http://cyberjournal.org/cj/fresia/ Toward an American Revolution Exposing the Constitution and other Illusions Jerry Fresia ------------------------------------------------ Chapter 5 The Constitution and Secret Government (a) The Constitution and Secret Government (b) The Power of the President and the Role of Congress ------------------------------------------------ (c) The Secret Government and the Rise of Nazi Germany I have suggested that the military defeat in 1787 of Daniel Shays and others who resisted the advancement of market relations expressed counter-revolutionary tendencies because it marked a return to the imperial values of Great Britain. As market relations became fully capitalist and spread from Europe and the United States into other parts of the world, resistance was organized by those who, similar to the participants of Shays Rebellion, sought either to defend or create space for an alternative way of life. And like the Framers of 1787, U.S. government leaders together with private elites have often felt compelled to organize counter-revolutionary armies to protect property and market relations or what they prefer to call "freedom." The first counter-revolutionaries or "freedom fighters" were the Framers themselves when they put down Shays Rebellion. The next organized effort to enlist Freedom Fighters to put down a revolution was in response to the overthrow of the Russian czar by the Bolsheviks after World War I. International bankers and lawyers in the Northeast, alarmed by the Bolsheviks but determined to press on with the expansion of foreign investments and operations, established the American branch of the Round Table Groups, a set of "semicovert policy and action groups" formed at the turn of the century by English aristocrats and bankers who sought to create a federation among the English speaking peoples of the world. The American group, centered in New York and led by the Rockefeller-Morgan financial establishment, has since come to be known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which was then committed to bringing the government and "all existing international agencies...into constructive accord." A second response was to assist the displaced armies and supporters of the czar, or White Russians, who were poised to restore the czar, his court, and his industrialists to power. Fourteen nations, including the United States, placed troops inside the borders of the Soviet Union. And still other responses were combinations of the two. But significant for us is the mixture of private interest and public policy particularly with regard to the use of the government for counter-revolutionary measures. With this in mind, let us outline the linkage of private and public power, in the immediate post-war era, of Herbert Hoover. Hoover, a former mining engineer employed by British concerns, had become a successful entrepreneur in Russian oil wells and mines. He had major investments in eleven Russian oil companies. By 1912, together with British investor Leslie Urquhart, Hoover had formed the Russo-Asiatic Corporation which was worth (in 1912 dollars) $1 billion. After the Russian revolution, Hoover's property was seized and a claim was filed with the British government by Russo-Asiatic Consolidated, a new cartel which Hoover and his partners had formed to protect their Russian interests, for $282 billion for damage to properties and loss of probable annual profits. Hoover, however, was also director of the American Relief Administration for the United States government. And it was in this capacity that he was able to use food relief to covertly support the White Russian army.13 The interest of the government of the United States was, by 1917, part of the interests of a North Atlantic class of capitalists. The armistice of 1918 (the Treaty of Versailles) between Germany and the allied powers contained in Article 12, for example, a clause stipulating that German troops should remain, with the consent of the allies, in whatever Russian territory they then occupied. It was understood that these forces would be used against the Bolsheviks. The British directed the remnants of the German army against the Red Army under General Rudiger Vondergoltz and later under the czarist, General Nicolas Yudenitch. In each instance, Hoover placed food supplies, which were intended for the relief of starving Europeans, under the direction of these generals who were proceeding with wholesale executions and campaigns of general terror. The money for the food relief had been in part appropriated by Congress and some of it had been privately donated. The point should not be lost, however, that Hoover was using an Executive branch of the government, covertly, to advance his private interests and the counter-revolutionary interests of his class. But he was not alone. In February of 1922, the New York Globe editorialized, "Bureaucrats centered throughout the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Department of Commerce...are carrying on a private war with the Bolshevist government..." There was in 1922, in other words, just as there had been earlier, a secret government. The penetration of the Soviet Union by the allied supported czarist Freedom Fighters was turned back. Moreover, to the horror of Western elites, enthusiasm among peasants and workers for various anti-capitalist ideologies spread throughout the West including the United States. It was in this context that many Western elites believed that their salvation lay in the rearmament of Germany. In other words, a rearmed Germany, together with royalist White Russians, would constitute the ultimate counter-revolutionary force both within Europe and against the Soviet Union. The first obstacle to overcome in the reindustrialization and rearmament of Germany was the Treaty of Versailles itself. The allies had imposed exorbitant reparations payments on Germany. Therefore, prominent U.S. bankers, such as J.P. Morgan, Charles G. Dawes, and Owen D. Young, with the support of the U.S. government came up with two plans, the Dawes and Young Plans, which would help Germany with its reparations payment problem through very generous international loans. The loans helped strengthen Germany's three largest firms (which had significant U.S. capital participation), IG Farben, United Steel, and German General Electric (30 percent of which was owned by U.S. General Electric) by enabling them to out-produce their competition and develop new product lines. It should be pointed out that IG Farben, a huge chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that enjoyed close ties to Standard Oil (now Exxon) even after Pearl Harbor, was, perhaps, the single most important firm in Nazi Germany. In addition it produced the gas for the Final Solution and built a synthetic fuel and rubber plant at Auschwitz, which it had created, in order to create an inexhaustible supply of slave labor. Two Americans who played a central role in successive secret governments were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. John Foster Dulles, as special counsel to the Dawes Committee, had drawn up the Dawes Plan and would eventually become Secretary of State under Eisenhower. Allen Dulles would become Eisenhower's CIA Director. Both Dulles brothers were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell which handled the legal affairs of American IG (the U.S. subsidiary of IG Farben). The Dulles brothers were also deeply involved in a number of U.S. and German firms and banks or their subsidiaries that contributed to the Nazi build-up and in U.S. firms which later traded with the enemy during World War II (such firms as the Chase Bank, Ford, ITT, General Aniline and Film, and Standard Oil).14 Numerous other U.S. corporations also were deeply involved in the German military build-up. Hitler's two largest tank producers were Adam-Opel and Ford of Cologne, wholly owned subsidiaries of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company. The Curtis-Wright Aviation Corporation helped the German Air Force develop secret dive bombing techniques and they supplied the German air force critical parts which were desperately needed by U.S. aircraft. The research of Charles Higham is the most exhaustive in this area. Perhaps a brief excerpt from his work will helped us grasp the depth of the U.S. corporate-Nazi collaboration. In noting that his research was made more difficult because the "government smothered everything, during and even (inexcusably) after the war," he speculates as to the reasons why: What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others]? Or that Ford15 trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?16 The U.S.-Nazi collaboration, we find, was not strictly a private matter. The tendency was for corporate elites to use their own organizations, private networks, and their positions in the government to form a secret government. Dean Acheson, for example, as Secretary of State and as former Standard Oil lawyer, together with the Treasury department issued licenses permitting Standard Oil and other corporations to trade with enemy collaborators during the war. Higham states that while President Franklin Roosevelt knew that these corporations were trading with the enemy, there was little he could do. "Roosevelt was blackmailed, " states Higham. "You can't run a war without Chase Bank, or Standard Oil of New Jersey, or ITT."17 Notes 13. For information on Hoover and the post-war attack on Russia see Albert E. Kahn and Michael Sayers, The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia (Boston: Little, Brown Books, 1946); also I have profited very much from the research of Dave Emory and Nip Tuck whose work in this area can be obtained on audio cassettes from Davkore Co., 1300-D Space Park Way, Mountain View, CA 94043. 14. Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press, 1978). 15. Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler, the highest award that the Nazis could give a foreigner. Ford had also written anti-Semitic texts, such as The International Jew which reportedly influenced Hitler. 16. Higham, Trading. 17. Higham, 62; the last quote is taken from an interview conducted with Charles Higham by Louise Belloti, November 1982, broadcast on KPFA, Berkeley, CA ------------------------------------------------ Coming next: The Secret Government Following World War II ============================================================================ Richard K Moore Wexford, Ireland Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance email: •••@••.••• CDR website & list archives: http://cyberjournal.org content-searchable archive: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/ featured article, "Escaping the Matrix": http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/WE/jun00_Matrix.shtml A community will evolve only when the people control their means of communication. -- Frantz Fanon Permission for non-commercial republishing hereby granted - BUT include and observe all restrictions, copyrights, credits, and notices - including this one. ============================================================================ .
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