The Crisis in Yugoslavia and its Relationship to Global Fascism
26 April 1999
Richard K. Moore
Fascism was a creation of capitalism. Hitler and Mussolini were financed,
encouraged, and supported (mostly covertly) by Western industrialists, and
Western governments, for the express purpose of suppressing grass-roots
democratic forces (labor, socialist, communist, and anarchist movements)
trying to overcome capitalist exploitation. I looked up some Readers
Digest articles from the thirties. I found an "interview" with two young
Germans, one male one female, in which they explained all about the shiny
new Germany, the virtues of eugenics, and about how Jews were like a cancer
that had to be rooted out, even if unfortunate human suffering might be
necessary. The article was a sympathetic one, not a crtique.
Hitler's Mein Kampf agenda was on the public record, and the extensive US
investments and technology transfers to Nazi Germany enabled Hitler to
invade Russia, the avowed enemy of the capitalist system. General Motors
and Ford (along with other US firms) operated manufacturing plants in
Germany both before and throughout the war. The bombers which blitzed
England were built in a General Motors plant. After the war, Allen Dulles
made it his mission to see that no US firm was punished for collaboration
with the Nazis. In fact, General Motors and Ford received something like
$30 million in compensation for damage to their plants from Allied bombing.
This is all thoroughly documented history, and references are supplied at
the end of this article.
The US withheld its invasion of Europe until Russia began to turn the tide
against the Nazis. Only then did Allied troops land in Italy and
Normandy. This timing, along with other evidence, indicates a strategy
aimed at limiting the western advance of Russian forces, rather than a
strategy of defeating Nazism as quickly as possible. In fact Harry Truman
said outright:
If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia
is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many
as possible . . .
Harry S. Truman, 1941
(I believe the original source was a
local newspaper in Indepence, Mo.)
The use of fascist governments by the West to suppress local democracy was
not abandoned after WW II, despite propaganda rhetoric about "free-world"
democratization. Throughout the Third World, by means primarily of covert
and military US interventions, fascist military dictatorships were
installed in order to suppress the local population and facilitate
exploitive capitalist operations.
Racism and nationalism were both characteristic of German Nazism, but
neither is characteristic of fascism in general, and the presence of either
is not evidence for fascism. Racism has existed for millenia; nationalism
has existed for centuries; fascism is a twentieth-century invention. What
characterizes fascism in all cases is police-state suppression of the
population, and the delegation of economic operations to capitalist
interests.
Fascism is not a phenomenon which can be usefully studied in terms of the
isolated national context, and certainly not in terms of the psychology of
individual leaders. Power-mad leaders, charismatic or otherwise, can
always be recruited - you only need one per country. And any nation, if
subjected to sufficient externally-driven destablization, can fall prey to
fascism. How and why fascism arises can only be understood from the larger
perspective - in the context of capitalist strategies to maintain global
dominance.
Fascism is only one of many arrows in that strategic quiver. Liberal
pseudo-democracy is the arrow generally employed in the West, and in some
third world countries (eg, Phillipines) when the oppressiveness of the
fascist arrow threatens to bring about an autonomous, locally initiated,
change of regime.
Theocracies (eg Iran) are another of the strategies. The Shah had
faithfully played the fascist role, and when a popular rebellion threatened
to bring in an autonomous local regime, most likely a socialist one, the
Ayatolla was dusted off in his Paris sanctuary, transformed by the global
corporate media into a manufactured "people's choice", and installed by the
US, France, and Britain just-in-time to prevent local autonomy of an
unapproved variety. Western rhetoric pretended to be disappointed when the
Ayatolla turned out to be a tyrant, but in fact he serves Western interests
perfectly, both as "someone to hate" (justifying military expenditures and
all sorts of anti-Bill Of Rights, so called "anti-terrorism" legislation)
and as a general destabilizing force in the Arab world. Fear of Arab
solidarity has been a driving force in Western Mideast policy at least
since the end of WW I.
Destabilization is another general strategy for global capitalist
dominance. In this case, the goal is to break a region down into smaller,
more manageable chunks.
US/NATO policy in Yugoslavia, or in Iraq, it seems to me, must be examined
primarily in terms of the strategies it reveals - what strategic arrows are
being deployed to benefit global capitalism. The "threat" posed by Iraq
was to become a model of Arab modernization - a model based on the
reinvestment of oil profits to build a modern national infrastructure.
This is why Kuwait engaged in intentionally provocative price cutting, and
why the US tricked Saddam into invading Kuwait. That sequence of
orchestrated events provided the pretext for the US military to go in and
destroy the national infrastructure which was developed contrary to the
interests of global capitalism. The fact that Saddam is a dictator was of
no strategic significance, except for its propaganda value. All the
oil-producing states are dictatorships, installed by the West, and any
pretense that Saddam's style of government was a reason for Desert Storm is
transparent hypocrisy.
In Yugloslavia, the strategy obviously being deployed is that of
destablization. Local fascism has little strategic relevance to the
situation, nor does the level-of-democracy in any of the local governments,
and most certainly US/NATO policy has never been organized around any
intent to promote human rights in the region. By encouraging the
fragmentation of Yugoslavia, by secretly providing arms to militant
factions, and by discouraging any useful attempts at negotiation or
mediation, Western policies have led quite predictably to what is being
called, at the level of individual episodes, "ethnic cleansing".
In fact ehnic cleansing, at the macro level, is precisely what Western
policy is all about: the creation of several small countries, each of which
has its own ethnic identity, and each of which is in conflict with its
neighbors. This is a textbook example of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of
Civilizations" model for global capitalist domination.
If one or the other local governments in the Balkans are fascist, that has
little relevance to Western policy. If any government there deserves to be
painted with the fascist brush, Croatia would certainly be high on the
list, and Croatia is being treated as a friendly ally by the West. It was
Croatia which took the fascist side in WW II, and I recall reading a couple
years back about a soccer match which was delayed so the Croatian fans
could finish their enthusiastic round of Nazi songs. I'm not trying to
shift any finger of blame from Serbia to Croatia - they're both victims in
this scenario - I'm rather making the point that local fascism isn't
strategically relevant to the situation. The more relevant factors, I
submit, are -
(1) destabilization
(2) framentation along Huntington's "civilization boundaries"
(3) most of all - the establishment by de facto precedent of an
end to territorial national sovereignty and its replacement by a
pseudo-legitimized, capitalist-controlled, corporate-media
celebrated, global military regime.
Thus, as we look deeper, fascism is indeed of primary relevance to what's
going on in the Balkans - but at the global level, not the national.
At the national level, the hallmarks of fascism are police-suppression of
populations and the delegation of economic affairs to capitalist interests.
At the global level, the US/NATO hi-tech military machine serves to
suppress whole nations at a time, in order that economic affairs can be
conveniently managed according to capitalism's globalization /
TNC-world-governement agenda.
Far from promoting human rights and fighting fascism, the US/NATO actions
amount to the consolidation of a global fascist regime - the military arm
of globalization - the muscle that makes real the global sovereignty of
those institutions which manage the global economy on behalf of their TNC
constituency - the WTO, IMF, World Bank, OECD, WIPO, ad nauseum acronymium.
Human rights and human welfare, as we can see evidenced throughout the
Third World, are of no concern to global capitalism. In the calculus of
transnational "market forces", as implemented by the IMF, maximizing TNC
profits is the only goal. Human welfare and human rights are not to
interfere, even if that means mass starvation, which is precisely what it
does mean.
There's one more of capitalism's oft-used strategies which deserves mention
in this regard, and that is genocide. In North America, Australia, and
South Africa, to name three examples from the nineteenth century, genocide
against indigenous peoples was the method used to clear the land for
expansion of the capitalist system. It seems that some cultures don't
domesticate well, from a capitalist perspective, and outright genocide is
necessary to free up the resources being "wasted" on people who live
"outside the cash economy". Local self-sufficiency is anethma to
capitalism, as is economic sustainability. Both are fundamentally
incompatible with what capitalism calls economic growth and "development".
Sub-Sahara Africa is today's version of "Injun territory" - a vast land
occupied by semi-indigenous economies and peoples which aren't particularly
productive from the perspective of global capitalism. Against Native
Americans the weapons were the US Cavalry and the destruction of the Bison
herds; against the people of Sub-Sahara Africa the weapons are
Western-covertly-sponsored civil wars and the destruction of economies via
IMF diktats. The predictable consequence, both now and in the US Old West,
is genocide on a continental scale.
Of all the human rights - as enumerated by documents such as the US
Constitution or the UN Delcaration of Human Rights - the one least
respected of all by global capitalism is that of democratic self
determination. Local autonomy, democratic or otherwise, is the ultimate
sin in the eyes of global capitalism. The mechanisms for preventing local
autonomy, and for selling the prevention process to Western populations,
have been steadily refined over at least the past three centuries, and are
recently enjoing an unfortunate renaissance of demonic inventiveness, from
free-trade treaties, to NATO blitzkrieg, to state-of-the-art wag-the-dog
journalism.
Respectfully Yours,
Richard K. Moore
Wexford, Ireland
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Recommended References
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(Please accept my apologies for not having at hand names of current
publishers and other details for some of these references)
George Seldes, "Facts and Fascism".
James Pool, "Who Financed Hitler", 1978, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster,
New York.
William Manchester, "The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968".
Charles Higham, "Trading with the Enemy".
Laurence Shoup and William Minter, "Trilateralism".
Zinn, Howard, "A Peoples History of the United States", 1980, Harper & Row,
New York.
William Greider, "Who Will Tell the People, the Betrayal of American
Democracy", 1992, Touchstone Press, Simon & Schuster, New York.
Lederer, William J, "A Nation of Sheep", 1962, Fawcett
World Library, Crest Books, New York.
Michael Parenti, "Inventing Reality", 1993, St. Martin's Press, New York.
Parenti, "Make-Believe Media - The Politics of Entertainment", 1992, St.
Martin's Press, New York.
Parenti, "The Sword and the Dollar - Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms
Race", 1989, St. Martin's Press, New York.
William Blum, "Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War II", 1995, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine.
John Stockwell, "In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story".
David Horowitz, editor, "Containment and Revolution", Beacon Press, Boston,
1967,
John Bagguley, "The World War and the Cold War".
Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order", 1997, Simon and Schuster.
Michel Chossudovsky, "The Globalization of Poverty", 1997, Third World
Network, Penang, Malaysia.
Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, ed, "The Case Against the Global
Economy, and For a Turn Toward the Local", 1996, Sierra Club Books, San
Francisco.
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