Hoe Oekraïense- en Amerikaanse 'Hofjoden' Gebruikt Worden 14

In zijn boek The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, zette de joods-Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Eric Lichtblau uiteen:

The decision on whether to grant leniency to the Nazis fell to John McCloy, a pragmatic Washington lawyer who led the American operations in Germany after the war. McCloy’s seeming indifference to the horrors of the Nazis’ genocide was already on display. As a top official in the Roosevelt administration during the war, McCloy in 1944 had rejected repeated pleas from Jewish leaders and from FDR’s own War Refugee Board to bomb the train line from Hungary to Auschwitz, or the concentration camps themselves, in an attempt to disrupt the mass killings. Now, seven years later, with the West Germans pressuring him to extend clemency to convicted war criminals, McCloy complied. In January 1951 he announced that he was sparing twenty-one Nazi war criminals from execution and slashing the jail terms of dozens more, allowing them to walk out of prison to freedom. Among the beneficiaries were Nazi officers who had taken part in notorious war massacres; scientists involved in the medical experiments at concentration camps; and industrialists who had helped to build and finance Germany’s gas chambers and missiles, profiting handsomely. The British and the French were outraged by the Americans’ sudden generosity. The West Germans, of course, were thrilled; they knew they had the Cold War and the flare-up in Asia to thank. ‘Now that the Americans have Korea on their hands,’ smirked one German industrialist given his early freedom on slave-labour charges, ‘they are a lot more friendly.’ 

The Americans’ shift in attitude meant not just freedom for many of the accused war criminals in those early years after the war; it meant jobs and protection as well, as the American spy chiefs moved to exploit their newfound partners in the Cold War. So it was that America’s network of ‘reformed,’ Communist-hating Nazis took rootless than a decade after Nazi Germany’s surrender. In New York, a Nazi collaborator named Mikola Lebed worked with the CIA to stir Soviet resistance among Ukrainian immigrants in America. He gave anti-Soviet speeches, ran CIA front groups, and travelled back to Europe on occasion for covert assignments. During the war, Lebed had been ‘a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans in Ukraine, according to a witness account in the Army’s own files, and was linked to the ‘wholesale murders’ of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Intelligence officials smuggled him into the United States with his wife and daughter anyway, and when the INS tried to deport him in 1952 over reports of his war crimes, Allen Dulles blocked the move; Lebed’s spy work was of ‘inestimable value’ to the CIA, Dulles wrote. 

Outside Los Angeles, Andrija Artukovic, the top-level Nazi collaborator implicated in the murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs, and Roma, became a friendly resource for the FBI in tracking Communist threats in America. With rival Croatian refugees accusing him of war crimes, Artukovic was happy to have the government on his side, and he made clear to agents ‘his deep appreciation of the FBI’s interest in his safety.’ 

In Washington, one of Hitler’s top Russia aides, Gustav Hilger, was still shadowing the Soviets — but now as a secret analyst for the CIA. Although he was wanted in Europe for Nazi war crimes, senior State Department and CIA leaders intervened on Hilger’s behalf and brought him to the United States under an alias, giving him high-level security clearance and the veneer of respectability through postings at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Hilger made no apologies for his Nazi loyalties. ‘I feel no need to defend my actions or opinions; nothing urges me to make emphatic avowals or denials of my past life,’ he wrote in 1953 from his new home in America.

In Jordan’s capital city of Amman, meanwhile, Tscherim Soobzokov trolled through immigrant hangouts on orders from the CIA to identify fellow refugees from the North Caucasus — White Russians, as they called themselves — who hated the Soviets as much as he did. As part of a classified covert program, his job was to recruit other immigrants from the old country who might be willing to spy on Russia for the Americans.

In Bavaria, Klaus Barbie — better known in Nazi-occupied France during the war as the Butcher of Lyon — was living with his family in a comfortable apartment provided by the Americans. He was earning a decent wage as a spy. Lounging poolside, he and other ex-Nazi operatives would use a municipal swimming hole in Bavaria as a convenient spot to meet their American contacts; they figured their comings and goings would attract less attention that way. When French authorities demanded his extradition — ‘Arrest Barbie Our Torturer!’ implored one headline — the Americans refused to turn him over. As tensions with the French rose, U.S. agents spirited him out of Europe altogether, bringing him to Bolivia in 1951. Barbie seemed like an ‘honest man,’ one Army assessment concluded, and his value to the United States as an anti-Soviet agent was simply ‘too great’ to give him up.

Nowhere was the postwar collaboration between ex-Nazis and American intelligence officials seen more vividly than in Germany itself. There, under a secret program code-named Rusty, some four thousand agents under the control of a well-connected ex-Nazi brigadier general named Reinhard Gehlen began spying for the Americans almost immediately after the war. With the United States and Russia manoeuvring to control postwar Europe in a divided Germany and beyond, Gehlen’s men would secretly lay surveillance cables along the Russian zones, monitor the Soviets’ radio traffic, and toil along European rail lines to get intelligence on their movements. America’s own spies did not know the German locales or the language well enough for such a rudimentary spy-craft, so the Army and the CIA farmed out the work to Gehlen’s men. “Now was the ideal time to gain intelligence [on] the Soviet Union if we were ever going to get it,” said one American agent working with the ex-Nazi general.

Many of Gehlen’s agents — at least a hundred, by one count, and probably more — had clear ties to Nazi atrocities; they were better described as ‘outlaws’ than intelligence assets, one American military agent wrote in warning against hiring them. Gehlen’s group, financed by the Americans, became a safe haven for war criminals of all stripes and levels. One of his couriers had served on a mobile Nazi killing unit linked to the murders of eleven thousand Jews. Another Gehlen man killed Russian political prisoners during the war. A third was responsible for recycling the clothing seized from Jews en route to the death camps in Poland.

Just how many war criminals Gehlen employed in his European spy ring was a mystery, however, because the onetime Nazi general at the centre of the vast postwar fiefdom refused to give his military and CIA handlers the real names of his agents. Indeed, he ran his burgeoning network with impunity. The United States paid his group a half-million dollars a year in the early years after the war. Gehlen was even feted on a red carpet tour of America in 1951 that included a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. The general showed little appreciation. If he answered his handlers’ queries at all, he would often feed them half-truths and disinformation, or play them off the French and the British, who were also vying for his services. Starved for information on the Russians, American intelligence officials continued working with Gehlen and paying him despite their frequent misgivings. Sometimes the Army officers chasing Nazi war criminals would press for information about the wartime activities of one of Gehlen’s notorious agents. Back off, American intelligence officials told them; these were Gehlen’s men. They were untouchable.

While their American handlers tried to airbrush their records for appearance’s sake, some of the ex-Nazi spies did not bother to disguise their ideology or their crimes. Theodor Saevecke, an SS officer who worked with Adolf Eichmann, had rounded up Jews during the war to send to slave-labour camps and had admitted ordering the public executions of political prisoners in a town square in Italy as a demonstration of unflinching Nazi force. Even when he went to work for the CIA in postwar Europe, he was unrepentant — and brutally candid in a way that unnerved his American bosses. Most of the former Nazis in the CIA’s employ at least tried to hide their criminal pasts, but their man Saevecke ‘still hankers back after the days when the [Nazi] Party was in the saddle,’ his CIA handler wrote in 1951. ‘He is convinced that the principles of National Socialism were sound.’ 

When Saevecke faced war crimes accusations from survivors in Italy, he turned for protection, not surprisingly, to the CIA. Saevecke had two cards to play: besides his spy work for the agency after the war, he also claimed to have helped Allen Dulles and Nazi general Karl Wolff in the final weeks of the war to negotiate the early surrender in Italy. Dulles, who by now had risen to CIA director, didn’t remember him, but he was willing to help anyway, if possible, just as he had with Wolff and a number of others. ‘Our attitude on [Saevecke] will depend on how bad he really was,’ Dulles wrote. ‘If his past [is] in any way defensible,’ the CIA would try to make the war crimes charges go away and allow him to continue his espionage work. If not, the CIA suggested, the agency could always find him a job at a private detective agency as ‘insurance’ against something going wrong.

Lucky for Saevecke, it didn’t come to that. With the help of whitewashed documents furnished by the CIA, the former SS officer was ‘exonerated’ of war crimes accusations and remained a free man for another three decades, living off a pension from West Germany and dying of old age in 1988.

Het gebruikmaken van hoog geplaatste Nazis van wie bekend was dat zij oorlogsmisdaden hadden gepleegd, benevens misdaden tegen de menselijkheid en zelfs genocide, bleef een natuurlijk onderdeel van Washington’s expansionistische politiek, gericht op de ineenstorting van de Sovjet Unie. Hoewel de Sovjet Unie en het Warschau Pact  in 1991 ophielden te bestaan, bleef de VS de NAVO inzetten om zijn gewelddadige expansionistische politiek voort te zetten. Zo wees de voormalige voorzitter van het Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, in zijn memoires The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (2007) dat ‘het politiek niet van pas komt om te erkennen wat iedereen weet: de Irak oorlog draait grotendeels om olie.’ Een feit dat in de herfst van 2011 nog eens werd bevestigd door een andere insider, te weten de oorlogszuchtige neo-conservatief John Bolton. Tijdens een uitzending van Fox News rechtvaardigde hij een aanval op Iran met de opmerking dat:  

Iran er nauwelijks een geheim van maakt dat het naar de hegemonie streeft in de regio van de Perzische Golf, het cruciale olie en gas producerende gebied waarover wij zovele oorlogen hebben gevoerd om onze economie te beschermen tegen de nadelige impact van het verlies van deze voorraden, of wanneer we er alleen maar over kunnen beschikken tegen zeer hoge prijzen.   

Het is evenwel niet alleen de beschikking over grondstoffen -- tegen een door de Amerikaanse elite bepaalde prijs -- die leidt tot de vele gewelddadige interventies van de VS, maar ook de beschikking over markten speelt een vitale rol. Al in 1907, vatte de latere Democratische president Woodrow Wilson het Amerikaanse buitenlandse beleid nog eens kort maar krachtig samen door te stellen dat:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down… Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

Deze twee factoren verklaren waarom de VS 93 procent van zijn bestaan in oorlog is geweest, en over een miljarden verslindend militair-industrieel complex beschikt. Ook de huidige door de NAVO uitgelokte ‘proxy war’ met Rusland heeft als doel een regime-change in Moskou te forceren, zodat de VS de alleenheerschappij in de wereld kan bemachtigen. Grondstoffen en markten verklaren tevens waarom sinds twee jaar 60 procent van Amerika's oorlogsschepen in de ‘Asia-Pacific region’ is gestationeerd, nabij de Chinese territoriale wateren. De elite in Washington en op Wall Street, vreest namelijk dat na vijf eeuwen westerse hegemonie, het machtscentrum weer naar Azië verschuift, waardoor Washington en Wall Street de macht zal moeten delen, rekening zal moeten houden met de belangen van Aziatische grootmachten. In Azië leven 4,5 miljard mensen, meer dan de helft van de wereldbevolking, en vertegenwoordigt een groeiende economische en militaire macht, waardoor de mogelijkheid is ontstaan dat ditmaal onze gesloten deuren ‘must be battered down,’ om in de terminologie van de uitgesproken racistische en expansionistische president Woodrow Wilson te blijven. Het vergt weinig verbeeldingskracht te beseffen dat dit voor de westerse elite een nachtmerrie is. Het is dan ook de voornaamste reden dat de westerse ‘corporate press’ aan een bredere context van de oorlog in Oekraïne geen woord wijdt. Het grote publiek verneemt tussen alle entertainment en reclame door slechts de boodschap dat de strijd gaat om democratie versus tirannie, mensenrechten versus oorlogsmisdrijven, en alle andere cliché’s, die noodzakelijk zijn om de grondstoffen en markten ‘veilig te stellen,’ zoals dit in het propagandistische jargon zo fraai heet. Veel interessanter en voor ons belangwekkender is hoe vanuit China naar dit NAVO-expanionisme wordt gekeken. Op vrijdag 20 mei 2022 schreef de bekende columnist Alex Lo van de gezaghebbende South China Morning Post:

The US is priming (voorbereiden. svh) Asia-Pacific for war

For Washington, containing China is more important than risking the lives of millions in the region. Such a war will, after all, be fought on the other side of the world, so far as ordinary Americans  — already sold on the evil of communist China and the benevolence of their own country — are concerned.

The war in Ukraine has not caused mainland China to invade Taiwan, but it has provided a cover for Washington to double down  (verdubbelen. svh) on its aggressive Indo-Pacific strategy, of which the island is an integral part.

The United States has jettisoned (overboord gooien. svh) its long-standing one-China policy in all but name. In doing so, it is willing to risk a regional war that can easily spin out of control.

Beijing has been incensed (verbolgen. svh) by the US and Japan over their provocative moves. In a phone call this week with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s top foreign policy adviser, accused the Biden administration of failing to live up to its past commitments, especially on Taiwan.

In another heated exchange with his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi during a video conference, Foreign Minister Wang Yi criticized Tokyo for destabilizing bilateral ties with ‘negative moves on Taiwan and other issues involving China’s core interests and major concerns.’

Of course, all sides know what’s happening, but China’s enemies are happy with Washington’s bait-and-switch tactic (knollen voor citroenen verkopen. svh) over ‘one China.’

Without formally declaring it, America has brazenly made it a matter of foreign policy that Taiwan will never be allowed to be part of the mainland, even if it means war.

But such provocation must be justified and explained away with a mountain of lies, half-truths and deceptions; hence the endless statements from US politicians and op-eds from media pundits accusing China of planning to follow Russia’s example and invade Taiwan.

Washington is acting like Taiwan is already a fully fledged ally and will support any move towards independence. There are the latest statements about boosting the island’s self-defense to ensure ‘an environment in which Taiwan’s future is determined peacefully in accordance with the wishes and best interests of Taiwan’s people.’

In the White House’s February Indo-Pacific strategy statement, Taiwan is described as a ‘key strategic regional partner,’ on par with countries such as India, Indonesia and Singapore.

Militarily, the Pentagon has described the island as a ‘strategic node’ (knooppunt. svh) in the region’s first island chain line of defense against China.

For the US, containing China is more important than risking the lives of millions in the region. And why not? It will be a war fought on the other side of the world, so far as ordinary Americans — already sold on the evil of communist China and the benevolence of their own country — are concerned.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3178571/us-priming-asia-pacific-war 

Als achtergrond-informatie: 

Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.’ 

Zelfs voor westerlingen die uit een geconditioneerd reflex de kant van de neokoloniale machten kiezen, is duidelijk dat het Amerikaans expansionisme op zijn grenzen is gestoten, en dat China als nucleaire grootmacht zich niet langer meer de les laat lezen door het Westen. De uitgelokte oorlog in Oekraïne is slechts een opstap voor de komende gewelddadige krachtmeting tussen enerzijds China en zijn bondgenoten, en anderzijds de VS en zijn NAVO-satellieten. Meer de volgende keer.