As I announced in my blurb, its job after World War II was to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. First and foremost, to keep the Soviets out of Western Europe, which, it was expected, they would invade any day now. Had they not overrun Poland, Czechoslovakia Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia? Some would have called it liberation, the way Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands had been “liberated.” But several West European countries formed an alliance and appealed to the Americans for protection.
What were the Americans to do? FDR had died in April of 1945, and the new American president, Harry Truman, was a smalltime politician from Missouri who admittedly knew nothing of foreign affairs. He had met Stalin at Potsdam, Prussia, in August of 1945, and sort of liked him. Just the same, he itched to set the record as to who was boss, and “surprised” Stalin with the announcement of the successful atomic bomb experiment back home. Stalin was not surprised: he had his own sources.
So the decision of whether to drop the bomb on Japan and sorting out the European situation was on Truman’s to do agenda. With respect to Europe, Greece was a problem. The British had helped the Greek resistance against the Germans but when the Greek National Liberation Front was about to reconquer Athens, the British stopped them. Why? Because of the leadership of the Communists in the effort. Unsurprisingly, the elections organized by the British in 1946 were boycotted by the Greek Communist Party, and the resistance continued. (Greece is still resisting). The Soviet Union was not involved, but Tito’s Yugoslavia provided support and sanctuary. Britain, laid low by the war effort, appealed to the U.S. for help.
And then there was the Turkish problem. The Soviets were pressuring Turkey for free passage through the Dardanelles. That issue of access to the Mediterranean by a land-locked country is a historical one for Russia going back to Peter the Great and even before. Once upon a time Kievan Rus had been actively trading with Byzantium. But that trade was cut off by repeated waves of invasion out of the Eastern steppes. Crimea was eventually occupied by the Tartars, Turkey’s allies – hence Russia’s centuries-long conflict with the Turks. The Crimean War of 1854, when the French and British joined Turkey against Russia, is another chapter in that conflict. (“Ours is not to ask the reason why, ours is but to do and die” -Tennyson). But there was a perfectly good reason for the war. The Mediterranean was Franco-British territory by then, and they didn’t want the Russians, anywhere nearby. So now the Brits were worried about the Dardanelles again in 1946, and Truman better start worrying too.
He didn’t have to worry too long: The diplomat George Kennon, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of State George Marshall were good coaches. George Kennon advised that the Soviets only understood force, and the needed policy was “containment.” Dean Acheson was the first to articulate the since then familiar notion of the “domino theory”: if Turkey yielded and if Greece “fell,” the Mediterranean was lost. George Marshall distinguished between “horizontal aggression” and “vertical aggression”: the former was outright military invasion by the Soviet Union while the latter was the takeover of governments by Communist parties from within. To address what he thought was the more immediate problem, he proposed a massive economic aid to Western Europe to head off its vulnerability to Communist influence. After all, not just Greece but Italy, and even France had large Communist movements. His rescue plan, subsequently known as the Marshall Plan, included beaten and devastated Germany. So much for the initial goal of “keeping the Germans down.”
Truman saw the light. Involvement abroad was not a bad diversion from his troubles at home: the 1946 congressional elections had been a disaster. Truman proceeded to convince a reluctant, isolationist Republican Congress, which focused on cutting taxes for the rich (what else?) to open its purse strings for Greece and Turkey, and then for the comprehensive Marshall Plan. Besides, it was good business as the goods sent to Europe were grown or manufactured at home – especially weaponry. The “Military Industrial Complex” organized to fight World War II thus received a new lease on life. It became the country’s addiction President Eisenhower later warned against, and which we suffer to this day.
Thus the Truman Doctrine was born: “I believe, he stated, that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” REALLY? Just to make sure, Truman created the initial version of the CIA and the NSA, and in April of 1948, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed. The stated intention of NATO was “to settle…international disputes by peaceful means… and to refrain … from the threat or use of force.” The British journalist Richard Cottrell, however, calls it differently: his book “Gladio” calls it NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe, and documents in great detail the Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia connection.
He begins by explaining the “left behind” phenomenon. Apparently, there were people and cashes of ammunition “left behind” to resist the Germans. But Germany had lost and instead of the various anti-Nazi resistance movements, another set of resisters sprang up. They were all those that were disappointed BECAUSE Germany lost: Nazi hard-liners in Germany, Nazi sympathizers in other countries – or, for that matter, the Italian Fascists, to whom the name Gladio is attributed. These were the foot soldier NATO turned to and financed to organize a “strategy of tension.” We are more familiar with calling it the Cold War.
Richard Cottrell describes this strategy of tension as three-fold. First, there was a sort of guerrilla war fought in the streets. He contends that the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction, and Britain’s anarcho-Marxist Angry Brigades were thoroughly infiltrated by NATO’s “gladiators” and manipulated to create highly publicized “acts of terror.” The second strategy was political – to undermine democratically elected governments. Have any of you seen the movie “Z” by Costa Gravas? This would be just one example, as it played out in Greece. Maybe McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committee at home gives a sense of similar witch hunts all over Europe. The third strategy was assassination plain and simple, usually perpetrated by a “red,” preferably insane lone gunman. Sounds familiar? Have you seen Oliver Stone movie on John F Kennedy’s assassination? If you are interested in more of the gory details, I recommend the book. Let me just mention the French case. The French “gladiators” came from earlier Vichy collaborators, but more recently from the ranks of disappointed colons ejected from Vietnam and Algeria. One of them, colonel Guerin-Serac, was a mastermind of the “strategy of tension”- Cottrell quotes him as follows: “The destruction of the state (and in his conservative mind a liberal democratic state is precisely the target) must be carried out under the cover of ‘Communist activities.’ Popular opinion must be polarized…they must understand that we are the only instrument capable of saving the nation.” President De Gaulle, who they felt betrayed them in Algeria, survived four assassination attempts. No wonder the French pulled out of NATO, which found its new home in Brussels.
What about the Soviets during all these events? Well they did not, and as is well documented never intended to occupy Western Europe. Given the repeated invasions from Germany, they argued the necessity of a safe buffer zone, which Eastern Europe provided. They did, however, orchestrate a Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948. And then there was the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 and the Korean War in 1950. The Soviets supported the latter from afar, but it was the Chinese who actually sent troops and pushed the Americans back across the demarcation line between North and South. Stalin died in 1953 and in 1954 the Soviet Union actually expressed an interest in joining NATO. This overture was rebuffed while West Germany, was invited to join NATO in 1955. The same year the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact and in 1956 suppressed the Hungarian uprising.
Their launching of Sputnik in 1957 created a big stir, and a falsely claimed advantage over American arms caused additional fears. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Vietnam War gave new fuel to the domino theory. The sixties, however, also witnessed some measure of détente. The Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and there is evidence that President Kennedy was planning to draw down the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union experienced a “thaw,” and the rise of a significant dissident movement. The seventies, with Nixon’s trip to China, turned public attention eastward again as the era under Brezhnev was characterized as stagnant. NATO forces, however, continued to organize themselves and to practice military exercises on land and sea.
The eighties witnessed a rising peace movement. I participated in the one-million strong peace march in New York in 1982. I travelled to an international peace conference in Prague in 1983, where the representatives from Third World Countries expressed their outrage at the two giant Cold Warriors for wasting their resources on the arms race and neglecting dire human needs. I travelled to the Soviet Union in 1984, and discovered a vital, government supported peace movement completely unreported in the U.S. After all, World War II had been fought on their soil and they still bore the scars. Besides, they admitted that they could not afford the arms race, while we thought we could. We still think that the arms industry is our bread and butter. Characteristically, it was the conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan who could afford to enter into dialogue with the new Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. His instituting Glasnost and Perestroika represented a turn to liberal change. The going joke was that if Gorbachev, known as Gorby, were to run for president in the U.S. he would win. But it is not up to the citizenry to decide. The deciders they elect have their own agendas.
With respect to NATO, it was the meeting between Gorbachev and James Baker at Malta in 1990 that held the promise of real change. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989 and the issue at stake was the reunification of Germany. The U.S. needed Gorbachev’s guarantee that the Soviet Union would not veto the German unification project at the U.N. Security Council. The condition set by Gorbachev was “yes” IF AND ONLY IF there was a clear commitment not to advance NATO “one inch” to the East of the German border. Baker agreed, and the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. But the agreement had been based on a handshake, and it was later said – when NATO did expand further East – that if Gorbachev had been stupid enough not to get the agreement in writing, it was his problem.
The topic is NATO, and should not the disintegration of the Soviet Union have made NATO irrelevant? Had it not been created to protect Western Europe from its presumed threat of invasion? And what about the Communist threat – had they not seen the light and joined the glories of Capitalism? But if NATO had been created when the Soviet Union was perceived as strong, NATO now proliferated because the Soviet Union, broken into component parts, was weak. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1997, and a score of others joined as well, including France who returned to the fold under Sarkozy. But let me focus on just a couple of examples, both of which are up close and personal to me: Yugoslavia, where I was born, and Ukraine where my Mother’s family came from – while my Father came from Russia… oh no!
But let’s start with Yugoslavia. It was the bombing of Belgrade by NATO in 1999 that shocked me into action: both an effort to understand and an urge to resist. That’s when I showed up at the Thursday Vigil in front of the Federal Building and first met Joe Bernick. And the effort to understand, after some 22 books on Yugoslavia I found basically mealy-mouthed or just misleading finally took me to David Gibbs’ book, First Do No Harm, and here I found a thorough, fair, and reliable account of events.
Basically, a steady application of identity politics eagerly supported and promoted from abroad, did the job. Yugoslavia was not a conglomeration of separate nations, not even of separate ethnicities. Yes, former empires which had occupied the territory had left a legacy of different religions: Serb Orthodox going back to the Byzantine Empire, Muslims in Bosnia going back to the Turkish Empire, and Catholics in Croatia and Slovenia going back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, I should add, the Nazi occupation during World War II, where they found, especially in Croatia, fertile ground. This had been largely put to rest by Tito, until it became convenient to revive the differences in the 90s. Convenient for whom? Germany was a big player, training secret security forces in Slovenia and Croatia. But why am I harping on Croatia when it was so obvious that Milosevic was the villain?
Actually, like Milan Kucan of Slovenia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Aliya Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic had been prepared to adopt neo-liberal economics. As always, it’s the economy, stupid. In hock to the IMF, Yugoslavia had been caught up in the severe rise of interest rates in the 80s, and to pay its bills, AND try to maintain social amenities, suffered runaway inflation in 1989. And Milosevic, unlike the others, refused to implement the austerity measures imposed by the IMF. Of course, he was the villain. Then the fighting started, triggered by the secession of Slovenia and then Croatia, and since he had the JNA or federal army on his side, he did do well enough. But atrocities did happen, and on all sides – but we only heard about Serb atrocities, and that caused the “international community” to intervene. The UN peace-keeping mission in Bosnia was launched in 1992. But the fighting kept going because peace efforts kept failing. David Gibbs cites evidence that the U.S. had an interest in scuttling the peace efforts initiated by the European Union and the UN. It wished to reassert its own claim to the leadership of the “international community.” There was a sense that the EU had been trying to wiggle out of NATO… PERISH THE THOUGHT! The United States and “the international community” and NATO were one and indivisible. The job of NATO had morphed from defensive to patently aggressive.
And that aggression was now quite overt, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or Syria – and why not Iran? This is not to say that Gladio-like subversion had stopped. Richard Cottrell has much to say about any number of terrorist events in Spain, Britain, Belgium, France, Sweden… One of the more exotic diversionary tactics was the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The perpetrator, characterized as a Turkish “Muslim fanatic,” turned out to be a well-known gangster and CIA financed “asset” of the right-wing paramilitary organization known as the Gray Wolves. You may have noticed that by then the Communist terrorists have morphed into Islamic terrorists.
This is not to say that there was not more homework to do in Europe. Poland and the Baltic States is not enough. How about Ukraine? Maybe this talk is getting too long and I should sop here.
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 