From David Talbot’s critically acclaimed history, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government:
“Gehlen’s dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system was about to be realized.” (p. 269)
“The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union.” (p. 277)
A couple of years into this self-inflicted history course on which I’ve embarked, one critically acclaimed, impressively researched book after another informs me that, for decades, the U.S. deep state rescued and shielded thousands of high-ranking Nazis.
These new recruits of the national security state — keen to continue their war against the Russians — were not “just following orders,” and they were not just minor figures in Hitler’s Reich. By all accounts, they were zealous true believers and held positions of authority, including in the Gestapo and SS. Many of these deep state-embraced Nazis personally committed acts of torture, conducted scientific experiments on prisoners, and were directly responsible for scores of thousands of deaths.
At least one of these men, Dr. Franz Six, was one of the principle architects of the Final Solution.
To be clear: the powerful heads of the CIA and FBI, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, weren’t simply looking for Cold War allies. They were actual Nazi sympathizers, and in some cases, their very close friends. Dulles and Hoover used their considerable power and influence to shield their Nazi cohorts from the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S.S.R., the Europeans and Americans, Congress, the Justice Department, presidents, and the press.
Secret Kings of the U.S.A.
And if you’re not overly familiar with the indelible stamp/stain that Dulles and Hoover left on our nation’s history, you should at least understand that two, just two, unabashedly bigoted men — a globetrotting spymaster and a civil rights-crushing thug — dominated U.S. foreign and domestic security policy for decades… each overseeing his own, personal, unaccountable, relentlessly criminal fiefdom, like a modern-day lord…
(Or an extremely well-positioned Nazi, back in the day.)
Like secret kings of the U.S.A., they could have human beings disappeared as easily as they could have government files detailing the heinous crimes of their high-ranking Nazi friends disappeared.
(And they apparently did a great deal of both.)
Dulles and Hoover represented the interests of insatiable oligarchs, who vociferously complained that Franklin Delano “Jew-sevelt” had put the United States on the wrong side of WWII. And they resolved to undo FDR’s presidency, directly contravening the President’s orders — in order to rescue Nazis and keep the war against Russia going.
They subverted the presidency of Harry S. Truman, also, because even though he’d embraced and officially launched their new “cold” war, he, too, was a Democrat — and the neo-fascist cabal was more closely affiliated, at that time, with the Republican Party.
(The situation today, with Trump in the White House, is somewhat reversed.)
And they ran their own, off-the-books, highly illegal foreign policy establishment… until the arrival in the Oval Office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who they operated like a sock puppet. In Ike’s own words, these unrepentant Nazis and American neo-fascists turned his presidency into “a legacy of ashes.”
In his famous final presidential address, calling out the “Military Industrial (Congressional) Complex” — ever malleable, Ike was persuaded to drop “Congressional” from the speech — Eisenhower tried to warn the American people about the threat this cabal posed to our very liberty.
Although he’d spoken in appropriately dire terms, Eisenhower’s speech was too little, too late. He’d already effectively handed over his presidency to these profiteering sociopaths — resulting in coups, assassinations, and wars across the globe — auguring decades of foreign policy nightmares to come.
The Moral Problem
In their internal communications, the Dulles brothers and their disciples were clear that the only obstacle toward achieving their ends was what they termed “THE MORAL PROBLEM.” They had little use for politicians, journalists, citizens, or soldiers who believed that morality should enter into U.S. policymaking.
And they strained to persuade American presidents and allied world leaders that the West shouldn’t think twice about using nuclear weapons — in all kinds of situations.
The French, in particular, were appalled. However, Dulles had President Eisenhower declaring publicly that using the hydrogen bomb was no different than using “a bullet.”
Just another bullet…
And speaking of bullets, the Dulles mob would arrange, in time, for the assassination of a United States president — an idealistic, young, Catholic president whose presence in the White House was an affront to the Protestant cabal (mind you, I’m not suggesting they killed JFK because of his religious sect; that just made it easier for them).
Unlike 9/11 “Truther” claims, the more one looks into this “conspiracy theory,” the more compelling the evidence is that the U.S. deep state, led by Allen Dulles, killed our president. Mostly because JFK was trying to end the Cold War and making diplomatic overtures to the Russians. But also, I suspect, because Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs disaster (when JFK didn’t take the CIA bait and commit the United States to a military confrontation with the U.S.S.R.).
(The upstart, who did he think he was – the democratically elected President of the United States?! Allen Dulles and the rest of the grown-up world knew who was really in charge: the cabal. The very same cabal that then presided over the Warren Commission that investigated Kennedy’s murder… with unchallenged impunity and not a lick of shame.)
The neo-fascists haven’t looked back since that Dallas motorcade. Full speed ahead.
Still fighting the Nazis’ old war — leaving millions of corpses in their wake (in Korea, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Americas, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East…) — our nation’s intelligence establishment has been deliberately hyping the threat posed by Russia for decades… hunting for “Red October.”
Meanwhile, the increasingly lawless corporate state has glutted itself on obscene profits from financialized fraud and permanent war, in the process befouling and corrupting everything from our most cherished institutions — political, religious, educational, journalistic, and economic — to the planet itself.
The Nazi Pedigree of America’s Power Elite
Like the Wall Street bank run by Prescott Bush (GWB’s grandfather) in the 1940s, the titans of U.S. industry were largely sympathetic to Hitler’s Reich. Many continued doing business with Nazi Germany even after the U.S. had entered the war.
IBM, Kodak, the Coca-Cola Company, and the Associated Press were only the tip of this Reich-supporting, Wall Street iceberg.
The robber barons had been dealt real setbacks by the American labor movement, which was led by patriotic American communists and democratic socialists (back when Americans were permitted to think for themselves, before holding unpopular opinions about political/economic systems became grounds for dismissal, demonization, and worse).
But such people as these — the Kochs of their day, sociopathic, profiteering oligarchs — don’t give up easily, no matter how many presidents they have to deceive, manipulate, openly defy, or assassinate.
Setbacks or not, they usually get what they want.
And what does that look like? An unending holocaust of death, human misery, terror, and despotism.
Let’s review the history, shocking and depressing as it is:
An explicitly amoral, literally traitorous, neo-fascist cabal, with its hands on most of the levers of power in the American government/military/intelligence apparatus — and astonishing influence, if not outright control, over Western media — assiduously and covertly folded thousands of literal Nazis into the secret heart of our power structure… and Italy’s and West Germany’s (though France and England balked, at the time, siding with the U.S.S.R. on the question of whether Nazis should be prosecuted for their monstrous crimes — or rather, as Dulles and Hoover would have it, rewarded with important jobs in national security, U.S. government-purchased mansions and sailboats, and tickets to the World Series.).
These ruthless American warmongers covered up their Nazi allies’ old crimes while zealously facilitating new ones… in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, and on and on, year in, year out, butchering millions and thwarting democracy wherever it raised its pretty head (terrifying to them)… in the name of “fighting communism.”
Like the War on Drugs, with its anti-black/Southern Strategy raison d’etre, the Cold War proved to be a complete and total sham. The “Domino Theory” was a fraudulent means to an unspeakable end: conquering and enslaving the world.
And the fascists are still up to their same old tricks today, in Syria, Brazil, Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Yemen, and beyond. (In Yemen alone, millions of people are on the brink of starvation, thanks to U.S. foreign policy.)
With spies in the White House and across the bureaucracy, these sociopaths have demonstrated, time and again, that they have nothing but contempt for democracy, morality, or the rule of law.
Domination by force is all they know.
Along with James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, John Loftus’s America’s Nazi Secret, Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and Jeff Sharlett’s The Family, David Talbot’s book should be required reading in every high school and college in this nation.
Because when literal Nazis and their philosophical counterparts take over the internal mechanisms of the country, eventually our society comes to reflect that.
(It’s our country’s SOUL we’re fighting for… as well as whatever we can salvage of the future.)
The new fascist establishment, like the old, works exclusively for corporations, oligarchs, and plutocrats. It continues to practice Divide & Conquer, persecuting the marginalized and oppressed, with the masses vilifying each other first.
And their all-consuming project still threatens the future of billions of human beings…
Especially indigenous and dark-skinned peoples, any and all who are not of Western European ancestry.
Non-white, non-Protestant Christian, indigenous human beings are the first ones targeted by our political establishment. Indeed, the racism of our government is unmistakable, as our history amply demonstrates.
And the mass-murdering establishment’s champion in 2016 — it needs to be understood — was unquestionably Sec. Clinton, a career racist, warmongering demagogue, institutionally and politically. (That said, Donald Trump has proved pliable and useful enough to the cabal… even if he’s not the front person they desired for their grotesque enterprise.)
Today’s fascists, like yesterday’s, are still clawing and flailing madly at world domination, destroying far more than they conquer.
And they are still working to extinguish democracy in any form, corrupting our media and political institutions as they go, and dividing us along as many lines as possible, the better to conquer us.
They are still blithely amoral, perfectly willing to resort to ethnosectarian cleansing — usually through their terrorist, mercenary, and neo-Nazi proxies, but with “first-world” bombs and soldiers, if necessary — so long as they believe that genocide will advance their geopolitical aims… the aims of a corporatist, white-supremacist, Christian-Dominionist empire.
A Nazi empire.
Same as it ever was.
(Only this iteration is the one that’s wrecked the planet’s ecosystem and likely doomed us all.)