Nazi Elements in New Imperialism--Tafatoanoa P. Mahoso (The Sunday Mail--Zimbabwe)

[How about thiis?

US and Poland, Out of Iraq!!

Simple enough? Not a peep of this kind have I heard here in Krakow--where all the kids are online all the time.

Why were most of the Nazi death camps located in Poland? All we know here in this suburb of Auschwitz is that the Reich planned to send all the Jews back (after failing to create a 'homeland' in N Africa?) to their true spiritual homeland, Bolshevik Russia, and they were just staging them in Poland till they could line up the transportation.

Then Operation Barbarosa (1941), Hitler's last big push East into the Soviet Union, might have altered Nazi plans as to the intended fates of all these Poles and Jews and Slavs and Roma and labor organizers and Left-leaning, cross-dressing performance artists, all these untermenschen, but the vagueries of Historical instant-replay make this foul too tall to call right now. --At least, too tough for contemporary Catholic Poland. I mean, where was the Church when all this human waste management was going on?

So, as a kind of amends for my failure to 'live blog' the riots in my hometown of Paris, here's another article that came to CM/P from Le Requin canadien--an article out of the Zimbabwean journal, The Sunday Mail, about how the Nazis were never really taken out of the geopolitical game back when Schicklegrubber and his uber-bitch ate his Luger in that Berlin bunker--now a Polish-owned disco, I'm sure.

Read along with Stephen Gowan's superb piece on N Korea (elsewhere on this blog), Tafataona Mahoso's article goes a long way to re-enforce the notion that saved my theatrical bacon on opening night of 'Warsaw Rebuilds!': I improv-ed, 'Communism is essentially anti-Fascist, and Fascism is essentially anti-Communist.' . . . And never the twain shall meet--unless the twains are running on the same twack!

But seriously, folks: The survival of global Fascism through the artificial life-support given it by Western Imperialism (with its 2000+ year accumulation and concentration of surplus value as its back-up generator) serves as an irrefutable explanation for why, today, no Third Way is possible (Liberalism continuing to prove itself merely the Welcome Mat for Fascism), and that the 'Final Solution' for dealing with the enemies of Advanced Waste Capitalism is the total destruction, the absolute wasting, of the whole world and all its resources, human and inhuman. Capitalist production long ago swallowed its own tail, and currently it's chewing off its own bollocks*. (*I know, women don't have bollocks, but they do have teeth.)

And here, from Darkest Africa, is a bright and shining light on just how we of the truly benighted West got into this frenzy of self-immasculation. --mc]

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Nazi Elements in New Imperialism

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso

Progressive leaders within the African Union and elsewhere have called upon the movement for UN reform to first turn itself into a global resistance movement against the new Nazi-like imperialism led today by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In order for this global anti-imperialist movement to succeed, it must understand the Nazi elements of the new unilateralism and prepare to face truly vicious forms of intervention quite different from the liberal interventionism which prevailed between 1945 and 1975.

The first thing to remember is the continuity between liberal imperialism and rightwing imperialism, bearing in mind that the Nazi-like elements which have come into the open with the collapse of the former Soviet Union were recruited, nurtured and even deployed during the liberal years. Therefore it should not be shocking that one of the hotbeds of white liberal activism in the 1945-1975 period — the Scandinavian countries — has turned out to be among the most reactionary, rightwing and racist collaborators with North America unilateralism. Rightwing imperialism is merely reaping where liberal interventionism sowed.

In my PhD thesis in the mid-1980s,. I concluded that one of the purposes of white liberal activism in Africa was to capture and groom the future leaders of Africa on behalf of imperialism. What was not clear at that time in the mid-1980s was that the new rightwing would reap the benefits of white liberal activism and then demobilise the liberal activist movement altogether, replacing it with NGOs dependent on rightwing coffers.

But what do we mean by saying that the new rightwing is reaping where white liberal activism sowed? We mean that the Nazi-like elements of the new unilateralism of George Bush and Tony Blair were there for the last 50 years, waiting for the right moment to come out in the open. The collapse of the former Soviet Union in the wake of a global capitalist crisis the September 11 2001 bombings gave those elements the courage to come out and operate openly.

To understand the open manifestations of fascist tendencies in Anglo-American imperialism, we have to start with the foundation. The North American empire was built on slavery, colonialism and racism on a vast continent cleansed of natives through genocide. The white Anglo-Saxon population was supplemented by heavy doses of East European and German immigrants.

At the end of the Hitler wars, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the heavily populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly to get imperial Japan to surrender, but in reality to send a message to the Soviet Union. The bombs were not necessary as means of securing victory because Japan was already ready to surrender. But the history of Nazi-like elements in the US becomes most vivid if we turn to Europe and the relationship between the US and its most important ally in the fight against European Fascism and Nazism: the Soviet Union.

US leaders treated their alliance with the Soviet Union as a marriage of convenience and a tactical move on the way to US supremacy. Their long-term objective was to turn the anti-fascist, anti-Nazi mobilisation into an anti-communist and anti-Soviet mobilisation as soon as Hitler was out of the way. How do we know this?

First, we know because US President Harry S. Truman, deliberately sabotaged the United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s efforts to support all the countries which had suffered devastation in the war. The Soviet Union was the most deserving country to receive aid but it was quickly cut off. Instead the US moved quickly to strengthen and rehabilitate European empires against Africans fighting for their liberation, arguing that the Soviet Union’s solidarity with those movements made them a threat to Europe and America.

If we take US assistance to the embattled British empire up to 1948, we notice that it totalled US$28 billion of which $20 billion was actually written off.

But the Soviet Union received the very opposite treatment. After moving away from the financial credits and reconstruction help which had been promised through the UN, the US actively recruited surviving elements of the former Hitler regime to use against the Soviet Union. In other words, the US by 1947 had embarked on a programme of sanctions and destabilisation against its most important partner in the war against Hitler.

According to US historians themselves, the US hired more than 1 000 former Nazi spies and gave them new names and new identity cards with a view to deploying them against the Soviet Union. The US also recruited Nazi engineers and scientists who became instrumental in developing the US nuclear weapons programme and the space exploration programme. The Belgian historian Ludo Martens concludes his account on the roots of the fascist elements in US imperialism as follows:

"Even before the anti-fascist war was finished, a number of US generals dreamed of a shift in alliances so that they could attack the Soviet Union. For this adventure, they intended to recruit the [surrendered] Nazi army, purged of Hitler and his close entourage."

Martens cites US General Patton speaking to General T McNarney: "We’re going to have to fight them [the Soviets] sooner or later. Why not now [in 1945] while our army [in Europe] is still intact and we can kick the Red Army back into Russia. We can do it with my [Nazi] Germans… they hate those red bastards."

One of the more than 1000 Nazi spies recruited by the US was Lieutenant-General Reinhard Gehlen. He had served as Nazi Germany’s head of intelligence inside the Soviet Union. So his experience was considered precious. Gehlen was among many Nazi war criminals who should have been tried for crimes against humanity in Europe and the Soviet Union, but he was smuggled into the US on 22 August 1945 where he was introduced to top military and intelligence officials. His assignment was to set up an intelligence organisation to spy on the Soviet Union and its communist neighbours.

Martens writes that his sources indicate that altogether more than 10 000 Nazi war criminals were smuggled into the USA at the end of the Hitler wars. Martens also says that former US President Harry S Truman’s family confirmed that, from their own conversations with the President, the purpose of dropping nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was to prove US practical military superiority to the Soviet Union.

In addition to war criminals and spies, the US also recruited and imported more than 100 000 ready-trained civilian doctors, scientists, writers and professors, mostly form Eastern Europe.

These policies and activities fit very well with the expressed desires of both US President Harry S Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the time. Churchill’s position was that communism was a worse threat to capitalism and imperialism than Fascism and Nazism. Throughout his premiership, Churchill believed that the ultimate objective of imperialism was to destroy the Soviet revolution which it had failed to do at the beginning.

In recent decades, the former reactionaries imported into the US from Germany and Eastern Europe have risen to prominence not just in the military and intelligence establishment, but also in government and politics. The most notorious ones have been former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former US National Security Adviser Zhigniew Brzezinski, former US Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, under President Bill Clinton, was prominent in the anti-Yugoslavia wars and in the crippling of Iraq prior to its invasion by the next administration of President George W. Bush. Even the current US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is African American, is said to have learned politics and international affairs under the tutorship of an East European reactionary Professor who also happens to be Madeleine Albright’s father.

East European reactionaries, their intellectual descendants and allies in North America are credited with the eventual destruction of the Soviet Union in 1989. The same reactionaries and their allies have also tried to extend to Africa and Latin America the same strategies and tactics used against the Soviet Union. This explains why Zimbabwe, for instance, has been subjected to "regime change" rhetoric and "transition" politics borrowed from Eastern Europe. But what is important for progressive Africans is to understand why almost the entire white world from Norway to New Zealand and from Canada to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) have rightwing regimes.

Presidents Castro of Cuba, Chavez of Venezuela and Mugabe of Zimbabwe have fired the early shots in the resistance against this global form of apartheid. Iran is already in the trenches.

And the UN is going to be one of the stages for the emerging struggle. South African and Nigerian leaders seem to have misread the emerging trends. The Nazi-Fascist trends in the new imperialism will be resisted on a world-wide scale