By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
TO understand the open manifestations of fascist tendencies in North America under President Donald Trump, we have to start with the foundation.
The North American empire was built on slavery, colonialism and racism on a vast continent cleansed of natives through genocide. The white Anglo-Saxon population was supplemented by heavy doses of East European and German immigrants.
The history of Nazi-like elements in the US becomes most vivid if we turn to Europe and the relationship between the US and its most important ally in the fight against European fascism and Nazism: the former Soviet Union.
US leaders treated their alliance with the Soviet Union as a marriage of convenience and a tactical move on the way to US supremacy.
Their long-term objective was to turn the anti-fascist, anti-Nazi mobilisation into an anti-communist and anti-Soviet mobilisation as soon as Adolf Hitler was out of the way.
We know because US President Harry S. Truman deliberately sabotaged the United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s efforts to support all the countries which had suffered devastation in the war.
The Soviet Union was the most deserving country to receive aid, but it was quickly cut off.
Instead, the US moved quickly to strengthen and rehabilitate European empires against Africans fighting for their liberation, arguing the Soviet Union’s solidarity with those African movements made them a threat to Europe and the US.
If we take US assistance to the embattled British Empire up to 1948, we notice that it totalled US$28 billion, of which US$20 billion was actually written off.
But the Soviet Union received the very opposite treatment.
After moving away from the financial credits and reconstruction help which had been promised through the UN, the US actively recruited surviving elements of the former Hitler regime to use against the Soviet Union.
In other words, the US, by 1947, had embarked on a programme of sanctions and destabilisation against the Soviet Union, its most important partner in the war against Hitler.
According to US historians themselves, the US hired more than 1 000 former Nazi spies and gave them new names and new identity cards with a view to deploying them against the Soviet Union. The US also recruited Nazi engineers and scientists who became instrumental in developing the US nuclear weapons programme and the space exploration programme.
Belgian historian Ludo Martens concludes his account on the roots of the fascist elements in US imperialism as follows:
“Even before the anti-fascist war was finished, a number of US generals dreamed of a shift in alliances so that they could attack the Soviet Union.
For this adventure, they intended to recruit the (surrendered) Nazi army, purged of Hitler and his close entourage.”
Martens cites US General Patton speaking to General T. McNarney:
“We’re going to have to fight them (the Soviets) sooner or later. Why not now (in 1945) while our army (in Europe) is still intact and we can kick the Red Army back into Russia.
We can do it with my (Nazi) Germans… they hate those red bastards.”
One of the more than 1 000 Nazi spies recruited by the US was Lieutenant-General Reinhard Gehlen.
He had served as Nazi Germany’s head of intelligence inside the Soviet Union.
So his experience was considered precious.
He surrendered to US forces, together with his entire archives.
US Major-General Luther Sibert ordered Gehlen to write a detailed report which came up to 129 pages.
Gehlen was among many Nazi war criminals who should have been tried for crimes against humanity in Europe and the Soviet Union, but he was smuggled into the US on August 22 1945 where he was introduced to top military and intelligence officials. His assignment was to set up an intelligence organisation to spy on the Soviet Union and its communist neighbours.
In 1946, Gehlen was given another assignment: to reactivate and rehabilitate the Nazi spy service in Germany, now to serve the US occupation administration.
Gehlen of course hired dozens of his former Gestapo colleagues, gave them new identities and deployed them on behalf of the US.
Martens writes that his sources indicate that, altogether, more than 10 000 Nazi war criminals were smuggled into the US at the end of the Hitler wars.
In addition to war criminals and spies, the US also recruited and imported more than 100 000 ready-trained civilian doctors, scientists, writers and professors, mostly from Eastern Europe.
These policies and activities fit very well with the expressed desires of both US President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the time.
Churchill’s position was that communism was a worse threat to capitalism and imperialism than fascism and Nazism.
Throughout his premiership, Churchill believed that the ultimate objective of Western imperialism was to destroy the Soviet revolution which it had failed to do at the beginning:
“The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring
Russia, then postrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system, lies upon us today.”
Churchill made this confession in April 1949, as the Cold War was getting more and more intense.
His colleague, Truman, shared the same conviction: “(The) new menace (Soviet Communism) facing us seemed as grave as Nazi Germany.
A victory of our adversaries will inevitably Bolshevise all of Europe.”
In recent decades, the former reactionaries, imported into the US from Germany and Eastern Europe, have risen to prominence not just in the military and intelligence establishment, but also in government and politics.
The most notorious ones have been former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former US National Security Advisor Zhigniew Brzezinski, former US Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, under President Bill Clinton, was prominent in the anti-Yugoslavia wars and in the crippling of Iraq prior to its invasion by the next administration of President George W. Bush.
Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is African-American, is said to have learned politics and international affairs under the tutorship of an East European reactionary professor who also happens to be Madeleine Albright’s father.
East European reactionaries, their intellectual descendants and allies in North America are credited with the eventual destruction of the Soviet Union in 1989.
The same reactionaries and their allies have also tried to extend to Africa and Latin America the same strategies and tactics used against the Soviet Union.
This explains why Zimbabwe, for instance, has been subjected to ‘regime change’ rhetoric and ‘transition’ politics borrowed from Eastern Europe.
In addition to that realisation, it is essential to understand the Nazi-fascist tradition which influences the new right in the US and throughout Europe.
This does not mean that Latin America, Asia and Africa will surrender to this new style of white supremacy.
On the contrary, there will be mounting resistance from these three areas as well as some limited resistance from within Europe and the US.
While Trump’s personality and background fit well into the neo-Nazi tradition, his success in mobilising a white racist movement arises from current factors, including:
λ The rise of China and the challenge which that country’s technological edge poses to US hegemony.
λ The existence of good relations between China and Russia despite Western efforts to divide them.
λ The growing influence of Russia, China and India in Africa.
λ The clear likelihood that the coalition of white liberals and ‘peoples of colour’ which made it possible for former US President Barack Obama to become a two-term President will coalesce again with even bigger numbers.
λ The fact that birth rates among the so-called ‘people of colour’ (Latinos especially) are much higher that among whites, making it obvious that these people will outnumber whites probably by 2043.
Even long before that date, the kind of racial politics used by Trump is likely to galvanise a formidable coalition of white liberals and radicals with Latinos, African-Americans, Asians and Arabs against white supremacy. The nationwide uprisings against the murder of George Floyd already show the great potential of that coalition. The struggle will continue.