Phillip Bonosky

           War had been declared in September, 1939–but a most peculiar war, it turned out to be.  After having served up Memel, the Sudatenland, the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia itself to Hitler, egging him on eastward, Chamberlain had cried betrayal when Poland was attacked and subdued in a few weeks, and wept–or seemed to weep–much like the Walrus in Through the Looking Glass:

                        “I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

                         “I deeply sympathize”.

                        With sobs and tears he sorted out

                        those of the largest size,

                        Hiding his pocket handkerchief

                        Before his streaming eyes.

            Still Europe was at war, even if a strange war–a war that would be tagged “the phony war.”   Behind the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, some 110 French and British divisions sat and waited, sometimes peering across No Man’s Land, to the German’s Siegfried Line where some 23 Nazi divisions also sat and waited.  They stared at each other with binoculars.  Meanwhile, everything else remained normal.  While

Great Britain faced Germany behind the Maginot Line it would see to it that the Germans were regularly supplied with needed raw material and war supplies through Italy, not yet officially at war but already a junior partner to Nazi Germany.  Thus, through “neutral” Italy, Britain continued to supply the country it was presumably at war with everything the Germans needed to fight them.

            Strange.  But nobody budged from behind their respective lines.  The French were complacent.  They waited.  And in November that same year, it seemed that what they were waiting for–a real war–was literally dumped into their laps.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland.  Now the Allies–here meaning France and Great Britain–had the war they had longed for–against the USSR.

            For three months efforts to switch the war from Germany to the Soviet Union raged.  Denunciations of the Soviet Union far exceeded any hard words for Hitler.  Money poured into Finland, “volunteers” recruited from the inactive soldiers making faces at the Germans were ready to march, embargoes were declared and the news prints teemed with derisive stories about Soviet military clumsiness and Finnish courage.

 

            Did it matter that “little” Finland, under Baron Mannerheim,  the “butcher” of the Finnish working class in the early 20s, was joined to Nazi Germany in secret and public treaties?  Did it matter that the Mannerheim line (the equivalent in Finland of the Maginot) faced the USSR’s second most important city, Leningrad, only some 20 miles away–well within range of powerful artillery?  Did it matter that the Soviets had begged the Finns to push their line back out of artillery range in return for which the Soviets would compensate them with money and land?  Did it matter that, though the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact with the Germans in August, 1939, not a day went by that the Soviets didn’t expect a Nazi attack?  Did it matter that when the Nazis actually did attack, they were joined by the Finns, and if Leningrad was never taken,

 in 1941, it was partly because the Mannerheim Line had been destroyed  by the Red Army in 1940?

            In any case, what mattered was that war–the war that millions had sworn would never be allowed to happen again–had happened, and that the USA, officially neutral, actually was already committed to the allied side.

            But nobody wanted to go to war, even to save “poor little Finland”.  That war had ended after three months: the Mannerheim Line was dismantled.  Now the Germans and the British and French resumed staring at each other.  What to do?

            While they were staring at each other in Europe, plans were forming on crinkling map paper in a number of widely separated situation rooms which, when unfolded, covered a whole wall, or a large table.  On one such map the Japanese were entering the final touching-up details for a daring, massive attempt at knocking out America’s ability to fight them in the Pacific at one blow.  They had the approval of Hitler–and through Hitler of Baron Mannerheim.  The date on the first one was December 7, 1941.  For it: Tora, tora, tora!  In Berlin another map was being drawn up with red arrows all pointing east.  The date stamped on it was June 22, 1941.  Its name: Barbarossa.

            Before the attack on Pearl Harbor–“date that will live in infamy”(infamy lasted just a few years)–there was one powerful organization in the USA whose spokesmen crossed and criss-crossed the country touting one message: no war with Germany.  It had a very famous spokesman, a genuine hero, the man who was the first to cross the Atlantic by plane in 1927: Charles A. Lindberg, son of a maverick legislator, but no socialist himself.  The son’s exploit had made him world famous, and the tragedy of the kidnap-murder of his son in the early 30s re-echoed around the world.  Taciturn, a loner, the lean, frontier type (archetype), he nevertheless managed to marry and heiress, Anne Morrow, who was something of a writer–in any case, she saw in fascism the Wave of the Future.  Standing aloof from the sweaty, squalid reality of grunt-and-groan politics, and confining himself (or so it seemed) to the clean impersonal technology of aeronautics, it appeared that this man was truly removed from the gritty realities of daily life and communed, like a kind of priest, with ascetic comprehension, seeing the world from above.

            Shy, not given to public statements, yielding only to the solitary pleasures of aerial flight, alone and awake above the sleeping world, how could anybody imagine  what really cooked in his brain?  For finally, challenged to confront the country directly, as it hesitated on the brink of war, he would cry out that the war was a conspiracy of “the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration.”  It was Germany about to be victimized–that Germany, in its Nazi manifestation, which had already awarded him, on October 19, 1938, an honor he shared with Henry Ford, who also received the Nazi “Order of Merit.”

            The man who never joined anything now found himself the head of a movement called America First.  True, it had many powerful supporters, not least of them William Randolph Hearst Sr., whose newspapers would inform their millions of readers, three days before Pearl Harbor that “Japan is not threatening us with war. We are threatening Japan.”

            As for Europe, the Sage of San Simenon would in 1941 opine: “Is not the situation in Europe very much the same as it is in Asia?  It not Europe wary of war, and have not the allied anti-Cominform nations desired peace with England and America?”  Ill-timed indeed–these prescient words were spread coast-to-coast on December 3, 1941–the Japanese were already en route to Pearl Harbor.

            Hearst was well aware of the fact that the real enemy–for his class–was the Soviet Union, and he opposed any alliance, on any level, with The Beast. Along with him was Senator Robert Taft.So,to, did Lindberg, who had made a quick trip to the USSR in the late 30s, and in Berlin had announced that in his opinion the Soviet air force was so incompetently run that it would pose no barrier to any invading force.  The Nazis listened

and heard.

            But behind all the front personalities who exploited the genuine fear of war shared by most Americans in 1940-41, there were two men, brothers, whose influence on American politics would grow enormously like a monstrous tumor that almost went out of control.  One would become Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and the other would mid-wife and then head an organization whose entry on the scene was almost casual, later however to be known for its deeds that spread a malignancy over large parts of the world: the CIA.  The CIA was the corrupted heir of a wartime organization that had really fought the Nazis: the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).  But as the CIA, it brought upon the world a force that pledged loyalty not to a government but to a class, and not to the class as a whole, but to only the hard-core and introduced to the world the idea that crime could be should be unhesitatingly use to promote class power.  That in the process the entire inherited concept of western civilization was a rational and moral force was scuttled did not seem to bother either the architects of the CIA nor those in whose behalf it lied, murdered, stole, and destroyed.  In fact, a certain portion of the population reverberated with a strange new thrill: at last crime was made legal!

            John Foster Dulles’ contribution to political foresight was made in a speech before the Economic Club in New York in 1939 when he declared that “there is no reason to believe that any of the totalitarian states either collectively or separately would attempt to attack the United States.  Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplate war against us…”.

            Laughable today, one must not suppose, however, that such confident opinions concerning the motives of Germany, Italy, and Japan were based on no solid (or what appeared to be solid) grounds.  Dulles was a corporation lawyer whose services to his corporations were easily confused with his services to his country.  As senior partner to Sullivan and Cromwell, whose representatives sat on more than 40 other corporation boards, banks and utilities, with international connections, particularly with Germany, but also Italy and Spain, before and after Mussolini and Franco, Dulles’ tentacles reached far.  Through the magic of interlocking directorates, Dulles–as director of the Canadian Nickel Corporation–was brought into a price-fixing alliance with Germany’s I.G.

Farbin.  I.G. Farbin would be an industrial mainstay of Hitler’s Reich.  Among its contributions  to the war were a number of “experiments” its representatives conducted in various German death camps.  No matter. Such misalliances were the rule: by the break-out of war in 1939, and America’s involvement in 1941, most of America’s major corporations had some kind of agreement with the “enemy”.  Henry Ford, for instance, already awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, was assured by his German agents that no harm would come to his works in Cologne as well as in Vichy France.  Indeed, no ever did, and every pfennig of profit was meticulalously entered into the well-kept books by Ford’s German director, Dr. Heinrich Albert, who, during World War I,  had (not coincidentally) been in charge of  blowing up American ships, infecting American cattle with diseases and spreading some 400 million dollars among “publicists” in the crusade to undermine anti-Kaiser sentiment in the country.

            No matter.  When in 1940,  Dr. Heinrich Albert was exposed by the New York Herald Tribune as running a spy ring, now for Hitler, it was Dulles who stoutly came to his defense.  Said he of Dr. Albert: “I don’t believe he has done anything wrong.  I knew him in the old days and have a high regard for his integrity.”

            That “integrity” in a Nazi had to be looked for in an altogether separate code governing ethics in our times.  This “code” had little to do with normal honesty and truth: it had everything to do with class.  For Dulles and his brother, no such thing as a Nazi really existed, nor mattered: what mattered was German finance-capital, which transcended Kaisers and Brown Shirts and,  in one form or another, both brothers could claim to be part of with full justice.

            But this too was no real distinction and certainly did not imply moral turpitude.  For the fact was that the connection between American and German finance-capital, before, during and after the war, was so general that by that very fact it escaped indictment as criminal–to indict them was to indict a good part of American capitalism itself.  “By the time the present war broke out,” Sims Carter, Asst. Chief of Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, told the Kilgore Committee in September, 1944,  “most of Germany’s leading industrial,  commercial and banking firms had American connections.  Even after hostilities had begun, key figures continued to arrive in the United States and other parts of the hemisphere from Germany.”

            “Within a single week of May, 1942, the U.S. Department of Justice uncovered no less than 162 cartel agreements between the German I.G. Farben trust and American business firms.  Cartels which remained operative during the war years, or were temporarily ‘suspended’, covered chemicals, rubber, magnesium, zinc, aluminum and many other vital products.  Some of these cartel contracts were legally valid until after 1960.”

            Standard Oil’s deal with I.G. Farben prevented the U.S. from developing synthetic rubber for four years.  Why not go on and develop anyhow, you ask? And you would be answered, what and violate a sacred business contract with a partner temporarily engaged in killing your sons?  Only a Communist was capable of such vile thoughts!  Anyhow, Farben needed untrammeled rights to formulas by which rubber could be manufactured–including making truncheons to beat up recalcitrant prisoners in Nazi concentration camps!  If such  toard an enemy was possible it was only because Dulles (echoing an entire class) was well aware of European politics and did not misunderstand Hitler’s basic intentions–to destroy the German working class first and then to move on to destroy the land of the working class, the Soviet Union.  At no time did Dulles (himself an anti-Semite) nor any personality high in the echelons of power ever raise the question of the fate of the Jews, though the existence of death camps and an extermination policy, “The Final Solution” was well-known to key figures and policy-makers in the west.  In any case, extermination of the Jews was not Hitler’s priority: it was exterminating Marxism that took over his days and nights.  And this aim, above all others, recommended him to the Dulles brothers.

            The perspective with which corporate America looked upon Hitler was put with military bluntness by General Hugh S. Johnson, “czar” of the National Recovery Act (NRA, the Blue Eagle) as early as 1938.  Said “blood and guts” Johnson:

                        There is only one comforting thought in the whole dark future–

                        Hitler, at least, seems to be headed in the other direction–toward

                        the East and away from Britain, France and eventually us…

 

                        If Hitler continues his charted course as advertised, sooner or

                        later he must collide with Russia and perhaps even with his only

                        ‘friend’ (Italy).  It might possibly be that the salvation of the democracies            

                        will be the tactics of the Chicago police when ganghood was in flower,

                        to let the mobsters kill each other off.  (NY World-Telegram, Oct. 11,

                        1938).

            This already anticipates the Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman’s statement when the Nazis finally did invade the USSR in 1941:

                        If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia

                        and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that            

                        way let them kill as many as possible.

 

 

 

Fine.  But don’t complain when the Soviets look on you with less than brimming-eyed gratitude that you didn’t actually join up with the Nazis to finish pulverizing their country and putting the entire population underground!

Nevertheless, the reason Dulles and General Johnson (and others) could speak so confidently in 1938-39 about Hitler’s real intentions was because in 1936,(it must be remembered that Hitler and Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact (joined one year later by Mussolini).  Proving how profoundly the “West” of Daladier (France) and Chamberlain (England) with the watchful “neutrality” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (USA) believed in the reality of Hitler’s drang nach osten (drive to the East), England and France put their kiss of approval on the idea by adding their own signatures to it as a kind of codicil in Munich in 1938.  There, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler met and signed a document which (as the whole world now knows but only a few said then was a passport granted by the West for Nazi passages to the East  (swallowing up Czechoslovakia and Poland in the process). This signing has gone down in history as the “appeasement” of Hitler.  It was not.  It was feeding him bits and portions of bloody meat to entice him further along to the East.

With this as background no wonder Dulles could tell his audience of bankers and financiers in 1939 that they had nothing to fear from that man Hitler, an Austrian failed housepainter and social drifter.  He was in their pocket.  But he did have one talent  which was worth a great deal. An anti-communist fanatic, he had studied mass psychology  and set out to turn Communist doctrine and tactics against the Communists themselves, and this dedication, to which he remained true to the day he put a pistol to his head, was his main recommendation to both German and international finance-capital.

And, indeed, he seemed to justify international capital’s trust in him. He did move East.  Going into Poland was still acceptable to the West, despite a required declaration of war, which was immediately put on hold.  But there was a miscalculation in the board rooms ad cabinet rooms of England, France and the USA, nevertheless.  They underestimated the depth of German World War One humiliation and pride.  And to the ambitions of German finance-capital.

The victors in World War I had carved up the markets of the world to suit their appetites,

including taking Germany’s modest colonial empire away from German finance-capital and putting it on their own imperialist plates.  Germany never forgot what it “lost”, nor did its politicians or fiscal theorists ever accept the dominance of British power over the markets of the world (grudgingly ‘shared’ with France and even more grudgingly shared with the USA). The humiliating peace treaty imposed on defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919 was nothing but a time bomb which awaited only the hour when the Germans were ready to light the fuse…

            Allowing Hitler to rise to absolute power in Germany – for Hitler was handed power by that fortress of German class solidity, Marshal Von Hindenburg (with the approval of the key politicians in the West) – was a calculated risk, but the times were perilous and the hour seemed late.  To the bankers and financiers of Europe, reeling from a breakdown of their economic system, and listening to the ever-crescending roar of the millions of unemployed workers, it seemed that the tumbrils were being readied for their last ride to the contemporary guillotines. Russia had already broken free and the czar was no more. Hungary had had its 100 days of “socialism” before succumbing to white terror. But most impressive of all, Mussolini had “saved” Italy from a fate worse than death – the closing down of the Italian stock market. “Stout fellow” – you could hear the praise echoing down all the corridors of power in some variation of Winston Churchill’s gushing praise after having had the incredible experience of meeting in 1927 “Signor Mussolini” in the flesh: “I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing (Matteoti would be murdered, Gramschi would be confined to prison for the rest of his life, the trade unions would be destroyed, “dissenters” would be given the “castor oil” treatment). And here is the meat of what Churchill found so “charming” in Mussolin: “Italy had shown that there is a way of fighting subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people…” (that is what they wanted: some demogogue who could “rally” the people…”to value and defend the honor and stability of civilized society.” And, the man who had mourned that the “civilized world” had lost its golden opportunity to strangle the “Bolshevik baby in its crib” in 1920-23, now enthused: “she (fascism) had provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.  Hereafter no nation will go unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”

            Here was Churchill making his March 6, 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, 19 years earlier…

            The role, which Western finance-capital had assigned to Hitler, was well-known to Hitler himself. But he had no intention of being bought cheap.  The original idea was that in return for destroying working class power in Europe he would be allowed to expand eastward, clearing the pathway to land through the masses of people to Moscow with crematoria and tanks…

            Nevertheless, no puppy born in an oven comes out a hot bun! What was unknown to the West’s schemers was not so much Hitler’s own ambitions or their own designs, nor the extent to which they were willing to make room for Hitler, but how profoundly the ideas of Socialism, the need for Socialism, had sunk into the minds and hearts of the Soviet people.  Here, too, as events would prove later a profound miscalculation was to be made.  Socialism was not something alien thrust upon an unwilling populace.  When in 1919, standing at the podium Lenin said: “Let us proceed to build socialism” the masses of Russia and large sections of the world responded: “yes”.

            From “Framed: From the Smith Act through Cointelpro and the Patriot Act.”