How the Cold War Worked and Still Works
Military spending, the Cold War and corporate profits went hand-in-hand. In a contemporary mode, they still do. The Cold War as crafted was a farcical, mostly US/British construct that antagonized different socio-economic arrangements around the world. Mostly these socio-economic variants benefited ordinary masses, obviating corporate prerogative and accordingly, ruling classes painted them a threat to the “Free World.” While not all of these nationalized systems in question threaten specific interests, the end game complex does not ever want to acknowledge any type of egalitarian-oriented polity that would set an example for downtrodden societies to learn from, lest “investment climates” be damned.
The Cold War, while eradicating most examples, also afforded privileged corporate elites magnificent profits via the attendant arms industry. Basically the program was a cover for the United States and its sympathetic industrial allies to carry on the Manifest Destiny albeit under the more geo-politically correct “idealistic slogans.” The post-World War II world was rife with movement across traditionally subjugated colonial lands seeking a renewed opportunity to chart independent courses. These geo-political trajectories were seen as threats to the traditional elites, threats to the Cold War program. Of course, the Soviet Union (sometimes Red China) was depicted as the motor force behind these trajectories. To the Cold Warriors, there was no such thing as neutrality, no matter how much many of these Third World entities honestly distanced themselves from the Soviet sphere as well as the West. Indeed, most targets of US aggression or subversion were labeled “communist” or “totalitarian” whether they actually were or not. In the ensuing chapters, US foreign intervention correlating to the "Cold War" will be discussed. Here the actual origins of it, some dynamics and mechanics, will be explored.
The emergence of communism in the Russia circa 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution set off shockwaves among the capitalist rulers around the world. It was their nightmare come true. For them it was horrific to contemplate non-profiteers controlling the means of production and distribution. This development was seen as a monumental threat to the privileged that needed to be stamped out. Many US working men, tired of being shot at by the police, beaten by company goons and other such embryonic Pinkertons of capitalist repression, would have emulated some wrong ideas. The example that this new order could provide in other parts of the world was something to indeed be concerned about. The Soviet Union, “godfather of the world Communist movement," was merely the most prominent manifestation of an alternative socio-economic system targeted by the anointed defenders of freedom and democracy. But generally even before the Soviet Union ever existed, hostility toward any socialist prospects abounded in US media headlines going back to the late 1800s.(1) That is where the entrenched mindset lays, rooted in the reactionary anti-Marxist history.
Since it is understood the top consensus reflects that corporate profits must inflate while other alternative economic systems, and movements toward such, should be destroyed if not contained, it is necessary to understand what orthodox versions of the Cold War are aimed at us. The Third World has especially been the primary target, the stage, with the Cold War being the weapon that the US plotters had used to destroy alternative systems and nationalist movements that came forth after World War II. The powerful Soviet Union and to a lesser extent, the People's Republic of China were focal points in the US program to suit the world to its fancy. Thus the actual origins and dynamics of the Cold War truly need to be examined and then tested against the prevailing standard account seeing how the USA in rem still interferes in the Third World post-Cold War. It is also incumbent to view the US Cold War mechanisms still largely in place well after the “Evil Empire” went to “the ash heap of history.”
As noted, hatred of the Soviet Union by US elites was immediate upon its birth. Not long after the czarists’ removal, the United States, goaded by Secretary of State Robert Lansing (who feared “ignorant and mentally deficient” peasantry), and some fourteen other nations invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 to formally mark the real start of the “Cold War.” The American pretexts were always shifting and changing but the simple truth is that the revolutionary government in Russia was something that the Washington rulers could not tolerate.(2) Conversely the Soviets were far from hostile to the United States despite being invaded. Premier Vladimir Lenin offered the US economic concessions in return for political recognition and developmental assistance. He was rebuked when President Woodrow Wilson was apparently “offended” that “American goodwill” could be “bought.”(3) The United States did not recognize the Soviet government until 1933.
"The Allied effort to kill the revolution inflicted incalculable damage on Russia. A Soviet commission later concluded that the damage was equal to the loss of three years of pre-war national income. But how can one measure the cost in human terms – the value of the people who died in the fighting or in epidemics of typhus that could not be controlled because the embargo had created a shortage of medicine? The imperialists greeted socialism at its birth with deadly enmity. There could be no talk then of 'Soviet aggression' or a 'world-wide communist conspiracy.' There could be no question of a Soviet military threat. The imperialists didn’t like the loss of their Russian properties and the prospective profits from them. They didn’t like the removal of Russia from the imperialist system. They were afraid that the idea of socialism might spread."(4)
The imperialist invasion was certainly not insignificant. Historian Chuck Jorgensen tallies the greater damage:
"The Russian Civil War, enormously complicated and exacerbated by the 'allied intervention' – including that of the United States, created havoc in a Russia already suffering greatly from her participation in the First World War. Transportation and communication, except for the necessities of war, altogether ceased. The uprooting of people, the destruction of livestock and draught animals, the necessary consumption of seed reserves, and then the great drought of 1920-1921 – all practically destroyed Russian society. In the famine of 1921 alone, estimates are that some five million Russians perished. Most authorities place the total loss of Russian life for the years 1914 to 1922, the period of war and civil war, foreign intervention, drought and famine at 20 million. In addition, industrial production and capacity were driven back to levels existing prior to 1900."(5)
Viewing through the historical lens of the media establishment is appropriate. In the late 1990s authors/producers Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing brandished a twenty-four part television series of the Cold War for CNN. That also netted a hard-back version called Cold War: The Book of the Ground Breaking TV Series. This is arguably the authoritative contemporary literature on the subject. The examination of authoritative mindsets regarding the Cold War can be conducted with this production. It is more balanced in touching upon certain points while being less shrill than usual establishment media and conservative reflections. However balanced these authors try to appear though, it is very clear the language and adjectives they use are very Western-biased and anti-socialist.
Isaacs and Downing dictate that “radical socialist revolutionaries…had spent years exploiting the discontents of workers and peasants” as if the czarist repression and profiteering had really nothing to do with their underlying conditions. Also the authors imply that there was not much bad in Western countries at the time because their “activists” went to the Soviet Union due to “inequalities and injustices they saw in their own societies” as if, for example, black people being lynchable third class citizens in the United States throughout most of the twentieth century were mere figments of those activists’ imaginations. Antagonists such as Lenin were “inflammatory” though there is nary a word about the aggressive Robert Lansing who truly inflamed matters. In contrast, Lenin’s counterpart President Wilson “wanted to project, healthy, liberal American values into the heart of world politics.”(6) The fact is that the “values” Wilson wanted to export were more bankers, business people and government officials who followed allied troops and made off with Soviet coal, grain, furs, gold, ores, timber, oil and machinery.(7) A closer look at such capitalist machination in Russia before World War II is not to be found in this "ground breaking" production.
While Isaacs and Downing make mention of the British and US-led invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918, that tragedy was really no big deal to them since capitalist intervention was “never on a massive scale” despite the grim tally that is noted. The context of the allied “intervention” in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1920 has always been ignored or downplayed in the greater attempt to understand what the Cold War was about. Alvin Rubinstein acknowledges that the allies including the United States invaded Soviet Russia but the motives were “contradictory and confused” as well as “half-hearted” while the blameless Americans were there only to “check Japanese ambitions.” While he also recognizes the Soviets were paranoid of capitalist encirclement he nonetheless attributes Josef Stalin’s (Soviet) foreign policy to have been inspired by “Machiavelli, not Marx.”(8)
As such, the Soviet godfathers, and by extension communists, were painted as the world expansionists and imperialists who were the instigators of the Cold War. They were the troublemakers who had to be subjected to either conservative “rollback” or liberal “containment” if not both to some degree. The noteworthy US politicians, pundits, soldiers and theologians had always told us about the Soviet threat. Senator Malcolm Wallop expressed, “The Soviet Union is working to impose socialist tyranny on us all.”(9 Said General Maxwell Taylor, grandson of a Confederate soldier, “To a communist enemy, the Cold War is a total, unending conflict with the United States...”(10) (Considering the expansion of so-called “US interests," that can be taken as a truism.) Columnist Charles Krauthammer syndicates, “We were right to oppose the Soviets…trying to geopolitically defeat Soviet expansion as it advanced on every continent.”(11) This expansion reached such a point that a prominent born-again Christian, author of the infamous Late Great Planet Earth, with admitted access to Pentagon hearts and minds, hallucinated, “the Soviet Union and its satellites…reached the position of military superiority and strategic world power.”(12) The late great maverick who spearheaded America’s 1960s right-wing thrust, Senator Barry Goldwater, eloquently framed the issue:
"I hesitate to restate the obvious – to say again what has been said so many times before by so many others: that the Communists’ aim is to conquer the world…Our avowed national objective is 'peace.' We have with great sincerity, 'waged' peace, while the Communists wage war. We have sought 'settlements' while the Communists seek victories. We have tried to pacify the world. The Communists mean to own it.”(13)
In “waging peace," aside from the times Major General Butler “pacified” parts of the world for the bankers and Wall Street boys, Senator Goldwater’s troops set up military bases in Greece, Turkey, Austria, Norway, West Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan in addition to hundreds more around the world while Soviet troops who “meant to own the world” vacated Austria, Denmark, Norway, Manchuria, Finland, Korea, Iran and other places not relevant to their nation’s immediate security interests like Eastern Europe (the region through which they had been historically invaded by the likes of Poland, France and Germany). The Soviets were generally depicted as villains for submerging Eastern Europe into “totalitarian darkness” as they consolidated control. This control was subject in good part to a series of Roosevelt-approved, pre-Yalta “Eastern European armistice agreements” that essentially gave “the Soviet military almost complete control of internal politics in each Eastern European ex-Nazi satellite” and “have been available to the public for years, but have been successfully buried or avoided by most scholars.”(14)
After having lost 20 million people, over a million livestock, 30,000 industrial enterprises and other horrific casualties on account of a grand capitalist Nazi invasion that was generously supported throughout the war by American capitalists like Alfred Sloan, the Rockefeller family and Henry Ford, it can be deduced the Soviets were in no spirit to dole “democratic safeguards” to Eastern Europe, that region which was never free or democratic in the first place pre-Stalinism. At the same time, it can be asked why the Western powers did not dole out genuinely free elections to Greece, Vietnam, Italy and other countries. For instance William Blum quotes Professor D.F. Fleming who observed, “It is essential to remember that Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”(15)
Still, Stalin made a proposal in 1952 for a reunified Germany. The ever skeptical Cold Warrior types described it a “ploy to kill West Germany’s entrance into the Western military alliance” and was “difficult to take…seriously.”(16) (The “ground-breaking” work by Isaacs and Downing does not even mention it.) What the skeptics leave unsaid about that is the Soviets proposed a non-military reunification with the Germans free to choose their socio-economic direction. Unfortunately for potential European de-militarization, the Truman Administration tossed it aside so that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could whip up the Mutual Security Act of 1952 in order to find reasons to give West Germany $7.5 billion in armament aid thereby making some corporatists richer and inducing the Soviets to eventually build the Berlin Wall.(17)
The Soviet paranoia post-World War II and consequent hunger for a security buffer were not at all unfounded considering words coming from certain sectors of the US establishment. The well-regarded, however maverick and obnoxious, American General George S. Patton suggested, "Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to these people (the Soviets). This is the only language they understand." Asked by Undersecretary Robert P. Patterson what he would do, Patton replied, "I would have you tell the (Red Army) where their border is, and give them a limited time to get back across. Warn them that if they fail to do so, we will push them back across it."(18)
The establishment history never appreciates the collusion between the Fascists and Nazis with the other Western elites prior to and during World War II. It has always been to attribute sinister Soviet ties with Hitler while the Soviets themselves were aggressors prior to Operation Barbarossa (the 1941 German invasion of Russia). In that regard the victors are able to keep their history nice and clean for new generations to genuflect in the respectful manner.
"When Hitler attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the right-wing dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish rightist dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga. This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the Nazis to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case…by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the Nazi advance – which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do."(19)
Rubinstein nonetheless contributes, “Stalin’s covetousness was a match for Hitler’s.”(20) Despite such fanciful anti-Soviet exaggeration, there is no evidence that Stalin was hell bent on launching blitzkriegs in France, England, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, Italy and Czechoslovakia, countries ravaged by the Nazi military curriculum. There had never been a Soviet version of the material Nazi “lebensraum” (living space) ideology. Even Rubinstein admits the Soviet Union was “a territorially satisfied power…well-endowed with raw materials.”(21) Overall according to political scientist Stephen M. Walt, “the historical record does not support an image of the Soviet Union as either a highly aggressive power or an insecure status quo state. Unlike the great expansionist states of the past (revolutionary France, Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, etc.), the Soviet Union” had “yet to engage in a direct test of military strength with any of its major adversaries.”(22) But conservative scribes such as James Burnham attributed ideological exaggerations to “the Communist side” who had “from the very beginning been unambiguous about its aim: a World Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics.”(23)
Departing from this right-sector hysteria, unlike the United States with its blueprints (ala Policy Planning Statement #23 among others) regarding world domination for resources, the communists never had equivalent material or concrete plans of such when divorced from chiliastic Marxist-Leninist flowerings of the human condition or “forward movements of history.” Aside from “unambiguous” communist manifestos, Stalin furthermore espoused “Socialism in One Country” and would have stayed the path had it not been for the hostile Western discourse of events that made him pursue post-World War II realpolitik. Sheila Fitzpatrick more accurately observes “national modernization, not international revolution, was the primary object of the Soviet Communist Party.”(24) In any case, it is quite clear that Stalin was not “covetous” like Hitler. Stalin did not interfere with Yugoslavia, told the Greek communist insurgents to lay down their arms, pulled troops out of extra-peripheral areas, offered to re-unify Germany and unlike the United States, kept his military out of the hot Koreas and Civil War China among other temporally relevant instances; certainly no illusions of a “World Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics” need be inferred.
"As the influential National Security Council Paper No. 68 noted in April 1950, the 'overall policy' of the United States was 'designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.' This policy 'we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat'...brutal as Stalin was, there is little evidence, as (George) Kennan has indicated, to suggest he was a madman bent on world conquest. There was no Soviet 'blueprint' for expansion in the postwar period. Americans enthralled with 'Red Fascism,' exaggerated the Soviet threat, blaming Moscow for the postwar world’s ills and attributing to it expansive intentions and capabilities that Moscow’s behavior never matched, reprehensible as that behavior often was...another explanation as for why Americans exaggerated the Soviet threat is found in their attention since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the utopian Communist goal of world revolution, confusing goals with actual behavior…”(25)
Officially for the establishment, the Cold War was an era basically instigated by the expansionist Soviets and began much later than the 1918 imperial Western invasions initiated by the capitalists. For Norman Podhoretz “the period usually called the Cold War began in 1947 when the United States, after several years of acquiescence in the expansion of the Soviet empire, decided to resist any further advance.”(26) By George Will’s bow-ties, it began when Josef Stalin “enslaved Poland’s democratic forces” to announce Soviet Russia’s “declaration of Cold War.”(27) The Foreign Policy Association, with a nice major grant from the Phillip Morris Companies, Inc., disseminates that “the cold war (sic) started soon after the Allied victory…when the Soviet Union began taking control of its Eastern European neighbors…”(28) In this context, if one nation started the Cold War soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, it was not the Soviet Union. For “while the US Government had turned away from the Roosevelt policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union, the people of the United States had not. Among the people, there still remained a great reservoir of admiration and good will toward the Soviet Union, generated during the war. The people wanted peace. But a cold war like any war, requires that public opinion be mobilized behind it.” And to publicly commence the era at the encouragement of the Truman Administration, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, echoing General Patton, fired off an atavistic speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 whereby “the United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power” and with this “power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.” And since the Bulldog also spoke of “the Communist parties or fifth columns” who “constitute a growing challenge to Christian civilization," the USA “should still possess so formidable (a military) superiority as to impose effective deterrents upon its employment...”(29)
Something is amiss in the history when the pre-World War II Soviet Union is associated as the historical significant other of Nazi Germany. Although Alvin Rubinstein tells us “Stalin hoped that Germany and the USSR could do business,”(30) attributing wishful thinking to this certain Soviet Georgian tyrant and being cognizant of what sort of “business” actually went down between his antagonists is entirely another matter indeed. The collaboration and mutual admiration between US capitalists, media, British prime ministers, Italian Fascists and German Nazis are cleverly filtered from respectable history. It is quite a crafty scholastic, intellectual and institutional undertaking to revise such. To be sure, modern conservatism’s literary pillar William Buckley manages a great nugget, if in another context: “It was unclear why fascism wasn’t convenient twenty years earlier…to enrich the contented class…” spending “billions of dollars on useless military armaments” while “Communism was convenient.”(31) Far from being “unclear," perhaps the “contented class” was too busy admiring fascism rather than arming against it in those times. During the late 1920s and early 30s, US publications like Fortune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post and the Christian Science Monitor praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as the leader who saved Italy from the evil “radicals” (labor unions, social activists and the like). The Hearst news syndicate is another major media stalwart with telling admiration for the Nazis before they got carried away. Top Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring were invited to write a few guest columns for Hearst newspapers. And since the admired Nazis paid many times the usual subscription rates for Hearst’s INS wire service, William Randolph Hearst himself ordered his reporters to write friendly columns about the Third Reich or risk being transferred or fired.(32) H.L. Mencken also thought Adolph Hitler was on to something good in his favorable 1933 review of Mein Kampf. British leaders such as Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill expressed pre-war admiration for Hitler and his Reich. Professors Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel reveal that Chamberlain was not the appeaser he was made out to be as he coldly calculated that Hitler should re-arm Germany and expand his Reich in order to have his fill away from the British Empire while taking care of the Bolshevik problem. Churchill cautiously praised not only Hitler but admired his Mein Kampf as well:
"It is not possible to form a just judgement of a public figure who has attained the enormous dimensions of Adolph Hitler until his life work as a whole is before us. Although no subsequent political action can condone wrong deeds, history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power employing, grim and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.
On Mein Kampf:
"The story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate or overcome all the authorities or resistances which barred his path."(33)
As late as 1939, celebrated American capitalist and automobile tycoon Henry Ford still sent Adolph Hitler a $50,000 birthday check. The beloved American computer maker International Business Machines (IBM) was crucial to Nazi schemes of genocide. It introduced an embryonic computer system that read punch cards making it astonishingly easy and quick for Nazi officials to locate Jews and other targeted peoples. This relationship between IBM and Nazi Germany began in "1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power…continuing well into World War II." While business relations were officially illegal with Nazi Germany, the US investigation of owner Thomas J. Watson was curiously stunted as he was kept off blacklists. While Watson also helped maintain the US war machine, he also had a "struggle to remain in the Axis war machine." It is obvious that certain US policy was to quietly look away from such dealings.(34)
And well after the declaration of war by the United States against Germany, US companies were exposed doing business with the Axis powers "throughout 1942."
"Further revelations documented that Standard Oil tried to do business with Nazi firms in Occupied France, including construction of an aviation fuel refinery. In its allegations against Standard Oil, the Justice Department repeatedly emphasized that scores of American companies had been quietly capitalizing on relationships with Nazi Germany. In fact, said the Justice Department, (German corporation) Farben alone had consummated contracts with more than one hundred American firms, and that those efforts had retarded America's military preparedness by tying up patents and resources. Certainly scores of American firms used international connections to trade with the enemy."(35)
As such the subsequent shooting war did not stop the “contented class” from making a nice buck or two from the enemy during the war. General Motors owner Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. reassured his shareholders, “We are too big to be inconvenienced by these pitiful international squabbles.”
While finding ways to destroy irksome socialist non-profit systems is part of the program, it is noteworthy that capitalism and fascism complement each other so snugly. As noted through Sloan’s words, even after the Allied nations were already well at war with Hitler’s war machine, American big business continued to make profits while helping finance and arm the Nazi military that killed Canadian, Free French, Scottish, Indian, Ghurka, Soviet, American and other Allied troops. Throughout the war, Ford and Sloan’s subsidiaries provided some 80% of the transport vehicles for Hitler’s military, a sum the British Secret Intelligence Service called “the backbone of the German Army’s transport system.”
"General Motors, like Ford, was not a national corporation; it was a multinational organization. Throughout the Second World War, GM and Ford in Detroit continued to benefit from their operations in Germany and Japan and other territories controlled b the Axis powers. GM’s Opel plant at Brandenburg in Nazi Germany built, with Daimler-Benz, the Blitz truck. The Blitz was the workhorse of the Wehrmacht in their slaughter of American GIs in the Battle of the Bulge and the rearguard action on the road to Berlin. GM’s Opel plants at Rüsselsheim manufactured 50 percent of the propulsion systems for the Junkers 88, the bomber used in the Luftwaffe’s mass air raids on civilians. In 1943, while GM’s American subsidiaries were supplying the United States Air Force, its German subsidiaries were developing and manufacturing engines for the Messerschmitt 262, the world’s first twin-engined jet fighter…In spite of the loss of life in the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor and the carnage in the Pacific at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, GM also maintained its operations in Japan."(36)
While Private Eddie Slovik, a war-weary working class man, was executed under American governmental domain for his treasonous act of refusing to pick up his rifle and fight anymore, the treasonous acts of owning class Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan were treated quite differently. For his inconvenience, Ford received $1 million in the form of tax exemption on profits for the bombing on his military truck plants in Cologne. “Today, thirty years later, the Ford Motor Company is reviving the sanitized, homespun image of Henry Ford as the American icon in its television advertising. The Ford whom Hitler called ‘my inspiration’ has been airbrushed out of official history…” In 1967, ostensibly with no firing squad for Sloan, General Motors received $33 million in tax exemptions for its “troubles and destruction occasioned to its airplane and motorized vehicle factories in Germany, Austria, Poland and China.”(37) Other US firms such as ITT and DuPont produced fuel and other goods for the Nazi war machine. For its treason, ITT was entitled to $27 million from the US government. Not to be entirely outdone by the manufacturing sector, the financial was able to get its piece of the Nazi pie. “The Rockefeller family’s Chase National Bank used its Paris office in Vichy France to help launder German money to facilitate Nazi international trade during the war…”(38) There is no known record of any of the Rockefellers or the people at DuPont, ITT and Chase suffering the same fate as Private Slovik.
Fascism in and of itself, of course, does not entirely enrich capitalism (mostly the kind subsidized by US taxpayers). Domestic US big government also did that very well during the Cold War period. The arms industry in particular went deliciously well with the paradigm for the makers of profits, like maple syrup slathered on waffles. The leading tycoons of the day and their friends in government were vocal patriots who decried that these arms and their sales were needed for our freedom and democracy against a tyrannical, implacable and communist foe such as when Under Secretary of State James L. Buckley expressed they would “complement and supplement our own defense efforts” in “facing up to the realities of Soviet aggrandizement” in May 1981. Actual transactions revealed something else other than this patriotic urging. In that time frame the United States, instead of keeping some 8,800 tanks and self-propelled guns for “our own defense efforts” against the “realities of Soviet aggrandizement," allowed its profiteers to sell them to militaries abroad, the type which are generally very repressive to their own people or their neighbors. These transactions had practically nothing to do with "complementing and supplementing" US national security except the interests and global paradigm of corporate America.
It is very crucial for the US planning apparatus to lie about enemies, real or perceived, in order for initiatives to remain on the docket. Lies that formed a good part of the US Cold War construct were claims of “Soviet military superiority.” One such illuminating lie was the program known as the M-1 Abrams main battle tank. In 1980, the Soviet military modified its main T-72 battle tank with a mere side skirt. Taking advantage the Reagan Administration used that as proof of a new super weapons system by the evil Soviets and dubbed it the “T-80.” If the USA did not counter with a new Uber Tank of its own, the doom of Western civilization was at hand with the Reds running amok, Soviet T-80s treading all over Eiffel Tower to the Golden Gate Bridge. To the rescue came General Dynamics with the M-1 tank. Its initial cost was $1.4 million per tank but due to this wonderful profit-enhancing mechanism known as the “cost overrun," prices soon reached $2.8 million. Despite the pronouncements, the US military already possessed a tank called the M-60 which was still much superior to the Russian T-72 (or T-80) at one-third the cost and twice the reliability.39 This shows the M-1 tank was really an upgrade for General Dynamics profits, at taxpayer expense, than anything else.
Any good lie deserves a sequel for as late as 1988, the US militarists and their media propagandists served up the Soviet “FST-1” hysteria, a virtually invulnerable super tank. It served as the pretext for the US Army to attempt to get “a congressional go-ahead to outfit American tanks with a futuristic depleted-uranium armor developed in a crash program at a cost of nearly $1 billion.” Indeed as the journalists were so sure that the “FST-1” really existed that retrospectively “everyone will agree that the Soviet supertank is a threat that must be countered.”(40)
The example with the tank industry is but one of how the elite private economy uses propaganda, vilification and corporate welfare to increase profits extrinsic to an actual market reality. (The Joneses and the Smiths next door are not exactly in line to buy the next version of the M-1 for Christmas presents.) The cost overrun is one dimension of the fraud mislabeled “defense spending," particularly during the extreme increases of the Reagan era. For some innocent reason, F-18 Hornets that originally cost $9.9 million apiece wound up being closer to $31.6 million. Other weapons systems such as the AH-64 Apache assault helicopter had cost overruns of 67 percent while the Hellfire anti-tank missile went up by 322 percent. Many of the weapons systems ordered did not appear temporally commensurate to the pressing “Soviet threat.” Even when they did appear, they were certainly not always to the quantity or quality expected. Analyst George W.S. Kuhn of the right-wing Heritage Foundation complained, “The increased spending secured by President Reagan should afford significant improvements in force size. It does not.” What the profiteers did was simply stretch out production schedules on new weapons, taking it easy on new capital expenditure (ostensibly to invest in other unnamed things) while raising prices on older systems already with production facilities.
Some few fortunate individuals other than the millions of poor people dealing with drastic cuts in social services and gutted city budgets in the United States got richer during this “Morning in America” period. Outright fraud is really the only explanation. The J. Peter Grace Commission discovered that by June 1983, the corporate top men had overcharged, leading to a “waste” of $92 billion. But what was termed “waste” by the Commission definitely reflected as nice profits to the likes of General Dynamics, Grumman, Convair, Chrysler, General Electric, LTV Aerospace, Lockheed, Boeing and such. Certainly the cost overrun is not always the issue. Straight overcharging works as well. The US Navy paid $2,228 for a wrench worth $8 commercially. General Dynamics charged the Pentagon $7,417 for a motor assembly pin worth two cents. Even as this tremendous Reaganite military spending and urgent anti-Soviet rollback were part of I Love the 80s, “safety first” for our troops who defended us was not a priority considering the shoddy workmanship on more than a few of the military goods and their exorbitant costs. Bell helicopter defects took the lives of 250 US servicemen from 1967 to 1984 even though the defects were discovered in 1973 and nothing was done about it. Bell did not begin rectifying the problem until the Fort Worth Star-Telegram did an exposé (one of the rare times when established media do their rightful job).
F-18 Hornets had cracks in their tailfins. Trident submarines had thousands of imperfect welds. The National Semiconductor Corporation pleaded guilty for selling defective computer chips. The Metal Service Center also did so for selling armored plating for certain warships that were only half-strength of what was specified by the Navy and led to those ships rusting, needing multi-million dollar plating replacement.(41) With this obviously massive corporate criminal fraud going on, at the cost of billions of dollars, personnel lives at stake and indifferently-made war goods, we might wonder just how seriously the US power wielders took the “Soviet threat.” It was, then, a gross, deceitful and systemic enterprise to bilk US taxpayers in order to allow the rich men have a greater hand in the till.
Indeed, military posture and disposition had never at any time favored the Soviet Union despite what had been propagandized especially during the Reagan years. While the Soviets were marked for spending a greater amount for military spending in terms of gross domestic product, the fact is they never spent nearly as much as the USA per year in terms of actual dollars. The United States post-World War II typically averaged around $150 to $280 billion on the military with expenditures now over $330 billion thanks to the George W. Bush Administration.(42) From differing sources, the Soviets typically spent anywhere from 17 billion rubles per year (official Soviet) to 86 billion (British sources). An old declassified CIA report reveals “total Soviet military programs and activities, when similarly expressed in US dollars, remains…at an annual level of roughly $40 billion.”(43) Certainly the Soviets never outspent the United State by "$300 billion" in a given decade as hallucinated by Ronald Reagan in a speech. In the Soviet socio-economic system, no private individual or individuals profited from military spending and there were no corporations that allowed such since those entities of appropriation did not exist there. Military spending was certainly an item of power division among bureaucrats in Soviet Russia but not personal gain and profit.
And while the US military expenditures endangered American servicemen’s lives and ravaged domestic social spending in order to increase fat cat stock options and provide more expensive lavish lobster dinners for CEOs, at least the money in the Soviet Union continued to pay for universal public health care, subsidized rent, low food prices, workplace daycare, free education and the like. With the Soviets committing so much economic resources to their military in order to keep up with the United States and doing so with a much smaller industrial base, it is still profound that the Evil Empire was able to accomplish much post-1917 egalitarian modernization for its citizenry once siege socialism’s history passed despite it being nearly wrecked by the gross, horrific distortions of World War II among other Western inflictions. In fact in regard to human welfare expenditures, the Soviet Union proportionately invested in greater amounts than did the United States (which will be later treated in more detail).
The United States military record of worldwide violence is far more extensive than the Soviet. (See Appendix 1.) US governmental mouthpieces and tablet keepers have always defended the record, whether the Greatest Red Menace existed or not. Fighting words are never short from the spokesmen, such in particular a former US Secretary of State's: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future.”(44) These post-Cold War words could easily have been straight from the Manifest Destiny era. In contrast:
"The use of Soviet military force must be viewed in perspective. Compared with American, British and French forces, Soviet troops have seen little combat since 1945: before Afghanistan, Soviet forces had engaged in nothing comparable to the Korean or Vietnamese wars…Since Stalin’s death, most of the Soviet Union’s major military actions (had) been directed at other socialist states…In Soviet theory it is not Soviet actions that move the world from capitalism to socialism, but the contradictions inherent in capitalism itself…the functions of military power are presented in Soviet writings, in this context."(45)
Further analyzed, the Soviet Union's military never possessed the strategic disposition or infrastructure for global dominance unlike the United States. Such was never even close. The military dimension of the Cold War was a fraud sold wholesale to the nescient American public.
The United States possessed or had access to some 900 military bases and other minor installations around the world while the Soviets “who meant to own the world” dealt with no more than 80.46 The United States also anointed several Presidential doctrines that basically called for US intervention in several regions around the world far from immediate US borders, under altruistic guises and involved “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect” (to use a phrase from the Eisenhower Doctrine). The various doctrines are covered in the schoolbooks and occasionally newsmagazines, though accorded with the proper, respectful treatment. The Monroe Doctrine asserted the right to plunder, purify and rape Latin America on behalf of the bankers and the boys of Wall Street as Major General Smedley Butler observed. The Truman Doctrine asserted the Western prerogative to pummel the popular Greek resistance to restoration of the repressive monarchy. The Eisenhower was the first step for the United States to replace traditional British and French control over Middle Eastern oil. The Nixon Doctrine essentially was a policy to destroy the burgeoning socialism in Mozambique and Angola via the virulently racist South African regime’s military. The Reagan Doctrine reasserted a new version of the Monroe Doctrine via the use of death squad governments masquerading as democracies and CIA-sponsored “low-intensity warfare” (a.k.a. terrorism) to take out the hated Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Clinton Doctrine punished Yugoslavia for its holdout socialism that did not abide by IMF impositions. Thus the mandate for those 900 bases can be discerned. At best, the Soviet Union had the attributed “Brezhnev Doctrine” which essentially reasserted the Soviets’ desire to maintain their grip on Eastern Europe, certainly nothing which called for polluting the Philippines with military bases, forcing export bananas from Guatemala, dictating oil flow in the United Arab Emirate or turning the former Belgian Congo into a corrupt pilfer zone.
The US had forward-projection military capabilities that always vastly dwarfed the Soviet and East Bloc. During the Cold War, the US Navy possessed twelve carrier groups that owned the world’s seas while the Soviets maintained only two. These US carrier groups had at their disposal some eight hundred A-6s, A-7s, F-4s and F-14s while the Soviets had forty Yak-26s for theirs. The American military could also carry 944,000 tons across the oceans while the Soviets could do no more than 175,000. The Allied fleets could also operate for long periods away from home unlike the Soviets and their puppets. Accordingly, the former had 433 warships to the latter’s 279. Airlift capacity slightly favored the Soviets but the US range was considerably farther due to air refueling which the Soviets did not have.
On paper the Warsaw Pact had about 54,000 tanks versus NATO’s 36,400 but NATO had much superior tanks along with the 400,000 lethal anti-tank weapons. (Curiously, stored or exported Soviet tanks were added to the active tally.) NATO fighter aircraft such as Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, Mirages, Eagles and Tornadoes, numerically comparable to the East Bloc’s variation of the MiGs, were all also superior by way of navigation, armament, maneuverability and range. Epithets over imaginary “bomber gaps” always persisted in order to enrich the US aircraft industry such as when the US Air Force in 1954 propagandized that the Soviets would have 1,400 long-range bombers by 1959. They wound up with about two hundred by 1962. The US had always maintained a three hundred-plus advantage contrary to the “gaps.” Hundreds of hostile American bomber bases encircled the Soviet Union, from Turkey to Japan, Italy to South Korea, while the Russians had no such comparable items in the geography to surround the USA.
Historically in terms of troop strength, NATO’s 44 divisions always faced off against 211 Soviet even though 87 of those were in Soviet Asia; 1/3 of all Soviet divisions were at full strength while being only 1/3 the size of a US division and half the size other NATO divisions. Furthermore, Western divisions had better logistic support and precision weapons that the Soviets lacked. Unarmed Soviet construction brigades were counted as combat. French forces left NATO command yet France with its 500,000 troops remained in the Organization keeping 50,000 in West Germany as the French number was subtracted from the bean count.(47) The bottom line fact is that NATO possessed more than 5,300,000 active servicemen to the 4,800,000 of the Warsaw Pact even when precluding the Organization's symmetrical and qualitative superiority. The Cold Warriors always found disingenuous ways to lie about alleged Soviet quantitative, qualitative and strategic conventional military superiority.
This deception also worked with the nuclear aspect. Rush Limbaugh blurts, “We weren’t driving the arms race, the Soviets were.”(48) The plain facts are that the United States first made plans for nuclear war in 1961 and the Soviets not until 1968. It was the USA that first introduced wonderful toys like the long-range cruise missile and the multiple warhead. There was plenty of fear mongering with imminent threats of Soviet nuclear superiority, the “missile gap.” In 1959, the US already had nine Atlas missiles before the Soviets even deployed their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). By 1963, the US had 424 while the Russians deployed 127. The enemy finally built more ICBMs than the US but due to the multiple warhead, that disparity was negligible. In actual warhead delivery, by 1983, the threatened Americans could deliver a minimum of 10,733 while the advantaged Soviets had a maximum of 6,769. And indeed, US wordsmiths disingenuously always found a way to change the facts by rewording such as Soviet warheads versus American silos. The US/NATO nuclear force in good part lurked around in submarines and warships thus negating the silo selectivity.(49) If the Cold Warriors had to go to these lengths to deceive US taxpayers about Soviet military dispositions and alleged superiority, it can safely be concluded their complex had other interests in mind other than keeping the “Free World” safe from perceived communist expansionism.
Those in relative denial of some crucial points of the process do not like to acknowledge the “military-industrial complex” per se that President Eisenhower warned about in his outgoing 1961 address to America. These textbook frames of mind may deny a conspiratorial view that a small coterie of elites hides in a backroom priming a pump, able to gather whatever resources and funding they like at whenever time they want. These observers maintain that defense sales are only typically 10 percent of a given corporation's profits therefore no monolithic military-industrial complex exists that commands a near total sum of the funding and resources as well as policy prerogatives.(50) They believe "American business as a whole is not interested in promoting war or international instability" and other such "foreign adventure" that "threaten the financial corporate interests of corporate America… "(51) It is true that Halliburton and Unocal may not be interested in war if oil pipelines and wellheads are constantly being destroyed but absolutely are they interested in "international instability" if reformist, rogue or socialist governments nationalize the oil and attendant industrial services. (Halliburton makes a nice profit in reconstruction in Iraq but realizes that continual damage from guerilla warfare is counterproductive to the general profit-making structure over a long haul.)
War in itself may not be necessarily desirable to corporate interests but war posturing and "international instability" against targeted regimes certainly are highly so. But war including "low-intensity conflict" and foreign intervention are also corrective measures in keeping the world in line so the military-industrial enterprise has a material purpose for such even if war in itself is a means not an end.
In fairness, some of the textbook observers admit that "sufficient evidence is available to lend substantial credibility to the general military-industrial complex thesis." However while offering, via quote, from US News and World Report that "2,240 senior military and civilian Defense Department officials took jobs with major defense contractors over a three-year period in the 1980s," they still incredibly come up with a white-washed conclusion that "the conspiratorial version of the theory, which sees conniving generals and industrialists collaborating to corruptly enrich themselves…does not follow."(52)
Absolutely it "does not follow" that retired Four Star Generals like Jack Sheehan and ex-government officials such as Casper Weinberger (former Defense Secretary), William Casey (former CIA director), Richard Helm (former CIA director), George Schultz (former State Secretary), William Simon (former Treasury Secretary) and W. Kenneth Davis (former Energy Secretary) all preferred going to Bechtel Corporation at high official capacity in earnest search of neo-Aquarian love rather than wax cars at Bubbles, sack groceries at Piggly Wiggly or flip hamburgers at Burger King among other more lucrative occupations. Allen Dulles, late director of the CIA, was very tight with owner Stephen Bechtel, Sr.'s financial adviser John Simpkins. Undoubtedly, they collaborated to corruptly enrich themselves when they were involved in the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1953 preventing that nation from nationalizing its resources.
Bechtel is a defense-related company that also commandeers public water systems from poor countries like Bolivia and the Philippines, overcharging prices with favorable attendant currency protection from the World Bank when it is not busy building nuclear reactors all over America or profiting from billion dollar cost overruns constructing gigantic freeway underpasses in Boston due to "mistakes." Though former General Sheehan is "responsible for the business strategy in the region that includes Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia,"(53) taxpayers can be assured nothing systemically fraudulent is going on in the manner of outright deceptive propaganda, tens of billion-dollar "waste," "cost overruns," as well as "conniving generals and industrialists collaborating to enrich themselves" with these mechanisms and reflections.
Some textbook deniers of the systemic conniving do deceive and downplay the significance of the exorbitant defense budget appropriations. "Social welfare spending (welfare and social security) amounts to nearly 40 percent of the federal budget. Adding Medicare and Medicaid, the total health and welfare bill is over half the federal budget and nearly twice the size of the defense budget."(54) What is unclear is how much these authors decided on specific "welfare" appropriation and what is clear, though not clarified by them, is that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security each are all separate outlay items in the mandatory portion of the Federal budget. Defense, also a singular item, is in the discretionary portion of the budget and still constitutes perhaps over half of all that spending; it ultimately is second only to Social Security. In fact, not everything is known about the actual disposition of "Social Security." The troublesome Gore Vidal challenges the establishment vouchers:
"The press and the politicians constantly falsify the revenues of the Federal government. How? By wrongly counting Social Security contributions and expenditures as part of the Federal budget. Social Security is an independent, slightly profitable income-transferring trust fund, which should be factored out of Federal revenue and Federal spending. Why do the press and the politicians conspire to give us this distorted view of the budget? Because neither they nor their owners want the public to know (where) its tax money goes…the so-called entitlements come from a special fund.
In fact, close to 90 percent of the disbursements of the Federal government go for what is laughingly known as 'defense.' This is how: In 1986, the gross revenue of the government was $794 billion. Of that amount, $294 billion were Social Security contributions, which should be subtracted from the money available to the national security state. That leaves $500 billion. Subsequent budgets show different figures but similar proportions.
Of the $500 billion, $286 billion went to defense; $12 billion for foreign arms to our client states; $8 billion to $9 billion to energy, which means, largely, nuclear weapons; $27 billion for veteran's benefits…and finally, $142 billion for interest on loans that were spent, over the past forty years, to keep the national security state at war, hot or cold. So, of 1986's $500 billion in revenue, $475 billion was spent on National Security business. Of that amount we will never know how much was "kicked back" through political action committees and so-called soft money to subsidize candidates and elections."(55)
The particular authors who presume to tell us "the facts of the military-industrial complex" do not presume to explain just why the USA has such a gargantuan yet discretionary military budget that is larger than the next seventeen nations' combined. The so-called rogue nations of North Korea, Libya, Iran, Cuba and pre-Bremer Iraq spent a total of $9 billion on their militaries in a given year. Not even China, a potential rival, comes anywhere close. When it is said, "American industry does not depend on war or the threat of war for any significant proportion of its income or sales," it is a truism, for $388 billion out of a total of $2,158 billion (total 2003 outlay) is certainly a "significant" amount of funds going to line the pockets of favored profiteers. War, or threat of it, is not necessary; it only need be implied in order to keep the money coming in. American industry certainly does have a higher rate of profit with Department of Defense goods compared to comparable non-Defense goods. During the advent of Reagan, it was 23.3 percent to 10.6 percent.(56) And there is no competition as markets for the weapons and other related goods are virtually guaranteed, replete with all the cost overrun trimmings.J
The primary benefit of excess military spending is the profit it provides in those sectors of our economy where it is spent. A 1971 study based on information from the Federal Renegotiation Board found 131 defense contractors with profits after taxes of more than 50 percent of their net worth, 49 with profits of more than 100 percent, 22 with profits of more than 200 percent and 4 with profits of more than 500 percent. A subsequent General Accounting Office study showed that between 1970 and 1980, American defense contractors averaged profits of 56% after taxes. Michael Parenti concluded that "military appropriations are the single most important source of investment and profit for corporate America."(57)
It is to understate in noting that humongous, far-reaching and highly profitable enterprises like Bechtel can make so much when their goods and services are not even intended for public customers. It is CEO Stephen Bechtel, Jr. who remarks, "There's no reason for the public to hear of us, we're not selling anything to the public."(58) That is a revealing quote worth more than the 10 percent the observers who see no conniving bandy about.
It should not go without mention that notorious authors of official anti-Soviet policy had their nasal exteriors positioned up corporate posteriors connected to the defense industry. One such author was Paul Nitze, a governmental elite of great capacity. He was a major writer of NSC-68 in 1950, a National Security Council memorandum that basically declared institutional hostility against the Soviet Union. The most telling observation by historian John Gaddis Lewis is that it "was to suggest a way to increase defense expenditures without war." Nitze got the ball rolling when defense expenditures increased by 357 percent from 1950 to 1951. He was vice-president at banking firm Dillon, Read & Company that invested for defense companies like Grumman. Nitze was connected with board directors of General Motors, RJ Reynolds Industries, Litton Industries, AT&T, Singer, Control Data Corporation and Cutler-Hammer, all top 100 US defense firms at the time. Just before the dawn of the Reagan era, the Committee on the Present Danger surfaced in time to set détente aside and resume hawkish stances toward the Soviet Union. There were noteworthy members who had their own ties to the defense industry. John Lehmen owned the Abington Corporation, a consulting firm whose clients were Northrop, Boeing and TRW. David Packard (a former Defense Secretary) was chairman of Hewlett-Packard, a company that made electronic warfare equipment in a time before its consumer PCs became common household items.
Further illustration of network connections is how loaded right-wing think tanks that influence policy receive large sums from corporations. Bechtel gave hundreds of thousands of dollars worth in endowments annually to both the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. The Committee itself received $6 million from the Sarah Mellon Scaife and Carthage Foundations from 1973 to 1986, they being endowed by Gulf Oil. Members of the Committee also were members of another influential organization comprised of 106 conservative groups, the American Security Council. 2,465 retired admirals and generals were members of the Council. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer was director at Fairchild Republic and Texaco, two firms related to defense. Air Force Systems Command General Bernard Schriever directed Control Data Corporation and Emerson Electric.(59)
Certainly it is true that there is no small band of generals and capitalists commanding the entire endgame in a backroom but it definitely is true that a significant military-industrial complex certainly exists with privileged officials (not surprisingly even exclusive of the Defense Department) and grateful capitalists taking huge chunks of dirty money for themselves and continually exchanging places as part of a more complex socio-economic paradigm where much structural "conniving" goes on. Just because militarists and their corporate bedfellows do not own the whole pie does not mean they do not entitle themselves hefty discretionary slices of it at our expense, they being another connected network systemically sharing the forks and knives with other high-level parties even if they fight over some crumbs now and then (as the fierce publicized battle between Congress, the Pentagon brass and the Bush Administration over the Crusader missile program attests).
And just because it is "irresponsible to posit that the military-industrial complex is the exclusive determinant of American foreign policy" or other policy for that matter, it does not mean that the complex and its parts are not a significant determinant. Boeing, a top fifteen Fortune 500 player largely in defense and aerospace, paid out $9.2 million for access to the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. There is certainly "conniving" when the company makes about $3 billion in export sales to the world with missiles and combat aircraft and is able to put up a hefty bribe in order to make the planet a conducive place for arms makers who also wish to bypass local environment, health and labor standards.(60)
The Cold War as it was known is long finished. The reasons for increased military spending, intensive research on new macro-weapons systems and intervention around the world centered on the very existence of the Soviet Union soon after World War II. Still the United States has increased the current military budget back to Reagan era Cold War highs. In the Clinton 1990s, US military spending was still high by pre-Reagan Cold War standards, averaging around $270 billion annually. And yet, this was despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union…with no subsequent disappearance of Cold War military budgets. Now, with the war-mongering goons in the George W. Bush White House and Cabinet, that figure has risen to almost $340 billion per year with increases slated. This is how the "Cold War" still exists. Simply rename it to "war on terror" (previously for a short spell, it was the less convincing "war on drugs") while keeping the same budget for the same covert reasons.
The Soviet Union in its post-World War II assessment was nothing more than a pretext to continue the US war economy. Those involved in crafting institutional hostility toward the Soviets and their puppets were connected to the defense industry. These people also lied, deceived and engaged in fraud with the public money in a systemic manner that will never seriously be threatened under the existing macro-political fabric. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to see the implications of that. Even those in the US military establishment comment "about the military organizations of great powers: they embrace the big-war paradigm." Instead of downsizing or transforming the US military into one that is more efficient in fighting the constructed "war on terror," relying on expensive and indiscriminate firepower that seems to create more terrorists than it destroys, the US policy people still do not effectively strategize against "asymmetric conflict…the most probable form of conflict that the US may face." They know they will not downsize or reconfigure because asymmetric disposition is not the most profitable basis for the stratagem. "Most rational adversaries in the non-Western world should have learned from the Gulf War not to confront the West on its terms" but the US military-industrial complex still disposes for conventional confrontation.(61) No one can seriously believe that the asymmetric Al-Qaida is the Soviet Union's replacement as certainly it is now apparent why "military organizations of great powers" certainly "embrace" paradigms of "big-war." The profiteering structure is too lucrative for collaborative parties. To maintain the profiteering, it is patently obvious that the US Masters continue to find compelling constructs in which to scare the American populace while slaughtering others.
Aside from the holdover military budgets, that other significant mechanism of the Cold War indeed still exists: namely various levels and modes of US foreign intervention. US plotters still try and overthrow democratically-elected leaders in nations like Venezuela who may have picked up some of Marx's ideas and they still maintain aid, weapons and bases in nations like Colombia where people and rebels who are tired of starving and being butchered by their CIA-supported, Pentagon-supplied death squad democracy also have some of Karl's sentiments to activate. Since the Soviets were blamed for sowing or fermenting just about every revolution in all corners of the globe, it still is exquisite to observe that revolution still exists from Colombia to the Philippines. Revolution and US intervention existed well before the Soviet Union ever did. Other leftist resurgence is going on in places like Peru, Brazil and Ecuador. Enlarged flames will surely spread again in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador if they are not already enlarged. Again, there is no Soviet Union around that fans these flames. Communist China is communist only in name and has installed anti-labor policies and free enterprise zones that the capitalist interests approve of. The "Cold War" has been proven to cover a collaboration of fascism and capitalism against workers' prerogatives and has indeed shed its name into other slogans that the powerful need in order to continue their program. There is something larger to the big picture than just military-industrial complexes and Cold War vilification/attributions. Those are simply just mechanisms in the ongoing entrenchment.
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1 Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), p. 135.
2 ibid, p. 136.
3 Warren I. Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations 1921-1933 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), p.84.
4 Edward and Regula Boorstein, Counterrevolution: US Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1990), p. 17
5 Chuck Jorgensen, “Intervention and Civil War, 1918-1920," Millennial Files, (http://www.mmmfiles.com/archive/civilwar.htm)
6 Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing, Cold War: The Book of the Ground Breaking TV Series (London: Bantam Press, 1998), Passim.
7 Parenti, pp. 63, 140.
8 Alvin Rubinstein, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II: Imperial and Global (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), pp. 6, 16.
9 Free Congress Foundation, Combat on Communist Territory, (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1985), p. v.
10 Quoted in George Will, Suddenly (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 121.
11 Charles Krauthammer, “No Reason to Apologize for US Behavior in Africa," Houston Chronicle, 4/5/98, editorial section.
12 Hal Lindsey, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 86.
13 Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York: Macfadden Books, 1960), pp. 88-92.
14 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 331. There is certainly strong dislike of Franklin Delano Roosevelt whom some virulently rightist history adherents view as a Soviet dupe. Whether FDR was a Soviet dupe or not is irrelevant to the issue regarding genuine Soviet security concerns. The truth is that the more peaceable FDR was not as saber-rattling as Truman; conservatives saw anyone not waving swords at the Soviets as dupes. In any event FDR probably saw it best that the Soviets gain control of Eastern Europe rather than have fascists restored there, something the rightists generally would have preferred. At least President Roosevelt turned down the Office of Strategic Services (OSS-precursor to the CIA) plan to openly recruit Nazi scientists, intelligence officers and industrialists which was proffered by the likes of Allen Dulles and Bill Donovan.
15 William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 35.
16 Rubinstein, p. 112. He is very much a pro-Cold War scribe. “Whereas the United States seeks stability and melioration of regional conflicts, the Soviet Union generally sees them as an opportunity to weaken the West.” (Quote on p. 321.)
17 Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Boston: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 24-25.
18 William Norman Grigg, “Liberty’s Steamroller," New American, 12/19/99 (Vol. 15, No. 26). (http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1999/12-20-99/vo15no26_patton.htm)
19 Parenti, pp. 144-145.
20 Rubinstein, pp. 31-32.
21 ibid, p. 300.
22 Stephen E. Miller and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, ed., Conventional Forces and American Defense Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 29. From a piece entitled “The Case for Finite Containment” by Walt originally published in International Security, Summer 1989 (Vol. 14. No. 1).
23 James Burnham, The War We Are In, (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967), p. 10. Burnham also brings up the famous line of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, “We will bury you.” But Nikita Khrushchev never said, “We will bury you” as direct war with the USA or the West. This incident was written about on numerous occasions, and is a superb example of mistranslation with disastrous consequences. “My vav pokhoronim," as Khrushchev said did not mean, "We will bury you" (i.e. do you in, kill you). It means, "We will survive you, be present at your funeral." The phrase "we will bury you" in Russian is "my vas zakopaem" which Khrushchev never said.
24 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 (New York: Oxford, 1982), p. 105.
25 Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 15, 44-47. While he very much has an excellent analysis of the Cold War on many aspects, more in a critical liberal vein that does not analyze the systemic socio-economic aspects of US foreign policy, Paterson does not seem to recognize the collusion between the Nazis and the Western elites when he explores the origins of the topic.
26 Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 13.
27 George Will, p. 121.
28 Foreign Policy Association, A Citizen’s Guide to US Foreign Policy: Election ’88 (Camp Hill, PA: Book of the Month Club, 1988), p. 109.
29 Boorstein, pp. 51-52.
30 Rubinstein, p. 16.
31 Buckley, pp. 36-37. The celebrated writer of thrilling spy novels, exciting yachting diaries and spare time political matters sarcastically lampooned the left-leaning economist John Kenneth Galbraith on his “Marxist” paranoia or delusion of a “grand ideological picture.” Obviously Buckley is commenting that German and Italian fascism in the 1920s or 30s should have driven the conspiracy theories regarding elite taskmasters embarking on the military-industrial complex well before World War II (the way post-war Soviet communism did) in order to satisfy Galbraith’s “grand ideological picture.” Conservatives are on the same boat when it comes to minting communism and fascism on two sides of the same coin.
32 Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), p. 10-11.
33 Christopher Hitchens, “Imagining Hitler," Vanity Fair, February 1999, pp. 56, 59, 62. Churchill quotes are originally from a 1935 essay in his book Great Contemporaries.
34 Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), pp. 20-22, 347.
35 ibid, pp. 337-338.
36 Jonathan Mantle, Car Wars: Fifty Years of Greed, Treachery and Skullduggery in the Global Marketplace (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995), pp. 44-45, 76-77.
37 ibid, pp. 45, 77.
38 Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, p. 19.
39 Tom Gervasi, America’s War Machine: The Pursuit of Global Dominance (New York: Groove Press, 1984), pp. 5, 26, 47.
40 Gordon Mott and John Barry, “A Tank in Shining Armor: The Soviet FST-1 Has NATO Commanders Worried," Newsweek, 4/11/88, p. 51.
41 Gervasi, pp. 4-5.
42 Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 2004, tables 5-9, 7-2.
43 David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), table 6.1 at p. 114. While the Soviet ruble was never actually convertible to the dollar; Central Intelligence Agency, "Soviet Military Expenditures by Major Missions, 1958-65," CIA/ER 61-15, April 1961. (http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/princeton/ciaer_61_15.pdf)
44 Madeleine Albright, NBC Today, 2/19/98.
45 Holloway, p. 82, 102.
46 Gervasi, p. 23.
47 ibid, p. 23-24, 26-27, 29; Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, p. 154-56.
48 Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), p. 234.
49 Gervasi, p. 25, 29; Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, p. 152-54, 55. Parenti marked New York Times journalist John Korry writing “the Soviet Union has 5,000 ICBMs; the United States has 1,054 silos.”
50 Domhoff, pp. 52-54; Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 272-274. These authors acknowledge that the complex exists but its fraud and corruption are just matters of "unchecked rule" (as they quote John Galbraith) rather than being mechanisms that the privileged systemically exploit, just another network of means that the powerful take from the powerless (taxes, labor, military manpower, etc.) to enrich themselves. That the complex may exist as one imperfect sector, committing its share of sins in absence of stricter oversight, is no reason not to believe that the system simply works that way, allowing fraud while punishing some transgression and smaller fries.
51 Dye and Zeigler, p. 106; Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 274-275.
52 Kegley and Wittkopf, pp. 271, 274.
53 Cooperative Research, "Bechtel Corporation," 5/3/03. (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/corporation/profiles/bechtel.htm)
54 Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 105.
55 Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1992), pp. 31-33.
56 Steve Brouer, Sharing the Pie: A Citizen's Guide to Wealth and Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), p. 90.
57 Gervasi, The Myth of Soviet Military Superiority (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 218.
.
58 Cooperative Research.
59 Gervasi, The Myth of Soviet Military Superiority, pp. 216, 218, 221-222.
60 Jennifer del Rosario-Malonzo, "US Military-Industrial Complex: Profiting from War," IBON Features, 2002-22. (http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/9-11/military_complex.htm)
61 Major Robert M. Cassidy, "Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly," Combined Arms Center Military Review, September-October 2002.
(http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/milrev/English/SepOct02/cassidy.htm)
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