Potted Histories from 1948

[Magda Hassan]

From the wonderful Joe over at 'Making the World Safe For Hypocrisy' Go check his blog out and learn some real history.





1948: Trying To Kill Robeson, Promoting Fascism, Mass Murdering Koreans, Lebensraum For Jews And Spying On Everyone

1948: UNITED STATES. Renowned black singer-actor and dissident Paul Robeson is getting a bit too damned uppity for his own good. He is now known worldwide for his pro-democracy and pro-peace views. And then there is that embarrassing Freedom Train song he keeps singing. Paul should know that you can't be pokin' fun at the Freedom Train in the land of the free.

Just to make sure America is safe from the forces of darkness, J. Edna Hoover has Robeson, his car and driver under twenty four hour surveillance. Robeson is nearly killed when a front wheel falls off the car at speed. Robeson will continue to fight for human rights and genuine democracy in the United States until he is mysteriously incapacitated and rendered harmless in 1961.

I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler. Paul Robeson

1948: PERU. Following the election of a coalition of liberal and leftist parties in 1945, President Jose Luis Bustamente y Rivero institutes a wide range of liberal reforms including guaranteed civil rights, freedom of the press and the abolition of various dictatorial "rights" claimed by the president. We can't be havin' none of that, so the United States supplies weapons to the right wing in Peru who duly overthrow the democratically elected government, outlaw opposition political parties and install a nice, satisfactory dictatorship.

1948-1968: ITALY. An average of $30 million is paid annually by the CIA to fascist and other right wing candidates in order to subvert democracy in Italy. The plan is largely successful in maintaining in power the right wing which had collaborated with the Fascists and Nazis during World War Two. They then gratefully allow the U.S. to maintain a string of military bases in Italy.

1948: COLOMBIA. Populist presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, threatens American ruling class interests, including the Rockefeller's United Fruit Company, as well as the wealthy right wing in Colombia, by radically promising to use some of the country's wealth, land and resources for the benefit of Colombians. He is duly assassinated. The people of Colombia, with memories of the slaughter of United Fruit banana workers at Santa Marta in 1928 under mysterious circumstances, riot in protest in Bogata and elsewhere. Three thousand people are killed in the capital. The riots and subsequent slaughter are known in Colombia as the Bogotazo.

Not surprisingly, Gaitan's murder is blamed on the all-purpose commie bogeyman. The U.S.-compliant government of Colombia launches a campaign of massacre and sends death squads into the countryside. Over the next decade, known as La Violencia, some three hundred thousand people are murdered by the death squads. Colombia remains safe for United Fruit.

Some wild eyed conspiracy theorists speculate that the CIA, headed by Nazi financier, Rockefeller family member and United Fruit director Allen Dulles, was behind the assassination. It is doubtless completely unrelated but, as of 2009, the CIA is still hiding thousands of documents relevant to the Gaitan's murder "in the interests of U.S. national security".

1948: VIETNAM. The U.S. supplies arms to the French colonial occupiers of Vietnam who had actively collaborated with the Japanese during World War Two. The goal of the U.S. is to ensure that the Vietnamese independence movement, which had fought a valiant war against the Japanese throughout the war, would never gain control of their own country.

1948: UNITED STATES. President Harry Truman calls for Congress to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which was intended to eliminate racist hiring practices on federally funded contracts. He also calls for anti-lynching legislation and the abolition of the poll tax which effectively prevents the poor from participating in elections. But we can't be havin' none of that, so Congress declines.

1948: NICARAGUA. The U.S. supplies arms to the its puppet Somoza family dictatorship to maintain it in power on behalf of U.S. corporate and plantation interests.

1948: UNITED STATES. United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther, whose socialist views make the owners of General Motors and other carmakers a little nervous, is shot and seriously wounded in his home. Reuther will survive two more assassination attempts and a suspicious small plane crash before he is finally killed in a second suspicious small plane crash in 1970. As of 2009, the FBI is still hiding almost two hundred pages of documents relevant to Reuther's death.

If fighting for a more equal and equitable distribution of the wealth of this country is socialistic, I stand guilty of being a socialist. Walter Reuther.

1948: UNITED STATES. George H.W. "Bailout" Bush famously drives his old Studebaker from New England to Odessa, Texas, with his new wife Barbara, a new baby and a couple of bucks left over from college. In the wide open spaces of Texas, eschewing the Nazi millions of his father, Prescott Bush, through sheer hard work, perseverance and a bit a Yankee ingenuity, Bailout strikes oil and becomes wealthy in his own right, independent of his Nazi-financing daddy and his Nazi-financing bosses, the Harrimans and the Rockefellers. Bailout Bush is no longer a snivelling little New England rich boy who mailed his dirty laundry home from prep school for the servants to wash. He is a two-fisted Texas oilman.

It's the all-American success story. Unfortunately, like so many great American stories, it's a complete load of bullshit.

The old Studebaker story of Bailout's "humble" beginnings is just another fabrication in the mountain of fabrications which constitutes the "official" version of Bush family history, a history which consists almost entirely of omissions and lies and is widely and faithfully regurgitated ad nauseum in the mass media and in mainstream biographies.

In reality, young Bailout flies into Texas in a private airplane belonging to Dresser Industries owned by the Harrimans, prime movers in the Hitler Project. And who should be on the plane with young Bailout but his daddy, Prescott Bush who happens to be a director of Dresser Industries. The famous Studebaker was no doubt back up in New England getting polished by the servants.

1948: UNITED STATES. The U.S. State Department produces Policy Planning Study #23. George Kennan, the State Department's Director of Policy Planning writes,

We have fifty percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Although he didn't have his Edward Bernays mind control theories down pat, old George knew whereof he spoke. He had been the agent who went into Russia on behalf of the Rockefellers to help instigate, finance and control the communist revolution so the Rockefellers could get their bloodsoaked hands on Russia's oil and mineral wealth.

1948-1950. SOVIET UNION. The CIA begins Operation Bloodstone, infiltrating many of its premier Nazi war criminal employees into the Soviet Union for sabotage.

1948: PALESTINE. The Jewish terrorist group Irgun, as part of its ongoing effort to drive the Palestinians from Palestine in order to secure lebensraum, attacks the village of Deir Yassin on the Muslim sabbath. The unarmed villagers are ordered into a square, lined up against the wall and shot. Trapped villagers try to flee, but Irgun tracks them down and murders every last man, woman and child.

As part of its ethnic cleansing program, the Jewish Agency posts leaflets in Arab villages making sure all Palestinians know of the mass murder. Loudspeaker vans drive through East Jerusalem broadcasting: "Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate. " Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee in terror leaving their land and homes.

The leader of Irgun, mass murderer Menachem Begin, will one day be the Prime Minister of U.S.-armed and financed Israel.

1948-53: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Department of "Defense" Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare meets regularly to plan medical experimentation, including experiments on human beings, relating to atomic warfare. The panel's most cold-blooded "experiments" will be the placing of unsuspecting American troops in the direct vicinity of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

1948: COSTA RICA. The U.S. announces that it is ready to invade Costa Rica with forces from the Panama Canal Zone to end "communist control" of the country. U.S. favorite José Figueres Ferrer overthrows the democratically elected government and installs himself as dictator for a period of eighteen months.

1948: UNITED STATES. Former Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, given the boot for exercising freedom of speech, really upsets the apple cart by running for President on a, gasp, third party ticket. Wallace, a staunch capitalist, who simply believes in democracy and peace, is, inevitably, vilified as a filthy commie.

His Progressive Party is that most radical and dangerous of all things, an American political party not financed and controlled by the ruling class. Wallace presents the threat of transforming the U.S. into an actual democracy.

In the South, he is pelted with eggs for refusing to address segregated audiences. In Illinois, Progressive Party candidate Curtis MacDougall is stoned. In Georgia, four women campaigning for Wallace are abducted and beaten. In Pontiac, Michigan, a pro-Wallace campaigner is kidnapped, beaten and his head shaved by penknife. In Birmingham, Alabama, Wallace Vice-Presidential candidate Glen Taylor is overpowered and hauled off to jail for the crime of attempting to enter a church by the "colored" door.

At universities around the country, pro-Wallace meetings are broken up by egg-throwing students shouting "Zieg heil!" In Chicago, a meeting of student Wallace supporters is raided by police, who arrest the participants. Throughout the land of the free, Wallace supporters are fired or forced to resign from their jobs, while the use of meeting halls for Progressive Party functions is denied. Detectives openly copy down names at Wallace fund-raising events and the media publishes lists of Wallace petition-signers to incite harassment. A New York judge says he would deny custody of any child to pro-Wallace parents. A Detroit police commissioner says that Wallace supporters "ought to be either shot, thrown out of the country or put in jail."

In Charleston, South Carolina, Wallace supporter Robert New is killed. His murderer receives a trivial sentence after stating that New was a "despicable, slick, slimy Communist prowling the water front."

1948-ongoing: KOREA. Growing opposition to the U.S. puppet dictatorship of the U.S.-invented "nation" of South Korea is ruthlessly suppressed by the United States with the help of its army of Japanese collaborators in the Korean Constabulary. Kidnap, torture and murder are commonplace. With the "South" Korean military under the direct control of the U.S., guided by American military "advisors" and with the assistance of American firepower, the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee launches a campaign of massacre in which somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 people are murdered.

After Koreans on Jeju (Cheju) Island demonstrate against American-staged elections, America's boy in Korea embarks on a campaign of mass murder in which residents are driven into concentration camps, forty thousand homes are burned to the ground and as many as 60,000 of the island's 300,000 inhabitants are murdered, many of them farmers and villagers who are rounded up, tortured, shot and dumped in mass graves as Rhee's American military "advisers" look on benignly.

Peace, if it really arrived, would upset things. At present, arms expenditure and (military) aid to other countries are bolstering business. U.S. News and World Report, December 31, 1948

1948: UNITED STATES. The Internal Revenue Service begins revoking the tax exempt status of organizations on the Attorney General's list of so-called subversive organizations. Among those organizations apparently hell bent on overthrowing the greatest democracy the world has ever known are the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the School of Jewish Studies, the Hollywood Writers Guild and the Ohio School of Social Science, an organization to be feared by right thinking citizens everywhere.

1948: UNITED STATES. Nazi shyster cum CIA Director Allen Dulles creates a covert action and Nazi importation divison of the CIA with the harmless sounding name of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Dulles puts his crony, Frank Wisner, attorney of record to various eastern European fascists, in charge of the OPC. Aside from getting as many senior Nazi war criminals and mass murderers as possible into U.S. government agencies, Wisner's mandate is to carry out "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the 'free' world." Translation into English: terrorism.

Wisner's son will one day head the multi-billion dollar energy and stock market scam known Enron.

1948: GREECE. American journalist George Polk is murdered by the Greek military dictatorship to stop him investigating financial corruption within the U.S. armed and supported fascist regime. The dictatorship blames Polk's murder on the evil commies, a convenient fantasy with which the CIA and the U.S. mass media are only too happy to deceive the U.S. public.

1948-ongoing: UNITED STATES. The National Security Agency (NSA) is formed to spy on international communications, including those involving Americans. Like the CIA, it is prohibited by law from carrying out operations within the U.S. Like the CIA, it is one of the country's largest criminal cabals, breaking the laws of the United States countless hundreds of thousands of times and turning its spying apparatus directly on Americans. The NSA attempts to justify its criminal conduct and violation of the constitutional rights of American citizens by claiming that Americans who dissent are the "natural allies of the foreign enemies of the U.S."

1948-50: EUROPE. Innocuous-looking Averell Harriman, the man who probably did more than anyone else on Earth, except perhaps the Dulles brothers, to orchestrate the takeover of Germany by Hitler and the Nazis and to give them the means to prosecute the Second World War, is made U.S. "Ambassador-at-Large" to Europe. He is a so-called non-military "theater" commander and, most significantly, the administrator of the multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan. As one might suspect, under Harriman's firm guiding hand, the Marshall Plan, turns out to be not quite the benign act of generosity we have been led to believe.

1948-ongoing: EUROPE. In the same way that it is burned into the psyche of all Americans that the Revolution was all about freedom and democracy and that slaveowners George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were champions of individual liberty, Americans have been systematically programmed to believe that the post-war Marshall Plan was an act of the most extraordinary generosity on the part of a benevolent United States to assist the war-ravaged countries of Europe. Well, not quite.

In fact, the Marshall Plan resulted in billions of dollars of American taxpayers' money being transferred to large corporations by the government. Additionally billions of dollars of Marshall Plan "aid" were used to encourage the replacement of coal, an energy source in great abundance in Europe, with oil, largely under the control of the Rockefellers' and their clubmates.

But a much more sinister use of the Marshall Plan was the subversion of democracy throughout Europe. Billions of dollars were spent sabotaging democracy and the polical ambitions of the socialists and communists who had fought the Nazis and in supporting Fascist and Nazi elements to ensure that control of European governments resided largely in the hands of right wing politicians only too happy to cooperate in the building of the American empire.

1948-54: PHILIPPINES. The CIA runs an assassination and propaganda campaign to overcome popular, nationalist resistance and to install the U.S.-compliant right wing dictatorship of Ramon Magsaysay.

1948-ongoing: JAPAN. In its position as occupying power, the U.S. restores the wartime ruling class to positions of power in Japan. As in Germany, only a handful of Japanese are prosecuted as war criminals in staged show trials. The U.S. organizes a major disinformation campaign to reposition the formerly vilified Emperor Hirohito as a valiant ally of democracy and the U.S. During the Second World War, Hirohito played a leading role in the rape of China and the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in precious metals and other assets throughout Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia through his "Golden Lily" organization.

1948-ongoing: UNITED STATES. The Pew family, heirs to the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) fortune establish the Pew Charitable Trusts which provide funding for a bewildering array of foundations, causes and publications, many in the guise of nominally Christian and/or patriotic organizations. The purpose of almost all of them is to ensure that America is a nominally-Christian, fascist, corporate state.

Among the causes funded by the Pew family are American Action Inc., the successor to the pre-World War Two pro-Nazi American Liberty League, the Christian Freedom Foundation intended to ensure that nominally Christian "conservatives" are elected to Congress, the ultra right wing John Birch Society and countless other racist, homophobic, fascist, anti-democratic organizations and propaganda fronts.