There was a speech that the smug Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the US aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,217,326 views. The transcript is here.
His speech said that the US must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the US regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide US foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:
Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.
My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.
The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.
Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)
The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)
Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over.
First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.
Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is not the propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”
Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:
Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.
No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:
The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]
Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:
The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).
The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.
Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.
Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):
The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.
Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).
And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re alsosupposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why?
Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.
There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, verylimited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.
None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.
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Post Scriptum. Truman’s Diary
To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did).
For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarized that, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.”
Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said
“Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.”
But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”
The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40),
“Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’”
So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)
So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said:
“This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.
Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government)
“It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”
FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).
And that’s how the road to today started.
And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse.
If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were.
Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons
