What happened to America’s anti-Fascist traditions?

OPINION:

Americans once took great pride in defeating the Nazi scourge that threatened to run roughshod over the 20th century and beyond. Under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, America mobilized not only to heal from the devastation of the Great Depression, but also became a global leader of industrial power supplying the Allies with the tools they needed to fight the war before entering the fight herself in 1941.

Coming out of that scarring experience, there was great hope that the world would finally be raised from the fires of imperialism, poverty, and war. The U.N. charter enshrined Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, respect for sovereignty and a mandate for economic cooperation into law giving hope for a new age of brotherhood.

Despite certain pushbacks by U.S. statesmen to the Anglo-American special relationship, and military industrial complex that began to take on a life of its own, FDR’s vision for world peace continued to die throughout the Cold War.

Perhaps it was allowing RAND Corp computer modellers to shape international policy or the FBI-McCarthyite witch hunts and constant threat of global nuclear annihilation that caused once-courageous Americans to become gullible and fearful. Whatever the cause, the fact that major components of Hitler’s intelligence apparatus and unapologetic fascists were repurposed after the war to combat Communism throughout the Cold War did not help.

Allen Dulles was quick to install Hitler’s top intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen as the head of West German intelligence along with his entire network, and then before we knew it, Operation Gladio was launched by the CIA and NATO which utilized armadas of Nazi war criminals dubbed “stay behinds” throughout Europe. This operation ran terrorist attacks and assassinations targeting civilian population and even troublesome statesmen like Enrico Mattei or Prime Minister Aldo Moro who didn’t play ball with Cold War games. At least several of the 30 attempts on de Gaulle’s life were attributed to this network.

It was within this context that the plague of Ukrainian Nazism running rampant in Ukraine today and causing much damage during the past eight-year civil war in Eastern Ukraine is found.

Stepan Bandera, honored as an official national hero in Kiev, was a Nazi-collaborator during WWII whose Organization for Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) exterminated over 100 thousand Jews and Poles between 1941-1944. After the CIA forgave the OUN for all crimes in 1951, Bandera was quickly installed into Gehlen’s networks and immediately went to work in Gladio terror operations and was killed by the KGB in 1959. Bandera’s colleague Mykola Lebed oversaw OUN-directed genocides and fared better in the USA leading a consulting company called Prolog Research Corporation alongside head of CIA directorate of plans Frank Wisner.

Is it any wonder that in this atmosphere America lost touch with her constitutional traditions?

How could the great republic navigate the world as a moral leader when she had so deeply compromised on her own anti-fascist principles? From the earliest days of the Truman Doctrine, unjust wars were launched abroad, and nationalist leaders of foreign countries not wishing to play banana republic roles in the great game were often assassinated or overthrown in CIA-run coups.

The practice of lying to Americans or using false flags (such as Operation Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident that unleashed the Vietnam War) became common practice and the military industrial complex which Eisenhower warned of in 1960 only grew.

Under Zbigniew Brzezinski’s guidance, the CIA-funded emergence of Islamic terrorism became just another chess piece on the great game. Like the use of Nazis stay-behinds earlier, this was of course justified by the belief that all evils were good if they stopped the supposedly expansionist Soviet Union.

Many hoped that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would finally put an end to this chaos, confusion, and murky morality.

Sadly, it wasn’t long after Bush 41’s 1990 New World Order speech and Desert Storm that the Wolfowitz doctrine was established calling for the prevention of “the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.” In a bone chilling 1992 manifesto, William Kristol and Robert Kagan called for the USA to lead a “benevolent global hegemony.”

Rather than seeing a U.S.-Russian relations renaissance and an age of peace as many hoped, the dream was killed as it had been earlier in 1945. Instead of promised investments into Russian industrial growth, the USA oversaw the destruction of Russia under Perestroika, and the creation of a new parasitic oligarchical class. With the help of George Soros’ money, the NED and CIA, former Soviet states saw their economies shredded and militaries enmeshed increasingly into NATO whose raison d’etre should have dissolved in 1992. A logic of full spectrum dominance encircling Russia became increasingly recognized as the driving intent behind NATO’s growth which always had Ukraine and Georgia in its crosshairs.

The USA continued to advance into the 21st century under the religious-like assumption that the New World Order must be shaped by unchallenged Anglo-American hegemony as outlined by the Wolfowitz doctrine and restated by the authors of the Project for a New American Century who seized power in 2000.

Since the 2014 Maidan coup which saw fascist mercenaries under Azov, Svoboda and Right Sector banners overthrow the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, thousands of civilians in East Ukraine have been killed. Openly brazen neo-Nazis like Dimitry Yarosh have been appointed as special advisor to the head of Ukraine’s military (in Nov. 2021) and it has become evident that the old Cold War practices have been tough habits to break.

We are being told by nearly all media outlets in true Cold War fashion that Putin has started a war. I maintain that the NATO/neo-Nazi war against Russia began in 2014 and that, in many ways, WWII never truly ended. Taking those often-ignored facts of history into account, it appears Putin might be trying to finally end it.

• Matthew Ehret is the founder of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of “The Clash of the Two Americas.” He can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com.