"The National Security State": Part 4 of 4. Chapter 12 from "Our Country, Then and Now"

"Neophyte Truman’s Outsized Role in US History," "Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech," "Handing Palestine to the Zionists"

Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we have 4th and final installment of Chapter 12: “The National Security State” with sections on "Neophyte Truman’s Outsized Role in US History," "Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech," and "Handing Palestine to the Zionists."

In writing about World War II, we opted not to attempt to include a history of action on the battlefield, as this has been covered exhaustively in the standard literature. Instead, we tried to explain, though briefly, the primary political forces affecting the US role.

These consisted of 1) the British plan to turn Germany and the Soviet Union against each other for purposes of mutual destruction, while using the industrial and military might of the US to advance the purposes of the British Empire; 2) the fact unknown to the US public, but certainly known by the British, that Roosevelt’s administration was heavily infiltrated with communist sympathizers secretly working with Stalin for the Soviets to gain post-war influence in Europe; 3) the presence within the US of a strong popular anti-war movement ridiculed by left-leaning pro-war journalists like Walter Lippmann as being “isolationist”; 4) a virtual takeover of the Roosevelt administration’s policy apparatus by the strongly pro-British Council on Foreign Relations which laid plans for future US global military dominance.

When Vice President Harry Truman took over the presidency upon the death of President Roosevelt, the pro-British anti-Soviet faction of US governance took control of the US. The result was the National Security State and the Cold War. At the same time, the Zionist state of Israel was being created. Gradually, the Zionists also took over governance of the US through their Neocon faction. By the end of the 20th century, the American Constitutional Republic had ceased to exist. Still, within this imperial monstrosity, stirrings of freedom have continued to this day.

Neophyte Truman’s Outsized Role in US History

The start of the Cold War was presided over by President Harry S. Truman after Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office on April 12, 1945. Truman had few qualifications, but he knew how to take orders from powerful people.

Following World War II, Truman acquiesced in the largest military expansion in American peacetime history. Truman was determined to fight against communism, or any other progressive movement, though US belligerence was temporarily halted by its near catastrophe in Korea. The military-industrial complex also organized the rearmament of Germany and Western Europe, with bank and corporate profits soaring into the stratosphere. Latin America meanwhile became a de facto US colony.

The measures put in front of Truman for his signature were epoch-making. Truman knew almost nothing of what had transpired in the decision-making process presided over by Roosevelt for the past twelve years. This included the intricate discussions among Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and their staffs and diplomats during the war.

Truman approved the August 6 and 9, 1945, dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [i] When Roosevelt died the previous April, Truman had not even known of the existence of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons. On the other side of the world in Moscow, even Stalin had known what was going on. It is certain that the Soviets had been given nuclear secrets held by the US and Britain by spies and informants. This allowed them to quickly match the US and to explode an A-bomb in 1949 and an H-bomb in 1953, less than a year after the US had detonated theirs. What Truman was told was a US monopoly on nukes was all lies.

In a presidential directive of January 22, 1946, Truman created the Central Intelligence Group led by a Director of Central Intelligence. The National Security Act of 1947 changed the name to the Central Intelligence Agency, and in 1952 Truman approved the National Security Agency. The CIA was the outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services that ran covert operations in Europe during World War II.

The National Security Act of 1947 defined “covert action,” as:

“…an activity of the US government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the US government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.

The act specified that mass propaganda, paramilitary operations, and lethal force could be carried out against anyone deemed a threat. Soon, the policy of “plausible deniability” would become standard operating procedure; that is, our proud Constitutional government created by Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and other patriots would become, and still is, a clique of trained professional liars.

Sadly, when then-CIA director Mike Pompeo admitted to a Texas A&M University audience in 2018 that "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment", there was no protest from the audience; it joined him in laughter.

Just as Congress earlier gave away its Constitutional prerogative to create money, it now, through the National Security Act of 1947, gave away its prerogative to declare war. Conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government over war powers now became endemic, with the executive and its wall of secrecy almost always winning the battle.

On the recommendation of Britain, Truman signed into law the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 that established the Marshall Plan, named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Funding would eventually rise to over $12 billion for the rebuilding of Western Europe. Besides Britain and France, the beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan would include erstwhile enemies Italy and Germany. The plan overrode the advice of some US policy makers, including Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who wanted Germany to be turned into a huge but harmless tract of farmland.

The proponents of the Marshall Plan, including the British who suggested it, reasoned that the West needed a strong industrialized bulwark against future Soviet expansion, as long as Germany was demilitarized and strictly controlled by the Western powers. Again, Germany was to be raised up as a deterrent to Russia. For the US, flooding Europe with American dollars, even as loans, not grants, as the Marshall Plan would do, served to amplify the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Much of the money lent would come back to the US as the Europeans purchased American machinery and factory equipment for their reconstruction.

The “Truman Doctrine” was announced in a speech by Truman to Congress on March 12, 1947. Most immediately, Truman pledged to contain communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey—purely domestic struggles that were not being supported by the Soviet Union. The US had pulled most of its armies out of Europe except for a small force in Germany, so now Congress appropriated financial aid to support the economies and militaries of Greece and Turkey rather than send troops. US action was forced by the British pull-out of their own troops.

The Truman Doctrine marked the start of American support for other nations it claimed were threatened by the Soviets or by internal communist or progressive upheavals. As a result, Greece became ruled by a corrupt monarchy, while Turkey was in need of no military support at the time of Truman’s speech. This new orientation suited many other nations as well. “All the Greek government, or any other dictatorship, had to do to get American aid was to claim that its opponents were communist.” [ii] This pattern persisted throughout post-World War II history. The real beneficiaries of the Truman Doctrine have been right-wing oligarchs and the ruling classes of ostensibly pro-US nations—and the US military industrial complex.

The Truman Doctrine was a step toward the formation in 1949 of the North American Treaty Organization—NATO. Historians often use Truman's speech of 1947 to indicate the start of the Cold War, though tensions with the Soviet Union had started to run high even before the end of World War II. NATO now was to be the answer. As with the Marshall Plan, NATO started as the brainchild of the British, specifically British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. In fact, Bevin conceded that American independence had allowed it to attain the strength needed to save Britain.

NATO was also a British ploy to maintain their relevance by furthering the narrative of the US and Soviet Union being arch enemies. Stalin wanted the Soviet Union to be part of NATO but was rebuffed. Later, in 1955, the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact as a defensive alliance among the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.

June 1950 brought the US into the Korean War, when North Korea was enticed to invade South Korea following clashes along the border. North Korea was supported by China, which by now had been taken over by Mao Tse Tung’s communists, and by the Soviet Union, while South Korea was supported by the newly-formed United Nations—effectively, the US and Britain, since the Soviets were boycotting the vote in protest of the UN’s recognition of the Republic of China (Taiwan) as China.

Called a “police action” by the US, the Korean War registered over two million combatants as well as two to three million civilians killed, wounded, and missing. The fighting ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953, after Truman had left office, with the original borders between North and South Korea being confirmed.

According to F. William Engdahl, the US had provoked North Korea into invading in order to create outrage and fear among the US population with regard to the communist “menace” and to mobilize public opinion against the Soviet Union, which would now become the scapegoat justifying continued US military and economic dominance worldwide. [iii] [This dominance had been spelled about by control exerted prior to the war over the Roosevelt administration by the Rockefeller-controlled Council on Foreign Relations.]

Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill gave his famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he announced that the Soviet Union had caused an “Iron Curtain” to fall across Europe. [iv] Churchill had just been voted out of office as Prime Minister by a British electorate weary of war. But he was a master of war propaganda. More than that, it was yet another manifestation of the British maneuvering the US.

Churchill introduced the notion of a “special relationship” between Britain and the US. He spoke of US possession of the atom bomb and the unity of the “English-speaking peoples” in terms that Stalin called “warmongering” and imperialistic “racism.” In the speech, Churchill advocated the “common use” between the two nations of all their military facilities. Churchill also gave voice to the idea of “common citizenship” between the British and Americans. [v] Today this sounds like a desperate gambit to maintain British influence after its imperial power had been irretrievably lost.

Handing Palestine to the Zionists

At midnight on May 14, 1948, Zionist leaders in Palestine proclaimed a new state of Israel. On the same day, President Truman recognized the provisional Jewish government as the de facto authority of the Jewish state. [Such recognition had previously been granted by the Soviet Union.] Formal US recognition was extended on January 31, 1949. The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 had authorized the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. With Britain now diminished, the chief protector of Israel in a hostile Middle Eastern environment became the US.

In supporting the creation of Israel, Truman reneged on promises President Roosevelt had given to Saudi Arabia at the end of World War II that the US did not support large-scale Jewish emigration to Palestine. But the Zionist movement won out, with massive financial support from wealthy Jews in the US, including organized crime kingpin Meyer Lansky. Over the next generation, American Zionists would swell into the Neocon faction that began seizing control of the US national security state during the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations and that rules US foreign policy today.

---

[i] See Eustace Mullins’ The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb: Why Hiroshima Was Destroyed, The Untold Story, June 1968.

[ii] Ambrose and Brinkley, p. 82.

[iii] Engdahl, p.205-206.

[iv] Even as World War II was raging, with Britain and the Soviet Union as allies, the British government had begun making plans for future war against the Soviets in Europe. An iteration of this plan was called Operation Unthinkable.

[v] <https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html>

The National Security State -- Part 1 of 4

The National Security State -- Part 2 of 4

The National Security State -- Part 3 of 4

Books Available from the Three Sages:

Richard C. Cook, Our Country, Then and Now. ORDER HERE

Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World. ORDER HERE

Dr. Lewis Coleman: 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance: The discovery of Hans Selye's stress mechanism. ORDER HERE