Deep Politics Forum

Noam Chomsky

In his book Blowback, Chris Simpson described Operation Paper Clip, which involved the importation of large numbers of known Nazi war criminals, rocket scientists, camp guards, etc.

There was also an operation involving the Vatican, the US State Department and British intelligence, which took some of the worst Nazi criminals and used them, at first in Europe. For example, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon [France], was taken over by US intelligence and put back to work.

Later, when this became an issue, some of his US supervisors didn't understand what the fuss was all about. After all, we'd moved in-we'd replaced the Germans. We needed a guy who would attack the left-wing resistance, and here was a specialist. That's what he'd been doing for the Nazis, so who better could we find to do exactly the same job for us?

When the Americans could no longer protect Barbie, they moved him over to the Vatican-run "ratline," where Croatian Nazi priests and others managed to spirit him off to Latin America. There he continued his career. He became a big drug lord and narco-trafflcker, and was involved in a military coup in Bolivia-all with US support.

But Barbie was basically small potatoes. This was a big operation, involving many top Nazis. We managed to get Walter Rauff, the guy who created the gas chambers, off to Chile. Others went to fascist Spain.

General Reinhard Gehlen was the head of German military intelligence on the eastern front. That's where the real war crimes were. Now we're talking about Auschwitz and other death camps. Gehlen and his network of spies and terrorists were taken over quickly by American intelligence and returned to essentially the same roles.

If you look at the American army's counterinsurgency literature (a lot of which is now declassified), it begins with an analysis of the German experience in Europe, written with the cooperation of Nazi officers. Everything is described from the point of view of the Nazis-which techniques for controlling resistance worked, which ones didn't. With barely a change, that was transmuted into American counterinsurgency literature. (This is discussed at some length by Michael McClintock in Instruments of Statecraft, a very good book that I've never seen reviewed.)

The US left behind armies the Nazis had established in Eastern Europe, and continued to support them at least into the early 1950s. By then the Russians had penetrated American intelligence, so the air drops didn't work very well any more.

You've said that if a real post-World War II history were ever written, this would be the first chapter.

It would be a part of the first chapter. Recruiting Nazi war criminals and saving them is bad enough, but imitating their activities is worse. So the first chapter would primarily describe US-and some British-operations throughout the world that aimed to destroy the anti-fascist resistance and restore the traditional, essentially fascist, order to power.

In Korea (where we ran the operation alone), restoring the traditional order meant killing about 100,000 people just in the late 1940s, before the Korean War began. In Greece, it meant destroying the peasant and worker base of the anti-Nazi resistance and restoring Nazi collaborators to power. When British and then American troops moved into southern Italy, they simply reinstated the fascist order-the industrialists. But the big problem came when the troops got to the north, which the Italian resistance had already liberated. The place was functioning- industry was running. We had to dismantle all of that and restore the old order.

Our big criticism of the resistance was that they were displacing the old owners in favor of workers' and community control. Britain and the US called this "arbitrary replacement" of the legitimate owners. The resistance was also giving jobs to more people than were strictly needed for the greatest economic efficiency (that is, for maximum profit-making). We called this "hiring excess workers."
In other words, the resistance was trying to democratize the workplace and to take care of the population. That was understandable, since many Italians were starving. But starving people were their problem-our problem was to eliminate the hiring of excess workers and the arbitrary dismissal of owners, which we did.

Next we worked on destroying the democratic process. The left was obviously going to win the elections; it had a lot of prestige from the resistance, and the traditional conservative order had been discredited. The US wouldn't tolerate that. At its first meeting, in 1947, the National Security Council decided to withhold food and use other sorts of pressure to undermine the election.

But what if the communists still won? In its first report, NSC 1, the council made plans for that contingency: the US would declare a national emergency, put the Sixth Fleet on alert in the Mediterranean and support paramilitary activities to overthrow the Italian government.

That's a pattern that's been relived over and over. If you look at France and Germany and Japan, you get pretty much the same story.

Nicaragua is another case. You strangle them, you starve them, and then you have an election and everybody talks about how wonderful democracy is.

The person who opened up this topic (as he did many others) was Gabriel Kolko, in his classic book Politics of War in 1968. It was mostly ignored, but it's a terrific piece of work. A lot of the documents weren't around then, but his picture turns out to be quite accurate.

***
an interview of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian
from the book Secrets, Lies and Democracy, published in 1994
Odonian Press

Lovely to see that he is still at his anti US , anti Capitalism tirades.

Wonder when he will look truthfully at JFK or 9-11.

Not holding my breath.

I still hate gatekeepers.

And he is right at the top.

Very interesting piece otherwise.

In 1994.

Are we positive this is him???

Dawn

Maybe he's on acid and has some lucid moments.

Chomsky is so right on this topic, how can he be so wrong in regard to JFK & 9-11 ? Chomsky's anti Americanism and anti capitalism has made him a millionaire, if he pursued JFK & 9-11 in the same way his income and availability would be curtailed by his intelligence masters. Doesn't MIT receive buckets of federal grants ?

Imagine that, an anti-capitalist millionaire? How peculiar.

Actually, I quite like Chomsky (Dawn, I know, I know - sorry Sweetie, I'll go and punish myself severely right after this post). I interviewed him once for about an hour and had previously corresponded with him. He was always very charming, always polite and considerate, and always answered letters promptly (this was almost pre-internet times) and was very reasonable in his arguments. Never ducked a question. Never equivocated etc. I liked that about him.

David Guyatt Wrote:Imagine that, an anti-capitalist millionaire? How peculiar.

But it is money made from his own work and labor. No problems there. If only others got to keep the value of what they make for themselves instead of it being stolen and kept by others who often have nothing to do with what is produced.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:Imagine that, an anti-capitalist millionaire? How peculiar.

But it is money made from his own work and labor. No problems there. If only others got to keep the value of what they make for themselves instead of it being stolen and kept by others who often have nothing to do with what is produced.

Like paying tax on it, then putting the balance in a bank account, having part of that balance de facto stolen by greedy bankers in risky investments in order to boost their bonus pool, and then, sickened by all that, putting what's left in a new bank that then gets a 60% haircut - a la Cyprus.

Being a capitalist is a risky business these days I'd say.

Being a Columbian cartel don or Russian maifya, er sorry, oligarch etc., is so much more secure. Nobody takes them down.

Strange old world, eh.

David Guyatt Wrote:Imagine that, an anti-capitalist millionaire? How peculiar.

Actually, I quite like Chomsky (Dawn, I know, I know - sorry Sweetie, I'll go and punish myself severely right after this post). I interviewed him once for about an hour and had previously corresponded with him. He was always very charming, always polite and considerate, and always answered letters promptly (this was almost pre-internet times) and was very reasonable in his arguments. Never ducked a question. Never equivocated etc. I liked that about him.

I have to agree with David here. I too have in the past interacted by mail [remember that - letters, paper, stamps!?] with Noam C. and David characterized him correctly. He was most helpful - despite being VERY busy with courses and his endless books. I too HATE the fact he refuses to see any point in 'going there' to a conspiracy in JFK, RFK, MLK or 911. I [just my own personal opinion which others clearly do not share!] believe this to be his own blind spot for reasons that are obscure, and not that he is an agent for anyone, gatekeeping. Not everyone, even the wise old Noam, is as enlightened as we here. I take him for what he is worth on what conspiracy he sees and ignore him for those he refuses to see. He is not perfect.

Whom of us are perfect, Pete.

Apart from me, obviously...
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I am not familiar with Chomsky's detailed view of JFK and 9/11. I would guess that he would agree that the post event was a insider created narrative used to advance the agenda of the empire... something that is a predictable behavior of power... to get more and consolidate what they already have. The cover ups are as treasonous as the crime itself and usually involve more death and destruction and oppression. My sense is that Chomsky's position is the empire's over arching agenda is far more important that a single event. He perhaps doesn't want to focus on any particular catalyzing event for the next step in the advancement of the empire, but in the completely wrongheaded notion of a top down empire which constantly engages in criminal behavior and genocide.

I am not clear of where others stand on the notion of blow back... that being that the empire's actions have consequences one of which is resistance, blow back, and manifest as terrorism. The resistance to the empire is increasingly fragmented and forced underground. Movements such as labor are destroyed in plain sight. Anti war movements are simply ignored, regardless of how many protest the militarism of the empire.

There appears to be only two overarching approaches to resisting the empire.. peaceful and legal... and violet, subversive and illegal. If one advocates violet, subversive and illegal... which amounts to a call for revolution and overthrow of the status quo... one is more than marginalized... they are silenced, demonized and often killed. Real threats to to the powers that be are not tolerated.

This has completely neutered to left to what amounts to harmless critiques and robbed them of the mechanism to reach people and grow movements for change. All manner of false alternatives in a bogus two party system are presented both of which embrace the agenda of the empire... and all the myths of its narrative.

In order to raise consciousness about what has gone down and what is happening currently it is mission critical to any change or revolution to reach people and inform them. When the information is controlled... when the narrative is passed off as truth the people cannot know what is going down. Orwell's quote:


I think many of the so called gatekeeper journalists, political analysts and writers are facing a Hobson's choice. If they dig too deep peeling away the false narrative they are silenced, marginalized and even killed perhaps.... of they play it safe they life to write and speak but cannot reveal the entire truth that their research has revealed. Paperclip was apparently kept under the radar for 4 decades until well after the damage of the operation was done, the fascists were well in place in governments, industries and military organizations around world.

The media we have today is completely engaged in what amounts to chatting nonsense about tweedle dee and tweedle dum... a complete distraction. The www has provided the opportunity for the message of what's going down to reach millions if not billions. At the same time the TPTB are stepping up their surveillance and tactics to cut dissent. There have been several who have been turned into examples of what happens when you step outside the norm... from people such as John Walker Lind... Lynn Stewart... to Bradley Manning, Julian Asaunge, Barrett Brown, Aaron Swartz...and others.

Is being a gate keeper making a faustian bargain which the status quo... I get to peck at around the sides...leaving the core crimes of the beast unchallenged in exchange for being permitted to make general boiler plate complaints? I don't know the answer here. I do believe that compelling evidence is hard to deny.

The JFK story seems to be well supported with evidence. The 9/11 not so... at least the role of the insiders (whatever that actually means) is not clear beyond perhaps facilitating the so called terrorist attacks. We've been denied hard evidence and so speculation has arisen. This is particularly true with respect to the so called controlled demolition of the towers. Even a very strong CD advocate Tony Szamboti who has published on the 9/11 subject wrote recently:

His understanding about the collapse initiation being a CD is however not based on any hard evidence... more on a theoretical model derived from observation/measurements which have been disputed by many. His claim is that the CD took place in the core, but there is no reliable data about what happened in the core. And so his conclusion about initiation is speculation and he concedes that the collapse after imitation was a natural process.

The empire's response to 9/11 can hardly be disputed... a stalling of the technical investigation... a shoddy report coming well after the new American century policies were put in place. The are many parallels to between the behavior of the empire in the JFK assassination response and the the response to 9/11. I doubt that even the so called gate keepers would deny this.

Jeffrey Orling Wrote:I am not familiar with Chomsky's detailed view of JFK and 9/11. I would guess that he would agree that the post event was a insider created narrative used to advance the agenda of the empire... something that is a predictable behavior of power... to get more and consolidate what they already have.

Chomsky basically doesn't think there is a conspiracy in either 911 or JFK and if there was he still doesn't care. https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~palmquis...ctural.htm