Chapter 7. The World Breaking Free frightened the Security Councils of every Western Nation

The security councils of the historical colonial empires were horrified to observe that not only were populations on the periphery of empire who provided their cheap resources taking the rhetoric of democracy seriously and breaking free, but that the empires were losing traditional allies. After WWII, a Soviet system of government was installed in all but Hungary and Czechoslovakia when Hitler’s armies were driven from Eastern Europe. The security councils of all major Western nations were traumatized as:

(1) Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with diplomatic pressure from the Soviet Union but still of their own choice, quickly slipped into the Soviet orbit and labor now governed half of Europe.a

(2) In Greece, only an alliance with Hitler’s puppets, massive repression, and massacres of the partisans who had kept two-thirds of the country out of Hitler’s control throughout WWII kept the Greek nation in the Western orbit (this first battle of the Cold War started before WWII ended and was fought strictly against our former allies; the awakened workers of Greece).1

(3) Through nonviolent protest, Gandhi freed India from Britain.

(4) In spite of large expenditures of money and arms, military advisors, and the United States transporting Chiang Kai-shek’s troops back and forth across China, one-fifth of the world’s population was lost to the West: China was suddenly free to chart her own destiny.

(5) World opinion forced the dictation of the U.S. presidential “white paper” that would return Taiwan (Formosa) to China.2

(6) South Korea was having massive riots (over 100,000 killedb), the collaborationists of the United States installed dictator Syngman Rhee (who had spent 20 years in exile in Hawaii) were overwhelmingly voted out of parliament, “several crack South Korean military units [had] defected to leftist forces,” and South and North Korea were rejoining as one nation outside the control of imperial capital.3

(7) Japan, Germany, and Italy—being far from friends with their recent conquerors—made it uncertain that the facade of democratic control of those populations would hold, and France was equally insecure.4

(8) Workers in all nations of Europe were developing a political consciousness and not only were the Western economies not picking up as planned, they were moribund. The beacon of capitalism—the receptacle of power for the descendants of the old First and Second Estates and philosophical foundation for their social-control-paradigms (“frameworks of orientation”)—was not shining brightly enough to claim the loyalties of the world’s intellectuals or that of the stirring masses. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and retain its loyalty went forward at full speed and only by expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in the Italian and French elections (a practice that lasted two decades in France and four decades in Italy) were those two countries kept within the system of allied imperial-centers-of-capital.

(9) Virtually the entire colonial world was breaking free, their resources would be turned to the care of their own people, and those resources could no longer be siphoned to the old imperial-centers-of-capital for a fraction of their value.

(10) China and Eastern Europe were now allied with the fully federated Soviet Union. If the world’s former colonies continued to take the rhetoric of democracy seriously and form the nonaligned bloc as they were planning, over 80% of the world’s population would be independent or on the other side of the ideological battle. And, if Japan, Germany, Italy, and France could not be held (it was far from sure they could be), that would leave only the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia, about 10% of the world’s population, still under the old operational philosophies, and even there the ideological hold would be tenuous at best. After all, if there were no countryside under the firm control of an imperial center, the entire neo-liberal/neo-mercantilist philosophical system will have disappeared.

What Western nations were observing, of course, was the same potential loss of resources and markets, their “countryside,” as the cities of Europe had experienced centuries earlier. “National security” and “security interests,” which citizens were coached (propagandized) to believe meant fear of a military attack, really meant maintaining access to the weak, impoverished world’s valuable resources. The “domestic prosperity” worried about was only their own and the “constantly expanding trade” were unequal trades maintaining the prosperity of the developed world and the impoverishment of the undeveloped world as the imperial-centers-of-capital siphoned the natural wealth of their “countryside” to themselves.

A Crisis of Overproduction had to be averted

With industrial capacity having increased 50% during WWII, U.S. industry was calculated to be twice what was necessary for America’s needs and almost enough to produce for the entire world at its pre-war level of consumption.5 One of the primary tenets of a capitalist market economy is that surplus production at much smaller levels than that spells an economic depression.

The eighth conclusion of NSC-68, the master plan for the Cold War, states: “There are grounds for predicting that the United States and other free nations will within a period of a few years at most experience a decline in economic activity of serious proportions unless more positive government programs are developed than are now available.” In a democracy, the legitimacy of both ideology and leaders are judged at the ballot box by how well its citizens are cared for. Every leader in the developed world still remembered how near the world was to a ballot box revolution during the Great Depression; a market for that excess productive capacity was crucial. In short, the waste of building arms and covert and overt wars was both to protect the existing trade structure and to be a Keynesian infusion of money into the economy to prevent a replay of the Great Depression and the threat of a ballot box revolution.

But the post-WWII stirring of the masses worldwide was a more immediate concern. Noting the threat to their commerce and wealth as the entire world was taking the rhetoric of freedom and democracy seriously, corporations, through control of policy of the one remaining wealthy nation (America) and the devastated nations of Europe and Japan, made the same decision as the free cities of Europe centuries earlier. Threatened with loss of their cheap, but valuable, resources and profitable markets, they had to reclaim control of their countryside:

Fostering a world environment in which the American system can flourish … embraces two subsidiary policies. One is a policy which we would probably pursue even if there was no Soviet threat. It is a policy of attempting to create a healthy international community. The other is a policy of “containing” the Soviet system. These two policies are closely interrelated and interact with one another.6

Of course, the “healthy international community” Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of the primary architects of the Cold War, had in mind as he was justifying NSC-68 was only from the perspective of those who watch the wealth of others roll into their vaults. A healthy community as enforced by the Free cities of Europe 800 years ago meant wealth to them and poverty for the defeated neighboring cities. A healthy international community, from the perspective of corporate imperialism, means wealth for the developed corporate world and poverty for the formerly colonized, still defeated, and re-colonized undeveloped world.

Control had to be reestablished. Although done in the name of peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule (social-control-paradigms, “frameworks of orientation,” especially when girding for war), the fundamental goal of the forming IMF/World Bank/GATT/NAFTA/WTO/MAI/GATS/FTAA/ military colossus and the covert actions authorized by NSC-68, and many lesser Security Council directives both before and after that master plan, was the reclaiming and maintenance of control over valuable resources and profitable markets and the very negation of the principles so loudly touted as their rationale. The real fear was people taking democracy seriously, deciding their own destiny, and corporations losing access to those cheap resources and valuable markets.

National Security Council Directive 68

A study of NSC-68 will conclude that, besides being a master plan for the Cold War, this directive was also a propaganda instrument to stampede government officials into accepting that military posture. That analysis and the crisis facing the developed Western world are confirmed. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of the primary architects of NSC-68, sums it up for us:

Western Europe … shattered by its civil war, was disintegrating politically, economically, socially, and psychologically. Every effort to bestir itself was paralyzed by two devastating winters and the overshadowing fear of the Soviet Union no longer contained by the stoppers on the east, west, and south—Japan, Germany, and British India…. It was in this period [the first 3 years after the beginning of the Cold War] that we awakened fully to the facts of the surrounding world and to the scope and kind of action required by the interests of the United States; the second period, that of President Truman’s second administration, became the time for full action upon those conclusions and for meeting the whole gamut of reactions—favorable, hostile, and merely recalcitrant foreign and domestic—that they produced. In the first period, the main lines of policy were set and begun; in the second, they were put into full effect amid the smoke and confusion of battle…. The purpose of NSC-68 [the master plan for the Cold War] was to so bludgeon the mass mind of “top government” that not only could the president make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.7

Although President Truman may have been fully aware, the fact that the finalized NSC-68 was presented to him on April 16, 1950, but that it was not signed until September 30, 1950 (as NSC-68/2) three months after the start of the Korean War, demonstrates the likelihood that the American president was one of the “top government officials” the designers of the Cold War were stampeding into a war posture through the strategy-of-tension of the communists as the aggressor of the Korean war and this foretelling more communist aggressions worldwide.

The Korean War, a Strategy-of-Tension Building a “Framework of Orientation”

Any power-structure, “democratic” or dictatorship, facing the loss of control on the periphery of empire, will find or create an excuse for war. Because all the records were not destroyed as ordered, it is now known the American Joint Chiefs of Staff had just such a strategy-of-tension planned to create support for a war with Cuba. They urged President Kennedy to justify their planned war by staged covert terrorist acts, some of which would have caused the deaths of innocent Americansc:

In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba. Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plans which had the approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent Americans to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees from Cuba to be sunk in the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be blamed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.8

The political instrument to put NSC-68 into effect was the Korean War that started 72 days after that directive was finalized and presented to President Truman. When I.F. Stone wrote The Hidden History of the Korean War in 1952, NSC-68 was still classified. However, his book demonstrated the Korean War was a strategy-of-tension imposing the policies of America’s managers-of-state upon the world and the most important political event since WWII.

No empire (or nation) instigates a war on the periphery that is already politically won but they do instigate actual wars when loss of control is imminent. But this planned war was not only to save an outpost on the periphery of empire; this was a war to save the empire. There was nothing to lose in Korea; without a war it was going to be lost anyway and there was an entire world to gain through a strategy-of-tension mobilizing the citizens of the imperial centers for a war to suppress the renewed breaks for economic freedom of the emerging world. Though the plans were made in State, an analysis of our sources will conclude the excuse for the Korean War was obviously staged by General Douglas MacArthur, South Korean President Syngman Rhee, and Chiang Kai-shek of Formosa under the political cover of the American hard right (called the China Lobby), McCarthyism, and the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer.”

Highlights from Stone’s book outline a war created by those threatened with the loss of their power and wealth. Massive riots were breaking out all over South Korea with the goal of North and South Korea reuniting, over 100,000 were killed. Crack military units were defecting to the so-called left and the CIA and South Korean government were unable to control the elections. Syngman Rhee’s puppet government was voted out wholesale and the next to go would be Syngman Rhee.

North and South Korea were going to rejoin outside Western control, South Korean troops pulled back from the 38th parallel the day before the war started, South Korean government press releases were saying a North Korean attack was imminent, the UN inspected the 38th parallel—just hours before the war started—concluding there was no imminent attack, and intelligence briefings stated that North Korea was not prepared for war. Yet ships were in place to evacuate American families. Everything was set to fabricate an excuse for a war, a strategy-of-tension building a “framework of orientation”, to gain followers for the immense military budget and casualties it would take to suppress the world’s break for freedom.

But the clincher that the invasion of South Korea was a much more elaborately staged war than Hitler’s staged invasion of Poland was North Korea’s announcement that South Korea had invaded North Korea in three places and had been hurled back. Author John Gunther, General Douglas MacArthur’s personal biographer, just happened to be in the General’s personal railroad car when a high-level occupation official returned from being called to a phone, saying, “A big story has just broken. The South Koreans have attacked North Korea.”9

That verification which accidentally slipped into history and Stone’s cold political analysis verifies the North Korean claim that South Korea, under American guidance and promise of protection by America’s full military might, started that war. (A third verification was the few days it took to dislodge South Korea from Heiju, several miles above the 38th parallel.) I.F. Stone describes how many of the massive battles with hordes of Koreans and Chinese attacking were nothing more than military press releases (social-control-paradigms manufactured by intelligence service wordsmiths and passed out through military and government channels).d Stone would quote the headlines built from those press releases and then print the communiqués from ground commanders who were essentially searching for enemies they could not find.

Certainly 4-million were killed but they were primarily killed by an unopposed air force that napalmed North Korea to the ground, an unopposed navy that shelled North Korean coastal cities to rubble, and massive artillery that extracted a horrendous price in lives when a real attack was faced. This accounts for only 35,000 Americans being among the 4-million who died. Half those numbers were women and children who died in this carnage when defenseless and totally undefended North Korean cities and villages were napalmed and bombarded to the ground.

Neither China nor the Soviet Union provided any great support to North Korea until that tiny impoverished nation was essentially destroyed. Couple that war by press release with the documented efforts of the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets to bring that war to an end—every such effort unreported in Western media and thwarted by either a massive air attack or ground offensive—clearly mark it as a political event.

John Quigley wrote The Ruses for War: American Interventionism since World War II in 1992 and he came up with the same conclusions: The Korean war was started under NSC-68 by the West as a strategy-of-tension (the primary “framework of orientation”) so citizens and governments would support the militarization of the West for control of the world’s resources. Besides unearthing evidence we missed that America instituted that war, Quigley agrees that the West was at all times militarily superior to the North Koreans, that the North Koreans were not ready for war, and Western armies were many times looking for forces that simply were not there.10

Thanks to the hysteria of the Korean War, which legitimized the West’s primary social-control-paradigm (that the West was under imminent threat of attack), South Korea and Taiwan were kept within the sphere of Western influence; so called “leftist” dissidents in Germany, Italy, France, and Japan were totally suppressed (by a strategy-of-tension identical to American McCarthyism); the military budget did increase 350% as planned in NSC-68; the Cold War was on full force; and—after an intense 40-year battle—that struggle to regain control worldwide to protect those cheap resources, those markets, and the very right to govern the imperial centers, was won. e

That 4-million people were killed (half women and children), millions more wounded, that the entire Korean peninsula was scorched earth, that another 10-million would be violently killed as other breaks for economic freedom were suppressed all over the world, that tens of millions more would be wounded, that hundreds of millions would die from starvation and disease as the economies of impoverished countries struggling for freedom were shattered, that billions would remain impoverished as their governments were covertly overthrown or that trillions of dollars of the world’s resources would be wasted, could not deflect the managers-of-state from their decisions. They, like imperial-centers-of-capital for centuries, felt they had no other choices. To lose those natural resources, that cheap labor, and those markets was to lose their power and their wealth. As we will be addressing below, other choices are not only available today; they are imperative.

The security councils of all the Western European nations had long since realized that they could not rebuild their WWII devastated societies if they lost control of the resources of the world, nor could they rebuild if their industry, money, and labor were expended on arms. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made it clear that, even though Britain was damaged less than 10% as much as Eastern Europe and Western Europe was damaged possibly only 20% as much, “If rearmament is not spread out over a longer time the nations of Western Europe will be rushing to bankruptcy and starvation.”11

The Grand Strategy paid off. Except for China and all Southeast Asia slipping in under the umbrella of protection provided to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the natural-resource-wealthy developing world remained poor. This left those resources available for the use of the imperial centers and the resource-depleted developed world rebuilt its wealth to a level far higher than before.

Fabricating Incidents to Start Wars

Fabricating incidents to start wars empires feel they can win—such as Hitler’s strategy-of-tension through faking an attack by Poland on a German radio station and America’s strategy-of-tension through creating the Gulf of Tonkin incident in order for President Johnson to get congressional backing to widen the war in Vietnam and justify a heavier assault on North Vietnam—is standard practice. This is the careful writing of (falsification of) history by the powerful. United States documents on the destabilization of Cuba, declassified in 1998, titled “Pretexts to Justify U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” demonstrate how it is done. Plans for those in-depth deceptions were:

Fake an attack on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, with friendly Cubans masquerading as attackers…. Arrange for an unmanned vessel to be blown up near a major Cuban city…. Stage a ‘Communist Cuban terror campaign’ in the Miami area…. Plant arms in a Caribbean country and send jets painted to look like Cuban Migs, creating the appearance of a ‘Cuban based, Castro supported’ subversion…. Blow up an unmanned U.S. plane that would surreptitiously replace a charter flight of civilians (and much more).12

L. Fletcher Prouty was one of three officers who wrote the how-to book on covert operations for the CIA. In his JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, And the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, we learn that strategies-of-tensions (terrorist bombings, attacks by our own covert forces dressed as the enemy, counterfeit papers, and the drumbeat of the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer) were building a “framework of orientation” used throughout the world to control elections and to gain acceptance for the military suppressions of the many breaks for freedom. In fact, American intelligence service manuals on terrorism teach that, whenever they carried out one of their many acts of state terrorism, always leave evidence that the opposition was responsible.13

Peace in Korea could not be permitted

Attacks on defenseless civilians In North Korea were specifically to create anger and prevent negotiation. For a government to sign a peace treaty under such conditions is essentially unconditional surrender. For two years of negotiations at Panmunjom, every time it appeared a peace settlement was near there would be a massive air raid, a ground offensive, a naval bombardment, or all three.

When it appeared the Chinese were willing for a cessation of hostilities at the 38th parallel where it all began, three defenseless North Korean port cities were subjected to 41 straight days and nights bombardment by the navies of three nations and America’s Air Force.

That most intense naval and air bombardment of any city in history, against totally defenseless women and children, went totally unreported in the Western press.14 Instead of dictatorial powers planning to overwhelm the West militarily, those we were told were a dreaded dictatorial enemy were making every effort to return to peace and were being bombed and shelled to prevent a peace settlement.

The Korean War could not be permitted to end until the West’s war machine was fully rebuilt, until treaties were signed with Japan and Germany that fully committed them to the West and until the entire Western world was raised to a high level of tension believing that it was at high risk of being attacked. The Korean War was necessary to gain full support from governments and the masses so that other overt and covert wars to suppress the world’s break for economic freedom could be successfully fought.

To understand that the deciding factor in imposition of beliefs to control people is military power, read this book on how inequalities of trade are militarily imposed, then read NSC-68 while noting Acheson’s statement quoted above that its purpose was to “bludgeon the mass mind of “top government” that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out,” and then read I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War.

We are not exaggerating. These wars, in which we were told we were in such imminent danger of being attacked, were covertly instigated by imperial powers to maintain control of the developed world’s countryside with their immense natural resources and markets so crucial to their corporate industries. Voters would quickly change leaders if they knew that the Grand Strategy was to maintain control of the countryside through violence. Thus it was necessary to build a “framework of orientation” for the masses through a strategy-of-tension designed by the secretly functioning national security state blaming the violence on the very people being suppressed.

The decisions had been made. America’s managers-of-state were accepting the reality that only they had the economic and military power to re-impose control upon the world, and, though most of the planning (beyond NSC-4, NSC-4A, NSC-10/2 and NSC-68) had yet to be done, most of world history since Churchill’s famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech has been efforts to re-impose that control and the efforts of others to resist that imposition of control. We know this struggle as the Cold War and it was fought even more fiercely around the world than it was against the Soviet Union.

The First Efforts to Contain the Soviet Federation

To understand how even powerful, threatening rising centers of capital can be destroyed we will encapsulate the short 73-year history of the former Soviet federation. The Soviet reorganization to unwieldy community ownership, equally inefficient direct distribution, yet very sensible community mutual support principles, had barely begun when 14 countries sent in 180,000 troops and armed 300,000 dissidents within Russia to overthrow that revolution.15 Reclaiming this breakaway nation for capitalism’s managers-of-state almost succeeded; nearly two-thirds of the European region of the Soviet Union came under interventionist and counterrevolutionary control before the Soviets defeated the allied invaders.

The effort was more successful than the history books acknowledge—Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (these four countries having been a part of the Old Russian Empire for over 100 years) and the Eastern half of Poland, and Bessarabia were carved from the forming Soviet federation by that intervention.16 Except for Leningrad, this barred the Soviet Union from Atlantic ports and restricted its access to world trade. Note the similarity of the carving off of these historic sectors of Russia 1917 to 1921 to the later carving up of the Soviet federation after 1991, the carving up of Yugoslavia still on-going (2005), and the continued moving East of the line between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity. As of 2005, covert electoral support for one side and covert destabilization of the opposition moved the Ukraine to the Western side of the struggle. A previous attempt to covertly swing the Belarus election failed. And those same covert struggles are ongoing in the former Eastern Soviet Provinces. (This is hidden history, run Internet searches.) The suppression of rising centers of capital has a long and repetitive history.

Where only a few thousand died in the Bolshevik Revolution possibly 15-million Soviets died of disease and starvation in the interventionist battles between 1918 and the withdrawal of the last foreign forces in 1922.17 We hear of the millions who then died from famine in the decade of the 1930s in the wake of social disruptions caused by putting farms under collective or state ownership. But we are now alert to how intelligence services, furthering the policies of managers-of-state of imperial-centers-of-capital, expand or even create these images of rising–centers-of-capital as terrorist states. The truth is that the citizens of the former Soviet Union were fiercely loyal to, and worked hard for, their revolution and one should be very skeptical of those figures. The real threat was the potential for success of this new economic system which practiced participatory democracy. To prevent the subjects of their representative democracies from realizing the possibilities of full and equal rights under a participatory democracy was the primary purpose of the massive propaganda demonizing the Soviet federation as a bloody dictatorship.

Russian pre-WWI industrial capacity, 3% that of America, was not replaced until 1928. But, once the people were educated and the political and industrial bases were laid, the successes came quickly. In the next 12 years the Soviets soared well past France, Japan, and Italy, matched Britain, and their industrial capacity was now 25% that of the United States.18

The Soviet Union’s rapid development was matched by that of Germany. The plans of the managers-of-state are too well hidden to fully document but the similarities between the wars against these emerging centers-of-capital and previous such threats to imperial centers are high. Germany’s second in command, Rudolf Hess, supposedly fled to England 43 days before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union.f His lifetime incarceration at Spandau prison, where he was denied the right to speak on any except the most mundane subjects, allows only a glimpse of the hopes of fascists in Germany and Britain for an alliance against the Soviet federation ruled by labor and a reallocation of the world’s industries, resources, and markets among Western powers. The nations already overrun by Hitler were of Aryan descent and many countries of Europe had accepted fascist governments during the recent Great Depression. So a restructured European fascist alliance (the real purpose of Hess’s flight) would have been easily organized if Britain had agreed.

Except that German sympathizers were automatically kept out of the British government both before and during the war, a defecting Hess would have been welcomed by fascist elements in Britain. There are no other logical reasons for his flight except to form an alliance against the rapidly developing Soviets. Hitler and Hess were taking a gamble on Britain accepting a realignment of power to avoid a long war and they lost.

There were elements in Britain amenable to such alliance plans but Germany’s fascist violence, Britain’s treaty commitments with countries invaded by Germany, the impossibility of restructuring the “framework of orientation” of the masses of Britain in that short a time, and the almost certain eclipse of British economic, financial, and military power as Germany drew on a defeated Soviet Union’s vast resources and sold the products manufactured from those resources on Britain’s historic markets precluded any such alliance.

While the Germans felt for a political settlement in the West, their June 22, 1941 offensive against the Soviet federation, Operation Barbarossa, took the invading troops to the outskirts of Stalingrad and within sight of Moscow. In desperation, the Soviets moved their industrial machinery ahead of the invading army and rebuilt beyond the Ural Mountains. Industrial technology is not only the key to a wealthy economy, it is the key to modern warfare and the Soviets, who only 13 years earlier were a minor industrial power, produced far more weapons than Germany for the remainder of the war. By the beginning of 1945, “on the Byelorussian and Ukrainian fronts alone, Soviet superiority was both absolute and awesome, fivefold in manpower, fivefold in armor, over sevenfold in artillery and 17-times the German strength in the air.”19

Essentially unrecorded in Western history is what the West owes the Soviets in that war. The estimation that 85% of Germany’s firepower was expended against the Soviet Union alerts the serious researcher. Simple history and battlefield statistics tell the story well: Once the Germans were stopped, the massive 17-month battle for Stalingrad (liberated on February 2, 1943) ended with the death or capture of 1.5-million Germans, the death of 800,000 Soviets and wounding of hundreds of thousands more. That victory was followed by the greatest tank and artillery battle in history at Kursk and the immense battles at Kharkov and Orel; all of which the Soviets decisively won. The Soviet federation had been holding off the Germans for three years and had cleared the Germans from half the occupied area six months before the Allies landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944.

As the Allies fought inland the last year of the war, over two German soldiers out of every three were still on the Soviet front. In a replay of their 1944 offensive to take the pressure off the West’s Normandy beachhead, the Soviets launched an all-out attack on January 11, 1945, to take the pressure off the West’s Battle of the Bulge. The German counterattack collapsed five days later as they rushed troops to the Eastern front to stem that Soviet offensive. By the end of March, six weeks before the German surrender, there were seven German soldiers on the Eastern front for every one in the West and the Soviets would still reach Berlin first.20

World War II’s Huge Costs for the Soviet Federation

But a huge price was paid for that victory. The Soviets destroyed industries, railroads, and bridges as they were pushed east and the Germans destroyed what basic infrastructure the Soviets missed (oil wells, coal mines, dams, et al.) as they were forced back West. The Germans burned the cities and villages to the ground and hauled 7-million horses, 17-million cattle, 20-million hogs, 27-million sheep and goats and 110-million poultry away to feed Germany.21

That the Soviet Union was scorched earth, there can be no doubt. The destruction was there for all to see and 25-million Soviets were eating sunflower seeds and living in holes in the ground. By comparison, the United States had only 12.3-million men and women under arms, lost 405,399, its homeland was untouched, and its industrial capacity had increased fifty percent.22

The creation of beliefs to control people is never-ending. The first figure for total Soviet citizens killed of 20.6-million was quickly upgraded to 27-million. But Stalin’s response to Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, states the true losses at 7-million.

World War II was over and the Soviet Union was again reduced to less than 20% of the industrial capacity of the U.S. More important, social infrastructure is much more expensive to build than industrial capacity, and the Soviets had to remove all the rubble first.

In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State General George C. Marshall made a trip across Western Europe and Eastern Europe all the way to Moscow. Western Europe, damaged possibly 20% as much as Eastern Europe and Russia, was prostrate under capitalism’s laissez-faire principles while the shattered Eastern Europeans and even more badly damaged Soviets with their community support structures were rapidly rebuilding. Marshall rushed back to Washington to report that capitalism’s security interests were seriously at stake. His comments mirrored the concerns of all managers-of-state:

“All the way back to Washington,” [fellow diplomat] Bohlen wrote, “Marshall talked of the importance of finding some initiative to prevent the complete breakdown of Western Europe.”… [In a speech to the nation, Marshall gave a bleak report.] We cannot ignore the factor of time. The recovery of Europe has been far slower than had been anticipated. Disintegrating forces are becoming evident. The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate. So I believe that action cannot [a]wait compromise through exhaustion. New issues arise daily. Whatever action is possible to meet these pressing problems must be taken without delay.23

Those managers-of-state placed the Marshall Plan into effect in 1948 and, under those Friedrich List protection principles, Europe was rebuilt in about five years. The race for industrial and technological supremacy that had triggered the recent world war and many other wars was on again. The containment of the Soviet federation and the simultaneous suppression of the world’s break for economic freedom was going to require an enormous amount of expensive arms and, as addressed above, the Korean War and the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer created the “framework of orientation”—the belief the West was under imminent threat of attack from the East, a strategy-of-tension—under which the increasingly tense citizens of the West would support the expensive arms race and violence that would be required.

There is nothing in capitalism’s philosophy to give anything to anyone. Each person and each country are to succeed on their own in competition with all others and the fittest accumulate the wealth. The West has long been boasting that their welfare capitalism is superior to the Soviet federation’s communism. Not only was that not true, they fail to mention that welfare capitalism only exists because the West needed a philosophy to counter the obvious superiority of a cooperative/sharing philosophy over that of raw capitalism’s winner take all.

Thus the unwritten contract in the West between labor and capital that organized labor would be well paid to fight capitalism’s battle. Without the threat from the East, labor in the West would not have been given the high wages which provided the quality life they came to believe was normal and their right. As demonstrated by the steady loss in wages of American labor 1973 to 1998, as soon as capital was sure they would win this battle, they immediately started lowering labor’s share of the wealth produced. All labor throughout Europe and America are watching their earnings decline and structural adjustments throughout the world are forcing the same race-to-the-bottom logic of lowering the pay of labor that competition requires.

Fictional Missile Gaps were Strategies-of-Tension Building a “Framework of Orientation”

Professor George Kistiakowsky’s impeccable credentials as head of the explosives division for the Manhattan Project building the atomic bomb; professor of chemistry at Harvard University; and science advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson; had a rude awakening as he observed the workings of the “defense” planners from the inside.

I attended all the National Security Council meetings, by order of the President. I began to realize that policy was being formed in a way which really was quite questionable. It was being formed by people who didn’t really know the facts and didn’t have time to learn them because of bureaucratic preoccupation…. But it took time for all this to sink in. And then I began to see all of the lies, such as the so-called missile gap. I knew there was no missile gap, because our U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union could not find any missile deployment. This was 1958—after the U-2s began flying. We put a lot of effort into detecting possible deployment sites. And we could find only one, north of Moscow. This was really a test site. … Those first ICBMs were so huge that you couldn’t hide them.24

With full knowledge that the Soviets had no missiles pointed at anyone, the managers-of-state requested that the CIA crank up their Mighty Wurlitzer and propagandize American citizens that the Soviets had them targeted with 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

The truth of the arms race was that the West led the Soviets by 5-to-10 years in the development of every super weapon and that the devastated Soviets, who desperately both wanted and needed peace, were encircled with immense firepower by many of the very nations that had invaded them in 1918 in an attempt to overthrow their government and who still loudly proclaimed they were evil and should be destroyed.

The Soviet federation had paid a huge price and was owed an enormous debt for saving the world from fascism. The imperial-centers-of-capital repaid that debt by encircling the Soviets with steel, embargoing them from technology and trade, and vilifying those great and highly moral people throughout the world through the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer and those of other Western intelligence services. The basic principles of world trade had not changed. Any rising center of capital may take over scarce resources and markets—that is the base of wealth and power of established
imperial-centers-of-capital. Further proof of this analysis is the West’s military actually expanding since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Twelve years after that collapse, America alone was spending almost as much for arms as the entire rest of the world and the most powerful of those nations are allied with America as one imperial-center-of-capital. The combined military power of the allied, but not federated, centers-of-capital is truly immense and this 14th year after the Cold War ended (2005) military expenditures are rising rapidly as, under the flag of the War on Terrorism, the struggle for control of crucial resources and markets continues.

The Massive Resources of the Soviet Federation and the More Massive and Cheaper Resources of the West

Soviet successes under extremely harsh conditions were what was worrying Western managers-of-state. Covering one-sixth of the world’s land surface, the Soviet Union had massive natural resources. However, its citizens lived primarily in Europe while its major natural resources were in Asia 3,000 miles away, and much of that under frozen tundra. To mine and process those resources, entire cities had to be built in a cold and hostile climate. Shipping those raw materials to Soviet industries in their West and supplies from those industries to those new cities in their Eastern tundra required construction of expensive roads and railroads. Transportation is a major part of production costs, the Soviets estimated their costs of production at 1.8-times those in America, and Americans and other Western nations obtain much of their resource needs from their even cheaper periphery of empire.

We discussed Britain’s rich coal and iron ore deposits being only 15 miles apart and her cheap water transportation to anywhere in the world. Those largely unspoken-of advantages allowed Britain to produce more cheaply, sell more cheaply, and thus accumulate more capital and industrialize more quickly, than other nations. The West had the same advantage over the Soviet Union and that advantage over that region continues to this day. Not only were the natural resources of America closer to population centers and cheaper to mine and process, their roads, railroads, and factories were already in place.

And the West has advantages far beyond that. Paying equally-productive developing world labor 20% of the wages of developed world labor denies buying power to the periphery of empire. This leaves the only market for resources and products in the developed world which effectively gives the West title to the richest resources all over the world.

Not only was the harvesting of Soviet resources, and thus the production of Soviet wealth, far more labor-intensive than in the West, the Soviets provided those resources and industrial technology to the periphery of their sphere of influence (Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, et al.) at far below world prices (typically at 20 to 30 percent of world values). Thus the Soviets denied themselves a large share of the wealth produced by their own labors. With adequate resources within their borders, the Soviets were taxing their center to build their periphery.

As this is exactly the opposite of Western empires this tells us that the Soviet system was not an empire. It was instead a federation of diverse people who had broken free of the world control system and intent on building their society primarily utilizing their own resources.

Errors in Soviet Planning

Thirty percent of Soviet industrial capacity and an even greater share of Soviet infrastructure and social wealth were destroyed in WWII. As soon as Germany was defeated, the Soviets started rebuilding. By the 1980s Soviet industrial production was approaching that of the United States and pulled ahead in steel, oil, coal, and a few other industries. In only 70 years the Soviets had moved from the bottom among industrial nations to number two and they had accomplished this while fighting off the 4-year effort of 14 nations to overthrow her, under the massive losses of WWII, and while being forced to arm to offset the ring of steel being placed around her by the West. One can only wonder at the amenities of life the Soviet Union could have provided its citizens if it had been left in peace. (Of course the specific purpose of the massive destabilizations is to prevent those examples from emerging and the purpose of the massive propaganda worldwide is to prevent the world—both the masses and the intellectuals—from seeing the great gains possible within the impoverished world whenever economic freedom is attained.)

But a serious error was being made in Soviet planning. Some 77% of manufactured products were produced by only one-or-two huge factories for each consumer product.25 If technologies were equal, these huge factories could initially produce consumer products more cheaply than many competing companies, each with separate production, publicity, and distribution networks.

But they could not keep up with ongoing technological developments. Retooling factories is expensive. When there is no competition, managers will not retool a huge factory, while market capitalism—with its virtually hundreds of initial producers—will typically shake out to three competing producers of roughly equal economic strength, each with several factories. The others disappear from the scene. But those three or more remaining competing producers innovate, develop, retool, produce, distribute, train repair people, and receive feedback from all elements of society for further innovation and retooling, and the cycle keeps repeating itself. Thus, in a competitive society, factories become ever more efficient.

Soviet industry did not have that technological innovation and retooling cycle. Without feedback from society, innovating, retooling—and thus producing and distributing better products—the Soviet civilian economy became moribund.

Containing the Soviet Federation through forcing it to Waste its Industrial Production

There were far greater costs to the Soviet Union than their errors. The rubble of WWII had to be cleared away and homes, stores, and their complete economic infrastructure had to be rebuilt to the level of a modern nation. The Soviets had made the decision to sacrifice the present to build for the future.

But the arms race short-circuited those plans. We must remember British Prime Minister Churchill’s warning that Britain and Western Europe could not rearm quickly without facing poverty and starvation. Britain and Western Europe were damaged possibly only 20% as bad as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The result of offsetting the ring of steel being placed around the Soviet Union while simultaneously cleaning up the rubble, building homes (25-million were homeless), repairing the damaged infrastructure and then building new dams, highways, railroads, and industry was an economic nightmare.

“The estimate of a Soviet economist [is] that 51.4% of total Soviet industrial investment between 1950 and 1985 went into military production.” A large share of the rest—roughly 43%—was going into building and rebuilding basic infrastructure (roads, railroads, steel mills, et al.) and providing industry and resources to the embattled periphery (China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, et al.), and a minuscule 5% was left for producing consumer durables.26

Any serious study of economic growth rates will conclude that the Soviet socialist system accumulated capital and industrialized far faster than any capitalist country except those essentially given capital and technology after WWII so as to contain fast expanding socialism. Before they collapsed in 1990, the Soviets were able to raise their technology to about 1982-83 U.S. levels.27 But their expenditure of labor and resources toward rebuilding from the rubble of WWII, their building of expensive infrastructure, the necessity of turning their industry to producing arms to offset the West’s determination to destroy them, and their transfer of a share of their production to the periphery, as well as errors in Soviet planning, denied them the opportunity to apply that technology to consumer production. The mining of resources and land transportation in the arctic tundra thousands of miles away from their population centers were simply too expensive to overcome those hurdles.

Though it ended up a close race militarily and technologically as the Soviets fought for survival, the enormously expensive arms race imposed by the very wealthy and undamaged United States precluded the development of a Soviet consumer economy and eventually bankrupted the severely damaged and impoverished (and highly moral) Soviet Union just as the managers-of-state in the West planned.

Wasting the resources of the entire world building arms has been very profitable for corporate imperialists in a system that, as acknowledged by America’s President Eisenhower, in the final analysis is paid for by the world’s poor. Where building arms is highly profitable for capitalists, both in the actual production and in those arms being used to maintain control of others’ resources, processing their own resources into arms is always an enormous loss to a socialist economy attempting to live on its own resources. Through the multiplier factor, fully 30% of American jobs were attributable to arms expenditures. Thus the waste of the arms race was a wealth distribution mechanism for the West even as it greatly reduced real wealth throughout the world.

Destabilizing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

Peter Gowan, senior lecturer in European politics at the University of North London, describes the neo-mercantilist policy towards the East which eventually shattered the Soviet Bloc:

[I]n the closing decades of the Cold War, the Atlantic Alliance had combined a formidable economic blockade against Eastern Europe…. The West possessed two principal means of control. Through the IMF, it exerted political control over international finance and currency matters. Furthermore, it could restrict commercial access to Western markets through bilateral export policy, through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (Cocom) on high technology, and through import duties—largely imposed by the European Community (EC)—on ECE goods…. It is scarcely an exaggeration, therefore, to say that following the upheaval of 1989 the West had the capacity to shape events in ECE to an extent comparable to that enjoyed by the Soviet government in the region after 1945. In field after field the ability of governments to deliver to their people depended on the intervening decisions of the G7 [the 7, now 8, leading Western countries]. Employing this power, Western policy makers could shape the destiny of the region according to a very particular, and very political, agenda. The Western powers did not respond to the challenge of 1989 in a piecemeal fashion. Although the form and speed of the collapse took most policy makers by surprise, the G7 had, by the summer of 1989, established new machinery for handling the political transformation of Poland and Hungary and had worked out both the goals and the means of policy. Even before the region’s first noncommunist government … took power in Poland in September 1989, the G7 framework was in place…. Coercive diplomacy, not persuasion, became the tool by which the West established market economies in the East.28

Peter Gowan explains further how coercion was practiced by outside powers:

The EC, the G7 [now G8], and the IMF treated each country separately according to its domestic program, setting off a race among the governments of the region to achieve the closest relations with, and best terms from, the West…. The economic “liberalization” measures urged upon the new governments of ECE by Western agencies were bound to push these economies into serious recession, a situation only made worse by the disruption of regional economic links and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The result has been less a move to the market than a large-scale market destruction…. G7 experts were well aware that the drive for social system change would thoroughly destabilize ECE economies.29

The East was destabilized; the Soviet system did not just collapse. The above destabilizations were the policy decisions of America’s 1982 National Security Council Directive 54 (NSD-54) to destabilize all East European countries, except Yugoslavia, which throughout the Cold War was provided financial aid and some access to markets so as to wean it away from the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia prospered. They had a respectable standard of living, education and medical care were free, and each citizen was guaranteed a job and 30 days vacation with pay. This multi-ethnic melting pot was provided cheap transportation, cheap housing and inexpensive utilities. Such a wealthy socialist society could not be permitted.

Now it was Yugoslavia’s Turn to be Destabilized

The opening guns of financial warfare for the destabilization of the relatively prosperous Yugoslavia were the IMF’s 1980-84 demands for currency devaluation and an increase in the Yugoslavian Central Bank’s discount rate. That currency devaluation immediately increased the debt; the interest rate hike slowed the Yugoslav economy. The drop in living standards created by those structural adjustments led to economic and political turmoil.

Then the 1984 U.S. National Security Council Directive 133 (NSD-133) titled “United States Policy towards Yugoslavia” and labeled “SECRET SENSITIVE,” contained the marching orders for the final fragmentation of that nation: Further IMF-imposed structural adjustments denied the Yugoslav government the right to credit (money creation) from its own central bank, thus losing them the ability to fund crucial economic and social programs (industry and health care). Those structural adjustment policies included imposing a freeze on all transfer payments from the central governments to the outlying provinces.

The results were planned and predictable: A growth rate of 7.1% from 1966 to 1979 “plummeted to 2.8% in the 1980-87 period, plunging to zero in 1987-88 and to a minus 10.6% in 1990.” Another currency devaluation (30%) accelerated the 140% inflation to 937% in 1992 and 1,134% in 1993, with GDP dropping 50% in four years. Imported commodities flooded in to further disrupt domestic production and drain Yugoslavia’s hard currency reserves. It was calculated that, under those policies, 1.9-million workers—out of a total workforce of 2.7-million—were headed for unemployment.30

Simultaneous with the denial of Yugoslavia’s right to fund her outlying regions were offers to those provinces for funds and trade if they declared their independence. German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher was in almost daily contact with his Croatian counterpart, promoting independence. The 1990-91 U.S. “Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill” (an annual event funding destabilizations) demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav provinces with State Department approval of their conduct and outcome and, again, all aid to go to independent republics and none to the central government. A total embargo imposed in 1991 was still in effect in June 1999 during the final breakup of Yugoslavia. Independence meant funding and trade for the provinces while continued federation with Yugoslavia meant continued embargoes and no funds.

A country that had been peaceful and relatively prosperous since WWII, with 30% of the marriages interethnic, erupted into civil war and, with continued overt and covert support from Germany and America, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia were torn away from the Yugoslav federation. The Serbian populations of the seceding provinces, who had forgiven the Western Christians for the slaughter of one-third of the Serbian men during Hitler’s holocaust and formed the multiethnic nation of Yugoslavia after WWII, were again facing second-class citizenship.

Now it was Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Turn.

Western Christians allied with Muslims to give the Bosnia-Herzegovina secession the necessary majority voice. The November 1995 Dayton Accords, established under the threat of NATO intervention to suppress the ensuing struggle over who should govern, established a virtual colonial government which allowed the U.S. and the European Union to appoint a High Representative (HR) with full executive powers in civilian matters. A constitution for the Bosnian Federation was written at those peace talks by the U.S. State Department stipulating that the HR could overrule the government. That façade of democracy (the Parliamentary Assembly) simply rubber-stamped the decisions of the HR and his expatriate advisors. Those dictates (called “Accords”) actually stipulated that, “the first governor of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina is to be appointed by the IMF and ‘shall not be a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina or a neighboring state.’ ” The elected president of the Serbian segment of Bosnia—who objected to forcibly selling off banks, water, energy, telecommunications, transportation, and metal industries, at firesale prices—was forcibly removed by NATO.31 Of course, these dictates were all carried out under the flag of “democracy.”

Then it was Kosovo’s Turn

As Bosnia-Herzegovina was being digested by the NATO alliance, the foundation for the breaking away of Kosovo was being laid. Due to fear of secession, the autonomous status of Kosovo had been revoked by Yugoslavia as ethnic Albanians increased from 40% at the end of WWII to 80%. That political stalemate became violent when German and American intelligence armed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Before that arming and training of the KLA into a force of 30,000 by outside powers, the Kosovar rebellion had been a peaceful one similar to Gandhi’s peaceful rebellion in India 50 years earlier. Armed by German intelligence for years, the KLA surfaced in 1997 and started assassinating Serbian police officers and ethnic Albanian collaborators. Yugoslavia sent in the army to suppress that externally armed insurrection. In February 1998, and a sure sign that America’s CIA, Germany’s BND, and the Military Professional Resources (MPRI, retired U.S. generals under Pentagon contract) were still orchestrating this destabilization, the Croatian General, Agim Ceku—who had been in command of artillery in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia—took over command of the KLA.32

In a replay of the Dayton Accords, an assembly was convened in Rambouillet, France, to essentially dictate the carving off of Kosovo. The prepared accords allowed for 50,000 NATO troops overseeing that autonomous republic: NATO was to be granted the use of airports, roads, rail, and ports free of any charges, NATO troops were not only not to be subject to Yugoslav law they were to have supremacy over Yugoslav police and authorities, they were to be given the right to inspect any part of not just Kosovo but Serbia itself, and the Kosovo economy was to be structurally adjusted as per the Bosnian-Herzegovenan economy described above. NATO gave Yugoslavia only two choices: sign the accords (dictates) or be bombed. Virtually every serious diplomat of good conscience agreed that these were articles of surrender that no sovereign nation could sign. In short, those accords were little more than a disguised declaration of war. The world, of course, heard only the prepared press releases of an intransigent Yugoslavia as, with the support of the majority of their citizens who patriotically believed what they were told about Serbian atrocities, NATO proceeded to bomb the regional Orthodox Christians back to the 19th-Century.33

The destabilization of Yugoslavia is a classic on how propaganda works in what are called “democracies” with “freedom of the press.” Before the bombing, Yugoslavia had opposition radio stations, dissident publications, had several major political parties and each party had its own newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations. Milosevic had been elected three times, twice as president of Serbia and later as president of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav president had a cabinet to discuss and decide policy and an elected coalition parliament which included four major political parties, more than any other country in Europe and they ranged fully from the left political spectrum to the right, that approved all decisions, and this governing process had even been shown occasionally on Western TV.

During the Western orchestrated coup that overthrew Milosevic, armed units seized all major TV, Radio, and newspaper outlets. When the dust settled, there remained essentially only one media. Just as in the West, all papers published the same stories and all were written the same. Just as Americans can see the same news with the same slant on all TV channels, Serbs now found the same news with the same slant on all their TV channels. A nation which once had a wide choice of views suddenly had only one view, that of the West.

On news beamed into Yugoslavia and to the citizens of the West, Milosevic was labeled a dictator in almost every news report, while Croatian descendants of Hitler’s Ustaseg—who ethnically cleansed Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs during WWII (the Three-Thirds Doctrine: one-third of the Serbs to be deported, one-third forced to become Catholics, and one-third to be annihilated), who had just imposed a one-party press, and who had just ethnically cleansed several hundred thousand Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia—were simultaneously labeled democratic. While Western puppets purge their territory of ethnic minorities even as the West is accusing Serbia of these atrocities, that besieged nation is the home to 26 ethnic groups, 1-million are refugees ethnically cleansed from former provinces of Yugoslavia, including 350,000 Serbs and others who fled Kosovo after NATO’s takeover of that province.34

By 2005, there were so few Serbs left in Kosovo that it was essentially ethnically cleansed. The long and short of it is that a highly moral society giving full and equal rights to all was presented to the world as ethnic-cleansing dictators even as essentially fascist structures, covertly supported and coached by Western intelligence and Western military might, were ethnically cleansing the Serbs out of the birthplace of their culture.

There will be an occasional mild analysis of this propaganda process after the fact but, as every social system protects itself and its own, even those cautious reflections will not become part of assigned, well-read history. Thus it will remain largely unknown to most that the Kosovo rebellion was a civil war covertly organized and supported by the same governments militarily imposing the Rambouillet Accords. Some reality was expressed in a German documentary:

“On Feb. 8, the major German television network ARD broadcast a special on the war entitled “It Began with a Lie.” This showed that the charges of mass murder, genocide and organized “ethnic cleansing” made against Belgrade were inventions of the U.S., German and other governments.35

The Serbs knew the KLA had been armed and coached by U.S. and German intelligence to carve Kosovo off from Yugoslavia. They refused to sign the capitulation Rambouillet Accords, and—when the bombing began with the purpose of forcing Yugoslavians to sign away their sovereignty—was accused to have reacted by expelling the Albanian Kosovo population.h

The excuse for bombing Yugoslavia was the supposed (but fictional) ethnic cleansing and genocide of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo. The ethnic cleansing of Serbians which then took place as soon as that war was over went unreported in the American press. The “free” press should be called to account for not alerting the public to the fictions justifying that war and that it was really NATO members aggressing a peaceful society and that Yugoslavia was reacting just as any student of foreign policy would expect. They were not threatening anyone inside or outside their borders before the external orchestration of the KLA for a civil war (over 1,100 attacks on Serb police and Kosovar Albanian collaborationists, many fatal), and what struggles there were within their borders were reactions to this destabilization and forthcoming loss of a province Serbians consider the cradle of their civilization. Houses were destroyed as the KLA were rooted out from where they were firing on Serb soldiers but no ethnic cleansing occurred until after NATO took over Kosovo and then it was an ethnic cleansing of Serbs.

That will make no difference. Knowing the bombing was Western pressure that Serbs accept the loss of the heart of their culture, some of the atrocities required to demonize the Serbs occurred and these will be kept in the world news through war crimes trials even as the far greater war crimes of the aggressors (the total shattering of their country with the deaths of tens of thousands) disappears from all except the most deeply researched history.

Researchers should note that original propaganda figures of over 100 massacres with 100,000 to 500,000 Albanian men missing and thought to be slaughtered were reduced to a still sensationalized 10,000 expected to be found in mass graves when NATO first entered Kosovo. Inspection of the alleged 30 mass gravesites by an FBI team turned up 200 bodies and dropped the Kosovar externally orchestrated civil war body count to 2,108 killed by all participants—the Serbs, the KLA, local grudge settlements, and NATO bombs. Emilio Perez Pujol, the head of the Spanish Forensic team conducting the investigation, said not one mass grave was found.36

No mass graves in Kosovo and this rather low body count when an entire nation was being militarily fragmented by covertly funded and orchestrated opposition forces and under direct attack by those same foreign military forces as well as the 1-million refugees within Serbia from the destabilization and fragmentation of Yugoslavia testifies to a successful NATO propaganda blitz (that Mighty Wurlitzer again creating a “framework of orientation”) that was never addressed in depth by the media of record. When to the above disinformation we add the Pentagon wordsmiths’ claim of the destruction of one-third of the Serbian military (122 tanks, 454 artillery pieces, and 222 armored personnel carriers) and the postwar investigation by General Wesley Clark, the commander of that war, that only 14 tanks, 20 artillery pieces, and 18 armored personnel carriers” were destroyed, the outline of a planned propaganda campaign becomes clear.37

Quite simply, the American/NATO assault on Serbia/Kosovo destroyed about 50 of Serbia’s major weapons of war and very few soldiers while killing more civilians than Serbia and creating massive destruction of the obvious real target, Serbia’s economic infrastructure. Under the ultimate oxymoron of a “humanitarian war,” which depicted the West as saviors as they bombed 15 essentially defenseless cities around the clock for 78 days, the successfully destroyed real targets of precision bombing were: heating plants for entire cities, 344 schools, 33 clinics and hospitals, power plants, food processing plants, pharmaceutical plants, bus and train depots, electrical grids, bridges, factories, power stations, trains, airports, water supply systems, warehouses, oil refineries, fuel storage, chemical factories, museums, and TV and radio stations. Among the commercial buildings destroyed were twin tower skyscrapers eerily reminiscent of the World Trade Center destroyed in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on America.

After the destruction of Yugoslavia was carried out under the false flag of oppression and genocide in Kosovo, 350,000 Serbs, Gypsies, Slavic Muslims, Croations, Jews, Turks and anti-fascist Ethnic Albanians were driven out of Kosovo. After defeating the defending Serbian army, the Kosovo occupation army claims not to have been able to prevent this ethnic cleansing by the very forces they were financing, arming, and coaching.

Powerbrokers within NATO are concerned with Yugoslavia only as a small battle within one or more of the four major, ongoing, worldwide struggles:

(1) The splitting of the Roman Empire into Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity starting in the 4th-Century. This created the Eastern Orthodox Christian East and Christian West that are fighting over territory on the boundaries between those religions yet today, and it is obvious that, without the support of NATO nations, Yugoslavia’s Western Christians would not have had the political strength to shatter that once peaceful federation.

(2) The 1,300-year struggle between both Eastern and Western Christians and Muslims, a battle between the Muslim East and the same Christian West. The current alliance of the West with Balkan Muslims is only a temporary strategic decision of managers-of-state.

(3) The 70-year battle between communism and capitalism, the Cold War. Most, but not all, communists were Eastern Orthodox and most, but not all, capitalists were Western Christian. This is the historic in-step march of religion and governments as empires expand and contract.

(4) And then, the centuries of battles over who will control world trade and thus who will claim title to wealth. This battle over the world’s wealth is between the fragmented periphery of empire and the same allied, coordinated, and powerful West.

That last struggle, managers-of-state utilizing religious and political loyalties to control the wealth-producing-process, is the one that counts. At any one moment, what is motivating any one person’s vision of these historic events depends upon that person’s position and loyalties within those four struggles. For those deeply committed to religion, or moderately religious and not interested in politics, which covers most of the masses, religious loyalties will determine their opinions. Those committed politically will be on one side or the other of the battle between capitalism and any form of cooperative society. If one is a corporate strategist, a Manager-of-State, or aware that one’s livelihood is deeply affected—either positively or negatively—by the inequalities of trade, then some subdivision of the battle over world trade will be primary in their considerations.

President Clinton’s Energy Secretary Bill Richardson spelled out America’s Balkan policy a few months prior to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia:

This is about America’s energy security.… It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west…. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.38

The policies-of-state here are obvious, isolating Russia politically, reducing its control over the oil and gas deposits in the Caspian basin, and piping those hydrocarbons to Europe. Germany reached an agreement with Croatia (announced in the UN) for a pipeline through its territory and—even as the bombs were falling on Yugoslavia—officials of Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova were in Washington, DC, signing a regional alliance (GUUAM) that included discussions of oil pipeline export routes to the West. There was also high interest in the rich minerals of Kosovo (the Trepca mining/manufacturing complex, which was too valuable to bomb and now arbitrarily turned over to Albanian Kosovars), the suspected oil and gas deposits within the Dinarides Thrust, and other mineral wealth of Yugoslavia (coal, bauxite) planned for diversion to the west, which will deprive Eastern Orthodox Christians of that wealth, will weaken that tiny enclave of socialism while simultaneously increasing the wealth of Western Europe.39

The foundation of all property rights is military power. While the Trepca mines rich in gold, lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and coal were considered the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans (Soros tried to gain title to them), note that the world’s great oil bearing sands go from the Middle East, through the Caspian Basin, and end at Romania. The straightest route to Europe for that oil is through Yugoslavia. Then note that by 2005 Russia was the world’s greatest exporter of oil. As the standard of living of Russians dropped possibly 50 percent, the resource wealth of the former Soviet federation is pouring into the victorious West. Control of regions and populations so as to control resources and the wealth-producing-process was what the battle was all about all along.

Though the human cost is greater today, the destruction of the economic infrastructure of Yugoslavia and demonstration in Iraq of the ability to decapitate any leadership and destroy an entire army from a safe distance is a replay of the raiding parties of the cities in the Middle Ages controlling the countryside to maintain its dependency upon the city.

That empires manufacture excuses to gain the support of the people to destroy a potential rival is documented history.40 One need only analyze how far worse human slaughters failed to affect strategic decisions to convince one that the death of 2,108 Kosovars (both Albanian and Serb Kosovars and killed by the Serb military, the Kosovo Liberation Army, and by Western bombs) in Kosovo’s NATO-designed and supported civil war was not the reason for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. (Note how that statement answers its own question.) Over 1-million children and weaker old people have died in Iraq due to American-led sanctions and a few hundred thousand in the two American-led Gulf Wars.41 One-third of the East Timorese (200,000) have died in the Indonesian suppression of their independence (utilizing American-supplied weapons). Estimated number killed in five years of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, 500.000. Fifty thousand have perished in the 20-year conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea (a province of Ethiopia, the independence of which was covertly supported by America during the Cold War). Two million have perished in the 16-year struggle in neighboring Sudan. The estimated number killed in Russia’s ongoing Chechnya suppression, 80,000. And thousands were killed when Croatia —with the backing of the United States and Germany—“ethnically-cleansed” her territory of over 500,000 Serbs when breaking from Yugoslavia.42

Note how, after the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs are surrounded by the Western Christian nations of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and now (2005) the Ukraine, all of which are intended to be brought within NATO. One must remember that the West had Yugoslavia embargoed throughout the decade of the 1990s as she was being destabilized and the Serbs simply refused to collapse. Until its destabilization, and despite the embargo, Yugoslavia was quite prosperous relative to the surrounding nations before the total shattering of her industry by NATO bombs and her subsequent loss of access to resources. That successful federation could not be left to stand

Just as Cuba is still under economic and financial assault to prevent the world from observing the higher standard of living obtained by her citizens when free of domination by Western capital, Eastern Europe could not be totally restructured along Western political and economic lines so long as Yugoslavia remained intact with her citizens well cared for and her industry underselling Western products throughout Eastern Europe. Nor could NATO permit an opposing ideology with an intact military west of the planned new line of defense, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. It is for this reason that the Serbian economic infrastructure was pulverized by NATO bombs and missiles. Once the richest, Serbia is now expected to become one of the poorest nations in Eastern Europe, her citizens cannot be properly cared for, she cannot arise as an example for other dependent countries for generations, and she cannot afford to maintain a powerful military.

If Western capital dominates the economies and controls the governments of the fragmented former Yugoslavia, if oil pipelines from the Caspian oil basin (according to the U.S. Energy Information Association, possibly nine-times more oil reserves than in the U.S.) and the Middle East are built across Turkey and the former Yugoslavia to reach Europe, if Montenegro also breaks away, if the natural resources of the Balkans comfort Western consumers, and if that once relatively prosperous region becomes a market for Western industries, we will be observing the success of the Grand Strategy of the breakup and impoverishment of Yugoslavia by international capital.

As products and services produced under the management of labor and direct financing of industry by the central bank could be sold or contracted much cheaper than Western products (there was not the massive unearned monopoly profits or the highly wasteful management superstructure as in a subtly-monopolized capitalist economy), without the fragmentation and embargo of Yugoslavia it is the Yugoslavs who would have dominated those markets. It is they who would have become wealthy, and, the most dangerous of all, the rest of Eastern Europe had a similar industry/labor history, they and the entire world would have observed the Yugoslav success under their alternative form of government and labor/management relations, and many would establish a similar socialist market economy. (Totally ignored in the Western press is that the standard of living of virtually all of Eastern Europe in 2005 is far below that before their re-absorption by the West, most way below, and only a massive reallocation of world resources and markets to that region can change that. See the analysis of East Germany below)

Thus, in final analysis, the managers-of-state in the West understood well that protection of the markets of Eastern Europe for Western industry and emerging subtle monopoly Eastern European industry, and the very survival of Western neo-liberal economic philosophy required the destabilization of Yugoslavia, severe crippling of their industrial infrastructure, and that of any other nations that dared maintain their independence—Cuba for example.

A full accounting of the profits from those Eastern markets as well as the multiplier factor as the money from locally employed labor circulates within the economies of Western nations will show that, to the winners, the breakup of Yugoslavia was one of the most profitable combinations of economic, financial, covert, and overt warfare in history. It is nothing less than Germany’s 100-year dream of gaining control of Eastern and Central Europe to obtain their resources and markets for the 1000-year Reich. The only difference is that the Western imperial nations had given up on battling between themselves over the world’s resources, have allied together to maintain control of the wealth-producing process, and their East European Cousins are joining that Western alliance (in the middle stages of federation) hoping to get their share.

In September, 2000—the very month this author’s Economic Democracy came out with the above revelations—that American money was covertly financing elections in both Serbia and Montenegro became common knowledge and the U.S. Congress openly authorized $10-million to Serbs and Montenegrins economically and politically breaking ranks with their government and thus were prime prospects as puppets to run “imperial democracies” in that part of the world. This standard covert policy of the Cold War was secret and thus unknown to citizens of the Western imperial nations. But, where previously it was all covert, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with the exception of China and a few others, the U.S. has been both covertly and overtly financing elections of emerging nations throughout the world. (These struggles to control electoral processes by imperial nations are far more intense than we address here. Run an Internet search for “Ukraine, Belarus, elections,” keep refining those key words and keep broadening out to other parts of the world.)

The final destabilization of Yugoslavia provides a textbook example of what has been standard covert practice destabilizing functional democratic governments worldwide throughout the Cold War that were not accepting control from the imperial center:

(1) A ring of radio stations were established around Serbia beaming in propaganda (control of beliefs, thus control of elections, is standard practice worldwide);

(2) suitcases full of American and German cash supporting opposing newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, political parties, think-tanks, student groups, “human rights” organizations, and trade unions were passed out (control of beliefs, control of elections, standard worldwide);

(3) opposition forces were given access to satellite communications while Yugoslav loyalists were denied access (just a hint as to where future battles for control will center);i

(4) and in the final push mobs were armed, coached, and financed to take over the media. The Serbs no longer controlled any major media within their own country (again control of beliefs and thus control of elections, all to control resources and the wealth-producing-process.).

All who follow how overthrows of governments were accomplished all over the world by the imperial nations during the Cold War knew that the leaders of the mobs which burned the Yugoslav parliament and other centers of power of the Milosevic government were coached, financed, and even armed by German and American intelligence.j

In any of the nations allied against Yugoslavia, any opposition political group would be arrested if they were funded by outside powers trying to overthrow the government. Yet, even as they were being labeled as dictators, the Yugoslav government was not even arresting those that were openly funded by the very outside powers overthrowing them even though how this money was pouring in and funding the opposition was discussed over the Yugoslav national news.

Even as Western media parroted Western intelligence service wordsmiths as Yugoslavia being a “dictatorship,” Canadian observers reported the election as open as any election in Canada, with no police visible, and opposition literature widely distributed. When a nation is targeted for destabilization, or there is need to suppress a tendency for independence in countries already under control, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’ destabilization foundations (such as the Open Society Institute), and others fund opposition groups (such as the: Center for International Private Enterprise, Humanitarian Law Center, Center for Democracy Foundation, Belgrade Center for Human Rights, European Movement of Serbia, G-17 economists, Center for Anti-War Action and Media, think-tanks, student groups, and many others), all claiming to be private groups but they and many more are actually funded by the American Congress through the NED which provide the crucial service of funding puppet media and politicians.k This covert funding of opposition forces through NED and other means is standard practice worldwide. In short, Western powers were practicing total control of governments and media and military suppression of dissent, the very accusations of dictatorship they level at every country not safely under their imperial umbrella.

Before they had even taken office, Serbian opposition leaders met in Bulgaria with the IMF, the World Bank, and the leaders of NATO countries to finalize the fine points on the takeover of Yugoslavia. This included structural adjustment abandonment of protection of citizens imposed upon most nations on the periphery of empire and includes the takeover of their economy by the German mark and eventually the Euro. With the various former Yugoslav provinces using the German mark or the Euro as their currency (as all but Serbia now do including Croatia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Montenegro and others), Serbians can no longer create their own money and their funding of essential industries and services will be severely curbed.

Where the Western-imposed new leaders of Croatia, Slovenia, and other regions were direct descendents of Hitler’s Ustase death squads with every intention of making second class citizens of their Eastern Orthodox neighbors, the new leaders being installed in Serbia have no illusions as to the hard future the West will be imposing upon them. After all, poverty is many times higher in the collapsed East and the former Soviet Union than it was under Communism. Even the Ukraine, the breadbasket and industrial heartland of the East—which dutifully followed all the prescriptions of the IMF, the World Bank, and NATO—is prostrate and essentially begging the West for food. Of course, these leaders are aware that Western promoted structural adjustment prescriptions created that poverty but they are equally aware that they have been left with no other choices. As of 2005 this should change. Western supported leaders won the election and, as they border Belarus and Russia and great efforts will be made to ensure they stay in the Western camp, resources will be released to increase their living standards.

Key to any destabilization is the writing of history. Personal friends of Milosevic were being assassinated while his opposition leaders were untouched. These opposition leaders, even Ibrahim Rugova the Albanian secessionist leader, had their own media and were openly campaigning against the government. Yet Milosevic was being portrayed as a killer of his democratic opponents. The truth was that a lot of money was being spent to finance assassination of key members of the Yugoslav government and those positions were being taken over by the Western-backed opposition.

At his trial Milosevic had already brilliantly turned the testimony to prove it was NATO that was the war criminal. NATO’s prime witness, Rade Markovic former head of the Serbian secret service, took the stand. Prosecutor Jeffrey Nice was shocked when his prime witness described how in the Belgrade jail his torture had been overseen by two US/West European agents (Mihailovic and Petrovic) and he was finally offered a good life with a new identity if he would testify against Milosevic. Even realizing he was in mortal danger, Markovic testified that, far from being guilty of causing the exodus from Kosovo, Milosevic had ordered the flow of refugees to be stopped. As the prosecution desperately tried to stop their own witness, he went on to testify that Milosevic “came down hard on hate crimes and more than 200 such charges were filed against police and a like number against the army.”

Any testimony in which the prime witness had been tortured to testify for the prosecution should have shut down the trial and placed the witness under protection. Instead the testimony was ignored and Markovic was returned to the Belgrade prison. Where Markovic’s earth-shaking testimony at the trial of the century was totally ignored by the wire services, on September 6, 2002 some news about Markovic favorable to the prosecution was reported: “According to Markovic’s signed statement from a Belgrade jail Milosevic ordered him to remove bodies of civilians killed in Kosovo.”

Obviously their witness was again tortured and this time the prosecution was not going to take a chance on his live testimony. No legal body can justify returning a prisoner to torturers and an honest court would have thrown the case out of court as soon as such dictatorship tactics were exposed. But this is not an honest tribunal. It was established by NATO, paid for by NATO, and staffed with prosecutors and judges who knew what they were there for. They were there to write history as NATO wanted it written. As the designers of the destruction of Yugoslavia write their own history, Milosevic will be found guilty. America has the same plans ready for Saddam Hussein which, even though he was a U.S. ally for years, has at least some relevance to reality. It has no reality in Yugoslavia.

The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is instructive. It seems the policy was primarily to take no prisoners (openly stated on TV by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) and relatively few were taken. Those essentially executed rather than taken as prisoners are enemies of the countries financing the International Criminal Tribunal.l Although this is against the rules of both decency and war, one can be sure there will be no war crimes charges against those responsible.

The managers-of-state of the now allied imperial-centers-of-capital know well their power, use it ruthlessly, and leave weak countries no alternative. Once the powerful Soviet federation was destabilized, virtually every country in the world was at the mercy of the well organized, and allied, imperial-centers-of-capital. (This highlights the reality that only by allying together can the impoverished world, within whose borders are most the resources, gain the negotiating power to attain full freedom and equal rights.)

The guarantees of all Yugoslav workers for jobs, free health care and education, pensions, paid maternity leave and vacations, low-cost recreation, and cheap food and rent was replaced in the breakaway provinces with 20% unemployment and a lowered average standard of living. Analyzing the sharply lowered living standards of the dozen Eastern European countries religiously and culturally tied to the West and slated to be allies, provides a clue to the bleak future of countries not religiously and culturally tied to the West and not viewed as natural allies.m The very word “slave” is derived from what are now the Eastern Orthodox Slavic people of Eastern Europe (check a major dictionary).

The fate of the highly efficient VSZ steel complex in Slovakia provides another glimpse. With the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the collapse of all Eastern European countries, and the imposition of IMF/World Bank structural adjustments, the local markets for VSZ steel disappeared (markets in the West were protected from VSZ’s low priced, high quality, steel), the once-booming steel complex ran out of money, and under IMF/World Bank rules they could not be financed by the Slovakian central bank. This prostrate industrial jewel was picked up by America’s U.S. Steel for the bargain basement price of $450-million and now provides 25% of their steel making capacity. Slovak steel workers are paid roughly $2 an hour against U.S. Steel workers pay in America of $35 to $45 an hour.43 High quality Slovakian steel will be sold on the world steel market, those mills will operate at full capacity, any overcapacity will be alleviated through lowered production in America, West Europe, and Japan and the huge profits generated in the Slovakian mills will disappear into the accounting books of U.S. Steel. The labor of both Slovakia and America will take a loss and all gains will go to the owners of U.S. Steel. This same scenario will play out in other industries.

Like the underpaid developing world, Eastern Europe will gain only a little because their pay is too low to provide adequate buying power, labor in the developed world will eventually lose buying power as their jobs are taken by underpaid Eastern European workers, Japanese and other steel producers will have to lower steel and labor prices or lose market share. This will be the well-understood cyclical crisis of over production of capitalism compounded by the abandonment of economies once seen as crucial to protect against fast expanding socialism and further compounded by the melding of high-paid capitalist economies with low-paid former socialist economies. (Note: Eliminating monopolies through full and equal rights is what—as outlined in the later land, technology, and money chapters—permits economic increases equal to the invention of money, the printing press and electricity. Monopolization by the powerful has been the cause of poverty of the masses throughout history and is still the cause today. The continual preaching of the necessity and efficiencies of massive blocks of capital is only parroting of long standing protections of wealth and power.)

Economic statistics showing a steadily advancing world economy can only be through ignoring the shrinking of 40% of the world economy.44 The standard of living of all Eastern Europe and the collapsed Soviet federation is far lower than 20 years ago. The collapse of currencies, buying power, and industries in Mexico, Southeast Asia, parts of Latin America, and the former Soviet Union meant their citizens were impoverished as their resources and production of their labor were purchased by the imperial centers well below the previous norm. Low-priced oil contributes to maintaining healthy economies for the imperial centers. Thus a lowering of resource prices from the periphery of empire will, so long as the markets of the imperial center can be protected, be a boon to those economies even though the periphery may be devastated. (Watch for fast developing China and India and the recovery of Japan and the Asian Tigers to change that. If they, or any major share of them, ally with the developing world, containing that potential powerhouse will be the biggest threat imperial monopolists ever faced. It is this author’s firm opinion that this fast developing threat is why the imperial nations are now doing openly [under cover stories, the Yugoslav breakup, the Iraq occupation, ultimatums to other nations] the destabilizations and oppressions they had been doing covertly for 50 years.)

Protecting the markets of the imperial centers may be relatively easy in the short run as the periphery collapses but will be tough in the long run. Underpaid labor on the periphery will not be able to buy their own production while the products produced with that underpaid labor and lower-valued capital will be able to offer consumer products to the imperial center at a price lower than producers in the wealthy world. This will be tempered by capital of the imperial center purchasing much of the industrial capital of the periphery at bargain prices but, as outlined with the Slovakian VSZ steel mill above, this melding of cheap-cost industries with high-cost industries only means it takes a little longer for the cycle of lost buying power and collapsing values to work its way through the economy. And even that extended time span will collapse if stock market and real estate values in the imperial centers collapse and destroy buying power and consumer confidence. (Again, this outlines the enormous potential efficiencies possible if those monopolies are eliminated.)

Making a deal with the Corrupt of Russia

The majority of the Russian people wanted change, but only slowly and carefully. They were not so foolish as to throw away their livelihood and the natural wealth of their nation. But Russian powerbrokers were given the opportunity to immediately own the vast natural wealth of that nation. Fifty percent of Russia’s GDP came under the control of what became known as the “Russian Mafia.” These thieves sent the money out of Russia as fast as it came into their hands. Thousands of mansions were purchased with this money in Spain, France, Cyprus, Austria, and many other countries and purchasers of each of these homes had many times that value stashed in overseas bank accounts. Fidel Castro estimates 200-billion to $500-billion fled Russia45 while former President Gorbachev estimates $1-trillion.

When the Soviet borders crumbled, subversive funds flowed in (much of them from the National Endowment for Democracy, NED and George Soros, and other, destabilization foundations), political allies were organized, those heavily-funded politicians won enough control to pass the necessary laws, corrupt oligarchs gained title to valuable properties by various subterfuges, predatory capital came across the border to buy up resources at a fraction of its value, and massive consumer products produced in the West were sold to Russian citizens to soak up and return to the Western imperial-centers-of-capital even the small amount of money that was created within that defeated nation.

Western managers-of-state made the same alliance with powerbrokers of the defeated former Soviet Union as they had with corrupt leaders throughout the former colonial world. The wealth and power of those corrupt leaders were protected so long as the West had access to their nation’s resources at a fraction of its value and so long as there was access to their markets for the wealthy world’s manufactured goods. Economic shock therapy in the Russian sector of the former Soviet Union was an attempt to compress the 70-years of America’s age of the robber barons into 10 years.46 (As the Russians now understand all this and are making moves to regain control of their economy, the above is in the past tense. If they successfully restructure to Henry George economic principles, which some are trying to do, most the stolen wealth which, currently in the form of monopoly titles, will disappear. Russians will collectively again own their natural wealth. Understanding the simplicity of how the impoverished world can gain their freedom and full and equal rights through conditional titles to the world’s natural wealth outlines clearly why the imperial monopolists so violently and tenaciously protect their current exclusive title [monopoly] system.)

Unless Russia allies with the West for protection against the Muslims to her East, it is unlikely those aspirations of the West will hold as they are applied to Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. To build a wealthy economy those countries will eventually have to limit access to both their resource and consumer markets. When that happens, Western money will be withdrawn and those countries will have to rebuild without access to finance capital, technology, or markets. But the corrupt elite of some of the remaining 12 provinces of the shattered former Soviet Union will accept being paid off and a part of their resources, primarily oil and timber, will continue to flow to the West. The East will be weaker and the West will be stronger and this, of course, is what the battles are all about.n The math is quite simple: as per Chapter one, Western traders and the corrupt of those provinces share the difference between the market price in the West and the pennies per hour paid labor in those collapsed provinces to harvest, mine, and ship those resources. (This highlights the reasons for the covert efforts to influence the elections in virtually all those former provinces and other weak nations worldwide. The formula is as old as history, control the rulers, share the stolen wealth with those puppets, and siphon the greater share of the wealth to the imperial centers.)

On an evening news show, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was in charge of the U.S. economic team coaching the former Soviets in their shock-therapy economic collapse said, “the problem is they do not yet have enough free enterprise.” Having just cut economic arteries in Russia with abandon, this same economist, in a later statement, had deep concerns over the “fragility of the world economic system” and expressed fears about U.S. efforts to penetrate the Japanese market which he describes as “reckless.”

Simultaneously advocating opposite policies for the collapsed East as under which the booming West operates their economies indicates the economic health of the Russians was of no concern. Sachs was in charge of the Harvard Institute for International Development that oversaw their destabilization. We do not know if there is a connection between the CIA hiring economists during the middle and late 1980s and the Soviet collapse and we do not know if that institute was one established by the CIA as addressed above. But consider these points:

(1) The wholesale shutdown of Russian industry was done following the advice of that institute.

(2) These same economists would surely not offer the same advice to an allied nation, as the comment on opening Japan’s markets demonstrates.

(3) Any student of mercantilism would have recognized these suggestions would destroy Russia’s industry and commerce and create a dependency.

(4) Any economist could analyze that there was virtually nothing anywhere to replace the industry that was being defunded and shut down except imports from the West.

(5) And we know that imposing beliefs to protect an imperial nation’s “national interest” (the way Adam Smith free trade was imposed upon the world) is an oft-used tactic of managers-of-state of already developed nations.

So, how else can the guided collapse of the Russian economy be interpreted? Any nation which tried such a thoughtless plan would revert to developing world status with its wealth essentially confiscated by intact imperial-centers-of-capital. As would be expected, the Soviet collapse rapidly worsened as industries were shut down and massive amounts of minerals and oil were shipped West to run their booming economies. The Russians figured that out after it was too late and those advisors were expelled from Russia.47

When the Soviets collapsed in 1991 imports rose to an unsustainable officially-acknowledged 39% of Russian consumer products as imported in 1996 and climbed to an official 50% (and an estimated 60%) by 1998 with no compensating manufactured exports.

Documentaries showing both impoverished Russian soldiers begging for food and other soldiers unloading cases of food with American labels on them unwittingly expose the cause of Russia’s impoverishment. The second most powerful country in the world, totally self sufficient—except for bananas, coffee and coconuts—was quickly impoverished through massive consumer imports. A country’s economic multiplier is its economic health and Russia’s economic multiplier collapsed when its operating currency was spent on importing 50% of its consumer needs. There simply was too little money left in Russia to run their economy.

Meanwhile, 30% of America’s consumer products are imported against large compensating manufactured exports, and still many economists, including the “Harvard boys” mentioned above, are concerned. Couple that impoverishing 50-to-60% consumer product import statistic with the fact that Russia has a $35-billion per year trade surplus while its industrial production had fallen 80% and capital investment nearly 90%, this touted Russian success was really an enormous success for the West’s Grand Strategy for destabilization of its feared enemy. These statistics tell us that Russia’s massive natural resources are being turned to the West to produce consumer needs for Western citizens and a small share of those manufactured products are returned to Russia to pay for those resources.48 Massive natural resources exported to pay for a small amount of manufactured wealth—this is an exact replay of centuries ago when raiders from the cities of Europe controlled the resources of the countryside, when the science of laying claim to others’ wealth through inequalities of trade began (Chapter two).

The immense sums then loaned to Russia and the former provinces of the defeated Soviet federation can be repaid only through massive sales of resources and fire-sale prices dictate many years of a depressed economy for those beleaguered souls.

Before their collapse, 1-Ruble equaled $1 in value and would buy more than $1 would within the Soviet Union. At that time, 1-ruble would buy breakfast, lunch, and dinner with change left over. After the collapse, it required 6,000 rubles to buy $1. The Russians traded those old rubles for new ones at the rate of 1,000-to-1 which brought the exchange rate down to six of the new rubles for $1. Then the value of that new ruble fell by two-thirds. Most Russian savings were wiped out in the first currency collapse and the second collapse took two-thirds of what was left.49 One of the old rubles now would not buy a cup of tea.

A healthy economy requires faith in a nation’s currency. Without trust in a nation’s banks, the money will flee which is exactly what it did in Russia. Worse yet, once a population has lost their money they thought safely stored in the bank, trust in a nation’s banking system cannot be restored for at least 1-to-2 generations. Loss in faith in banks means efficient capitalism cannot be established in Russia for a very long time. This is the outline of a very successful periphery destabilization policy for imperial-centers-of-capital.

This has all the marks of a planned destabilization. Jeffrey Sachs knew that Russian citizens had massive savings in the bank. In any other society this would be considered a big plus. But Sachs referred to it as that “pesky overhang.” Those private funds would have been a natural to purchase shares in Russian Industry. But the goal was to transfer that social wealth to Russian oligarchs; the rights and well-being of the masses were to be ignored. To eliminate that “pesky overhang” it was necessary to collapse Soviet industries and flood the markets with imported products. That, and the resulting inflation addressed above, stripped Russian citizens of their “pesky” savings.50

The First Destabilization of Afghanistan was aimed at the Soviet Federation

The CIA’s largest covert operation was 1985 National Security Council Directive 166 ordering the destabilization of Afghanistan. However, that directive was only a massive expansion of what the CIA had already been doing since 1980 under a finding signed by President Carter on July 3, 1979, five months before the Soviet forces were invited into Afghanistan to suppress that destabilization. The CIA, working behind the scenes through Pakistani intelligence, provided massive arms (eventually reaching 65,000 tons a year) and training to Afghanistan’s Mujahideen and 40,000 Muslim zealots recruited from over 40 countries. All support seemed to be coming from Pakistan and most Muslims would have been unaware that their terrorist operation against Afghanistan and the Soviet Union was a CIA designed, funded, and coordinated operation.

Afghanistan was not the primary target. The goal was to destabilize the six Eastern Muslim provinces of the Soviet federation both by smuggling in subversive propaganda (fraudulent books on Soviet atrocities against Muslim people) and sabotage teams (focused on assassinating Soviet officers and destroying factories and supply depots). The Mujahideen rebels were based safely in Pakistan from which as many as 11 teams at a time would infiltrate across the borders to attack airports, railroads, fuel depots, electricity pylons, bridges and roads.

Satellite reconnaissance guided the Afghan resistance to Soviet targets and they were equipped with hand held stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships and other aircraft. A stinger missile electronic simulator was brought to Pakistan to train the Mujahideen. Soviet battle plans were intercepted by spy satellites and this information relayed to the resistance which were supplied with secure communications technology. Massive amounts of propaganda books were distributed to the population.

It worked. The progressive government of Afghanistan, and the Soviet forces supporting them at the request of the freely elected government, were defeated and Muslim “freedom fighters” went on to destabilize those Eastern Soviet provinces. Today’s civil war in Russia’s Muslim Chechnya is a residual of that CIA master plan. Those destabilizations were directly coached and financed by Western intelligence services.o

In 1998, after the successful destabilization of Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor at the time, admitted that covert U.S. intervention began long before the USSR sent in the requested troops. “‘That secret operation [National Security Council Directive 166] was an excellent idea,” he explained. “The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.”51

Take note of what was “an excellent idea”: It was the peaceful, rapid successes of Afghanistan that were a problem for imperial America. To subvert those successes, a country rapidly developing and moving towards modernization was politically and economically shattered, 2-million Afghanistani (out of a population of 15-million) were killed, millions more became refugees. One of the many forces financed and armed by the CIA to suppress the progress of that impoverished nation were the Taliban.

Activist Muslims worldwide, some of America’s most implacable enemies trained in Afghanistan by the CIA, used their CIA terrorist training to blow up American embassies worldwide. They then reached right into the heart of America to hijack planes and fly them into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon—killing 260 passengers and almost 3,000 on the ground for one of the greatest terrorist acts against the West.p However, that act pales alongside the acts of wholesale terror required by the West to suppress the periphery of empire’s breaks for freedom.

The destabilization of Afghanistan was only one of many covert actions undertaken with the primary goal of destabilizing the Soviet Union. If outside powers would stay out of them, the political conflicts of most countries would be settled peacefully and quickly. But when powerful outside powers offer to finance and arm radical groups to take over and govern, there are leaders in every society willing to take that offer. These impoverished people are given massive funds to fight proxy battles. Even the inexperienced can quickly make a value judgment that they are currently in poverty with little opportunity for a quality life and that, through the patronage of the world’s greatest power, they may end up as their nation’s leaders and become personally rich and powerful under the largesse of the wealthy world. What would happen in America or Europe if outside forces supported political grouping, with immense funds and arms to sabotage and destabilize those countries?

The website www.emperors-clothes.com has chosen the destabilization of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan as the focus of their research and they cite solid sources describing the same Muslim terrorists America trained in Afghanistan were later destabilizing Kosovo and Macedonia under the funding and guidance of American and German intelligence services. Later these same intelligence services (MPRI and other supposed private armies under the supervision of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, SOCOM.q) were organizing the Ethnic Albanian insurgency in Macedonia, utilizing some of these same Western trained Muslim extremists. The escort to safety of surrounded and trapped Ethnic Albanian insurgents by American troops provides strong support for these reports. For those sources in the media of record the reader will have to do an Internet search, especially that website, and check future quality books.52

The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the government was soon overthrown, and those progressive leaders attempting to build a modern Afghanistan were promptly hanged. All this was made palatable to the world by intelligence agency wordsmiths (that Mighty Wurlitzer again) use of terrorist adjectives (butchers) to describe the progressive leaders they had overthrown and assassinated.

The CIA and all managers-of-state knew better. CIA study-books available in most libraries described this government as freeing women and peasants, establishing clinics and schools with massive literacy programs, returning the land to those who farmed it, canceling the mortgage debts of small farmers, and canceling usurious debts. Sale of brides was prohibited and women were able to choose their own husbands. In fact, Afghanistan was then one of the leading nations in the world for providing women’s rights. More women were in universities than men.

Because one imperial-center-of-capital had targeted another powerful emerging-center-of-capital, Afghanistan went from one of the fastest developing nations in the world with full rights extended to all citizens to one of the most repressive in the world where a woman did not dare show her uncovered face in public, could not go to school, and could not hold a job. Take note of how the label “butchers” were placed upon what was one of the most progressive governments in the Muslim world. Research very deep before accepting one of the labels placed on people and nations by any nation’s Mighty Wurlitzer. The feudal structure of much of the Muslim world today is specifically because Western imperial-centers-of-capital reestablished that feudal structure when they collapsed the Ottoman Empire and overthrew or contained every democratic government that emerged. (This makes a mockery of the current stated objective of the Iraq occupation being to bring democracy to the Middle East.)

As Afghanistan is of strategic importance for the allied imperial-centers-of-capital to control the oil and other resources in the former Eastern Soviet republics and the Middle East (check the maps), we were told that immense funds would be spent to rebuild that shattered nation and incorporate it into world trade and the wealth-producing-process. True to form, this is not happening. Money for destabilization is plentiful while money for rebuilding is scarce to unavailable. The Middle East policy may have been intended as a replay of the industrialization of Japan and the Asian tigers to stop fast expanding socialism 50 years ago but the world understands these hidden strategies well enough to deflect such blatant control.

Exactly what the deepest secrets of the current War on Terrorism are we cannot be sure. But this we do know: Terrorists had already attacked American embassies and infrastructure overseas and that they were going to attack targets within mainland America was a known. After all, such terrorist efforts generate a lot of phone traffic and ECHELON, America’s electronic intelligence gathering service, intercepts and analyzes (through keywords picked out by powerful computers) virtually every message in the world that is sent through space and much of what is sent by ground. Clearly dangerous messages lead to detailed analysis of all traffic to and from those phone numbers. Over time, almost all terrorist cells and a rough outline of their plans become known.

The current prime target of the War on Terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, worked with the CIA and Pakistani Intelligence in establishing terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and training terrorists. So long as he and Al-Qaeda members were terrorizing capitalism’s competitors as we were financing and training them to do, they were classed as “freedom fighters.” As soon as they turned their training to blowing up American political and economic emblems, they became terrorists. Terrorists, of course, are what they were all along. Western media simply ignored the destruction of political and economic infrastructure of ideological competitors.

We do know that every empire creates enemies to justify expansionist and suppressionist policies. We know that excuses for war are created so as to gain the political backing of a nation’s citizens and these excuses include permitting attacks on, and deaths of, citizens. History is rife with examples and America has its destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana which rallied citizens for the Spanish American War and Pearl Harbor which rallied them for WWII.

So much terrorism of others by the imperial centers has been neglected by the media and there has been so much distortion of reality by the greatest propaganda system in history that figuring out what is real is very slippery. We do know Osama Bin Laden praised the terrorist attacks on America. But so did Western leaders praise their terrorist attacks on the empire’s competitors. We do know that Al-Qaeda is dedicated to the destruction of America. But America trained them to terrorize and destabilize both Afghanistan and the Soviet federation and millions were killed in the process as opposed to the few thousand killed so far as these terrorists turned on their trainers and benefactors.

More that we know is that the West feels they must control the vast oil fields around the Caspian Sea, Afghanistan is one of the keys to that control, and that control is now in place. Besides planned oil pipelines being now more secure, virtually all the former Eastern provinces of the Soviet Union have joined NATO’s Orwellian-named Partnership for Peace (PfP) military bloc. Those former Soviet provinces will receive arms from, and be doing training maneuvers with, NATO troops.

Major wars have been fought over far fewer resources. Sincere researchers should look close at the War on Terrorism being a cover for control of those largely untouched resources. But they will have to look deep, this will not be the analysis recorded in history. Instead of the destabilization of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, history will record only a collapse of the Soviet Union and a War on Terrorism. For example: Running a Google/Nexus-Lexus Internet search using the keywords “Defense Planning Guide, Cheney, Wolfowitz, 1992” will alert one that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was planned 11 years earlier.

We discuss what is a known only to point out that there is much more to the story of the terrorist attack on America than Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. These terrorists must be neutralized but so must the massive violence, suppressions and oppressions of the West we discuss be abandoned.

The one aspect of this history that stands out is how these American trained terrorists were freedom fighters when terrorizing and destabilizing America’s competitors and terrorists when they turned on America.

The Decision to restructure to a Market Economy was made by Soviet Intellectuals

Soviet intellectuals studied both their economy and that of the West closely and made a conscious decision for change. Once the decision to change to a market economy was made, these same intellectuals had little to say about the actual restructuring:

When I [Fred Weir] came here seven years ago at the outset of perestroika, there was very little belief in socialism among the generation dubbed the golden children. These sons and daughters of the Communist party elite had received excellent educations, had the best that the society could give them, and only aspired to live like their Western counterparts. Many had high positions in the Communist Party, but were absolutely exuberant Westernizes, pro-capitalists, and from very early in the perestroika period, this was their agenda…. People who thought they were going to be the governing strata in a new society are [now] losing their jobs, being impoverished and becoming bitter. The intellectuals, for instance—whose themes during the Cold War were intellectual freedom, human rights, and so on—had a very idealized view of Western capitalism. They have been among the groups to suffer the most from the early stages of marketization as their huge network of institutes and universities are defunded.53

Those golden children of the communist elite are undoubtedly quite silent as they gaze at their once proud country lying prostrate at the feet of imperial capital. The population of Russia has been falling at the astounding rate of 800,000 a year, birth rates have plummeted to the lowest in the world, and only 1-in-4 children are born healthy. There are dramatic increases in the number of children born with physical and mental impairment, disease is rampant, and the average lifespan of Russian men has fallen from 65 years to 58, below that of Ghana.54

Sale of the Century by Chrystia Freeland is a highly recommended masterly study on the collapse of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.55 However, as a correspondent for the Financial Times when doing her research, the author focuses only on finance and politics and ignores other crucial factors. Ignored were: basic economics, Russia’s highly motivated labor ready to make the transition to capitalism as addressed above by Fred Weir, the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding and management of Yeltsin’s election, the American election specialists orchestrating of that election,r the Harvard Institute for International Development’s advising Russia’s “young reformers” throughout that collapse, and how the massive imports of consumer products both collapsed the economic multiplier and sucked the wealth out of Russia.

Without the economic multiplier as money from wages circulates, a country essentially has no economy. Yet, while intending to document the full history of the attempt to restructure the Russian economy, the author fails to notice that the “young reformers” paid no attention to primary production in Russia. These neophytes were so immersed in classical Western philosophy that they thought all there was to establishing capitalism was to create rich capitalists by giving title of valuable resource industries and banks to a few “oligarchs,” who, without a doubt, pulled off one of the greatest thefts of social wealth in history.

In the West, preventing the rise to political power of labor is a primary consideration. Thus the highly motivated “golden children” (the latest generation of leaders) who were ready to restructure Russia’s economy were never given the opportunity. Instead, the neophyte agents of capitalism (the “Young Reformers”) were intent on the obviously impossible job of telescoping the 70 years of the age of American robber barons into less than 10 years. The “golden children” running Russia’s economy wanted to restructure to capitalism and would have understood how to do so. But labor in charge of any part of an economy is anathema to theorists of Western philosophy. So the only people offered a serious opportunity to buy Russia’s productive industries for a fraction of its true value were the new “oligarchs” with no experience in running any part of the Russian economy. Without any background on running industries or much of anything else, these oligarchs were expected to become the leading capitalists of Russia.

No country has ever developed under the principles imposed upon post Soviet Russia. In fact, economic protections for the developed world are all in place and functioning and no wealthy nation would consider subjecting their economies to such harsh economic medicine as was imposed on Russia. To double, triple, and quadruple prices while shutting down industry right and left and destroying consumer savings would be taught as a recipe for disaster in any economics class.

The easiest way to understand the failure of the restructuring of the Russian economy is by outlining a sensible restructuring plan:

(1) The massive savings of Russian citizens should have been protected;

(2) Industry and media shares should have been distributed to all citizens;s

(3) modern consumer product industries should have been built, the bonds to be repaid from profits (the workers being owners would help insure those profits);

(4) until those industries were established and the economy competitive, import restrictions should have stayed in force;

(5) as fast as those modern industries came on stream, Russia’s obsolete huge factories would have reduced production and shut down in stages;

(6) an inescapable society monthly collection of landrent, as per Chapter 24, should have been placed into law, including royalties on natural resources such as oil, minerals, timber, and communications spectrums;

(7) citizens should have received title to their homes through paying landrent taxes in monthly payments (they had massive savings with which to do that);

(8) farmers, businesses and industry should also have been given title to their land with the legal responsibility of paying landrent to society;

(9) locally owned banks (better yet credit unions) should have been put in place to fund consumers, farmers, and producers;

(10) and, with those massive consumer savings and financing available, retailers would spring up automatically and this would be the ideal moment to establish an efficient distribution system as per Chapters 27 and 28.

There are many other factors to consider but the above would have been the foundation of a workable restructure plan. Subtle monopolization of technology is the biggest barrier. Virtually any successful restructure plan must provide access to technology, resources and markets and Russia’s massive resources could have been bartered for that technology as opposed to its current hemorrhaging to the West. Patent licensing could have been imposed by law. This is accepted as legal in international law, was being tested in court with AIDS drugs in South Africa, and the major drug companies capitulated rather than go to trial.

The reason these suggestions were not followed is obvious, labor would have ended up with enormous wealth and political power. If they had been given the chance, those egalitarian trained and idealistic “golden children” could have established democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism as opposed to today’s dependency on the periphery of imperial-centers-of-capital. If that had happened, the secret that no power-structure in the imperial centers had yet given their citizens full rights would have been exposed.

Could the Soviet Union have avoided the Cold War?

From the Soviet side it certainly looked as if war was coming. From 1945, and up to at least 1956 when the U-2 spy flights started, thousands of U.S. “ferret” spy flights photographed Soviet territory and raced back before they could be identified and attacked. In 1946 and 1947 alone (note this was before the Cold War officially started), 30 such planes were shot down, at least 20 U.S. airmen were captured alive, never acknowledged by their government, they finished out their lives in Soviet prisons, and their families were told they died in various accidents. As acknowledged by the highly respected U.S. News and World Report, between 1950 and 1970 (after the Cold War officially started but those overflights had been going on since the end of WWII) there were over 10,000 and possibly over 20,000 such overflights deep into Soviet and Chinese territory by military aircraft.

There was a lot more going on than just the acknowledged photographing of Soviet territory. Sabotage and assassination teams were being dropped in to hide among their relatives and ethnic brothers. Almost universally these acts of war failed, with large losses among the agents and their relatives who were to hide them.56

In June 1992, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin met with President Bush and said, “We may have American prisoners yet,” quite a stir was created. News anchor Tom Brocaw reported this disturbing news and the congressional uproar over these possible prisoners. The next night Brocaw said, “These were American airmen shot down during the Cold War. This is the first time Americans have been apprised of this.” Then for weeks, except for an occasional highly sanitized statement, all went silent on that explosive subject. A few months later, the headlines read, “Yeltsin: POWs ‘Summarily Executed.’” But the last line of that front-page article depicting these execution horrors told the real story. “The largest group of Americans imprisoned in the Soviet Union included more than 730 pilots and other airmen who either made forced landings on Soviet territory or were shot down on Cold War spy and sabotage flights.”57

The intelligence agencies of Britain, France, and Germany were running similar, but smaller, covert operations against the Soviet Union and other nations of the Eastern bloc. This was a massive assault on Soviet sovereignty, actually outright acts of war, by essentially the same powers that had invaded Russia 25 years earlier and also the same powers that owed an enormous debt to the Soviets for saving them from fascism in WWII.

The fact that there were no Soviet spy planes carrying assassination and sabotage teams, overflying Western territory during this period is something scholars should note. Nor should the internment of U.S. pilots in the Soviet Union have been news to U.S. newscasters. With the Soviets complaining to Washington, DC, to the United Nations, and holding many trials, for the American people not to be informed of these assaults on Soviet territory can be due only to cooperation by the major media of record in misinforming America. These illegal flights remaining a secret only to Western citizens testifies to how social-control-paradigms require suppression of information about acts of war by managers-of-state simultaneously with depictions of imminent attack from the targeted society. That is, of course, the creation of enemies to protect a power-structure.

As in any society after any revolution, there were those within the Soviet Union who were sympathetic to, and subject to manipulation by, their religious and cultural cousins in the West. Thus, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, whole communities of ethnic Germans and other communities that still had religious ties and loyalties to the West joined the invading army.

When that war was over, entire communities were resettled in Siberia where they could not link up with outside powers still threatening to overthrow the Soviet government. Millions of innocent people (even many dedicated and loyal communists) were rounded up for resettlement and many were executed. But many executed had been harboring trained saboteurs who had been parachuted into the Eastern European countries all the way to Byelorussia.t Struggles for power became mixed with the legitimate battle to defend the revolution, and many were swallowed up in that holocaust. (America facing a much weaker terrorist threat is reacting even more violently, primarily outside its borders but also within them.)

But note! It was protecting their country from being overthrown by external powers manipulating internal ethnic groups that created these suppressions. Where America faced no such threat after its revolution, the cooperative efforts of many nations to overthrow the Soviets had been ongoing for 70 years. These included direct intervention in their revolution, the WWII effort to exterminate them, years of covert actions such as training and flying in assassins and saboteurs, being embargoed from world trade, and their post-WWII military encirclement.

Ignoring the background behind the forced migrations to Siberia, and in its constant search for drama, the Western press openly pushed the governing social-control-paradigm, giving the death toll as 60-million. But then it became 40-million, then 20-million, then 10-million, and the figures are still coming down towards the true number killed under “Stalinism”—certainly under 100,000, most likely fewer than 50,000, and these were primarily those actively allying with their cousins in the West.58

These are the same principles that peddlers of crisis have been using for thousands of years. The greater the lie, the more surely it will be believed by their followers. Even if it is done only verbally and the accuser is in no personal physical danger, the surest way to be recognized as a leader is to lead an attack against an enemy.

There has been so much fabrication that it is impossible to know what is true. We are satisfied that, of the citizens of those Soviet communities who welcomed the German armies and were the contacts for the saboteurs the West was infiltrating into those countries, and thus were a threat to the security of this new federation, so many were relocated to Siberia. This was a full-fledged war, the Soviets knew it, and many innocent people died from the 70-years of intense destabilization efforts and outright wars.

The names of the now declassified plans for war against the Soviet federation (Bushwhacker, Broiler, Sizzle, Shakedown, Dropshot, Trojan, Pincher, and Frolic) graphically portray their offensive purpose. Some of those plans included the actual occupation of the Soviet Union. 59 Papers in President Johnson’s library testify to a planned nuclear strike to destroy the rising economic and philosophical threat. Make no mistake about it, the intention was to both destroy the Soviet federation and suppress any other breaks for freedom and both goals were reached (only temporarily, periphery nations are allying and again making a break for freedom). Those destabilizations cost trillions of dollars, 12-million to 15-million lives, and hundreds of millions of deaths from disease and hunger as those nations’ economies were destroyed.

Analysts are right when they say the West would not have attacked the Soviet Union. But that is only because the Soviets developed the atomic bomb too quick. One hydrogen bomb getting through to America would be one too many.

Study the history of suppressions worldwide, study why tiny impoverished Vietnam faced such an assault, study why Cuba is under such an assault even though their revolutionary government provided Cubans with health care and education equal to America and eliminated hunger, and study why every offer of the Soviets for mutual disarmament was ignored and not even reported in the American press.

A key part of Western propaganda was the lack of rights in the Soviet Union and secret police everywhere. Not only was this fundamentally true only for Western visitors of which many were spies, America and most of Western Europe could give more freedom and rights to their citizens because they were not subject to bombings, assassinations, and threats of invasion; the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer saying otherwise notwithstanding. Take note how, under a far lower threat level (group terrorism as opposed to state sponsored terrorist), America is reacting at a far higher level of repression and suppression of rights.

Imperial Democracies, Representative Democracies, Participatory Democracies

An internet search using the keywords “republic, not a democracy” is an education. Though America is always describing itself as a democracy, conservatives openly state this is a republic and that it was never intended to be, and it is not today, a democracy. Of course word meanings change over time. If a majority of the people perceive a word has a certain meaning, that becomes its new meaning.

Western nations have described themselves as democracies for so long their citizens, and the world, take it for granted that is what they are. However, in their original meanings, most “democratic” governments are actually representative democracies.

But even that meaning, as understood by their citizenry, does not, and never did, conform to reality. Most voters think the winners of those elections are representing them. But that is seldom true. Winners of elections at the state and national levels, where those crucial laws are enacted, are normally determined by who spends the most money and who controls the various medias. Thus, at most times, the winners of elections represent wealth and power far more so than the citizenry at large.

On the other hand, that the Soviet Union and Cuba, attempting to create participatory democracies under hostile conditions of foreign imperial powers bent on their destruction, had true participatory democracies, and thus were true democracies by that word’s original meaning, has been kept out of Western media coverage and history books. Under those participatory democracies suggested laws were discussed within the communities and a representative was sent to the legislatures with specific instructions to vote yes or no on each aspect of each law, not to decide on his own how to vote.

Scholars at the North American/Cuban Philosophy conference in June 2002 were mesmerized watching the nation shut down for three days as Cuban citizens of all ages gave impassioned speeches over the TV on the pros and cons of changes in their constitution. These participatory democracy countries being dictatorships are only imprints on the Western mind placed there by propaganda.u

Though the words are never used within an empire’s mainstream media or educational system, the world has many imperial democracies. These too are supposedly elected by the citizenry but, just as most candidates in representative democracies being picked by powerbrokers essentially disenfranchises the electorate, the same powerbrokers picking the candidates within those imperial centers have control over who can run for puppet governments on an empire’s periphery.

As the citizenry believe they have democratic rights, both representative and imperial democracies have the potential of becoming true democracies. That of course would be ballot box revolutions restructuring authoritarian nations into true democracies.

The entire world understands how the citizenry within imperial democracies are disenfranchised but few understand how they too are similarly denied true representation. To maintain such democratic fictions all powerbrokers insert massive propaganda into their media and educational systems.v

Propaganda Building a “Framework of Orientation” was the Essence of the Cold War

Former attaché to the Soviet Embassy George Kennan, undoubtedly the U.S. citizen most knowledgeable about the Soviet Union (one of the prime promoters of the Cold War, and one who eventually had a change of heart about the morality of that deception), is quoted as saying that those executed in the Soviet Union were in the tens of thousands, meaning the total is under 100,000 as addressed above.60 Tens of thousands is still a large number to be sure, but, even though many—even possibly most—were innocent, a large number were attempting to overthrow that new government, and that is a capital offense in any country. (For a balanced perspective, compare the under 100,000 killed within the former Soviet Union as they searched for those being supported by the West to overthrow the government with the 12-million to 15-million killed on the periphery of empire by the West as documented in the next chapter.)

Many innocent people within the Soviet Union were swallowed up in this mass hysteria. The Soviets opened their records and restored the good names of these people. Historians are tracing what happened to each individual so their families can know their fates. Perhaps the world may someday know the true numbers of those unjustly persecuted souls.

We caution the reader on the statistics that will be published. The slaughters within defeated-centers-of-capital and others threatening to break free will be exaggerated, while the suppressions and oppressions by the dominant centers of capital will be camouflaged as defensive actions and their slaughter of innocents will be recorded in history as a response to others’ aggressions.

When Hitler was planning WWII, Reinhard Heydrich, deputy chief of Hitler’s SS, operated a covert operation that counterfeited letters from top Soviet military officers to falsely indicate a counterrevolution by these officers.61 Possibly 35,000 highly loyal officers were executed. We say possibly because again we must remember how intelligence services create and exaggerate facts to demonize an enemy; these exaggerated figures then tend to become recorded history.

After WWII, copying Heydrich’s successful destabilization efforts, Western secret services counterfeited papers and letters that caused massive arrests of innocent people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Citizens of the West heard all about the repressions but nothing about the causes or that, when the Soviets caught on to the scam, they released those imprisoned and even paid compensation to an innocent American couple who were caught up in that intrigue and imprisoned for several years.62

Even as the Russian revolution with its participatory democracy with full and equal rights for all was succeeding, the British were attempting to destroy Lenin’s reputation to the world. By the same methods that placed Napoleon in history books as a megalomaniac, the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution will be in future history books as mass terrorists.63 That falsification of history will be accomplished through financing already highly biased historians to research executions and point out the total innocence of those executed, and will simultaneously totally ignore the counterfeit papers fingering innocent people, the destabilization/ assassination teams inserted, the many who were guilty, or the massive amounts of money spent placing a ring of steel around the Soviet federation. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that a participatory democracy with full and equal rights for all was a threat to representative democracies with their excessive rights for a few and limited rights for the many and the intention was to take the Soviet Union out. (Limited rights for the many is not immediately apparent due to broad sharing of the wealth stolen from the periphery through plunder-by-trade. When they need allies, monopoly capital pays well.)

The alert can watch this writing of history unfold. Alternative views typically find little financing and, due to the already programmed masses, no audience. Once imposed, a society’s belief in an enemy continues to control a population even after the defeat of that enemy. Major publishers publish only books they think can make a profit, the loyal and patriotic masses read only books which support the social-control-paradigms that have been imposed upon them, and thus books based on this fraudulent history are best sellers while there is little audience for a book that documents honest history.

Conceptually Reversing the Process

Remembering how close the Soviets came to winning the arms race and thus winning the Cold War, does anyone doubt what would have happened if the Soviet Union was untouched and America was the one that had been invaded, the nation which lost 30% of its prime labor, and the nation in which everything above the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River had been blown up or burned to the ground? The conclusions are obvious. WWII and the arms race imposed upon it broke the Soviet federation. Their cooperative ways explain why the Soviets developed so fast under such adverse conditions and that development could even be much faster yet under democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism.

If the Soviets had been incompetent, as we hear so often, they would have been no threat and there would have been no Cold War. They would have simply been quietly overwhelmed by capitalism. It was their competency that was the problem. To have advanced as far as they did under such adverse conditions before finally collapsing under the weight of assaults by the Western world testifies to a fiercely loyal population working hard for their country. They were not a terrorized and sullen population.

Keeping the World in Chains

Forces in the former Soviet Union intending to take back their country are rapidly rebuilding. This means the property titles of those who bought Russia’s wealth for pennies on the dollar are at risk. But for a quick lesson on what Marx meant by “monopoly capital,” and what “debt traps” mean, look at what those shattered economies face. If they repudiate or default on any external debts, any assets outside their borders can be, and will be, attached. This means businesses, property titles, bank accounts, goods-in-transit, ships, or planes. Those beleaguered societies would be in one of the tightest containment traps that any imperial-center-of-capital ever devised. Every ship or plane that left their ports would be subject to seizure to repay those debts. Without unimpeded access to the world, no economy of any country can function efficiently. The traps structured in law designed to keep the world in chains becomes fully visible.

Footnotes

1. Certainly there was repression within Hungary and Czechoslovakia as the Soviet Union suppressed the political elements who wished to ally with their cultural and religious cousins in the West. But, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter, the repression exercised to maintain the Eastern European bloc pales alongside the massive repression required worldwide to suppress the many attempted breaks for freedom from Western capital. Back to text
2. One has to research deep to find the true level of South Korean massacres of civilians. These slaughters of dissidents to maintain control of South Korea and prevent its rejoining the North were still going on as late as 1980 (Lee Jai-eui, Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age. (Los Angeles: University of California, 1999). Back to text
3. Historians should look close at the anthrax scare after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on America. Those anthrax spores were proven to be biologically identical to that produced at the U.S. germ warfare facility at America’s biowarfare facilities at Fort Dietrich. John Pilger stated in the New Statesman, December 16, 2002, that America’s leading powerbrokers spoke of “needing “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor”—so as to gain the loyalty of the American people for their violent foreign policy. The source of that anthrax is not in dispute. The probability is very high that propagandists took advantage of the September 11th terrorist attack to further their strategies-of-tension to maintain that loyalty. Run Google/Nexus-Lexus Internet searches using the many keywords on this page. Back to text
4. When China joined the war and pushed the Americans back to the 38th parallel the West did face a capable enemy. But the 35,000 Americans killed while 4-million North Koreans and Chinese were killed fully supports I.F., Stone’s analysis. Back to text
5. But only temporarily. After successful suppression of breaks for freedom all over the world at a massive cost of money and lives, as we will be addressing in the next chapter, suddenly, in 2005, alliances are again being made throughout Latin America (Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Cuba; and other alliances are forming) and the world as the suppressed and impoverished continue their battle for freedom and full and equal rights. Brazil, Russia, India China, and South Africa (BRICS) are forming a trade/energy bloc and many more such blocs will form. Some of those blocs will unravel as the entrenched Western Bloc does everything in their power to prevent their successful formation. But, when a large enough bloc of the developing world forms, their economic ability to sanction the wealthy world will force powerful nations to negotiate honestly and fairly. Back to text
6. James Douglas-Hamilton, Motive For a Mission: The Story Behind Rudolf Hess’s Flight to Britain, (New York: Paragon House, 1979). As it does not even mention the “Clivedon Set” of Britain who were supporters of fascism, this book’s analysis is far too soft. There is a serious school of thought on the pre-World War II worldwide alliance of fascists but that history is too well hidden and unsure for us to address Back to text
7. The Romanian death squads under Hitler’s occupation were called The Iron Guard. In Latvia they were called Vanagas. Back to text
8. The KLA engineered the ethnic Albanian exodus from Kosovo under the coaching of Western Intelligence services who were carefully writing history to justify the destruction of Yugoslavia. Only an alert researcher on the ground in Kosovo can research the truth. Jared Israel, “Why Albanians Fled During the NATO Bombing: The Truth About What Happened,” Interview with Cedda Pralinchevich, http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/keys.htm, will provide insights. Cedda Pralinchevich is very persuasive that Albanians were fleeing upon orders of their leaders and, in their culture, not obeying was not an option. History will prove the claims of NATO of preserving Kosovo as a Serbian province was only a cover story for it being carved from that nation. Back to text
9. Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2000; New York Times, September 20, 2000; Senator Joseph Biden’s Senate Hearings on Serbia, July 29, 1999; Serbian Democratization Act, HR1064, September 5, 2000; sourced on various webpages at http://emperors-clothes.com. We have barely opened the door on the all-out financial, economic, covert, and overt warfare destabilization of Yugoslavia. The definitive books have not yet been written on this hidden history. We suggest early readers to study the website http://emperors-clothes.com and later readers watch for books and articles by Michel Chossudovsky, Jared Israel, Peter Gowan, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, and authors in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and Russia. Back to text
10. Six months after this was written, Milosevic’s trial started and this was his first defense. His continued defense outlined the entire process of the West’s destabilization of Yugoslavia far more thorough than we have outlined it here. A lady spectator who came for the purpose of seeing Milosevic convicted said, “We have been deceived.” As that deception will not leak out through the media or into the history books for the reasons outlined in Chapter six, sincere researchers will have to study Milosevic’s defense to write honest history. Back to text
11. Heather Cottin, “Imperial Wizard: Soros is not just doling out cash—he’s fleecing entire countries” CovertAction Quarterly (Fall 2002, pp. 1-6). In “Regime Change: A Look at Washington’s Methods and Degrees of Success in Dislodging Foreign Leaders,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 27, 2003, Peter Ford outlines the 50 years of America destabilizing other governments we are addressing, including the demonization of progressive leaders like Milosevic and how George Soros’ destabilization foundations work. When knowledge of American covert funding of other nations’ elections surfaced, the U.S. Congress established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983 to fund openly a part of what the CIA had been funding covertly (Washington Post, September 21 and 22, 1991 and William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Super Power (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), Chapter 19. Back to text
12. For a view of the threat to the West of an unbiased International Criminal Court read: Tuva Raanes, “A Divine Country All on Its Own,” World Press Review, October 2002, p. 17. As the year 2000 came to a close, 139 nations had signed a treaty to create that court. It was also established at The Hague, assumed legal jurisdiction in July 2002, and by late 2004 was preparing for its first trials. Due to the history of immense terror imposed worldwide we have been addressing, the U.S. is, under threat of severe economic and financial sanctions, pressuring countries to sign that they will not extradite Americans for war crimes in that court. Back to text
13. Russia fears the Muslims on her Eastern borders. After all, it is they who pushed Eastern Orthodox Christianity out of their birthplace around Constantinople and it is they, far more so than Western Christianity, which has been their primary enemy. We must leave open the possibility that Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries may join the alliance of industrialized nations against the impoverished world. President Vladimir Putin was first showing signs that he was amenable to such an alliance. As time progressed, Russia’s arming of Iran and China with currently unstoppable, ship sinking, sunburn missiles and they possibly joining with China in trade agreements with the developing world indicate their enormous potential for causing problems for the imperial world monopolies. Back to text
14. If the struggle between Christians and Muslims becomes more intense, there is the possibility that Russia itself will be included in the trading alliance. How much of the wealth-producing process is shared with Eastern Orthodox Christians depends upon how badly they are needed as allies and how willing they are to accept being less than equal partners. Back to text
15. Energized by the CIA designed Jihad to push Soviet influence out of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union’s Eastern provinces, the “freedom fighters” restructured their newly gained knowledge into a Jihad to free all Muslim nations from Western domination. The bombs that fell on Afghanistan in October 2001 were blowing apart the terrorist training camps built by the CIA in the 1980s to train terrorists to destabilize the Soviet Union. These students of terrorism have turned their deadly skills towards destabilizing the nation who trained them and America is now searching out and killing the very terrorists they trained. Control of discourse and self-censorship by the media is so thorough that, even as their nation gears up for war against terrorism, the immorality, the injustice, and the lawlessness of the West’s training of terrorists to destabilize fundamentally peaceful nations is not even discussed. It is crucial that this state terrorism not be recorded in history. This accounts for terrorists being tried in military tribunals rather than civilian courts. A civilian court would record terrorist testimony that they were trained and financed by America while any such testimony will be suppressed in a military tribunal. Back to text
16. See the endnote to the above paragraph. CIA Director William Casey suggested to the Muslim terrorists they were training that after overthrowing the Afghanistan government that the U.S. would support their terrorizing/destabilizing the Muslim provinces of the Soviet Union. Though virtually every CIA covert action must be plausibly denied, a Google /Nexus-Lexus search using various keywords on these pages will come up with the documentation. Back to text
17. Linda Robinson, America’s Secret Armies, U.S. News & World Report (Nov. 4, 2002), pp. 38-43. In Dollars for Terror (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), Chapter 10, Richard Labeviere explains that Special Operations Command (SOCOM) overseas MPRI and other private military groups and interfaces between those groups and the Pentagon. Occasionally a news broadcast or talk show will address lightly the covert activities of the CIA. On one of those occasions, the TV camera turned to a younger Congressman who evidently had been in on covert activity briefings. He said, “We think of the CIA as carrying out these covert operations but the really big covert operations are carried out by the military.” Of course it is in support of the CIA that special operations forces of the military are called upon. These are the military covert operations that have gone under the deeper cover of MPRI and other supposedly private armies. Back to text
18. This was very successful. Through covert black ops and political pressure, even Michael Gorbachev was denied access to local reporters, media, or even an audience to speak to, wherever they went. Freeland, Sale of the Century, Chapter 9. Back to text
19. This was done through vouchers but, as Chrystia Freeland documents, there were many schemes for the oligarchs to buy up those vouchers, not the least was they had to be sold for survival. Back to text
20. Besides those with ethnic ties to the West who betrayed their new country by joining forces with the Nazi invaders (such as Vlasov’s army and Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Croatian, and Polish volunteers for the mobile death squads; 20,000 were volunteers; the rest were conscripts who were granted amnesty). John Prados, The Presidents’ Secret Wars (New York: William Morrow, 1986), Chapters 2 and 3; Loftus, Belarus Secret, Chapters 1-3, pp. 51-53, 49, 102-03, especially p. 43; Ranelagh, Agency, p. 156. Back to text
21. Those imprinted with the horrors of 60 million of their own killed by the Soviets will not believe this. But that is the beauty of propaganda, the bigger the lie the deeper it is believed. The true numbers killed were well under 100,000 and even those were due to confusion and paranoia as the West determined to overthrow that democracy. The famous Soviet Gulag were entire communities moved to Siberia to eliminate Western saboteurs and assassins hiding within those cultures. Back to text
22. This, of course, will be rejected by those teaching. But the process is simple: All the rewards (promotions, research money) go to those who promote the current belief system and those who challenge it are, through peer pressure and denial of rewards, ostracized to the margins. Over time the true believers end up as far away from reality as the emperor with no clothes. Back to text

Endnotes

1. Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), especially pp. 162, 283; Kati Marton, The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-up in the case of Correspondent George Polk, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990); C.M. Woodhouse, The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels, (New York: Franklin Watts, 1985); Stephan Rosskamm Shalom, Imperial Alibis (Boston: South End Press, 1993) pp. 26, 26; William Blum, CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed Books, 1986), pp. 31-36; David Leigh, The Wilson Plot (New York; Pantheon, 1988), pp. 17-18; William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), pp. 433-43; Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 11-17. See Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
2. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 99-100. Back to text
3. Ibid, pp. 99-100; I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1952); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2000), Chapter 4. Back to text
4. Ibid, Chapter 3, pp. 43, 61, 97, 108, 110, 119; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Pantheon, 1990), Chapters 3 and 4. Back to text
5. Sidney Lens, Permanent War (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), pp. 20-21;William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp. 208, 235. Back to text
6. Arjun Makhijani, From Global Capitalism to Economic Justice (New York: Apex Press, 1992), pp. 25-26, quoting a memorandum on NSC-68. Back to text
7. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), pp. 374, 726; see also p. 377; emphasis added. Back to text
8. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 70-91, especially p. 82; Linda Robinson, “What didn’t we do to get rid of Castro,” U.S. News & World Report, October 26, 98, p. 41; Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, p. 215-17; John Quigley, The Ruses for War: American Intervention Since World War II (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992). Back to text
9. Stone, Hidden History, pp. 1-3 Back to text
10. Quigley, Ruses for War, Chapter 3. Back to text
11. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 257. Back to text
12. Linda Robinson, “What didn’t we do to get rid of Castro,” U.S. News & World Report, October 26, 98, p. 41; Fidel Castro, Capitalism in Crisis: Globalization and World Politics Today (New York: Ocean Press, 2000), p. 215-17. See also, John Quigley, The Ruses for War: American Intervention Since World War II (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992). Back to text
13. L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, And the Plot to Kill Kennedy (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), Chapter 3; James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), especially pp. 70-75; Back to text
14. Stone, Hidden History, pp. 263-64. Back to text
15. Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 197-8; Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1975), Chapter 7; Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 33, note 2; Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), p. 359; Ernest Volkman, Blaine Baggett, Secret Intelligence (New York: Doubleday, 1989), Chapter 1. Back to text
16. Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 150; Michael Kettle, The Allies and the Russian Collapse (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p.15; Taylor, Fall of the Dynasties, p. 381. Back to text
17. Philip Knightley, First Casualty, p. 138; D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins (New York: Doubleday, 1961, 2 vols.), pp. 26, 1038 Back to text
18. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 321, 323. Back to text
19. Vilnis Sipols, The Road to Great Victory (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), pp. 109, 132, 179-80; Kennedy, Rise and Fall, especially pp. 321, 323, 352, in part quoting J. Erickson, The Road to Berlin (London: 1983), p. 447. Back to text
20. Jeffrey Jukes, Stalingrad at the Turning Point (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), p. 154; National Geographic TV (August 23, 1987); Fleming, Cold War and its Origins, p. 157; Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 19, 351, 372. Back to text
21. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, pp. 357-58; David Mayers, George Kennan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 190-91; Oleg Rzheshevsky, World War II: Myths and the Realities (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1984), p. 175. Back to text
22. Lens, Permanent War, pp. 20-21; Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, pp. 208, 235. Back to text
23. Don Cook, Forging the Alliance, (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1989), pp. 78-9. Back to text
24. E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, Protest and Survive, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), p. 123. Back to text
25. Lester Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World (England: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 56; Lester Thurow, Head to Head (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992), pp. 92, 95; David Kotz, “Russia in Shock: How Capitalist ‘Shock Therapy’ is Destroying Russia’s Economy,” Dollars and Sense, June 1993, p. 9. Back to text
26. Patrick Flaherty, “Behind Shatalinomics: Politics of Privatization,” Guardian. Oct. 10, 1990, p. 11. Back to text
27. Rich Thomas, “From Russia, with Chips,” Newsweek, August 6, 1990. Back to text
28. Peter Gowan, “Old Medicine in New Bottles,” World Policy Journal (Winter 1991-92), pp. 3-5. Back to text
29. Gowan, “Old Medicine in New Bottles,” pp. 6-8, 13. Back to text
30. Ramsey Clark, Hidden Agenda: U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia (New York: International action Center, 2002); Michel Collon, Liars Poker: The Great Powers, Yugoslavia and the Wars of the future (New York:: International action Center, 2002); Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms (London: Zed Books, 1997), Chapter 13; Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Yugoslavia, Colonizing Bosnia,” CovertAction Quarterly (Spring, 1996), pp. 31-37; Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 26; William Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), Chapter 6, espec. pp. 149, 153-54; Sean Gervasi, “Germany, U.S., and the Yugoslavian Crisis,” CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1992-93), pp. 41-45, 64-66; David Lorge Parnas, “Con: Dayton’s a Step Back—Way Back,” Peace (March/April 1996), pp. 17-22; McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, pp. 71-82; Catherine Samaray, Yugoslavia Dismembered (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995; Charles Lane, Theodore Stranger, Tom Post, “The Ghosts of Serbia,” Newsweek. April 19, 1993, pp. 30-31; Dusko Doder, Yugoslavia: “New War, Old Hatreds,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1993), pp. 4, 9-11, 18-19; Thomas Kielinger, Max Otte, “Germany : The Presumed Power,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1993), p. 55. This was essentially acknowledged by former Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on the McNeil/Lehrer Report (May 6, 1993), and many other talk shows and news programs, pointing out that there were those who pushed for the collapse of Yugoslavia, specifically pointing to Germany. On that same show, Michael Elliot of the respected British publication, The Economist, agreed. Back to text
31. Ibid Back to text
32. Ibid and Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 10, p. 105. check Jane’s Defense Weekly, especially May 10, 1999; Linda Robinson, “America’s Secret Armies,” U.S. News & World Report (November 4, 2002), pp. 38-43. Back to text
33. Ibid; Check later articles and books by those same authors; Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 11. Back to text
34. Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 15, p. 12, 28-29; Fidel Castro, Capitalism in Crisis: Globalization and World Politics Today (New York: Ocean Press, 2000), p. 209. Back to text
35. “Big Lie Exposed,” Workers World, April 12, 2001. Back to text
36. Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 14. Back to text
37. See endnote 32. For reduced Serbian losses: Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 16; Richard J. Newman, “A Kosovo Numbers Game,” U.S. News & World Report, July 12, 1999, p. 36. Back to text
38. George Monbiot, A Discreet Deal in the Pipeline, The Guardian, 15 February 2001. Back to text
39. See endnote 32; Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Chapter 16. Run a Google/Nexus-Lexus Internet search. Back to text
40. Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, pp. 215-17; James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 70-75. Back to text
41. Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002). Back to text
42. Parenti, To Kill a Nation, pp. 12, 28-29, Chapter 15. Back to text
43. Deirdre Griswold, “Marxism, Reformism and Anarchism: Lessons from a Steel Mill in Slovakia” Workers World (December 14, 2000). Back to text
44. Mark Weisbrot, “The Mirage of Progress.” The American Prospect (Winter 2002), pp. A10-A123. Back to text
45. Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, pp. 42, 104. Back to text
46. John Gray, False Dawn (New York: The Free Press, 1998), Chapter 6; Alexander Buzgalin and Andrei Kolganov, Bloody October in Moscow: Political Repression in the Name of Reform (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994); Boris Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994). The tables of contents of most good magazines, mainstream and alternative news. Back to text
47. Janine R. Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” The Nation. June 1, 1998, pp. 11-16. Back to text
48. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism, pp. 43-45; Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, pp. 99-104; “Proud Russia on Its Knees,” U.S. News & World Report, February 8, 1999, pp. 30-36; David R. Francis, “Debt -riddled Russia to Ask for Forgiveness,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 1999, p. 17; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial, The Nation, August 10-17, 1998, pp. 4-6. See also Julie Corwin, Douglas Stranglin, Suzanne Possehl, Jeff Trimble, “The Looting of Russia,” U.S. News & World Report, March 7, 1994; John Feffer, “The Browning of Russia,” CovertAction Quarterly (Spring 1996). Back to text
49. Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, pp. 99-104. Back to text
50. Ann Williamson, “An Inconvenient History,” http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7842/wcessay04.htm Back to text
51. Greg Guma, “Cracks in the Covert Iceberg” Toward Freedom (May 1998), p. 2; Yousai Mohammad and M. Adkin, The Beartrap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (London, England: Leo Cooper, 1992); Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 2; K. Lohbeck, Holy War, Unholy Victory: Eyewitness to the CIA’s Secret War in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993); J. Peterzell, Reagan’s Secret Wars, CNSS Report 108 (Washington, DC: Center for National Security Studies, 1984); T. Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (New York: Warners Books, 1990); E.T. Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995); D. Cordovez, and S.S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); S. Emerson, Secret Warriors (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1988); Westerfield, Inside CIA’s Private World; L.K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power; R. Kessler, Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Spy Agency (New York: Pocket Books, 1992); Duane A. Clarridge, A Spy for all Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997) ; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
52. Linda Robinson, “America’s Secret Armies,” U.S. News & World Report (November 4, 2002), pp. 38-43; Greg Guma, “Cracks in the Covert Iceberg” Toward Freedom (May 1998), p. 2; Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New York: Yale University Press, 2001); Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001); John Cooley, Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000); Yousai Mohammad and M. Adkin, The Beartrap; William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Super Power (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), Chapter 2; K. Lohbeck, Holy War, Unholy Victory: Eyewitness to the CIA’s Secret War in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993); J. Peterzell, Reagan’s Secret Wars, CNSS Report 108 (Washington, DC: Center for National Security Studies, 1984); T. Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (New York: Warners Books, 1990); E.T. Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995); D. Cordovez, and S.S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetnam. Osama Bin Laden’s al-Queda: Profile of a Terrorist Network (Ardsley NY: Transnational Publishers, 2001); Peter L. Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism, 2nd edition (London: Pluto Press, 2000); M.J. Gohari, The Taliban: Ascent to Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War: State failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001; Robin Wright, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985; S. Emerson, Secret Warriors (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1988); Westerfield, Inside CIA’s Private World; L.K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power; R. Kessler, Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Spy Agency (New York: Pocket Books, 1992); Duane A. Clarridge, A Spy for all Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997). Back to text
53. Fred Weir, “Interview: Fred Weir in Russia,” CovertAction Quarterly (Summer 1993), pp. 54-55. Back to text
54. Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, pp. 42, 99-104; 60 minutes, May 19th, 1996. Back to text
55. Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride From Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2000. See also, Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). Back to text
56. Michael Ross, “Yeltsin: POWs ‘Summarily Executed’,” The Spokesman Review (November 12, 1992), pp. B1, A10; Volkman and Baggett, Secret Intelligence, p. 187; John Loftus, Belarus Secret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), especially Chapters 5-8, pp. 109-10; Blum, A Forgotten History, Chapters 6, 7, 8, 15, 17, especially p. 124; U.S. News & World Report, March 15, 1993, pp. 30-56; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
57. Ross, “POWs “Summarily Executed,’” pp.B1, A10. Later TV documentaries on this episode claimed 130 airmen lost, the above referenced U.S. News article claimed 252, but all pointed out that the losses may have been much higher. Back to text
58. Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pp. 127-28, 131, 185; Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1980), Chapter 6, especially pp. 152-56; Philip Agee, Inside the Company (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), especially pp. 53-54, 62-63, 541-42; John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard (Boston: South End Press, 1991), pp. 100-1; Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1983), especially pp. 30, 58, 62, 189; Philip Agee, Louis Wolf, Dirty Work (London: Zed Press, 1978), especially p. 262; David Wise, Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 256, 257; Ellen Schrecker, No ivory tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Random House, 1981). See also Introduction, note three. Back to text
59. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, To Win A Nuclear War, (Boston: South End Press, 1987), especially p. x Back to text
60. Alexander Cockburn, “Beat the Devil,” The Nation, March 6, 1989, p. 294; David Corn and Jefferson Morley, “Beltway Bandits,” The Nation, April 9, 1988, p. 488. An interesting appraisal of Stalinist terror is made by Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev, “Parallels Inappropriate,” New Times (July 1989), pp. 46-47. See also Volkman and Baggett, Secret Intelligence, p. 187; Loftus, Belarus Secret, especially Chapters 5-8, pp. 109-10; Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, Chapters 6, 7, 8, 15, 17. Back to text
61. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 45. Back to text
62. Blum, A Forgotten History, Chapter 7. Back to text
63. Volkman and Baggett, Secret Intelligence, p. 9, and see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text

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