"The National Security State": Part 1 of 4. Chapter 12 from "Our Country, Then and Now"
"The Good War?", "Britain Always Has the Plan"
Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we have the first installment of Chapter 12: “The National Security State” with sections on “The Good War” and “Britain Always Has the Plan.”
The world today is embroiled in crisis, but what else is new? As we hearken back to the turn of the 20th century, we remember a time when a substantial portion of humanity, especially in the United States, actually believed that mankind had turned a corner and that a Golden Age of peace and prosperity lay just ahead.
Unfortunately, World War I, followed all-too-soon by the Great Depression, blew that illusion to smithereens. By 1939, the world was on the verge of an even more devastating war. In less than a decade, the destruction had barely died down than the era of endless conflict starting with the Cold War had begun.
What characterized governance in the US now became the existence of the infamous National Security State as a permanent feature of international relations, whereby ordinary citizens permanently lost all right to know what was really going on behind the scenes within the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the governmental institutions that fed it money for reasons barely ever articulated. The era of 24/7 government by propaganda had begun.
We begin our treatment with a few words on what came to be called the “Good War” but soon realize that once again, it’s Britain that has been spinning the spider’s web.
The “Good War”
World War II was the “Good War”—right? We all know that the good guys—us—kicked the bad guys’ butts—them. We know who the bad guys were—the Germans and the Japanese. Thousands of war movies have told us that. And we taught the bastards a lesson, didn’t we? It was mainly the British who firebombed the major German cities, reduced them to smoking rubble, but we joined in. We did the same to the citizens of Tokyo, and we dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Why then, if it was such a “good war,” have we been fighting endless wars ever since? Korea was a “good war” too, right? Vietnam was also a “good war,” I guess. Then we fought Desert Storm against Iraq. Then we bombed and dismembered Yugoslavia. Both “good wars” of course. And so was the “War on Terror,” with the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, Iraq again in 2003 on the pretext that they had WMDs—which they didn’t, and then Libya. And we still have forces in Syria.
Now we’re conducting another “good war,” our proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, a Ukraine whose government we created in an illegal coup in 2014 and have armed to the teeth and egged on ever since. And America’s president [Biden, when this book was published] and our incredibly sophisticated propaganda media are once again telling us that it’s all the other guy’s fault. It’s always “unprovoked aggression.” Always, just like in the killing of the Sioux Indians.
This doesn’t even include the governments we’ve attacked, overthrown, and/or subverted in smaller-scale conflicts over the last seventy-five years, the foreign leaders we’ve assassinated, places to which we’ve sent troops, countries we’ve ransacked with economic sanctions, the “color revolutions” we’ve instigated using the resources of the CIA and/or the National Endowment for Democracy. Yes, we’ve really done a great job of creating “open societies” with our weapons, our propaganda, our pressure, our massacres, and our manipulations. And we have military bases in over eighty nations around the world to be sure we keep up the good work.
But back to World War II. What if it wasn’t a “Good War”? What if conservative commentator, Reagan speechwriter, and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan was right? What if both of the world wars were “unnecessary wars”? What if, as Buchanan says, these wars were “hideous and suicidal,” that they “advanced the death of our civilization”?[i]
Britain Always Has the Plan
But let’s turn back to Great Britain, which, in its centuries-long quest to build an empire, has attacked any competing power on the European Continent that threatened to establish its own hegemony. As a result, [even before the US joined the game], Britain has been at war, or poised for war, for its entire history, including the conflicts it has waged for control of the various imperial components in North America, Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia. While Britain may often pay other nations to do the fighting, Britain itself, with its “Royals” atop the heap, has been the chief imperial power of modern history.
As Britain neared the end of the 19th century, it had already waged successful war against the Spanish Empire; the Dutch, with whom it merged institutionally through the Glorious Revolution of 1688; then with the France of Louis XIV and later with the French republic and Napoleon. Each time, those threatened attempted to launch an invasion of the British homeland, and each time failed. The closest instance was by the Dutch, who succeeded in getting their fleet up the Thames estuary and won a major naval battle in 1667 but did not disembark land forces.
By the first years of the 20th century, it was clear that another war of continental proportions loomed. Every statesman in Europe knew it. But it was not clear whom Britain’s foe would be. I have tried to explain in a previous chapter why the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary were finally designated as the World War I opponents, rather than Britain’s other two imperial rivals, France and Russia.
In the process, the most prescient minds within the British establishment were also likely wondering who they could engage as allies, because whenever Britain fought a major war, it always did so through a coalition. Often Britain’s partners could simply be paid to fight. On occasion, Britain would send its own forces to the Continent, as it did against Napoleon. But faced with a project of the scope of World War I, who would be its partner in the coming conflagration?
Of course it would be the US. By the end of the 19th century, the British and their American cousins were joined at the hip financially, even if the bulk of America’s population had no intention of going to war in Europe on anyone’s side. No one in the US government bothered to read the section of the Monroe Doctrine that pledged the US would stay out of internal European political affairs.
The British could be so persuasive, especially if, as did Cecil Rhodes and Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, they had the fantastic wealth of South African diamonds and gold at their disposal. And especially if Rhodes then bequeathed his wealth toward the formation of a “secret society” aimed, in his words, at “recovering the United States of America for the British Empire.” As explained previously, this secret society was the Round Table. Rhodes’s successor in the enterprise was Alfred, Lord Milner. A spinoff of the Round Table was the Anglo-American Pilgrim Society.
It took a while, but Britain was able to stage the sinking of the Lusitania, and America finally got itself in gear. Germany and its allies tried to call a truce, even as the Bolshevik Revolution plunged Russia into chaos. In fact, as Guido Giacomo Preparata argues in Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe, Britain—and the US—allowed the Bolsheviks to defeat the White army in the five-year Russian Civil War. Russian Admiral Kolchak himself, leader of the White armies, said he was betrayed by the Western powers. The point being, says Preparata, that a future combination between a royalist/aristocratic Russia with a resurgent Germany would be a lethal threat to Britain’s imperial future. Britain’s greatest fear was an alliance between Germany and Russia fighting on the same side.
After World War I ended, Germany would soon be able to fight again. Britain and the US had assured this with massive investments in German heavy industry in the 1930s. But rearming Germany only made sense if Britain could direct Germany’s newly found might against the Soviet Union, in the hope that the two might destroy each other, so that the British Empire would be spared.
To prepare for the next war, the British and American elites would encourage a reactionary movement within Germany that would view the Soviets as Germany’s mortal enemy. The charismatic leader, one Adolph Hitler, was identified very early on—in fact, by 1919. He was groomed, flattered, financed, dressed up in military glory, and gotten ready to act as Pied Piper to the nation’s future destruction, all carefully prepared by British lords and diplomats well practiced at this sort of thing. Behind the scenes schemed the Round Table and other assorted British “clubs,” as Preparata calls them.
Hitler loved the British and saw the Soviet Union—Russia—as the enemy. He had written in Mein Kampf:
“If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia….For such a policy there was but one ally: England….No sacrifice should have been too great for winning England’s willingness….Only an absolutely clear orientation could lead to such a goal: renunciation of world trade and colonies….Concentration of all the State’s instruments of power on the land army.” [ii]
But then, neither the US nor Britain neglected the Soviet Union in the rearming process. Standard Oil and Ford built installations, and other companies signed on for gold and oil extraction. The great Dnipro dam on the Dnieper River, for instance, was built from 1927 to 1932 with US money and British engineering skill.[iii] The British also looked the other way as the Stalinist Terror killed a million people, including Leninist and Trotskyite partisans and the top military echelons.
At any time during Hitler’s dictatorship, which was consolidated after the false-flag burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the purge of the Nazi Party’s left-wing in 1934—the “Night of the Long Knives”—the military power of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union could have squashed the still-rebuilding German Wehrmacht. Britain chose not to, France was appalled at Britain’s inaction, and the Soviet build-up continued.
First Russia, then France, then Germany, had felt the British stab in the back And the Soviet Union knew well that their turn would be next. So Germany and the Soviet Union shocked the world by signing a non-aggression pact on August 23, 1939, “the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.”
The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact guaranteed peace between the two parties and made the commitment that neither nation would aid or ally itself with an enemy of the other. But there was also a Secret Protocol which defined the borders of Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
Britain may have realized its mistake in standing by idly. But by then it was too late. War now loomed. The German plan was to bring Europe under control by subordinating all industry to ownership and coordination by the German national banking system with the Reichsmark the reserve currency, much as the dollar would become for the world after US victory in World War II. The Germans also discarded the gold standard as being a compromise of sovereignty. The Germans foresaw a Eurasian economic union that would include the Soviet Union and Japan, a prospect that was anathema to Britain and the US.[iv]
On September 1, 1939, only days after the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, on September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. On September 16, 1939, the USSR invaded Poland. Implementation of the Soviet-German Secret Protocol was underway.
The British had set out to wean Stalin’s Soviet Union away from the German alliance. They succeeded. The Soviets had been cooperating with Britain for a decade in allowing the Nazi war machine to attain its present prowess.[v] Its pact with Germany couldn’t hold; Stalin had little choice but to play along. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until 1941, after Hitler broke his pact with the USSR and invaded that, on July 12, 1941, the USSR then signed a military alliance with Britain. [The USSR was aided by massive amounts of armaments shipped by the US under secret Lend-Lease provisions.]
Even through the Battle of Britain, fought in the skies over England, Hitler appeared to nurture the hope that he and the British might one day share a common future, so long as America remained on the sidelines. His vision was always for Britain to rule the sea while Germany controlled the continental land mass. This was why he felt compelled to neutralize the Soviets, but he hoped in vain.
Looking back, the only fly in the ointment was that if Britain had to count on the US to provide the muscle once the next phase of the war began, the Americans might feel entitled to take charge of the entire Anglo-Saxon enterprise themselves. But the Americans, though mighty and rich, were not practiced at this sort of thing and might be easy to steer in another direction.
Today, not without reason as we shall see, the British still sometimes refer to themselves as the “tugboat” to the American “destroyer.” And Americans have always been easy to dupe with a “fistful of dollars” waving in their faces. After all, said US President Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business.”
[i] Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World”, Crown Publishers, 2008, p. x.
[ii] Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Created the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe, p. 135. Otto Strasser, an early Hitler collaborator, commented that during those early Munich days, Hitler was always flush with cash from unexplained sources, while his mates could barely outfit themselves with a decent set of clothes. The implication was that even then Hitler was on someone’s payroll.
[iii] Ibid, p. 244.
[iv] Engdahl, p.183.
[v] Ibid, p. 249.
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