#GodSave the #Queen. The #US #Destruction of the #BritishEmpire

By Larry Romanoff

This is a little-known and never-discussed part of US history, but yet one of the major factors that propelled the US to its overwhelming manufacturing and economic supremacy after the Second World War. It involves the final destruction of the British Empire, for which no thinking person would have regrets, and also the conditions obtaining after the end of World War II. The First World War caused Britain to lose about 40% of its former Empire and wealth, and the Second World War completed this task, but not without the little-known predatory intercession of America.

During the Second War, Britain needed huge volumes of supplies of food, raw materials, manufactured goods, armaments and military hardware. But Britain’s factories were being destroyed by the war, and in any case lacked sufficient productive capacity. Britain also increasingly lacked money to pay for those goods, its solution being to purchase on credit from its colonies. Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and many other nations supplied England with necessary goods and war materials, on promise of future payment. The plan was that after the War ended, Britain would repay these debts with manufactured goods which a rebuilt Britain would be able to supply. These debts were recorded in the then British currency of Pounds Sterling, and maintained on ledgers in the Bank of England, commonly referred to as “The Sterling Balances”.

After the Second War ended, the US was the world’s only major economy that had not been bombed

Meet The Man Who Started #WorldWar2

Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly

tomatobubble,com

As regular readers well know by now, the ultimate culprits behind the disaster of World War II were the high-level masters of the New World Order crime gang (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Sulzberger, Baruch et al), and their skilled operational henchmen of the political world (FDR, Churchill, Daladier, Stalin et al). By the way, this is the same self-perpetuating crime syndicate that has, in recent years, been agitating for confrontation against Russia and China. Same game, new players, long story.

But the one thing this dirty gang could never have accomplished by themselves was to trigger the actual war. As even the most geographically illiterate Boobus Americanus or Boobus Europithicus should know, neither the US, nor the USSR, and nor the UK shared a common border from which to make mayhem against Hitler's Germany. 

France does share a border with Germany, but when Hitler permanently renounced any claims to the

Imperialism, The Cold War, and the Contradictions of Decolonization

By Anthony Mustacich

The Second World War had devastated the colonial empires of Western Europe, leaving the United States as the capitalist world’s undisputed superpower. At the same time, the war demolished the colonial system that had defined the imperialist era up until that point, giving rise to a new stage of imperialism called neo-colonialism.

In conjunction with this shift from colonialism to neo-colonialism, another shift occurred from intra-imperialist rivalry to intra-imperialist unity, as the former colonial empires joined together under the leadership of the United States into one imperialist world system, which I have labeled Trilateral Imperialism (in reference to the Triad: the U.S., Western Europe and Japan).

To be sure, there were still contradictions among imperialist nations, but these were non-antagonistic and could be resolved without war. No longer would Western Europe devour itself in barbaric conflicts over colonial possessions; now, they would merge together and plunder the third world as one.

As the last standing capitalist superpower, the United States was charged with redesigning the imperial landscape after WWII. The former colonial empires of Western Europe were in shambles and no longer had the ability to manage their colonies. The United States adopted a comprehensive aid program to help rebuild Europe and Japan, investing some of its capital surplus into the devastated economies of the capitalist world. The Marshall Plan, as it was called, was no altruistic gesture stemming from America’s noble spirit, but rather a way for American capital and products to penetrate European markets. In the end, the Marshall Plan pumped $13 billion into the reconstruction of Europe, reviving capitalism on a world scale.

The recovery of capitalism in fact began at the onset of WWII in the United States, with the war effort stimulating production on a massive scale. The New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt also began implementing Keynesian economic policies, which would come to characterize the post-war capitalist economy. Keynesianism argued that capitalism, due to its inherent tendency towards underconsumption, required government intervention in the economy to stimulate aggregate consumption through government spending and progressive taxation. Similar measures were adopted in capitalist Europe after the war, resuscitating the economy and creating welfare states that limited the worse social consequences of capitalism, such as poverty, unemployment, and economic insecurity.

Along with the Marshall Plan, the U.S. pressured Britain and France to dismantle their colonial empires so that the whole third world could be opened up to American capital. Although the decolonized countries were seemingly independent, U.S. policy makers believed that these countries’ only purpose was to “provide raw materials, investment opportunities, markets and cheap labor” to “complement the industrial countries of the West” (Chomsky, 1992). Thus, the primary threat to the U.S.-led order were “’nationalist regimes” that dared to use their national resources to attain the “immediate improvement of the low living standard of the masses’”(Chomsky, “On Foreign Policy). The so-called “Cold War,” then, was conceived to be a war for U.S. control over the third world.

Formal colonies were no longer necessary to ensure the continuous transfer of wealth from the periphery to the metropolis and that is why the United States pushed for the abolition of colonialism. As one scholar of imperialism noted, “colonialism, considered as the direct application of military and political force, was essential to reshape the social and economic institutions of many of the dependent countries to the needs of the metropolitan centers. Once this reshaping had been accomplished economic forces – the international price, marketing, and financial systems – were by themselves sufficient to perpetuate and indeed intensify the relationship of dominance and exploitation between mother country and colony” (Magdoff, 139). Thus neo-colonialism was just as effective as colonialism.

The Cold War is often misinterpreted as a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two contending world powers, with the U.S. working to contain Soviet ambitions of world domination. However, as declassified U.S. policy documents make clear, the primary threat posed by the Soviet Union was its willingness to supply military and economic support to third world regimes that were targets of U.S. aggression and subversion (NSC 68). The Soviet Union thus served to deter and restrain U.S. actions in the third world, which was unacceptable to U.S. imperial ambitions. Further, the Soviet system with its “autarkic command economy interfered with U.S. plans to construct a global system based on (relatively) free trade and investment, which, under the conditions of mid-century, was expected to be dominated by U.S. corporations and highly beneficial to their interests, as indeed it was” (Chomsky, 1992). To be sure, the Soviet Union betrayed the cause of socialism after the death of Stalin, becoming a social imperialist power in its own right. However, its imperial aims were limited to the region allotted to it under the Malta agreements and the threat it posed to the U.S. was its willingness to support nationalist third world regimes resistant to U.S. imperial demands.

Throughout the Cold War, the military-industrial-complex became a major part of the U.S. economy, and thus a catalyst for sustained growth, albeit sluggish starting in the 1970’s. For the Soviet Union, however, the “arms race” had the opposite effect of bleeding the Soviet economy and intensifying its internal contradictions until it imploded in 1989. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the Cold War came to an end, and with it, according to some, so did history. The triumph of the United States and Western Europe over the Soviet system proved to most people the superiority of free markets and capitalism. Free market euphoria swept the globe, giving birth to the new world order of neo-liberal capitalism.

Neo-liberalism, in stark contrast to Keynesianism, argued that economic growth required an end to government intervention in the economy (except in the military and prison sectors). Now the “invisible hand” of the market should rein unhindered, naturally allocating economic resources fairly and efficiently, creating a healthy equilibrium between supply and demand. Thus the era of Keynesianism and welfare capitalism came to an abrupt end, once again transforming the imperialist landscape.

The shift to neo-liberalism in the metropolis did not end neo-colonialism in the third world however. In fact, the neo-liberal onslaught began in the third world much earlier than it began in the developed world, starting with the U.S.-instigated coup in Chile in 1973. The third world was always encouraged to adopt trade liberalization and free market policies in order to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the third world to the U.S. and Europe. The shift to neo-liberalism in the metropolis only changed how neo-colonialism was enforced on the third world. Now international institutions, representing the collective economic will of the imperialist powers, emerged to impose neo-colonial policies on third world countries. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund gave third world countries “development loans” on the condition that they adopted “structural adjustment programs” designed to open their economies to western markets. Of course these policies did not lead to development, but only more intense underdevelopment for third world nations.

The neo-liberal empire of today is not the empire of one imperialist nation, but the empire of transnational corporations, based in the Triad, and enforced through U.S. and NATO military force. Neo-liberalism will not lead to the liberation or development of third world nations, but only their further underdevelopment and exploitation, as recent events in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most shamefully, Libya have proven.

The empire of today is the most destructive and dangerous empire that has ever confronted the human race. In the name of freedom, democracy, and economic prosperity, it is pillaging the third world at an unprecedented rate, leading to devastating wars of terror and occupation. The failures of capitalism should be clear to everyone not on its payroll, and the choice facing humanity today should be even more clear: Socialism or barbarism.

Notes

Chomsky, Noam, “Deterring Democracy,” (1992), retrieved online at http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/dd/dd-c01-s07.html.

Chomsky, Noam, “What Uncle Sam Really Wants,” retrieved online at http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/dd/dd-c01-s07.html.

Magdoff, Harry. Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present. Monthly Review Press (1978).

May 1945: “Operation Sunrise”, Nazi Germany Surrenders, But… on May 7, 8, or 9?

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

After the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, the Americans, British, and Soviets had agreed that there would be no separate negotiations with Nazi Germany with respect to its capitulation, and that the Germander surrender would have to be unconditional. In the early spring of 1945, Germany was as good as defeated and the Allies were getting ready to receive its capitulation. The expected unconditional German capitulation vis-à-vis all three Allies would have to be concluded somewhere, but where – on the Eastern Front, or on the Western Front?

If only for reasons of prestige, the Western Allies preferred that this would happen on the Western Front. Secret talks with the Germans, which the British and Americans were holding at that time (i.e. in March 1945) in neutral Switzerland, code-named Operation Sunrise, were useful in that context, not only with an eye on a German surrender in Italy, which had actually led to the talks, but also in view of the coming general and supposedly unconditional German capitulation, of which intriguing details – such as the venue of the ceremony – might possibly be determined in advance and without input from the the Soviets. There were many possibilities in this respect, because the Germans themselves kept approaching the Americans and the British in the hope of concluding a separate armistice with the Western powers or, if that would prove impossible, of steering as many Wehrmacht units as possible into American or British captivity by means of “individual” or “local” surrenders, i.e. surrenders of larger or smaller units of the German army in restricted areas of the front.

The Great War of 1914-1918 had ended with a clear and unequivocal armistice, namely in the form of an unconditional German surrender, which everybody knows went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The Second World War, on the other hand, was to grind to a halt, in Europe at least, amidst intrigue and confusion, so that even today there are many misconceptions regarding the time and place of the German capitulation. The Second World War was to end in the European theatre not with one, but with an entire string of German capitulations, with a veritable orgy of surrenders.

It started in Italy on April 29, 1945, with the capitulation of the combined German armies in southwestern Europe to the Allied forces led by Alexander, the British field marshal. Signatories on the German side included SS General Karl Wolff, who had conducted the negotiations with American secret agents in Switzerland about sensitive issues such as the neutralization of the kind of Italian anti-fascists for whom there was no room in the American-British post-war plans for their country. Stalin had expressed misgivings about the arrangement that was being worked out between the Western Allies and the Germans in Italy, but in the end he gave his blessing to this capitulation after all.

Continue reading:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/may-1945-operation-sunrise-nazi-germany-surrenders-but-on-may-7-8-or-9/5334299        

The Story of U.S. Exceptionalism in Iraq

http://www.globalresearch.ca/war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity-the-story-of-u-s-exceptionalism-in-iraq/5328599

War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: The Story of U.S. Exceptionalism in Iraq

By Ajamu Baraka

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq, one of the most egregious expressions of naked power and imperial ambition since the Second World War.

The attack defied both an outraged world opinion — expressed by global mass demonstrations — and the United Nations charter. It also marked a change from the previous veiled decorum of supposed adherence to international law that defined post-war international relations. The Bush administration, armed with the ultimate expression of the arrogance of U.S. exceptionalism – legislation passed by the U.S. Congress – unleashed a murderous assault on the people of Iraq dubbed “Operation Shock and Awe.”

Ten years later, the awesome consequences of that criminal assault are clear. More than a trillion dollars spent, almost five thousand American lives lost, more than 32,000 Americans wounded, estimates of a million dead Iraqis and almost five million displaced, an epidemic of Iraqi birth defects from “depleted” uranium, daily bombings, devastated public services and the dismemberment of the country. Yet, ten years later, no one, not one government official, has been held accountable. The obvious question is: how is it that, in light of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed by a State, there have been no investigations, prosecutions or convictions of the officials responsible for this assault?

The lack of accountability is even more incomprehensible in light of the fact that it is now widely acknowledged that the real reason for the Western invasion of Iraq had little to do with its concern about weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with its desire to steal Iraq’s oil.

American officials have long-since broken their silence on the phony excuses proffered to the American people to sucker them into supporting a war of choice against an Iraqi regime softened-up by a decade of crippling sanctions. Antonia Juhasz, in an article written for CNN’s website, pointed out that the historical record is now unambiguously replete with evidence that the real motivation to attack Iraq was control of Iraq’s oil and that plans were being made as soon as ten days after the Bush Administration took power to figure out how to accomplish that objective.

But that was not the reason presented to the U.S. and the global public. What was presented was the argument that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that President Saddam Hussein and his government, therefore, posed a threat to the world (meaning the U.S.). The “threat argument” was concocted to respond to any questions regarding the justification for waging war against a sovereign nation and was the basis for the ridiculous assertions by the Bush Administration that there was some operational cooperation between the government of Iraq and Ansar al-Islam, at the time loosely identified with the Al-Qaeda network.

Anyone with an even cursory understanding of the relationship between the Iraqi government and Al-Qaeda knew the assertion to be a laughable one, as Saddam Hussein was universally hated by the radical Islamic movement. However, with a compliant U.S. mainstream press and a U.S. public notorious for being one of the most unsophisticated in the world, it was relatively easy to not only make the argument that Iraqi WMDs posed a threat to the U.S. but also that Iraq was somehow connected to the attacks on 9/11. The government was so successful in planting this notion in American minds that even after an avalanche of evidence to the contrary was revealed, in 2004 over 60 percent of those who voted for the re-election of Pres. George Bush believed that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11.

So if it is clear that the concern for WMDs was an elaborate hoax and that the attack on Iraq not only violated international law but even violated U.S. law, where is the investigation by the International Criminal Court? Why don’t we see the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their boss George Bush in the dock at a Special Tribunal on Iraq? And why has there been no accountability even under U.S. law?

Why the continued impunity, when the facts indicate that a crime of epic proportions was committed? At a very minimum, there is enough evidence to justify an investigation into the attempts to evade, manipulate and distort U.S. law to further the narrow economic interests of powerful interests in the Bush Administration. Don’t “we, the people” deserve to know the details and role of the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Dick Cheney, that was formed right after the Administration took power?

Who pays the price for impunity?

The Iraqi Government nationalized its oil sector more than 30 years ago. But Western oil companies are now back. Riding in under the gun of the coalition of the willing, Western companies have now taken over the Iraqi oil sector, with 80 percent of production being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs. So Western oil is doing fine.

Did the U.S. media learn anything from the Iraqi war? It should have been clear that something had gone horribly wrong with a media culture that could allow itself to be reduced to a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the U.S. Government. Sadly, it does not appear that any lessons were learned. What this episode has revealed is that by the early 2000s, a corporate media culture had emerged in the U.S. that embraced an ideological orthodoxy that framed its perception of the world in terms that did not diverge substantially from the positions and views of the economic and political elites in the country. The result is a mainstream media culture today that is more than willing to parrot the government’s line on the “big questions of war,” almost without question.

The latest example if this role is the hysteria being whipped up by the corporate media to push the Obama Administration to attack Syria because of unconfirmed “reports” that it’s military has used chemical weapons in the civil war that the U.S. orchestrated in the country. Here again, we see that the media still passes on information from unnamed governmental sources and when it takes editorial positions that find it on the same side as the government, NATO and A-Qaeda in places like Libya or Syria it is seen as just an odd circumstance of history.

So neither government representatives nor associated institutions like the media and corporations pay the price for their role in crimes perpetrated internationally. The lawlessness and impunity of the West is paid for by the people of whichever nation finds itself in the crosshairs of U.S. and Western interests. It is paid for by the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, the working class families of the troops killed or injured, and the troops who returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress. A price has also been exacted from all us who believe in the possibility of cooperative, global human progress

What the U.S. war on Iraq demonstrated is that in order to maintain their fantasies of continued global dominance, the U.S. and its colonialist allies will resort to naked piracy. But it is not gold trinkets and slaves that are the contemporary booty – it is whole nations. And while the undermining of the rule of law, the normalization of war to advance national interests and the hollowing out of the human rights idea in order to justify “humanitarian interventions” might seem to be beneficial in the short term, the people of the world who have been slowly liberating themselves from the conceptual myopia of colonization see very clearly the hypocrisy of the West’s supposed commitment to universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law when international crimes like the attack on Iraq go unpunished.

The result is that many are not moved by the West’s expressions of concerns for the people of Syria, when the U.S. and the West continue to support the occupation and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, kill innocents with drone strikes, and train and provide weapons to repressive states and terrorists groups. Many understand that if there was a real commitment to the equal application of international law and accountability, U.S. and British officials would be held to account for the crimes committed in Iraq. But we all know that is not going to happen anytime soon.