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

By John PILGER

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honour the new flag …the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

“Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.”

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

“Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.”

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

mintpressnews.com

“The life of just one person is worth more than the private property of the richest man.” This is what’s written on the Calixto Garcia public hospital in Havana Cuba as a testament to the country’s commitment to free public healthcare, and to putting people before profit. I know this about Cuba  because in March, at the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I spent a week in the ICU at Calixto Garcia. I had been hit by a speeding ambulance, and Cuban doctors saved my life, operated on me twice, and nursed me to stability before putting me on a private medical evacuation flight back to the U.S. All of this, including the flight, was free of cost to me- covered by Cuba’s government-run insurance for foreign visitors. From my hospital bed, as the global emergency around me escalated, I witnessed  how the Cuban government swiftly mobilized resources to protect its citizens from Covid-19: at-home testing for anyone with symptoms, door to door preventative education in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, and coordinated isolation when necessary. While deaths soared toward 100,000 in the U.S., Cuba was able to get the average daily Covid-19 related deaths close to zero for most of May-August.

Cuba’s humanist approach  when it comes to health was not new to me. In 2013, I co-directed a documentary on a free hospital in northern Honduras. The doctors there, all from afro-indigenous Garifuna communities, had been trained in Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) for free. Cuba created the ELAM in 1999 to train doctors from the poorest regions of countries around the world (including the U.S.), providing full scholarships of six years tuition, room, and board, with the hope that these doctors would return and provide accessible and preventative healthcare in their communities. The ELAM was born as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and has trained tens of thousands of doctors from over 110 countries since then.

Cuba is now poised to play an important role in global efforts to curb the pandemic. New variants in South Africa and Brazil, all with yet unknown implications for vaccine effectiveness, have shown us that any effort to achieve herd immunity is only as good as it is accessible equitably across the globe. Yet, as predicted, the global north is outpacing the global south dramatically in vaccination.

On February 3, Anthony Fauci said, in an event hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) network, that developing COVID-19 vaccines “is not a race.” “We want everybody to get over the finish line,” he assured. Dr. Fauci mentioned the Russian and the Chinese vaccines  and later suggested that the U.S. should help other countries strengthen their vaccine manufacturing capacity to promote more vaccinations globally. At no point did he mention Cuba.

Thanks to an established publicly-funded biotechnology program, Cuba currently has four vaccine candidates. One of those vaccines, Soberana 02, started Phase 3 clinical trials in early March. Another candidate, Abdala, started Phase 2 trials in February. Both vaccines are being developed by public research institutions and are the most promising candidates in Latin America. The fact that Dr. Fauci failed to mention these candidates is disappointing.

The U.S. and other governments should set aside antiquated hostility toward Cuba and support the development and distribution of its vaccines. The first step is to take the vaccine candidates seriously and remove any barriers presented by U.S. sanctions. Second, global actors should support Cuba’s efforts to scale up manufacturing, should they decide to pursue this. Unlike current vaccines which are hoarded by the Global North, Cuba’s vaccine candidates have the potential to become the “people’s vaccine” that activists and scientists around the world have called for. For example, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) makes it possible to have the first vaccine ever licensed openly on the global stage. While the WHO’s better-known COVAX program aims to pool procurement and distribute vaccine doses more equally, it does nothing to address the underlying intellectual property regime that produces monopolies on vaccines and limits their manufacturing.  The C-TAP was created at the onset of the pandemic to pool the rights to life-saving technologies and facilitate a truly equitable and effective vaccine roll out, but no country or company has chosen to license through the C-TAP to date.

Regardless of the mechanism, Cuban officials have stated a clear intention to, once again, place people before profit.  “Cuba’s strategy to market the vaccine is a combination of things; first comes humanity and the impact on health, and in second place is our industry’s need to sustain sufficient production of the vaccine and medicines for the country,” explained Vicente Vérez of the Finlay Vaccines Institute in Cuba for Prensa Latina TV. “We are not a multinational where returns [on investment] are the number one reason for existing, and improving health is just a consequence. We work the opposite way. For us, it’s about achieving health. The returns are a consequence of achieving health, but they will never be the priority.”

Having an adequately tested and accessible vaccine from Cuba will, as the Soberana 02 name suggests, contribute to the autonomy of countries like Cuba and nearby Haiti to safeguard their populations free from dependence on multinational monopolies. But it also might be the saving grace for the botched global vaccine rollout that leaves us all susceptible to new strains. The US should support Cuban vaccine development because it is good for us and it is good for the world.

counterpunch.org

For the past decade “The Walking Dead” has been one of the most popular television dramas in the world and arguably the most successful horror franchise ever made. And the now it is more topical than ever: The Biden administration has just taken over in Washington and the Compassionate, All-Powerful, All-Knowing and All-Wise European Commission continues to rule over the 27 nations of the European Union

For “The Walking Dead” owes its success to the subconscious power of its political metaphor: It is all about liberal internationalism – a corrupt, rotting zombie version of the liberal creed that really died 50 years ago but refuses to admit it.

For from the fateful year of 1965 onwards, the great tide of liberal internationalism started to disintegrate to the horror and fascination of the entire world. First, the mighty, invincible United States at the very same time it was even outracing the Soviet Union to the Moon was humbled and made fools of by a rag tag army of fierce, impoverished but implacable guerrillas in the remote little Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam.

At the same time as it fell flat on its face halfway around the world, American liberalism fell apart at home, the United States itself was convulsed for years by race riots even after President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the century-overdue Civil Rights and Voting Acts. American colleges became theaters of rage and childish destruction too until Johnson’s successor, cynical Richard Nixon finally ended the threat of being drafted in to fight in the jungles of Vietnam.

Finally, the third leg of the liberal triad, the supposedly wise and humane economics of John Maynard Keynes, lost all credibility in the great inflation unleashed by Johnson. The inflation was then witlessly fanned by Nixon with wage and price controls. They had previously failed for President Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression and the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Needless to say, they failed for Nixon too.

The great inflation was finally crushed by the policies of the greatest of all Federal Reserve chairs, Paul Volcker in the late 1970s and early 1980. But the price was a deflation and rolling back of the role of government in the private sector that flew in the face of the Grand Liberal Faith.

Yet two decades into the 21st century what do we find? A neo-Keynes based on pumping endless paper money into the economies of the United States and Western Europe has reemerged and again reigns supreme. Interest rates have been reduced to literally zero, or flat rates, a new mechanism to make purchasing power worthless that was eagerly fostered by George W. Bush, the dim without limits, fake-macho, posturing U.S. president who permanently discredited the heritage of Ronald Reagan – just as Lyndon Johnson destroyed that of his own hero Franklin Roosevelt.

In the 1960s, classic American liberalism stumbled into an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia and lacked any moral courage or intelligence to pull out. Forty years later “Dubya” Bush unleashed two endless unwinnable wars also in Asia that two succeeding Democratic presidents – Barack Obama and now Joe Biden – have both eagerly embraced to fight: This time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again we see the same monstrous triad of nightmarish, and absurd policies: Fighting unwinnable foreign wars, fanning endless racial and now even gender divisions in one’s own country through policies meant to banish them and economic policies that bring impoverishment, joblessness and ruin instead of the growth and prosperity they endlessly promise.

All three “legs” of this liberal policy triad were supposedly discredited forever 50 years ago after the catastrophic presidency of Johnson bequeathed his successor the glowing heritage of race riots and hatred at home, the worst inflation in U.S. history and the Vietnam War. To see them all now raging more thoroughly than ever, half a century on, is an exercise in bloodcurdling horror. It exceeds anything we can watch on “The Walking Dead.”

The parallels are obvious. What died 50 years ago refuses to recognize it. Dead ideas and their eager acolytes still walk.

Merely 20 years ago, a New York publisher rejected one of my books on the patterns on international economics in which I correctly predicted the coming revival of Russian agriculture and food processing. The pompous fool was particularly outraged because I spoke disrespectfully of the Sainted John Maynard Keynes. Now I have some respect for Keynes: At the very least, he hammered home the elementary value that economics should be used to reduce and eliminate human suffering, not callously ignore it. But I told that publisher what he could do with his Keynes.

My book “Cycles of Change” eventually came out in 2015. In it I predicted the progressive revival in the U.S. Democratic Party against liberal internationalism that was led by Senator Bernie Sanders and the nationalist-patriotic reaction on the Right that made Donald Trump President of the United States. I had to self-publish it. Not a single publisher in the United States would touch it: 140 of them rejected it. There’s freedom of speech, U.S. style for you.

It is a mark of zombies that they cannot recreate the past they cling to but instead make a gruesome mockery of it. They are also cruel, stupid, intolerant and merciless. Can anyone looking at the policies that still pour forth ceaselessly from Washington and Brussels therefore doubt for a second that both imperial capitals are run by zombies?

The Walking Dead have won.

The inability of capitalist countries to provide equal access to healthcare is being challenged by Cuba – under blockade, boasting one of the best and most accessible healthcare systems.

There is no denying that the coronavirus pandemic has catapulted Cuba onto the world stage. A comprehensive approach at home, based upon the country’s emphasis upon education and healthcare access, has ensured nationwide care for Cubans while clinical trials are underway for the country’s production of vaccines – the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean to accomplish such a feat.

Meanwhile, Cuba has also been at the helm of medical internationalism since the start of the pandemic, with the Henry Reeves Brigade offering medical assistance in several countries, including Italy.

At the 46^th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called for internationalising medical cooperation, calling out the neoliberal model practiced globally as the cause of social and economic crises exacerbated during the pandemic.

“Privileging narrow interests over the general welfare will increase suffering and deaths, even in industrialised countries. The internationalization of cooperation is urgently needed. It is necessary to fight for the establishment of a just, democratic and equitable international order,” Rodriguez declared.

Governments worldwide have come under sharp criticism for the mishandling of Covid19. Recently, a spat between AstraZeneca and the EU made news when the company announced it would not be able to meet the stipulated supply of vaccines by the required deadline. The EU has been accused of vaccine hoarding since January, when it bought 300 million doses from Pfizer.

Meanwhile many countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa have been left with meagre access. In Palestine, where access to vaccines has been extremely limited due to Israel’s initial refusal to cooperate, the Palestinian Authority has angered the population upon admitting its first batch of vaccines went to privileged individuals rather than the most vulnerable and front-line workers.

On the other hand, Cuba, which has faced almost six decades of the illegal US blockade on the island, is calling for political change both in terms of global cooperation. The blockade, as Rodriguez pointed out, has not deterred Cuba from making inroads when it comes to the healthcare of its population and medical internationalism abroad. Despite ongoing US hostility, Cuba has announced it will be creating enough doses – 100 million – to immunise its population and provide marginalised countries with access to the vaccines, which are less expensive and easier to transport than the brands used in the Western world.

High income countries have purchased 60 percent of the available vaccines, with some countries purchasing in excess of what is necessary to vaccinate the population. Cuba – mostly forgotten by the world unless mainstream media can run a story about how the socialist-driven economy needs to shift to capitalism – is at the helm opposing such exploitation. The contradiction here is stark – the inability of capitalist countries to provide equal access to healthcare is being challenged by Cuba – under blockade, boasting one of the best and most accessible healthcare systems, and with the potential to address the gap in inequalities that rich countries have turned a blind eye to.

Not to mention that apart from nominating the Cuban medical brigades for the Nobel Peace Prize, there has been no concentrated international effort to confront the US about the illegal blockade imposed on the island. That Cuba has managed such a feat, up against US hostility and international complacence, is in itself an accomplishment that no other country with easier access to trade has managed.

It is activists worldwide that uphold the call for the blockade to end, even as governments worldwide reap the benefits of Cuba’s medical success, lament the Cuban revolution and do little other than vote in non-binding resolutions, with no recognition of how the principles of the revolution as early as 1953, before its triumph, paved the way for the long-standing position Cuba so rightly deserves in the field of education and healthcare.

By Robert W. MERRY

Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, by Stephen Wertheim, (Belknap Press: October 2020), 272 pages.

Probably the most profound geopolitical development of the Twentieth Century was the rise of America as the world’s preeminent power during and after World War II. We’re still living in what Henry Luce called the American Century some eighty years after the publisher proclaimed its inception. Historians have put forth various interpretations for how and why this happened: that America was always an irrepressible nation whose expansionist impulses presaged its hegemonic ambitions; that with all of its resources and power, the country had no choice but to embrace the challenge of global stability.

There’s some excellent history here as Wertheim traces the perceptions and recommendations of prominent thinkers struggling to keep up with a world in flux. No sooner would they craft a grand strategy for the future they foresaw than the perceived future would be washed away by powerful new developments. Ultimately they concluded that their options narrowed to a single vision: world primacy. “Six years after global supremacy was all but inconceivable,” writes Wertheim, “it was now indisputable.”

Wertheim goes awry a bit, though, in tracing the broad sweep of U.S. international relations from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt. His interpretation elides significant elements of that rich story while interpreting others in questionable ways.

In Werthheim’s view, America was born as an internationalist nation, “promising and incarnating a world governed by reason and rules, not force and whim.” George Washington’s famous farewell call for America to avoid “entangling alliances” was actually a broader admonition against engaging in any form of power politics in the world. That concept, “premised on the ability of peaceful interaction to replace clashing politics,” became a central element of the American ethos.

As Wertheim tells it, this was America’s fundamental foreign policy outlook throughout its first century and a half, right up to Wilson’s decision to take America into World War I alongside the Allies.

But wasn’t that decision a violation of Washington’s farewell warning? No, writes Wertheim, because Wilson’s League was designed to “transform the balance of power into a ‘community of power’ in which ‘all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose.”’ Wertheim explains that, under the Wilson plan, the United States would  “Americanize Europe” by creating a universal alliance with American participation. This would be a “disentangling alliance” that would “forever end the capacity of European alliances to ensnare the United States.”

The key here is that the increasingly powerful U.S. would not seek “to counterbalance or dominate any rival but instead to render counterbalancing and domination obsolete.” America would be the progenitor of endless peace.

Of course America declined to join Wilson’s League and rejected his broader vision, whether entangling or disentangling. The country entered what most historians have considered an “isolationist” phase (a term that Wertheim abhors, as we will see).

Then came World War II in Europe, which set American planners to the task of developing a grand strategy for what seemed like a new global order. When Hitler conquered France and unleashed his bold effort to destroy Britain’s defensive air power so he could invade, the planners promptly grappled with the American response to a Europe fully dominated by Nazi Germany. Perhaps America could confine its sphere of influence and central trading zone to the Western Hemisphere, including Greenland and Canada and encompassing all or most of South America. It didn’t take long to see, however, that such a zone would hardly sustain the U.S. economy.

Even adding a vast section of Asia, perhaps including a powerful and aggressive Japan (a daunting diplomatic challenge), wouldn’t solve the economic problem while also posing new geopolitical difficulties. The planners seemed stymied.

After Hitler failed to gain dominance over British skies, thus ending any immediate prospect of an invasion and seemingly preserving the British Empire, a new concept emerged: combine the Western Hemisphere with the Pacific basin and the British Empire into a vast area encompassing nearly all of the non-German world. As Wertheim puts it, “Finally, after months of study, the planners had discovered that if German domination of Europe endured, the United States had to dominate almost everywhere else.”  This “everywhere else” became known as the Grand Area, and it was based on the imperative that Germany must be confined to continental Europe and that only American leadership could ensure the success of that enterprise.

This dealt a fearsome blow to what Wertheim considered America’s foundational internationalism, the Wilsonian concept of peaceful dispute adjudication. He writes: “Out of the death of internationalism as contemporaries had known it, and the faltering of British hegemony, U.S. global supremacy was born.” But it still had to be sold to the American people, and that led to two new developments. First, partisans of hegemony demonized opposition thinkers as “isolationists,” a new term of opprobrium designed to put naysayers on their heels. “By developing the pejorative concept of isolationism,” writes Werthheim, “and applying it to all advocates of limits on military intervention, American officials and intellectuals found a way to make global supremacy sound unimpeachable.”

They also conceived the idea of a United Nations to gather other states into the fold and thus “convince the American public that U.S. leadership would be inclusive, rule bound, and worthy of support.” In other words, it was a ruse to help the elites supplant the old notion of placid internationalism with armed supremacy.

Thus do we see, in Wertheim’s telling, how a small group of wayward intellectuals, back in the chaos years of World War II, hijacked the country’s intrinsic internationalist philosophy and reshaped it into something else entirely, inconsistent with traditional Americanism, namely a credo of power politics and global supremacy.

No doubt many opponents of the foreign policy aggressiveness of today’s Republican neocons and Democratic humanitarian interventionists will embrace Wertheim as a sturdy ally in their cause. But they should note that he builds his thesis upon a foundation of dubious history.

George Washington was not a forerunner to Woodrow Wilson, and warning against entangling alliances circa 1797 can’t be logically equated to advocating world government in 1919. Neither can one draw an accurate picture of American foreign policy thinking without noting the force of American nationalism, which played a major role (though of course not the only role) in the formulation of U.S. international relations throughout American history. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago calls it “the most powerful ideology in the modern world.” Wertheim hardly mentions it.

He argues that we shouldn’t consider America’s expansionist zeal under James Polk in the 1840s as representing power politics because, after all, the United States was simply consolidating its position on its own continent while eschewing the acquisition of Cuba or all of Mexico (as opposed to gobbling up merely half of Mexico in an aggressive war). But when in history did a major power, after consolidating its position in its own neighborhood, stop there? Did Rome? Did the Ottomans? Did the British? Neither did America.

Similarly, Wertheim disputes any link to power politics on the part of the United States at the turn of the last century by noting that America “continued to stay politically and militarily apart from the European alliance system while intensifying efforts to transform power politics globally.”

The latter part here is false. America built up its navy just in time to destroy Spain’s Pacific and Atlantic fleets, kick that waning empire out of the Caribbean, free Cuba from Spanish dominion, and take the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. If that wasn’t power politics, the term has no meaning. For that matter, why did the United States annex the globally strategic islands of Hawaii, from which America could project power far into Asia? And why did it build the Panama Canal, which allowed it to concentrate more naval firepower more quickly in more places?

No, America wasn’t born as a benign instrumentality of peace destined to calm the waters of international conflict through means never before seen in any successful guise in the annals of human history. America was born like every other nation, into a world of conflict and danger, buffeted by swirls of power, ambition, and potentially hostile forces. The country proved remarkably adept, like its mother nation, in the arts of self-reliance, self-defense, popular government—and expansionism.

It was therefore natural that when the world turned upside down and power interrelationships got tossed into the air like confetti, those U.S. planners would perceive American power as the greatest hope for stability in the world as well as the greatest hope for U.S. security. For the first 45 years of the new era, the Cold War, America played its role largely with aplomb. Then it went awry when the world changed and the country’s elites could neither see the transformation nor adjust to it.

Wertheim is correct in positing that America’s current foreign policy follies are a product of its leaders’ insistence on clinging to the same ideas that emerged from the minds of those strategic planners back in the 1940s. But in his effort to tell the story of how we got here, he gets it only partially right.

theamericanconservative.com

Under U.S. President Donald Trump, pointing out corruption is becoming a veneer under which the U.S. can manipulate the trajectory of human rights violations. The PAHO has not been singled out for its affiliation to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which Trump recently defunded, but for the organisation’s role in facilitating the Cuban revolutionary doctors’ internationalist approach to aiding countries during the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. has intensified its vilification of Cuban doctors – a source of pride for Cuba – as the country’s version of alleged forced labour. A briefing by the U.S. State Department describes Cuba as facilitating human trafficking. Cuban officials have rejected the U.S. insinuations, contrasting Trump’s mismanagement with the Cuban model of medical practice; the latter efficient enough to cater for both Cubans and countries abroad.

Fidel Castro envisaged healthcare as a human right – a view shared by Argentine revolutionary and medic Ernesto Che Guevara. In his early travels across Latin America in 1951, Che’s observations of medical practice and community relations led him to envisage a different system comprising of health awareness and preventive medicine. The Cuban Revolution eliminated all prestige associated with the medical profession, with the best doctors leaving Cuba for the U.S. Nevertheless, the model envisaged by Che, which brought medical practice to all parts of the island, has proved successful, to the point that Cuba’s healthcare system, despite the illegal blockade enforced by the U.S. on the island, managed to cater not only for the Cuban people’s needs, but also regionally and internationally.

Cuba’s healthcare system is intricately woven with its internationalist approach. Besides exposing the failings in a capitalist system that contributed to the death toll in Western countries, the world was also offered a glimpse into the Cuban medical model. The medical brigades reached out internationally, while in their country, Cubans benefited from rigorous checks and door to door medical visits, thus illustrating how community relations were integrated into the Cuban approach to medicine. The not-for profit model inspired by the Cuban revolution thrived despite U.S. efforts to destabilise Cuba economically and politically, partly due to the education system which is also based upon the revolutionary principles of internationalism.

It is worth noting that the UN, despite its role in destroying the environment through its promotion of wars and plunder, is now calling for recognition of the “interdependence between humanity and biodiversity”, which, as UNESCO Director General Azulay stated, “is so profound that the latter’s vulnerabilities are our own.”

In this regard, Cuba also sets an example. The plunder of natural resources was perpetually referenced by Fidel in his speeches, which regularly emphasised the consequences of war and capitalist economies. Despite the U.S. sanctions on the island, in 2019 Cuba was declared the most sustainably developed country by anthropologist Dr Jason Hickel.

U.S. threats, therefore, do have the potential to create the space for additional human rights violations, in particular when it comes to institutions that are dependent upon the same corruption to thrive. However, Pompeo’s posturing also puts the U.S. in stark contrast with Cuba and its commitment to humanity – a principle which, despite Fidel’s death, remains ingrained within the island’s political and education system.

Fortunately for the U.S. military industrial complex, fighting COVID 19 has apparently not diminished the White House’s zeal to take on other, perhaps better armed and more serious traditional opponents. But of perhaps more interest is the different kind of conflict that has been initiated by the White House in attacking the United States Congress, which has been demonstrating the temerity to deny to the Chief Executive the inherent right to start a war against whomever he feels deserves a bit of “Made in U.S.A.” shock and awe.

This war fought in Capitol Hill in Washington is perhaps more significant than what is going on with coronavirus as its outcome will decide whether post 9/11 executive authority includes a president being able to attack another country that does not directly threaten the United States. Current legislation based on the War Powers Act of 1973 permits a president to respond to an imminent threat without the consent of congress, but the action thus initiated has to be terminated within 60 days. Any conflict lasting longer than that requires a declaration of war by Congress, as is stated in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Trump’s dissent relates to two attempts by Congress to specifically rein in U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian aggression against Yemen and also to preempt a possible attempt to attack Iran. On the Yemen resolution (S.J. Res 7), approved last March, the Senate voted 54-46 in favor followed by the House passing the same resolution by a vote of 248 to 177. The Iran resolution (S.J. Res 68), which had bipartisan support through a 55-45 vote in the Senate in February and a 227-186 vote in the House in March, finally reached the president’s desk last Wednesday. Both resolutions were immediately vetoed by the president.

The two resolutions would have limited Trump’s ability to continue an armed conflict or go to war without the specific authorization of Congress. In characteristic fashion, Trump called the latest iteration on Iran “very insulting,” and also criticized its Republican supporters Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, accusing them of helping the Democrats in the lead up to November’s election. In an official statement explaining his veto, Trump stated that “The resolution implies that the President’s constitutional authority to use military force is limited to defense of the United States and its forces against imminent attack. That is incorrect. We live in a hostile world of evolving threats, and the Constitution recognizes that the President must be able to anticipate our adversaries’ next moves and take swift and decisive action in response.”

To be sure, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton contrived to attack Libya even though it in no way threatened the U.S. To do so, the mission was initially framed as humanitarian in nature and NATO was subsequently involved in it so it could be framed as a collective action against a country that posed a potential security threat to the Mediterranean region. President George H. W. Bush and his son George W. likewise were careful to get United Nations authorization for the use of force in the two wars against Iraq and the latter also relied on 2002’s blanket Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) which permitted military action against the perpetrators of 9/11. The AUMF was later expanded to de facto include all “terrorist” groups. Most of those justifications were, of course, nonsense, frequently little more than contrivances based on fabricated intelligence to permit wars of aggression.

Donald Trump’s viewpoint on the authority of the president is somewhat less fastidious, though he has also cited the AUMF. He is currently involved in a litigation going to the Supreme Court over his claim of “temporary absolute immunity” regarding an admittedly politically motivated suit by the Manhattan district attorney to obtain his tax records. He has similarly embraced the idea that he, as commander in chief of the armed forces, can use them as a resource to conduct his foreign policy, an idea possibly put into his head by his belligerent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Conceding that he has that power would grant him de facto authority to intervene anywhere in the world any time based on any pretext. It also ignores the original War Powers Act and Article I Section 8 of the Constitution which gives the sole authority for declaring war to Congress.

Given his propensity to seek military solutions and his belief that he has the absolute authority to do so, Trump has not hesitated to attack Syria several times in spite of there being no imminent treat and his act of war/war crime assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in January nearly ignited an armed conflict with Iran. Indeed, though Trump has been engaged in “maximum pressure” economic warfare against Iran for the past two years, he and his administration frequently claim that it is only being done to modify Iranian bad behavior.

As there is no chance that Congress will overturn Trump’s veto in an election year in which the Republicans will be counting heads and circling their wagons, we the American people are stuck with a president who believes that he has the authority to use military force as he sees fit. And “as he sees fit” is the danger as “restraint” is not exactly Donald Trump’s middle name. And one has to also recognize that there is another political reality at play. When things are going badly domestically, as with the coronavirus, a war can serve as a great distraction and a demonstration of strong leadership. Let us hope that no one puts that idea into Donald Trump’s head.