say, as long as the USA focused her efforts on fixing her own problems with a focus on internal improvements, then the Monroe Doctrine would be a blessing for both herself and the international community.

John Quincy Adams also understood the danger of the growing British-run fifth column inside of the heart of the USA then centered around the Federalist Party. While serving as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Adams wrote to his mother in 1811 (just as Napoleon was preparing his Russian invasion and as Britain were on the verge of a new war against the USA):

“If that Party [the Federalist Junto of New England] are not effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors.” (1)

John Quincy Adams firmly understood the world historic significance of the American revolution not as a geographical phenomenon among 13 isolated British colonies, but potentially as the spark of a new paradigm for all humanity liberated from hereditary institutions. At the turn of the 19^th century, there were still French, British, Spanish and Russian imperial interests which all had ambitions to gain control of the territories of the Americas forcing the Hobbesian paradigm of war and intrigue into the new world. In the mind of Adams, as all great American patriots, this had to be stopped.

During the July 4 celebrations in 1821, Adams noted that the Declaration of Independence “was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only LEGITIMATE foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people.”

Did Adams believe that “destined to cover the surface of the globe” meant that the USA was destined to become a Pax Americana subduing the weak to her hegemony? Not at all.

On January 23, 1822 Adams wrote that colonial institutions “are incompatible with the essential character of our institutions.” He also said that “great colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave trade.”

Adams understood the importance of seeing the world as “a community of principle” where win-win cooperation based upon the self-improvement of all parts and the whole international community as more than the mere sum of parts, would constantly bring renewal and creative vitality to diplomacy. It was a top-down systemic approach to policy that saw economics, security and political affairs interwoven into one unified system. This is an integrative way of thinking that has been sorely lost in the hyper theoretical, compartmentalized mode of zero-sum thinking dominant in today’s neo-liberal think tank complex.

It was for this reason, that Adams advocated the use of Hamiltonian national banking and large-scale infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal and railways throughout his years as Secretary of State and President. IF this system were the causal force behind the growth of American interests across the continent or the world more broadly, it would not be through brute force, but rather by the uplifting of standards of living of all parties.

Adams, Lincoln and National Banking

Working with a young protégé named Abraham Lincoln, Adams fought tooth and nail against the Spanish-American War of 1846 which saw a deep abuse of his Monroe Doctrine.

Both a young Lincoln and John Quincy Adams had earlier organized to get Whig leader William Harrison (1773-1841) elected president in 1841 with a focus on reviving Hamilton’s national bank which had earlier been killed by President Andrew Jackson to great damage to the economic sovereignty of the USA itself.

Although this ugly chapter of history has been scrubbed from the popular records, the operation to kill the second National Bank in 1832 resulted in a total collapse of all public works in order to pay the national debts using a technique not that different from the IMF demands for austerity on debtor nations in our modern era. Credit was to farmers and entrepreneurs dried up, speculation ran rampant, thousands of local currencies (many counterfeit) ran rampant, and the growth of slave-picked cotton took over the production of the nation’s productivity like a cancer.

Sadly even though legislation to revive a national bank had passed both Houses of Congress and only awaited the signature of President Harrison, his mysterious death after only three months in office put an end to that dream.

The best elements of the Whig party regrouped to form the anti-slavery republican party in 1856 after the second Whig president Zachary Taylor also died of poisoning in 1851 after only 2 years in office.

Abraham Lincoln Arises

Out of this small grouping of nationalists struggling to preserve the Union, Abraham Lincoln emerged with a concise plan to revive national banking, protectionism and a security policy founded upon the Monroe Doctrine. Describing the terms of the oncoming civil war from a global strategic perspective, Lincoln debated the pro-slavery candidate Judge Stephen Douglass in 1858 saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

We all know essentials of the Civil War, but we may not appreciate the success of that conflict depending upon Lincoln’s activation of state banking via the issuance of greenbacks and 5-20 bonds that by-passed private financiers demanding usurious interest rates. These productive bonds and greenbacks also funded the execution of the war at the same time as they funded great infrastructure projects like the Trans Continental railway uniting the continent.

Lincoln found like-minded reformers in Russia whose new Czar Alexander II was intent on carving out the rot of oligarchism, serfdom and underdevelopment that had subverted Russian potential for far too long. To this end, Alexander II liberated over 25 million serfs, began sweeping anti-corruption reforms and overhauled the finances of his nation with a focus on industrial development in tandem with the United States. The czar’s decision to send a fleet of Russian naval ships to the eastern and western coasts of the USA as a message to the British and French imperialists to stay out of the war gave Lincoln a decisive edge he needed to end the secession and preserve the union.

Sadly, this victory did not play on either the national or international scale as it should have. Not only was reconstruction soon thwarted with a newly re-organized slaveocracy creating a new program of “share cropping” that pulled newly freed blacks into a new master-slave dependency, but Lincoln’s greenbacks were soon taken out of circulation under Anglophile puppet presidents. With the 1876 Specie Resumption Act, tying the U.S. dollar to a one-to-one parity with gold, internal improvements seized up, credit to industry evaporated, speculation began to run rampant once more and bank panics began to periodically wreak havoc on the nation’s stability.

With the assassinations of Lincoln, President Garfield, and Alexander II between 1865 to 1881, a mad effort to put the Constitutional genie back into the bottle as the fifth column operations within Boston and Manhattan pushed increasingly for a new imperial foreign policy modelled on the British Empire.

William McKinley Revives the American System

The last major 19^th century effort to break this traitorous network took the form of President William McKinley’s emergence into the White House in 1897. Once again, a program of national planning, protective tariffs, industrial growth both at home and abroad became the characteristic shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Describing his understanding of the historic current that he was stepping into, McKinley eulogized both Lincoln and Washington in 1895 saying:

“The greatest names in American history are Washington and Lincoln. One is forever associated with the independence of the States and formation of the Federal Union; the other with universal freedom and the preservation of the Union. Washington enforced the Declaration of Independence as against England; Lincoln proclaimed its fulfillment not only to a downtrodden race in America, but to all people for all time who may seek the protection of our flag. These illustrious men achieved grander results for mankind within a single century, from 1775 to 1865, than any other men ever accomplished in all the years since first the flight of time began.”

Although he was sucked into an unjust war in the Philippines by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt (the story told here), McKinley fought consistently to defend the Monroe Doctrine by giving full U.S. support to the industrial growth of North, South and Central America. Internationally, McKinley fought to keep the USA out of the carving up of China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and worked closely with international co-thinkers like Russia’s Count Sergei Witte and France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to advance rail development and peace treaties across Eurasia. Had such programs not been sabotaged by murder, coups and regime change operations, then it is certain that the train wreck of World War One and its sequel would never have been possible.

Sadly, after McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy launched a new 20^th century trend that saw the USA extending its hegemony over weak states rather than keeping out foreign imperial intrigue as Adams had envisioned.

Assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception on Sept. 6, 1901. (BY AMERICAN PAINTER T. DART WALKER, 1905/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

FDR and Wallace Attempt to Revive a Sane American Foreign Policy

Since 1901, we have seen small but significant attempts to revive Adams’ overarching security doctrine.

We saw it come alive again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program for internationalizing the New Deal across China, India, Ibero America, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace laid out the terms of this international New Deal in his 1943 book “The Century of the Common Man” laid out this vision for the post-war world saying:

“The new democracy by definition abhors imperialism. But by definition also, it is internationally minded and supremely interested in raising the productivity, and therefore the standard of living, of all the peoples of the world. First comes transportation and this is followed by improved agriculture, industrialization, and rural elecrification…. As Molotov so clearly indicated, this brave, free world of the future can not be created by the United States and Russia alone. Undoubtedly China will have a strong influence on the world which will come out of the war and in exerting this influence it is quite possible that the principles of Sun Yat Sen will prove to be as significant as those of any other modern statesman.”

Sadly after FDR’s untimely death on April 12, 1945, the Anglo-American special relationship was again revived and all international New Dealers were quickly purged from all positions of influence. Despite an Orwellian age of anti-Russian hysteria then taking hold, Henry Wallace still maintained some influence in the U.S. government (although having been downgraded to Secretary of Commerce under President Harry Truman).

In the September 12, 1946 speech that got him fired, Wallace clearly laid out the two paths forward for the USA:

“Make no mistake about it—the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war…

“… It is essential that we look abroad through our own eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press…. The tougher we get, the tougher they get.

“I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot let national oil rivalries force us into a war….”

Eisenhower to Kennedy: The Battle for the Soul of America Continued

Eisenhower made some positive moves towards this renewal by ending the Korean War and attempting his Crusade for Peace driven by U.S.-Russian cooperation and advanced scientific investments into India, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Latin America. Eisenhower’s many positive plans were sadly derailed by a growing parasite in the heart of the U.S. deep state which he addressed in his famous “military industrial complex” speech of 1960.

Kennedy’s efforts to extract the U.S. military from Vietnam, revive FDR’s New Deal spirit in the 1960s, while seeking entente with Russia was another noble effort to bring back Adams’ security doctrine, but his early death soon put an end to this orientation.

From 1963 to 2016, tiny piecemeal efforts to revive a sane security doctrine proved short-lived and were often undone by the more powerful pressures of unipolarist intrigue that sought nothing less than full Anglo-American hegemony in the form of a New World Order whose arrival was celebrated by the likes of Bush Sr and Kissinger in 1992.

‘America First’ Revives a Sane Security Doctrine

Despite his many limitations, President Trump did make an effort to restore a sane security doctrine by focusing American interests on healing from 50+ years of self-inflicted atrophy under globalized outsourcing, militarism and post-industrialism.

Despite having to contend with an embarrassingly large and independent military-intelligence industrial complex that didn’t get less powerful after Kennedy’s murder, Trump announced the terms of his international outlook in April 2019 saying:

“Between Russia, China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.… I think it’s much better if we all got together and didn’t make these weapons … those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace.”

This call for a U.S.-Russia-China cooperative policy ran in tandem with the first phase of the U.S.-China Trade deal which went into effect in January 2020 guaranteeing $350 billion of U.S. finished goods purchased by China. None other than Soros himself suffered a public meltdown that month when he announced that the two greatest threats to his global open society were 1) Trump’s USA and 2) Xi’s China.

Of course, a pandemic derailed much of this momentum and the trade deal slowly broke apart. Despite these failures, the idea of returning the USA to an “American first” outlook by cleaning up its own internal messes, extracting CIA operations from the military, cutting the USA out of the Big Pharma-led World Health Organization, defunded regime change organizations like NED abroad and returning to a traditionally American policy of protective tariffs were all extremely important initiatives that Trump put into motion, and set a precedent which must be capitalized upon by nationalist forces from all parties wishing to save their republic from an oncoming calamity.

America’s Slide into Self-Destruction

One year into Biden’s “rules based international order”, the hope for stability and peaceful cooperation among the nations of the earth has been seriously undermined. Unlike Trump, who rightfully severed U.S. cooperation with NATO, the current neo-con heavy administration has made absorbing Ukraine and other former Soviet States into NATO a high priority going so far as to infuse private mercenary forces, and Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters from Syria into Ukraine to fight the Russians. To this dangerous policy we have also seen billions of dollars of lethal weapons sent into a neo-Nazi infested Ukrainian military with confused untrained citizens from Ukraine being told to fight and die for a cause that even western geopoliticians admit they cannot win.

Today’s USA has committed to a full-scale policy of self-destruction both on economic and military levels promoting a war which risks escalating out of control into a thermonuclear exchange both against Russia and also China.

When looking at Russian demands for security guarantees from this standpoint and holding in mind the new form of a Eurasian Manifest Destiny emerging with Putin’s Far Eastern Vision, Polar Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a rich irony that the spirit of John Quincy Adams’ security doctrine is alive in the world. Just not in the USA.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).

The financial system is clearly careening towards a point of dissolution.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the collapse itself has already happened and we simply have not yet felt the full brutal force of the shockwave accelerating toward us. This process is comparable to a tectonic snap deep in the crust under the ocean. The snap happens and a tsunami has begun. It will hit the beach front with devastating consequences and only by breaking the habit of living in the myopic “moment” might those on the beach have a chance to get to safer ground before it is too late.

The question isn’t “will the system collapse”, but rather when will the full tsunami hit?

Additionally, WHAT will be the operating system that is brought online to replace the chaos of supply chain meltdowns, hyperinflation, scarcity and violence that will ensue?

Two Systems Clash

Already we can clearly see two opposing patterns that have taken form, illustrated in the remarks recently made by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who said:

“I fear our world is creeping towards two different sets of economic, trade, financial, and technology rules, two divergent approaches in the development of artificial intelligence—and ultimately two different military and geo-political strategies. This is a recipe for trouble. It would be far less predictable and far more dangerous than the Cold War.”

Guterres is speaking of two divergent paradigms, so what are they?

On the one hand, there is the ideology that Guterres himself devoutly supports which has taken on the title in recent years of “The Davos Agenda”, or “The Great Reset”.

Guterres even went so far as to sign UN-WEF integration treaty in June 2020 uniting both globalist bodies into one Borg-like operating system, announcing: “The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.”

While the Great Reset professes to use the current pandemic to push through a complete overhaul of human society under a technocratic world government, the opposing system driven by those nations not invited to the recent “Global Democracy summit” and labelled “authoritarians” by Soros and the Davos clique wish to avoid being sacrificed.

Where one system is premised on a scientifically managed depopulation agenda from the top, the other system asserts the right of sovereign nations to continue as the only legitimate basis for international law and scientific progress to be the basis of economic ideology. The terms of the new system were recently re-emphasized throughout the 5000 word Russia-China Joint Statement on the terms of the New Era now emerging.

Putin himself recently laid out these terms stating: “Only sovereign states can effectively respond to the challenges of the times and the demands of the citizens. Accordingly, any effective international order should take into account the interests and capabilities of the state and proceed on that basis, and not try to prove that they should not exist. Furthermore, it is impossible to impose anything on anyone, be it the principles underlying the sociopolitical structure or values that someone, for their own reasons, has called “universal”. After all, it is clear that when a real crisis strikes, there is only one universal value left and that is human life, which each state decides for itself how best to protect based on its abilities, culture and traditions.”

What a breath of fresh air!

Compare that to Klaus Schwab’s infamous “you’ll own nothing and be happy”.

From where did the dystopic world order of the Davos Crowd emerge?

H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy

It might surprise you, but to answer that question, we will need to jump back nearly one century into the past and meet an ageing misanthropic social engineer named Herbert George Wells who wrote a 1928 opus called The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution calling for world government, and depopulation saying:

“The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.”

Wells was a member of an organization called The Fabian Society which itself was established in 1884 by a coterie of British eugenicists and Malthusians in order to promote a new social order designed to mold society into a new mechanized order run by a managerial elite of “social scientists” from above.

The choice of title “Fabian” was derived from the Roman general Fabius Maximus who was renowned for his strategy of defeating his enemies by superhuman patience and slow attrition. The Fabian philosophy was displayed in an infamous stained-glass piece of art featuring Fabian leaders George B. Shaw and Sidney Webb as blacksmiths hammering the world into their own secular image and featuring a shield of the Fabian logo of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Unlike the conventional “brute force” approach of conservative British imperialists who often opted for scorched earth methods of destroying their victims, the Fabians prided themselves on playing a more “peaceful”, subtle and deadly long game. Rather than push big wars which often had the effect of risking heavy losses on the oligarchy itself, the Fabians understood that it were better to promote slow attrition and infiltration using Jesuitical techniques of permeation. Historian Stephen O’Neil wrote of the Fabian Society’s guiding principle of Permeation theory:

“Despite their traditional political image, the Fabians, under the impetus of Sidney Webb, thought that they had a new and unique weapon in the policy of permeation. It was through the utilization of this tactic, according to Webb, that the Fabians, in the spirit of the Trojans and their legendary horse, would enter the ranks and minds of the politically influential by providing them with programs, ideas, opinion, and research heavily documented with statistics which could be conveniently drafted into public policy”. (1)

Throughout the 20^th century, the Fabian Society would penetrate all branches of government, military, academia, media and even private corporate boards around the world creating global systems of fifth columns operating within cells, hierarchically unified by a central command within the highest echelons of British Intelligence.

From below, plebs and laborers would be attracted by “words” promoted by Fabians like equality, social justice, and re-distribution of wealth utilizing Marxist terms while never realizing that those words were just a sweet illusion with no claim to reality.

Like Jesuitical and Masonic orders, many Fabians would never have a clue what the machine truly was that they were merely parts of. This is why the British Labor Party (aka: The Fabian Party of Britain) was so often occupied by well-intended members who never had a clue what the game was truly about. The official Fabian School that became an ideological control hub and recruiting grounds for next generation talent (paralleling the Rhodes/Milner Round Table’s Oxford University) was the London School of Economics.

In fact, over the 20^th century, these two oligarchical operations often interfaced closely, with the Fabian Lord Mackinder working with the Round Table’s Lord Milner to craft a strategy for North America in 1908 or the Canadian Fabian Society’s founding by five Rhodes Scholars in 1932.

George Bernard Shaw outlined the pro-eugenics Fabian philosophy clearly in 1934 when he said; “The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”(2)

One can hear this cold-hearted figure describing his views in his own words in the following short video:

HG Wells was equally explicit in many of his non-fiction writings saying in 1904: “The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” (3)

Sculpting our Dreams into Nightmares through Storytelling

It is no coincidence that both Shaw and Wells had spent the previous three decades innovating a new form of cultural warfare called “predictive programming”.

Whether it was in his science fiction stories of War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The World Set Free, The Island of Doctor Morrow or the Time Machine, Wells always infused trojan horses into his narratives that he knew would have lasting value on conditioning the broader zeitgeist.

These were simply: 1) human nature was intrinsically absurd, selfish and incapable of resolving the duty-freedom paradox in any believable manner, 2) science and technology would thus always be used towards selfish and destructive ends, 3) world government is the only salvation for humanity.

The only solution to such problems was that society had to be recast afresh according to a scientific priesthood which knew how to make the sorts of “hard” decisions that the dirty masses would never have the wits to make themselves. The theme of world government and collectivization of wealth under one central command were also themes advanced by Wells who wrote in 1940:

“Collectivisation means the handling of the common affairs of mankind by a common control responsible to the whole community. It means the suppression of go-as-you-please in social and economic affairs just as much as in international affairs. It means the frank abolition of profit-seeking and of every device by which human beings contrive to be parasitic on their fellow man. It is the practical realisation of the brotherhood of man through a common control”.

The Fabian Society propaganda organ The New Statesman wrote in 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.”

While genuine socialists who truly cared about labor rights in opposition to oligarchical forces generally didn’t get along well with fascists, the peculiar species of Fabian socialists were always united with the fascist cause and always strove to destroy genuine-labor movements in any nation which they were permeating. If only those fascists could be cured of their nationalism wrote Wells, then he would gladly champion the swastika saying in 1932: “I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis”

Eugenics and Fascism: Miracle Solutions to the Great Depression

While these words were spoken, the Anglo-American financier oligarchy which Wells served had been well on its way to establishing a global system of political economy designed to impose eugenics onto humanity through its support for Hitler. This new science of government (with its corporatist flavor in Italy) was pushed onto the world as the “economic miracle solution” to the horrors of the great depression of 1929-1932 (itself also the cause of a controlled disintegration of a financial bubble).

Despite the fact that the fascist project failed in 1933 (when a central bankers dictatorship was derailed by Franklin Roosevelt) and again when the Hitler Frankenstein monster stopped obeying London’s orders and had to be put down, the blueprint for a New World Order continued into the post-war age under the design of an open conspiracy.

With Wells’ 1946 death, other Fabians and social engineers continued his work during the Cold War (including designing the Cold War itself as a way to destroy the system of win-win cooperation and U.S.-Russia-China friendship envisioned by FDR).

Post-War Fascism: Making the Unthinkable Become Thinkable

One of the leading grand strategists during this dark period was Wells’ associate (and former Fabian Society member), Lord Bertrand Russell, who wrote in his 1952 The Impact of Science on Society:

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education’. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema and the radio play an increasing part… it may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the state with money and equipment.”

“The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First that the influence of home is obstructive. Second that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Thirdly verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”

Russell’s dystopic vision was paralleled by his friend Sir Julian Huxley (founder of the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization) in 1946 who said:

“The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”

To what end would this “world political unity” be aimed? Several pages later, Huxley’s vision is laid out in all of its twisted detail:

“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

The Economic Recolonization of the World

While many think the post-war years to have been shaped primarily by a Cold War, the reality is that the Iron Curtin was always merely a cover to impose a complete infiltration and colonization of the minds of citizens across the Trans Atlantic community that had given so much to stop the rise of fascism. The focus was especially placed on the young “baby boomer” generation who would suffer the most intensive full spectrum conditioning of any generation in history.

While the population was driven into states of insanity throughout the age of constant nuclear terror, asymmetrical wars abroad and drug-sex-rock’n’roll counterculture revolutions domestically.

By the time of Bobby Kennedy’s murder, and ouster of de Gaulle, the stage had been set for a new phase of colonialization of western nation states via the floating of the U.S. dollar and the destruction of the gold-reserve system that had served as the bedrock of the post-1945 Bretton Woods system. As long as the exchange rates were fixed then economic warfare against nations via short term speculation (which had always been a tool of the City of London) would not be possible. Additionally, the stability afforded by fixed exchange rates permitted long-term thinking and planning requisite to build large scale infrastructure and other scientific projects that required the sort of patience and foresight that short term market-driven thinking never allowed.

Under this new age of post-1971 deregulation, humanity was further atomized around a new idea of “value” which was driven by the notion that individual desires unbounded by regulation “cause” creative change within supposedly self-regulating forces of the marketplace. The more the formula “greed=good” became embedded within the operating system of western states, the more the broader structures of those states were commandeered by private corporations and banks which increasingly merged and fused into each other during an age of Darwinian “survival of the fittest”. The more that these interconnected supranational entities merged, the more those levers of economic power were ripped away from sovereign nation states and into the hands of private finance beholden to forces antagonistic to humanity. During this process, the once productive sectors of the economy that gave vitality to nations were atrophied and outsourced abroad.

Normal rates of investment into the maintenance and improvement of capital-intensive infrastructure seized up and industrial sectors were shut down and moved to cheap labor sectors abroad which themselves became new zones of modern slave labor filling western consumerism with “cheap goods” from China and cheap resources stolen from the global south.

Where monetary growth had formerly been tied to the growth of industrial production, the post-1971 paradigm tied monetary growth to ever increasing rates of unpayable debt and speculative capital unbounded from the real world.

Two Faces of Evil: WEF and Inter-Alpha Group

During that same fateful year of 1971, two other ominous entities were created.

In January 1971, an entity was set up in Switzerland by a protégé of Henry Kissinger named Klaus Schwab titled “The World Economic Forum”. One prominent founding member was Maurice Strong, a Rockefeller connected Canadian elitist that had become a founding father of the modern environmental movement and co-architect of the Club of Rome. One of the initiatives that Strong had helped build in 1970 was the 1001 Nature Trust which was project devoted to raising capital for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and the new environmental movement. One of the founders of the WWF? Sir Julian Huxley.

The other ominous entity formed in 1971 was the Rothschild Inter-Alpha Group of banks under the umbrella of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The stated intention of this Group would be found in the 1983 speech by Lord Jacob Rothschild: “two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate.”

What Lord Rothschild was referring to was the destruction of Glass-Steagall bank separation laws across the Trans Atlantic which had kept commercial banking, investment banking and insurance activities compartmentalized in separate worlds since WWII. In 1986, this destruction of the dividing walls in banking began with Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang followed soon thereafter by Canada’s destruction of the Four Pillars. Although it took another 14 years, the final nail was put into the Glass-Steagall coffin when Clinton destroyed the law as one of his last acts in office. After this point, derivative contracts that had only accounted for $2 trillion in 1991, and $80 trillion in 1999 soon ballooned to over $650 trillion when the housing market blew out in the USA in 2007.

The Economy Becomes A Bomb

What is important to hold in mind is that through this entire post 1971 process, capitalism itself was thus slowly turned into a time bomb which could do nothing but collapse. This means that it is fatally wrong to consider the abuses of globalization or the collapse now underway as errors, but rather as the intended consequence of the system’s design itself.

The western nation states had lost their economic sovereignty as they sold their futures for the price of cheap goods from abroad making them addicted to keeping poor nations poor and cheap labor cheap (developing, modernizing nations tend to result in qualified, high paid labor not becoming of a banana republic).

And so, humanity slipped ever more into an “end of history” cage that ultimately sought a new world order to replace the old order of nation states and democracies that had governed the previous couple of centuries. More centralized supranational control of nation states by the financier oligarchy occurred behind such “free trade” agreements as NAFTA, and Maastricht in the early 1990s.

This was of course the near unstoppable trend after the Soviet Union’s disintegration (and the replication of western globalization within the short period of the 1990s Shock Therapy of Russia). I say thankfully “near unstoppable” because something very special and unexpected happened to derail this blueprint in 2013.

A New Operating System Emerges

I am here referring to the moment that Xi Jinping made it known to the world that China would not continue as the cheap labor hub of the west indefinitely and instead a new program dubbed the “Belt and Road Initiative” was unveiled as the driving force of China’s foreign policy. Soon this program merged with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and won over 140 nations of the world to its operating system with branches stretching into the Arctic dubbed the Polar Silk Road. The multipolar system of Eurasia which had been slowly moving forward between 1999-2013 began to take on an accelerated rate of growth with new financial institutions, large scale infrastructure projects, and new diplomatic platforms built up along the way.

By 2015 both Russia and China had created their own alternatives to the U.S.-controlled SWIFT and in that same year Russia entered Syria in defense of the principle of national sovereignty.

Now Russia and China, both encircled by the U.S. military industrial complex, have released a powerful  joint statement establishing a manifesto for a new operating system that enshrines the principle of sovereign nation states, and activities that promote win-win cooperation and population growth as a bedrock of order.

So when Guterres wets his pants complaining about the danger of two opposing systems now emerging, or when Biden’s handlers promote democracy summits that exclude all the nations of the world who don’t want to be sacrificed on the alter of Gaia, you can be sure that it is because something compatible with human dignity has emerged.

Might the current freedom movements springing up across the trans Atlantic force a shift in the elements of the political class that have not lost their humanity to a World Economic Forum borg-like commitment to assimilate everything into a unipolar transhumanist priesthood? That remains to be seen.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) The Origins and Development of the Fabian Society, 1884-1900, Stephen J. O’Neil Loyola University Chicago
(2) George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable and Co., 1934), p. 296
(3) H.G. Wells in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 10 (1904), p. 11

In my last essay, I made the case that a specifically Eurasian expression of Manifest Destiny has emerged in recent years sharing many important parallels with the original Manifest Destiny often associated with 19th century America, but with one big difference. Unlike the earlier U.S. variant, the current Eurasian version is not being used as a big stick to smash small nations and minority groups into obedience to an elitist master class.

Despite the many abuses committed by U.S. devotees of “Manifest Destiny”, one might be surprised to discover that it is not entirely evil. This better tradition has sadly been scrubbed out of history books which have been framed to present an over-simplified narrative that asserts either 1) “all American expansion was good”, or 2) “America is just shaped by evil white males destroying minorities, raping pristine nature and pushing slavery”.

If you are surprised by my proposition that something positive actually existed beyond these two wrong extremes, then I’m sorry to say, you’ve been fed a bad batch of either romanticism, or Critical Theory Kool Aid and this article is for you. By reading onward, I promise that you will be able to appreciate the historical forces active behind both China and Russia’s long term strategic thinking and maybe something good embedded within the USA itself that you didn’t realize existed.

The 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway: Master key to Universal History

Let us start with an 1890 map commissioned by an American statesman named William Gilpin (titled “Gilpin’s American Economic, Just and Correct Map of the World”) and featured in his 1890 Magnum Opus‘The Cosmopolitan Railway” (subtitle: compacting and fusing together all the world’s continents).

Several peculiar things pop out upon looking at this map:

1) It is among the earliest American-made maps featuring a Pacific-centric focus rather than the typical Atlantic perspective.

2) It features the growth of railways across every continent including the closing of the Darian Gap uniting North and South America, east-west rail from China to Europe and extensions across Southwest Asia and into Africa via Egypt.

3) It centers around a keystone extension rail connecting Eurasia with the USA via the Bering Strait.

This map, and associated book have been known by many for a long time. Many look at it, murmur “interesting idea” and then turn their brains off.

The inquiring mind should instead be provoked to ask: IS there a story here? Was this Gilpin guy some lone eccentric envisioning a fantasy world completely disconnected from reality? Or was there an international geopolitical process underway that he was an integral part of?

In order to address this question, let’s start by asking: Who was William Gilpin anyway?

William Gilpin: American Patriot and Sinophile

Born into a leading American political family in 1813, William Gilpin became known during his adult life as the “Prophet of Manifest Destiny” serving as state representative, spy, bodyguard to Lincoln, industrialist, and Governor of Colorado. America changed a lot during its early years growing from 13 states to 45 by 1900 (sometimes legitimately and sometimes illegitimacy).

Through out this period, there was a raging fight over what identity would shape the young republic? Would it devolve into racism, slavery and empire, or would it endure and develop according to the ideals laid out in its founding documents?

The USA that existed when Gilpin was born looks very different from the USA of today

As we will come to see, Gilpin’s life was dedicated to the latter. Starting in 1843, Gilpin devoted himself fully to building the world’s first trans continental railway uniting for the first time an entire continent by rail.

Having drafted a 1949 resolution in Missouri conference devoted to the Trans Continental Railway, Gilpin wrote: “Let it be resolved that, whereas the Almighty has placed the territories of the American Union in the center between Asia and Europe and the Route of the Asiatic and European Railway” through the heart of our national domain, it is our duty to the human family to prosecute, vigorously, through its new channel, that supreme commerce between the oriental nations and the nations of the Atlantic, which history proves to have existed in all ages, and to be necessary to keep alive comity, science and civilisation among mankind”.

Watching the decay of the minds and morals of the U.S. population and political establishment then firmly underway, Gilpin explained to German publisher Julius Frobel in 1852 why he believed it necessary to unite Chinese and American cultures into a new synthesis in order to save the nation:

“Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the “Chinese constitution” viz. the “patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire”. The political life of the United States is “through European influences”, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States”.

Speaking in 1856, Gilpin advanced this idea of a paradigm shift saying that America must: “disinfect ourselves of inane nepotism to Europe in other things as we have done in politics; to ponder boldly on ourselves and our mission, and develop an indigenous dignity- to appreciate Asiatic sciences, civilization, commerce and population- these are essential preparatory steps to which we must tune our minds.”

Gilpin and his World

Among the earliest of Gilpin’s childhood memories was an aging Marquis de Lafayette coming to his home to celebrate the anniversary of the Brandywine Battle victory during the Revolutionary War. During this decisive battle, the Gilpin home served as Lafayette’s headquarters, and Gilpin’s grandfather Thomas was a close collaborator of both Ben Franklin and the French General. Both Gilpin’s father and grandfather were members of Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical Society and worked closely with the Hamiltonian National Bank where the Gilpins were in charge of constructing one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history: The Chesapeake-Delaware Canal.

Before his 1804 murder at the hands of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton (founder of the National Bank) had innovated a new form of political economy tied to large scale national credit generation via a nationally-directed banking system, internal improvements, and protective tariffs/bounties. This system of political economy was dubbed “The American System” by German Economist Friedrich List in 1827 and was used successfully to transform the republic from an underdeveloped bankrupt agrarian society in 1783 to an industrially advanced nation outperforming much of Great Britain within 40 years. Large scale projects like the Erie Canal, Chesapeake-Delaware Canal and a growing network of railways was instrumental in this process.

When Hamilton’s Bank was killed by Andrew Jackson (not coincidentally a leading figure in Aaron Burr’s political machine) in 1836, the most important instrument to direct national development was destroyed. National projects were cancelled, economic systems deregulated in favor of money worshipping British Free Trade, and unbounded speculation resulted in chaotic boom/bust cycles starting with the Bank Panic of 1837. Local banks were empowered to print their own currencies and soon over a thousand different notes sent the divided nation into chaos.

The 19th Century Deep State

Under Jackson, the Anglo-American deep state consolidated its power, genocidal programs were launched against natives, and influxes of black slavery grew from two million in 1830 to four million by 1860. With fertile southern soils cleansed of natives, the Slavocracy increased its cotton output becoming among the richest regions on earth with London purchasing over 80% of the south’s output.

By 1860, Britain had acquired a near monopoly on textile production, having destroyed India’s sovereign industries and forcing that once proud nation into producing opium as it’s primary export product. This soul-killing drug was then infused (via British free trade) into the heart of China which suffered crushing defeats when it tried to block the poisoning of its citizens in 1840 and again in 1859.

The Anglo American deep state grew immensely in power leading towards the near break up of the young republic into “free” vs “slave” confederacies… which had been the objective since 1800 when Aaron Burr first attempted it.

The Transformative Power of Rail Development

Despite having lost the national bank, a general orientation towards scientific and technological optimism still animated the American character. The first passenger and freight railway was built in 1827 (the Baltimore and Ohio Railway) and soon rail extensions began moving across the daunting Appalachian mountains. By 1840, over 2800 miles of rail had been laid, growing to 9021 miles in 1850. By 1860 that number had grown to 30,000 miles but a new quantum leap was effected by Lincoln’s decision to devote considerable resources during the height of the Civil War towards the construction of the Trans Continental Railway (built between 1863-1869). With the completion of this project, and the resolution of the Civil War (largely through the intervention of the Russians), rail growth and industrialization exploded. By 1880, over 93,000 miles of rail were laid and when Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway in 1890, the USA had over 163,000 miles of railway while many other nations were experiencing parallel growth through the application of this same model of political economy.

It was in this context that Gilpin became a leading figure of the anti-slavery America, developing a reputation as an Anglophobe suspicious of British Imperial intrigue and working closely with patriots who wished to take back their nation from the clutches of the oligarchical slave power.

For decades, this grouping rallied primarily around the Whig Party of John Quincy Adams and even won two important victories in 1840 and 1850. The first 1840 victory of the nationalists saw President William Harrison take office on the basis of reviving Hamilton’s national bank and re-launching protective tariffs and internal improvements. This was followed by the 1848 victory of Zachary Taylor. Unfortunately, both Whig presidents were poisoned with Harrison only serving three months and dying under mysterious circumstances before the legislation for a Third National Bank (passed by both houses of Congress) could be signed into law. The official cause of Taylor’s 1851 death? Too many cherries and cold milk.

Gilpin soon became an early member of the republican party (founded in 1856 as the anti-slavery party of the USA), where he rose quickly to prominence as one of Lincoln’s team of 11 elite bodyguards who accompanied the newly elected president from Illinois to Washington (narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt along the way).

Lincoln, Carey and the Global Dynamics of the Civil War

Lincoln clearly understood that the USA would not survive as a house divided saying in an 1858 speech:

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

Most importantly, Lincoln and his allies understood that this was much more than a domestic issue, but profoundly implicated the course of world civilization and touched upon the nature of empire itself as the basis of international law. In a debate with Judge Stephen Douglas, Lincoln stated:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

The terms and conditions of the clash of paradigms on a global level was iterated masterfully by a leading Whig economist who soon became a principal economic advisor to Lincoln named Henry C. Carey. In his 1852 Harmony of Interests, Carey stated:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Image: Left to right: Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Henry C. Carey

Gilpin and the Greenbacks

In order to do battle with the London-centered financier oligarchy, while simultaneously battling the slave power, Lincoln took control of credit emissions from the private banking cartels by establishing a government-issued “greenbacks”, and “5-20 bonds” starting in 1862. Through these new credit mechanisms directed by national priorities, and a nationally-regulated banking system, Lincoln was able to fund the war and also drive vast development projects like the trans-continental railway.

Before it was launched on a national level, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin was the first to use this successfully on a state level.

How?

In March 1861, Lincoln appointed Gilpin first governor of the newly formed Colorado Territory on the southwest frontlines of the civil war. During his commission, Gilpin received word that Confederate plans were underway to open up a western front, and was confronted with the dismal fact that financial resources did not exist to organize, train or arm militias to stop this from happening. Before leaving to Colorado, Gilpin’s biographer records the following orders Lincoln gave his lieutenant:

“On finances we have not one cent. I have just negotiated a loan of $50 million from the banks of New York and have called a special session of Congress to meet on the 4th of July to know if they will hang me for this unconstitutional act. If you are driven to extremities, you must do as I have done- issue drafts on your own responsibility”

Gilpin used his authority to issue state-level funds to pay for the militia which made it possible to do battle with the invading confederacy culminating in the Battle of Glorietta Pass in New Mexico in March 1862 which became known as “The Gettysburg of the West”. After putting down this attack, no effort to open a western front was ever to be tried again. Speaking to the Colorado Legislative Assembly in September 1861, Gilpin described his understanding of the strategic importance of Colorado as a bridge not only between oceans but as a gateway to Asia:

“Our territory will be bisected East and West, by the grandest work of all time, constructed to fraternize the domestic relations of our people and to draw the travel and commerce of all the nations, and all the continents of the world.”

The U.S.-Russian Alliance That Changed the Course of History

In the ensuing years, Lincoln’s allies worked closely with their Russian counterparts who helped save the Union in 1863 when Czar Alexander II deployed his navy to Pacific and Atlantic Coasts. These same forces worked together in constructing railways in Russia (with the later Trans Siberian railway built with the help of American engineers and using rail cars made by Baldwin Locomotives from Philadelphia. These would be the same networks that effected the sale of Russian Alaska to the USA in 1867.

Defending the Alaska Purchase in the Congess, Senator Charles Sumner stated: “To unite the East of Asia with the West of America is the aspiration of commerce now as when the English navigator (Meares) recorded his voyage. Of course, whatever helps this result is an advantage. The Pacific railroad is such an advantage; for, though running westward, it will be, when completed, a new highway to the East.”

As the trans-continental railway was being completed, the Alaska purchase was initiated and everyone knew that the continuation of rail from California through British Canada, Alaska and Eurasia was an organic next step.

Gilpin described this program in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway saying: “From what has been stated, it is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and Northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an impracticable and perhaps not a very difficult undertaking.”

Although Lincoln’s Greenbacks had been destroyed with the 1875 Specie Resumption Act (shackling the U.S. dollars to gold availability), Gilpin fought to revive the American System traditions to fund this new age of global rail development saying “For every dollar that is laid out on railroads, it is estimated that at least ten dollars is added to the sum of human wealth; and that this ratio would be largely increased by completing the chain which needs but a few more links to encircle the globe, is beyond a shadow of a doubt. It would not be a difficult matter for the governments of the United States and Russia to issue say 4-40 bonds and thus settle at once the financial question”.

In both the USA and Russia, this Gilpin’s vision took concrete steps towards realization, first with Edward Harriman’s 1899 expedition to Alaska where plans for an extension of Union Pacific Rail to Russia were charted out. By 1905, as Sergei Witte served as Prime Minister to Czar Nicholas II, a team of American engineers was hired to conduct surveys for the Bering Strait tunnel connection with a March 23, 1906 New York Times headline reading: ‘For Bering Strait Tunnel- Czar Approves Recommendation for All-Rail Route to America’. Sadly, chaotic events of that era derailed this program from unfolding as it should have.

The Strategic Value of Hamiltonian Credit

Gilpin’s reference to “4-40” signified bonds issued with four to forty year maturation and tied directly to the construction of specific megaprojects. This type of productive bond/credit was the essential master key to the success of the Hamiltonian system from its earliest days in 1791 to its renewal under Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal. Every time this system has been applied, measurable bursts of progress, strengthening of sovereignty, uplifting of citizens and destruction of deep state controls have followed in its wake. Whenever it has been repealed, the opposite has occurred.

Gilpin was extremely direct about this tradition, writing: “No amount of Argument will make America adopt old world theories… To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the United States from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days.”

Some might say that Gilpin only wished to advance his rail program in order to make money for investors, but that would be the furthest thing from the truth. A few pages later (in his Cosmopolitan Railway), he wrote: “Let the world but for a day stop its senseless wranglings over political clap-trap, stop its wars and preparations for further human butcheries and devote its intelligence and energy to this works and it is done. It is a small matter how the money is raised; or by whom, so that it is forthcoming; only as before remarked, the work, in my opinion is better in the hands of the nations than under the control of individuals; For all species of tyranny, that which emanates from individuals or corporate power, is the worst.”

Speaking of China, Gilpin stated: “The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.”

As Gilpin wrote these words, Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte, German Chancellor von Bismarck, French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux and leading industrialists in Japan were working hard to implement the American System in their respective nations as rail lines, productive credit, protectionism, technical education and industrial progress were expanded both within each nation and among themselves.

Despite the assassination of leading statesmen by British directed anarchists between 1865-1905, the orientation towards a new post-imperial society of win-win cooperation moved ever closer to realization.

Lincoln’s Spirit Revived in China

In China, a process was unleashed by a young revolutionary who had been given the opportunity to study in the United States due to the 1868 Seward-Burlingham Treaty that created a short lived ‘special relationship’ between the USA and China. This treaty gave China free emigration and travel in America, reciprocal access to education for citizens living in the others’ country, and favored nation status with the United States. (1)

That young man was recruited to republican networks in the USA and became a devotee of Lincoln’s system of government, which guided his every strategic insight culminating in the 1911 overthrow of the corrupt Qing Dynasty. When he received word of the success of the revolution, Dr. Sun Yat-sen was organizing funding for the Chinese republican cause in the USA (to be specific, in Denver, Colorado). Upon receiving the good news, he immediately returned home to lead the new nation, becoming China’s first President.

It is for this reason that a special 1942 stamp commemorating U.S.-China friendship was first issued in Colorado, featuring portraits of Presidents Sun Yat-sen and Lincoln with the motto “Of the People, By the People, For the People”. The Chinese rendition of this motto was written as “民族, 民權, 民生,” which was made the basis of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People”.

Although foreign intrigues forced him to abdicate the presidency, Dr. Sun Yat-sen remained the moral and strategic force of the Chinese patriots authoring an in-depth program for an industrial renaissance in China tied to a renewal of rail lines, development corridors, energy projects, ports and educational institutions.

Forecasting an interconnected Eurasian railway system and U.S.-Asia alliance, Sun Yat-sen echoed the spirit of Gilpin, famously stating in his 1920 treatise:

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

Image: Sun Yat Sen’s rail plans for China published in his 1917 International Development of China called for 10 000 km of rail, 100 000 km of roads, ports, mines and industrial sovereignty. All this was finally accomplished with the advent of Xi Jinping’s age of the Belt and Road – Image EIR

This network of industrial corridors stretched across China, and into India, Southwest Asia, Mongolia, Russia and Europe. Anyone reviewing this grand design today would clearly see the germ seed of the Belt and Road Initiative which has sprung to life since 2013.

In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it known to the west his desire to open up the Siberian and Far Eastern zones of Eurasia to large scale development. As early as 2007, Putin began publicizing his desire to even extend rail through the Bering Strait itself connecting new and old worlds. Although rejected by Bush in 2007, it was renewed in 2011 and in 2014 China began showing significant support for the project. By 2018, China’s BRI took on an Arctic branch known as the Polar Silk Road and today, both nations have clearly picked up the torch dropped by the west after the murder of President Kennedy.

Image: The next phase of the evolving Belt and Road Initiative branching out across the world [image produced by the Schiller Institute]

It is clear that Russia and China have revived a new form of Manifest Destiny in Eurasia as both nations have integrated their destinies into a new garment of interconnected mutual interest bringing in over 135 other nations into agreements of cooperation.

If the west is able to discover the moral fitness to survive at this late stage of decay, it will be due to our rediscovery of this lost heritage and recognize its living expression in the Russian-Chinese alliance today.

The author delivered remarks on this topic viewable here.

(1) With the ouster of Lincoln’s allies from power after the assassination of President Garfield in 1880, however, the stage was set for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which overthrew Seward’s treaty and many of the efforts to create a new global system based upon US-China cooperation.

Economic sanctions against Cuba were discussed in April 1960 by the U.S. government. If the U.S. found it impossible to counter the Cuban Revolution, a memorandum with the subject “The Decline and Fall of Castro” stated, economic hardships should be imposed on the island. “If such a policy as adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The memorandum noted that the lowest estimate of support for Fidel Castro in 1960 was 50%, and that the majority of Cubans supported their leader.

On February 3, 1962, ignoring the Cuban popular support for the revolution and influenced by the defeat the U.S. and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) suffered at the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the trade embargo between the United States and Cuba, stressing that the U.S. “is prepared to take all the necessary actions to promote national and hemispheric security by isolating the present Government of Cuba and thereby reducing the threat posed by its alignment with the communist powers.”

The U.S. loss of influence in Cuba and later in the region is one major reason why the blockade was imposed. Grassroots support for the Cuban revolution long before it triumphed existed, as the July 26 Movement took up the fight against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Sixty years later, U.S. President Joe Biden shows no sign of revoking even the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, let alone broach the subject of the illegal U.S. blockade on the island. The international community fares no better. As long as the majority of UN member states vote annually against the illegal blockade, passing non-binding resolutions that have failed to dent U.S. policy towards Cuba.

On the 60^th anniversary of the blockade, the National Security Archive (NSA) has published a selection of declassified documents, among them a CIA document which states, “In our judgment, the U.S. and OAS economic sanctions, by themselves or in conjunction with other measures, have not met any of their objectives. We also believe that western economic sanctions have almost no chance of compelling the present Cuban leadership – mostly guerrilla warfare veterans in power since the late 1970s – to abandon its policy of exporting revolution.”

Indeed, the Cuban revolution remained a reference to emulate in the region, later eclipsed by then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s concern that Chile’s example – socialist revolution through democratic elections – would pave the way forward in Latin America.

In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which outlined U.S. plans for Cuba and specifically stipulated that the illegal blockade would only be lifted once Cuba holds democratic elections and moves towards a free market system. It also made a provision for U.S. interference in Cuban affairs through a so-called “assistance, through appropriate nongovernmental organizations, for the support and organizations to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.”

Two years ago, in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the world lauded Cuba and temporarily called for a lifting to the blockade. Briefly, the world hailed Cuba for thriving under such restrictions, its medical interventions became mainstream news, while the medical brigades brought much needed help to severely impacted countries, including in Europe. When the vaccine race commenced, Cuba was left in the margins even as it developed its own vaccines under difficult circumstances and secured provision for its citizens and countries in the region. The cry to end the blockade was forgotten, diplomacy once again followed the Western model of capitulating to U.S. interests, and Cuba was left once again to fend on its own, as it also did when the U.S. once again attempted to destabilize Cuba through protests and the world ignored the blockade in its haste to appease the U.S.

Is the U.S. in a position to maintain the embargo upon the pretext of bringing democracy to Cuba with its record in destabilising secure states, even those upholding democracy, such as Chile under Salvador Allende for example, and more recently, Bolivia? Proclaiming human rights through atrocious acts constitutes subversion and it is unlikely that Cubans, with or without Fidel Castro, will forget the U.S. treachery in a hurry.

“She [the United States] has seen that probably for centuries to come, contests of inveterate power, and emerging right [will persist]…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

– speech in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829), and the first American Ambassador to Russia in 1809.

This three part series will discuss how American foreign policy and ideology came to be what Eisenhower would refer to in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961 as the “military-industrial complex” that held whether sought or unsought, the power to acquire unwarranted influence, and that such a “power exists, and will persist,” leaving the following generations of Americans “a legacy of ashes,” for a once great nation.

This series will explain how in particular, the philosophy of the American establishment, including that of the military, formed their “understanding” of nuclear strategy which continues to influence thought today such as in the belief in the winnability of a limited nuclear war. It will also explain the reasons for why the Vietnam war was fought with the approach used as well as the War on Terror, and most importantly why.

A Foreign Attack on American Soil

On December 7th, 1941, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese navy, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178. However, the Americans would only begin their military air campaign against Japan by mid-1944.

General MacArthur estimated that a million Americans would die in only the first phase of the Pacific War. The Russians were being heavily courted by the Americans to break their Neutrality Pact with Japan and enter into the Pacific War for the very straightforward reason that fewer Americans would die.

After three years of the most savage warfare against the German Nazis, where over 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died, Russia was now prepared to enter into another war with Japan, only months later, to offer military support to the U.S., a country that had suffered minute losses in comparison.

When Admiral King, chief of naval operations, was informed that the Russians would definitely enter the fight against Japan, he was immensely relieved commenting “We’ve just saved two million Americans.”

* * *

On April 12th, 1945 President Roosevelt passed away and much of the American-Russian partnership with him.

On July 16th, 1945, the first successful atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Seven days later, Stalin was informed at the Potsdam conference by Truman that America now had the bomb.

Truman, contrary to what he was advised to do, made no mention of collaboration, no mention of making the world peaceful and safe, and no offer to share information with the Russians, not even in return for any quid pro quo. Simply that America now had the bomb.

On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

On August 9th at 1:00 am, one million Soviet troops crossed the border into eastern Manchuria to face the Kwantung, the culmination of ten months of coordinated planning. Later that same day a second atomic bomb, Fat Man (named after Churchill), was dropped on Nagasaki.

The Russians were completely taken aback. They had not been notified of this plan, and it was certainly not a “friendly” message that the U.S. was sending to their supposed allies.

On August 15th, six days later, Japan surrendered. Many historians have agreed that the Russian attack in Manchuria had the greater weight in causing the Japanese to surrender. (1) But it did not matter.

Most in the West would either never know or would soon forget about the Russian sacrifice.

The decision to drop the bomb, Truman would write in a letter to his daughter Margaret, was “no great decision…not any decision you would have to worry about.”

Nuclear physicist Yuli Khariton would voice a common Russian reaction when he wrote that the two bombs that were dropped on Japan were used “as atomic blackmail against the USSR, as a threat to unleash a new, even more terrible and devastating war,” if Russia refused to play by the rules decided for her.

By the end of WWII, the contrast between the United States and Soviet Union were enormous. The U.S. was supplying over half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, more than half of the world’s electricity, holding two-thirds of the world’s gold stocks and half of all the monetary reserves. It had suffered 405,000 casualties, 2.9 percent of its population (The size of the American population in 1945 was approximately 140 million).

Russia suffered 27 million casualties, 16 percent of its population. The Germans burned 70,000 Russian villages to the ground and destroyed 100,000 farms. Twenty-five million Russians were homeless. 32,000 factories and 65,000 railroad tracks were destroyed. And its major cities: Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow were in shambles.

The Godfather of RAND: Air Force General Curtis LeMay

“If we had lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

– Air Force General Curtis LeMay in “The Fog of War”

On October 1st, 1945, less than two months after the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, Commanding General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces, inspired by what the scientists under the Manhattan Project could do, met with Franklin R. Collbohm, Arthur E. Raymond, Donald Douglas, and Edward Bowles. This was the pioneering team that would create RAND.

Franklin R. Collbohm was the right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America’s largest airplane manufacturer, and the special assistant to Arthur E. Raymond, the company’s vice president and head of engineering. Edward Bowles, a consultant from MIT, worked with Collbohm on the notorious B-29 Special Bombardment Project against Japan in 1944.

After witnessing the atomic bomb, Arnold foresaw that the future in warfare would revolve around the technology of long-distance missiles and was adamant that only the Air Force and no other branch of armed forces should control the new weapon. Arnold pledged $10 million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and keep it running independently for a few years. (2) Collbohm nominated himself to head the group, which he did for the next 20 years.

Air Force Deputy Chief Curtis LeMay of Air Staff for Research and Development, was soon after brought in by General Arnold and tasked with supervising the new research group.

LeMay, whom it is said Kubrick based his military brass off of in “Dr. Strangelove,” was known for many military “feats” but the most notorious of these was when Arnold sent LeMay to the Mariana, to head the 21st Bomber Command that would execute the inhumane raids over Japanese cities in 1945.

It was there that LeMay first worked with Collbohm, Raymond and Bowles. It was because of Collbohm’s team that the B-29 bombers were able to inflict maximum damage. These incendiary bombs were dropped on the civilian population of Japan, burning alive hundreds of thousands of people. Homes, shops, and buildings of no apparent military value were consumed by the fiery rain that fell from the low-flying B-29s night after night.

This was the same tactic that had been used in Dresden by the European Allies, killing 25,000 civilians (3) but it had never before been used by the Americans who had up until this point avoided civilian populations.

As would occur during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the concept of the enemy was beginning to become blurred for the Americans. They were finding it harder and harder to combat a clearly defined opponent, rather, the “enemy” was increasingly looking like the vague unfamiliarity of an entire people, a whole population of seemingly soulless faces not like their own.

Unlike all the other countries involved in the world war, the Pearl Harbour attack was the first direct foreign offense against the United States other than the war of 1812. It did not matter how much more damage or destruction the Americans would inflict upon the Japanese in response to this, for it was justified as self-defence. An attempt to ensure that such an attack would never dare be repeated against the United States. It was an outlook that would continue on into the war arenas of Korea and Vietnam.

Because of the Pearl Harbor attack, many in the United States began to see large swaths of the world population like a swarming mountain of flesh-eating ants, wishing nothing more than to destroy American values and liberty. It was thought by many that the only way to save oneself and loved ones was to scourge the earth of them.

As General Arnold wrote, “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” (4)

Alex Abella writes in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“…the carpet bombing of Japan left the founding fathers of RAND and the future secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who also collaborated on the B-29 project – with the reputation of looking only to the practical aspect of a problem without concern for morality. Their numbers-driven perspective had the effect, intentional or not, of divorcing ethical questions from the job at hand. Eventually RAND doctrine would come to view scientists and researchers as facilitators, not independent judges. As LeMay himself said, ‘All war is immoral. If you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’ “

On March 1st, 1946, RAND had an official charter:

“Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” (5)

Unlike other government contractors, RAND would be exempt from reporting to a contracting command. Instead, the unfiltered results would be delivered straight to LeMay. (6)

Within a few years, a new mind-set would take hold in government: science, rather than diplomacy, could provide the answers needed to cope with threats to national security.

Rather than nationalize key military industries, as the UK and France had done, the U.S. government opted to contract out scientific research development to the private sector, which was not bounded by the Pentagon. RAND would be a bridge between the two worlds of military planning and civilian development.

And in a very real way, this great country with an island philosophy went into a fit of madness over the realisation that they were not invulnerable to an outside attack. This realisation, though they were to suffer minor losses compared to that in Europe and Asia during the two world wars, turned into a gaping wound of constant “what ifs,” a never-ending barrage of paranoid suppositions.

From then on, the United States would become obsessed with thwarting the next enemy attack, which they were certain was always in the works.

In Search of a Prophet: Enter the RAND Mathematicians

By March 1st, 1946 there were but four full-time RAND employees. Collbohm’s fifth hire to RAND was John Davis Williams who was to serve as director of the newly created Mathematics Division and would become Collbohm’s right-hand man. (7)

In 1947, Ed Paxson, a RAND engineer created the term “systems analysis” when Williams placed him in charge of the Evaluation of Military Worth Section. Paxson had been a scientific adviser to the U.S. Army Air Forces and a consultant to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945-46.

During WWII, the considered shortcomings of operational research (OR) was that it could not function without hard data, what was already known about a system.

As Alex Abella puts it in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend to the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet nuclear test RDS-1 was conducted, with the yield of 22 kilotons.

With this advent, there was mounting concern over what were the intentions of the Soviet bloc. Did they create their own atomic bomb as simply a defensive manoeuvre or was there the possibility they were planning an offensive?

In response to these questions, RAND put forward the doctrine of “rational choice theory,” developed by a 29 year old economist named Kenneth Arrow. The bulk of Arrow’s work at RAND is still classified top secret to this day. (8)

Arrow was tasked with establishing a collective “utility function” for the Soviet Union. In other words, “rational choice theory” meant to establish mathematically a fixed set of preferences in order to determine what were the best actions that would yield the greatest service to the Soviet leadership’s collective interests.

Since there was a lack of hard evidence, western policy makers became increasingly reliant on mathematical and also psychoanalytical speculation in order to create hypothetical scenarios, such that counter-strategies could be formed. RAND needed Arrow’s “utility function” so its analysts could simulate the actions of the Soviets during a nuclear conflict in order to justify increased funding and military buildup.

As long as somewhat complex mathematical explanations could be used to create such speculations, it was considered under the domain of “science,” and there was no need to cross-check the validity or accuracy of such speculations.

Arrow’s paradox, otherwise known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem, had demonstrated through a mathematical argument that collective rational group decisions are logically impossible.

Abella writes:

“Arrow utilized his findings to concoct a value system based on economics that destroyed the Marxist notion of a collective will. To achieve this result, Arrow borrowed freely from elements of positivist philosophy, such as its concern for axiomization, universally objective scientific truth and the belief that social processes can be reduced to interactions between individuals.” (9)

Arrow’s impossibility theorem lay a theoretical foundation for universal scientific objectivity, individualism and “rational choice.” That the so called “science,” in the form of a mathematical argument, has determined the collective is nothing, the individual is all.

And if we are all just reduced to our petty individual selfish self-interests, who is to challenge the players of the game who wish to shape the world stage?

As Abella phrased it, “Put in everyday terms, RAND’s rational choice theory is the Matrix code of the West.”

In 1950, William’s fascination with game theory peaked after the success of Arrow’s rational choice theory for RAND, and he hired John von Neumann, the father of game theory as a full-time staffer for RAND. Like Williams, von Neumann was an advocate of an all-out pre-emptive nuclear war on the Soviet Union. (10)

Together with Oskar Morgenstern, Neumann cowrote the book that lay the foundation for the field, “Theory Games and Economic Behavior,” published in 1944. Morgenstern and Neumann assumed that players in every game are rational (motivated by selfish self-interests) and that any given situation has a rational outcome. It was Neumann who coined the term “zero-sum game,” referring to a set of circumstances in which a player stands to gain only if his opponent loses.

By the mid-1950s, RAND became the world center for game theory.

Years later RANDites would ruefully acknowledge the futility of attempting to reduce human behavior to numbers. Yet, that has not deterred its continued use in military strategy as well as in numerous fields in academia to this day.

Out of the “science” of systems analysis, governed by a rational choice outlook, a plan to strike pre-emptively at the Soviet Union was born in the halls of RAND.

First Strike: The Revenge of the Technocrats

“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

– Bhagavad Gita

In seeking out further independence from its exclusive client the Air Force, RAND under the direction of Collbohm, would be reborn as a non-profit corporation.

1956. Rowan Gaither, the attorney who was drafting the RAND articles of incorporation, contacted the Ford Foundation about funding RAND. Gaither obtained not only close to half a million dollars from the Ford Foundation for RAND but he also became Ford Foundation’s president from 1953 to 1956. (11)

It was a steamy love affair in the midst of a Cold War. Ford Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization of the time and was in the process of reorganizing itself to lend financial support for world peace and the advancement of scientific knowledge. What better benefactor than RAND for such noble endeavours?

In a statement Gaither crafted after assuming the presidency of the Ford Foundation, he stated as his goal a society where technocrats ruled using objective analysis, stating:

“This very non-partisanship and objectivity gives the [Ford] foundation a great positive force, and enables it to play a unique and effective role in the difficult and sometimes controversial task of helping to realize democracy’s goals.” (12)

By 1950 administration policy had changed from the theory of containment advocated by George F. Kennan to open military competition. A notable RAND associate, Paul Nitze brought about that change almost single-handedly.

On January 1st, 1950, Paul Nitze replaced Kennan as head of the president’s Policy Planning Staff and wrote a memorandum for the NSC on how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age. The paper called NSC-68 warned apocalyptically about the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.”

NSC-68 declared that the U.S. was in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 (drafted January 20th, 1950) claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the United States.

President Truman accepted NSC 68 as the official policy and increased the national defense budget by almost $40 billion.

It is now known that such a prediction of the Soviet threat was indeed baseless, yet nonetheless, managed to create a deranged positive feedback loop in the ceaseless striving for the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. It entered the United States into the maniacal mindset that one must always have the greater firing power in order to have the greatest number of options in a nuclear scenario.

This was considered the only option, and not only put the Soviet Union in a difficult position, but the rest of the world as well, for who could withstand such a mighty force if it wished to inflict its will, let alone its paranoia, on any nation?

It is no wonder that the Soviet publication Pravda at this time (late 1950s) famously called RAND “the academy of science and death.” (13)

The Father of all technocrats at RAND, was Albert Wohlstetter.

Albert would be recruited into the dysfunctional RAND family in 1951 by Charles J. Hitch, the head of the RAND economics department. Within a very short period of time Albert would rise to the very top of the RAND food chain.

In achieving this king of the unruly jungle status, he first had to battle with RAND colleague Bernard Brodie. Brodie was an advocate of nuclear deterrence, he was the true developer of the “second-strike capability” doctrine as the ultimate agent of deterrence and the key to global stability in the thermonuclear age.

The only alternative to such mutually assured destruction, Brodie argued, was a fundamental shift in humanity’s understanding of warfare.

This thought had established Brodie in 1951 as a major strategist of nuclear war. However, this status was short-lived, in large part because he simply could not play the game as well as Albert. That is, Brodie did not understand something that was at the fundamental core of RAND philosophy, to “win” at all costs.

What was the game? To ascend and conquer…no matter the game and no matter the terms.

Albert endorsed the idea of creating a strategy for controlled and discriminate warfare in which nuclear weapons would play an active role. He would take Brodie’s second-strike stratagem and turn it into a justification for what he would term a “the delicate balance of terror.” Counterforce, Albert’s version of Brodie’s second-strike, advocated for engaging a gradual, precisely controlled use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets.

Insane? Yes.

Albert would put forward “Insofar as we can limit the damage to ourselves we reduce his [the Soviets] ability to deter us and, therefore, his confidence that we will not strike first. But decreasing his confidence in our not striking increases the likelihood of his doing so, since striking first is nearly always preferable to striking second. And so any attempt to contain the catastrophe if it comes also in some degree invites it.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Albert’s proposed theories or of the greater majority of those who worked at RAND, which was mostly made up of mathematicians devoid of hearts, the purpose of anything they do is simply to win, to get what is desired. Thus if a certain theory works in a certain case, use this theory, if not in another case, simply use another theory.

They view the world quite literally as a game. It is all about justifying the means to the goal in which you ultimately seek for. It is like starting with the desired answer and working backwards to justify the proof and hypothesis.

Albert argued for an American strategy based on “possibilities”— the entire spectrum of enemy options, both rational and irrational — rather than “probabilities,” the latter being the dominant characteristic in game theory.

Ron Robin writes in his “The Cold World They Made”:

“Albert now rejected that premise [of rational theory], proposing instead a theory of ‘limited irrationality,’ the notion that when faced with existential dilemmas, ‘people aren’t always irrational.’ One had to prepare for contingencies based on the assumption that the enemy may behave irrationally in contemplating a nuclear strike, but that the enemy is also ‘sometimes rational enough to be able to see that there is a grossly greater danger in taking the course of using nuclear weapons than if he takes the next course.’”

It is like a short-circuiting to the mentally constipated challenge of the so-called “prisoner’s dilemma,” in the end even game theorists said all options were “rational,” and couldn’t even agree which option was more rational vs. irrational.

For Albert, the Soviets were entirely to blame for the Cold War due to their assumed aggressive motives and predatory behavior, rather than the fact that the atomic bomb was created by the Americans in the first place.

Albert’s Soviets were cruel despots who would willingly sacrifice tens of millions of their citizens for the price of strategic advantage and world domination. Thus, it was the responsibility of the United States to prevent such a calamity as their primary objective, and that this could only be achieved, according to Albert, through an unrelenting investment in nuclear arms development and improvement.

Fred Kaplan writes in his “The Wizards of Armageddon”:

“Echoing his colleague Herman Kahn, he [Albert] wondered what the difference was ‘between two such unimaginable disasters as sixty and 160 million Americans dead? The only answer to that is ‘100 million.’ Starting from the smaller losses, it would be possible to recover the industrial and political power of the United States. Even smaller differences would justify an attempt to reduce the damage to our society in the event of war.’” (14)

According to Albert, the 25 million sacrifice of the Soviets in fighting WWII was nothing valiant or noble, but rather showed how coldly and callously the Soviet leadership regarded their own people that they could sacrifice them, without any apparent concern, into the burning furnace of war as nothing but cheap fuel for the military engine.

Ironically (or perhaps not…), this Soviet monstrosity that Albert had convinced himself, was used as the very justification for Albert’s push towards a nuclear confrontation, that would sacrifice many more lives.

Strangely Albert justifies the sacrifice of what he ultimately regards as just a number, whether it be 60 or 160 million (the population size of the U.S. in 1954 was 161,881,000). Thus, the possibility of 100 million Americans dead as the number Albert lands upon, was at the time 62% of the American population. This is not even taking into account how many Russians would die in such a scenario.

It appears what Albert is saying is that the United States is justified in becoming the greatest monstrosity in the world such that it can end all other monstrosities, whether real or merely speculative.

However, we are expected to believe that our sacrifice and murder in such numbers will be the most noble of all?

Together, Paul Nizte, Albert and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter (all RAND associates) would dominate the theory and policy surrounding nuclear strategy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Nov. 1985, Reagan would award all three with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Roberta, an authority on the “academic historical” work around the attack on Pearl Harbour and the psychological uses this had, had great insight into what could stir the sleeping madness that slumbered within the most powerful nation in the world.

Her work was used, by Albert and others at RAND, in scare-mongering and manipulating the mind-set of the military and the American population into thinking another Pearl Harbour was always just around the corner. It would be the foundation upon which Albert based all of his “hypotheses” and “revelations” in nuclear strategy.

It is difficult not to wonder where America would be today in its understanding of Russia along with its relations and orientation in nuclear policy if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of American nuclear strategy, had been exposed as a “former” Trotskyist…

[Shortly to follow: Part 2 of this series titled “Albert Wohlstetter’s ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’: The Story of How a Trotskyist Became the Authority on Nuclear Strategy for America.”]

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com

(1) Susan Butler, Portrait of a Partnership: Roosevelt and Stalin
(2) Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason, pg 13
(3) Ibid, pg 18
(4) Ibid, pg 10
(5) Ibid, pg 14
(6) Ibid, pg 14
(7) Ibid, pg 21
(8) Ibid, pg 49
(9) Ibid, pg 51
(10) Ibid, pg 53
(11) Ibid, pg 32
(12) Ibid, pg 32
(13) Ibid, pg 92
(14) Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pg 368

Despite the worldwide boycott movement against awarding the 1936 Olympics to Berlin, they finally took place, bigger and more brilliant than ever before. Dictator Hitler stood with them in the summit of his international recognition.

The crimes of Hitler’s government were internationally known since the beginning of 1933. They began immediately after the seizure of power in January 1933 with the arrest and murder of political opponents and their incarceration in concentration camps. This mainly affected communists, social democrats and other leftists. All parties except the NSDAP were banned. After May 1, 1933, the trade unions were smashed and expropriated.

The Nazis excluded Jews, Sinti and leftists from sports clubs. The two Jewish sports associations, Maccabi and Schild – they had about 350 member clubs in Germany in 1935 with a total of 40,000 members – were no longer allowed to use sports facilities. It was also clear that there should be no Jews on the German Olympic team.

Alternative Games in Barcelona

In 1931, two years before Hitler came to power, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had awarded the 1936 Olympics to Germany – Winter and Summer Games.

In 1933, after Hitler came to power, only two governments drew consequences: the Soviet government and the Republican government elected in Spain in 1931. For 1936, they prepared the second People’s Olympics in Barcelona with workers’ sports federations from 17 countries; the first People’s Olympics had taken place here in 1931. But when the 2,000 participants arrived in July 1936, the fascist coup of General Francisco Franco began, supported by supplies from U.S. corporations such as Texaco, General Motors and Chrysler – despite the neutrality decided by the U.S. Congress.

Sports federations from several European countries called for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. The largest athletic association at the time, Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in the U.S., under President Jeremiah Mahoney, also called for the boycott.

Alternative Jewish Games in New York and Tel Aviv

In May 1933, Rabbi Stephen Wise organized demonstrations in New York with the American Jewish Congress. The AAU organized a World Festival of Workers’ Athletes there. It was supported by Jewish civic leaders, including New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York State Governor Herbert Lehman, and the Jewish Labor Committee and the Anti-Nazi League. But the major Jewish organizations American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith held back on criticizing the Nazis. On August 15 and 16, 1936, the World Festival in New York drew only 400 participants.

In 1935, the second Jewish sports games, the Maccabiad, had taken place in Tel Aviv, with 1,350 participants from 27 countries. Most of the athletes, however, did not return to their home countries because of the advance of fascism in Europe – in Spain, Hungary, Austria, and Poland, for example.

Alternative Winter Spartaics in Norway

In Norway, leftist organizations put on a Winter Spartakiade in 1936, with athletes from the Soviet Union, Sweden, and Finland. But the world press, such as the New York Times, reported only from the simultaneous Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

In Austria, six of the eight Jewish athletes, including swimming champion Judith Deutsch, refused to participate in the Berlin Games: They were banned for life; Judith Deutsch emigrated to Tel Aviv as late as 1936.

But there were several Jewish U.S. stars, such as weightlifter David Mayer and Samuel Balter of the winning basketball team, and sprinters Samuel Staller and Marty Glickman, who wanted to be in Berlin. Harold Abrahams, a Jewish gold medalist in the 100 meters at the 1924 Games in Paris, lobbied for Berlin as president of the British Athletic Association along with Defense Minister Thomas Inskip.

The IOC: Nobles, Generals, Entrepreneurs

The organizers of the traditional games proved more powerful. Berlin became the venue.

The 1936 International Olympic Committee (IOC) included princes from the monarchies of Denmark, Japan, and Liechtenstein. Colonels, generals, field marshals, and grand admirals came from Germany, Italy, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands.

Both IOC members from the United States were entrepreneurs – Chicago construction tycoon Avery Brundage and real estate speculator William Garland. From France came Marquis de Polignac, head of the Pommery & Greno champagne cellars. From Germany came Karl Ritter von Halt, a member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, a member of the NSDAP and of the SS circle of friends Heinrich Himmler who was fond of donations. From Sweden came Sigfrid Edström, head of the electronics company ASEA.

The noblemen and their families, such as the British IOC members Clarence Napier Bruce, 3rd Baron Aberdare of Duffryn (=Lord Aberdare) and the 6th Marquess of Exeter (=Lord Burghley), were furthermore not only owners of large estates, but were also involved in companies. This was also the case with Baron Henri de Baillet-Latour, the president of the IOC; he belonged to one of the ten richest families in Belgium, which held shares in the largest bank, Société Générale, and other companies.

Decision mainly by the U.S.

The IOC and National Olympic Committees stifled the boycott movements. Quick commitments for the Games came from the fascist Axis powers of Italy and Japan, as well as from the fascist-friendly ruled states of Finland, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, Portugal, Romania, and Austria.

The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics had set new standards because of the number of participants, the records, the size of the stadium and the other modern sports facilities. The participation or non-participation of the successful sporting nation of the United States – “the world’s greatest sporting powerhouse ” – would determine the significance of the 1936 Games.

The president of the American Olympic Committee (AOC) was Avery Brundage. His company owed its rise to government contracts during World War 1. He was the largest developer and real estate investor in Chicago. He had skyscrapers, luxury apartments and hotels built, including a manufacturing plant for Ford.

President of the U.S. Olympic Committee: ardent anti-Semite

Brundage admired Hitler and showed himself to be an avowed anti-Semite: “No Jews are allowed in my club in Chicago either. ” He saw the boycott movement as a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy. ” IOC President Baillet-Latour also supported Brundage’s anti-Semitism: “Jews usually start shouting before they have a real reason to do so,” he wrote to Brundage.

At the initiative of IOC President Baillet-Latour, Brundage was elected to the IOC. His U.S. colleague on the IOC, Charles Sherill, a brigadier general in World War 1, a lawyer in New York, and U.S. ambassador to Argentina and Turkey, was enthusiastic about fascism. In the New York Times on March 4, 1933, Sherrill, like other U.S. industrialists, praised Hitler as the best German politician. Likewise, Sherill had previously hailed Mussolini as the new statesman who could restore order in Europe with his system in place of the incompetent democracy.

Hitler Bribes the Founder of the Olympic Games

To keep the founder of the Olympic Games and honorary president of the IOC, Pierre de Coubertin in line, Hitler granted him an “honorary gift” of 10,000 Reichsmarks (about $100,000 today) shortly before the opening of the Games. Hitler had already offered him a life pension in 1935 if he supported the hosting of the Games in Berlin.

Swedish IOC members also played an important role in favor of Berlin. Clarence von Rosen, royal equerry married to a wealthy U.S. industrialist’s daughter, was in-law to Herman Goering’s wife Carin. Brother Eric von Rosen founded Sweden’s fascist movement, and Clarence joined in.13 The second Swedish IOC member was Sigfrid Edström: the head of the Swedish electronics company ASEA did good business with the German Reich.

Churchill for Berlin

Two British IOC members, Lords Aberdare and Burghley, also lobbied for Berlin. Sir Noel Curtis Bennet, who was in favor of boycott, found no support.14 Winston Churchill appeased: communism is worse than Hitler!

French Champagne King for Berlin

After the German Wehrmacht occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, French sports officials called for a boycott of the Summer Games, including Marc Bellin de Coteau, president of the International Hockey Federation (HIF), and Jules Rimet, president of the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA). For France, however, IOC member and champagne king Marquis de Polignac tipped the scales. France’s ambassador in Berlin, André Francois-Poncet, a lobbyist for French heavy industry, had already enthusiastically welcomed the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Apartheid General for Berlin

Henry Nourse also had nothing against the Nazi regime, on the contrary. The IOC member from South Africa had distinguished himself as a lieutenant-colonel in the British colonial army under General Lord Kitchener during the Boer War (1899-1902): In concentration camps, Burian families and locals were starved to death, scorched earth tactics applied, and killing was indiscriminate. Nourse became the owner of South African gold and coal mines, where he was able to exploit blacks with state help – even before the formal legalization of apartheid after World War II.

None of them were swayed by the crimes of the Nazi regime, nor by the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935, nor by Nazi Germany’s military support for Franco’s coup in the weeks leading up to the Games.

Mass enthusiasm and elite luxury

The Winter Games in the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen took place undisturbed from February 6 to 16, 1936, while the Summer Games were held in Berlin from August 1 to 16, 1936.

At first, the Nazi newspapers Der Stürmer and the Völkischer Beobachter had agitated against Negroes and Jews, who had no place at the Olympics. But at the Winter Games in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, just as in Berlin, all signs with “For Jews forbidden” were removed, the demonized “Negro music” jazz was briefly permitted, and swastika flags waved cosmopolitanly to the international audience.

Token Jews

The U.S. member of the IOC, Charles Sherill, recommended to Hitler in two personal meetings how a few token Jews on the German Olympic team might reassure the international public. The Nazis followed Sherill’s recommendation: two “half-Jews” were added to the German team as token jews: In addition to ice hockey star Rudi Ball, it was fencer Helene Mayer: outwardly she resembled the ideal image of the blond Aryan woman and lived in the USA. At the award ceremony, she gave the Hitler salute in the stadium.

The newly built Olympic Stadium with 100,000 seats – modeled on the equally large stadium for the 1932 Games in Los Angeles – was the largest in Europe. It was surrounded by a huge parade ground, an Olympic village, spacious sports facilities for the various disciplines and with art exhibitions.

Richard Strauss, Evangelical Church, Leni Riefenstahl, Coca Cola …

In 1936, the Nazis invented the torch relay from ancient Greek Olympia across Europe, which has been customary since then. 3075 runners carried the torch through five countries to Berlin. The final runner was only found after three rounds of judging: Running style, physique and posture, hair and eye color as well as political attitude – everything had to be right.

The world-famous composer Richard Strauss created the Olympic anthem. Hitler’s sculptor Arno Breker contributed the sculptures of naked Aryan athletes: The Winner, The Decathlete. The Protestant Church held the opening mass for the IOC in the Berlin Cathedral. The light domes of Hitler’s favorite architect Albert Speer, developed for the NDSAP party rallies, also shone above the stadium.

Fanfares accompanied Hitler’s arrival, fights and award ceremonies. For the first time, competitions were televised. Corporations like Coca Cola appeared as sponsors. The IOC commissioned Hitler’s favorite director Leni Riefenstahl to make the official Olympic film, which was also made with the help of motorized cameras – including underwater cameras – that were new at the time.

Goebbels: “Italian Night” on Aryanized Property

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Field Marshal Hermann Göring vied for the favor of celebrities with lavish parties. Goebbels had an “Italian night” organized on his Aryanized property on Berlin’s Pfaueninsel (Isle of peacocks ).

Goering invited guests to his Prussian palace. At any one time, 1,000 guests were invited: Kings, European nobility, the diplomatic corps, the IOC, officials from the SS, NSDAP and the ministries, stars of stage and film, medal winners. Fireworks, dances with costumes from the ancient and Victorian eras were offered, fighter-bomber ace Ernst Udet showed his stunt tricks.

New York Times, Daily Express, Kölnische Zeitung

Hitler had declared that the games “strengthen the bonds of peace between nations. ” It was not only the German bourgeois media that were on Hitler’s course.

Thus the Kölnische Zeitung (It is still in the subtitle of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the present successor newspaper) wrote: “The greatest celebration that the new Germany is giving to all the peace-loving peoples of the world.” The Anglo-Saxon press, which shaped “world opinion,” also chimed in: “Greatest sports show in history” (New York Times), “wonderful change in the thinking of the German people” (Daily Express, London).

Avery Brundage fulfills all of Hitler’s wishes

Already at its meeting in the Hotel Adlon at the beginning of the Games on August 1, 1936, the IOC decided: the Games for 1940 would be awarded to Tokyo – regardless of Japan’s imperialist expansion in Korea, China and Taiwan. In 1939, the IOC awarded the Winter Games to Germany again. Brundage and the IOC fulfilled all of Hitler’s wishes.

Because of the excellent, also economic relations with the USA, Hitler’s Germany wanted to present itself in Washington by a considerably enlarged embassy: None other than the contractor Brundage was to get the contract for the new building in Washington.

Roosevelt dismissed Ambassador Critical of the Nazis

In 1938, after the Games, the Roosevelt administration replaced its previous ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, who had been critical of the Nazis, with Hugh Wilson, a Hitler admirer. The latter berated U.S. media as “Jewish-controlled” for occasionally being too critical of Germany’s treatment of Jews in the meantime.

Wilson, on the other hand, praised the Hitler government for working toward a “better future.” Hitler had “brought his people out of moral and economic despair and led them to pride and prosperity. ”

Churchill reiterated his appreciation of Hitler: “One can dislike Hitler and yet admire his patriotic achievement,” Churchill wrote in 1937. The dogged anti-Communist then worried whether Hitler might adopt the wrong tactics toward “Russia” and remain unsuccessful: “Will Hitler make the same mistake as Napoleon? ”

Churchill’s fear came true. Fighting and war in the same direction continued and continues to this day.

On January 28, Cubans celebrated the 169^th anniversary of Jose Marti’s birth – the Cuban poet and revolutionary upon whose values the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro was founded. In the aftermath of the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 when being interrogated by dictator Fulgencio Batista’s officers, Fidel described Marti as “the intellectual author of this revolution.” In 2010, Fidel had declared, “I can only bear witness to the way in which the heroic city [of Santiago de Cuba] fell in the hands of the Rebel Army on January 1st, 1959. Then, Marti’s ideas triumphed in our country!”

Marti’s legacy prevails in Cuba. Fidel’s remembrance is of immense value, given that the Cuban revolution’s premise for mobilisation against colonial and imperial interests derives from recognition the anti-colonial struggle in Cuba started prior to the emergence of the July 26 Movement. Like Marti, the Cuban revolution also recognised the importance of regional liberation, as it refused to limit its struggle to Cuba but instead expanded according to necessity and political will. The Cuban revolutionary consciousness, therefore, is an ongoing process as Marti had indicated in his writings – political independence from Spanish colonial rule and later, US interests in Cuba – would require an entire alternation in the island’s socio-political structure.

When Fidel was imprisoned and awaiting trial for the Moncada barracks attack, the authorities prevented him from accessing any of Marti’s literature, along with other books which could have helped to prepare his defense. In his “History Will Absolve Me” speech, Fidel quoted Marti: “A true man does not seek the path where advantage lies, but rather the path where duty lies, and this is the only practical man, whose dream of today will be the law of tomorrow, because he who has looked back on the essential course of history and has seen flaming and bleeding peoples seethe in the cauldron of the ages knows that, without a single exception, the future lies on the side of duty.”

Marti’s name and legacy, however, is also exploited by the Cuban exiles in Miami and by the US government – both of which have tried unsuccessfully to thwart the process of the Cuban revolution through terror attacks, assassination attempts and sabotage. The portrayal of Marti, therefore, differs among Cubans depending on their political commitments.

For the Cuban exiles who deserted Cuba after the revolution, Marti is a historical figure and his example is not tied to the ongoing revolution started by Fidel. The dissociation between history and the present has been necessary for the Cuban exiles to manipulate Marti’s legacy based upon the community’s counter-revolutionary actions, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Marti is depicted as a historical figure with no current relevance, rather than a revolutionary who started an ongoing legacy. Not to mention the US government’s attempts to exploit Marti in their threats towards socialist leaning governments in Latin America. That Marti would be equated with the imperialist ideologies he fought against is abominable, however it also reflects the symbolism which is revered on one hand, in Cuba, and exploited abroad, as in the case of the US and its interests which reflect a return to imperial hegemony in the region.

By contrast, Marti remained a constant reference for Fidel and the Cuban revolution. “History Will Absolve Me” reflects Marti’s influence as it is replete with the concept of the revolution as an ongoing process. Marti was an important prelude to Cuba’s ongoing tenacity to define its liberation according to revolutionary values, as opposed to colonial and imperial impositions. If Marti is to be appreciated, his legacy needs to be read within the context of a continuous awareness – one that is renewed within revolutionary consciousness and education.