The Creation of Enemies back
The Creation of Enemies next
The Creation of Enemies (Part I)
THAT EVIL EMPIRE (Go to Part I)
After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviets had good reason to be paranoid. Just as in the French Revolution, the Second Estate (the old and the reconstituted both inside and outside the Soviet Union, with those outside controlling governments) was organizing a counterrevolution. Those outside forces (fourteen countries) mobilized 180,000 troops and armed 300,000 anti-Bolshevik troops within the Soviet Union in a three-year intervention that almost overthrew the new government.* In a replay of the "Holy Alliance" to destroy the French Revolution, these foreign powers never abandoned their goal of destroying this socialist society and removing its threat to their centuries-old system of world domination.
From the Soviet side it certainly looked as if an assault was coming. From 1945, and up to at least 1956 when the U-2 flights started, thousands of U.S. "ferret" spy flights photographed Soviet territory and raced back before they could be identified and attacked.† They did not all succeed. In June 1992, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin met with President Bush and said, "We may have American prisoners yet," quite a stir was created. News anchorman Tom Brockaw reported this and the congressional uproar over these possible prisoners. The next night Tom Brockaw said, "These were American airmen shot down during the Cold War. This is the first time Americans have been apprised of this." Then for weeks, except for an occasionally highly sanitized statement, all went silent on that explosive subject. Three months later, the headlines read, "Yeltsin: POWs 'Summarily Executed.'" But one line in the last column of that front page article told the real story; "The largest group of Americans imprisoned in the Soviet Union included more than 730 pilots and other airmen who either made forced landings on Soviet territory or were shot down on Cold War spy flights."‡ Over 730 U.S. airmen captured can only mean many thousands of illegal flights. This was a massive assault on Soviet sovereignty by essentially the same powers that had invaded them twenty-five years earlier. The fact that there were no Soviet planes shot down over Western territory during this period is something scholars should note. Nor should this have been news to U.S. newscasters. The Soviets complained to Washington D.C. and to the United Nations, and held many trials. These illegal flights were a secret only to the citizens of the West.
All empires support dissenting indigenous groups in other countries to help overthrow their governments. Besides the ferret flights and the political rhetoric that claimed the Soviet Union should be destroyed, thousands of saboteurs were trained and slipped across the borders, or parachuted into Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union. Most were captured and executed.‡‡ Key contacts on the ground were also executed, but potentially disloyal ethnic groups typically were resettled away from border areas. In the Soviet Union, for those with ethnic ties that were still politically loyal to the goals of Hitler's Third Reich, and who were providing sanctuary to those saboteurs, this meant Siberia--whole communities were moved there.21
The chaos in the Soviet Union was not an exception in history. Although it did not have to face an all-out effort by the restructured Second Estate to overthrow its government, the repression and political chaos in the United States after the American Revolution were comparable to that in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. After America's successful revolt, there was "the banishment or death of over 100,000 of [the] most conservative and respectable Americans."22 The same ratio after the Bolshevik Revolution would be three million under assault for clinging to the old loyalties.
The history of the creation of enemies to protect a power structure will be easier to understand if we look at the efforts of European empires to expand their power by gaining the loyalty of the United States. After the American Revolution, and before the nation developed an identity of its own, "England and France acted as polar pulls" with a French party and an English party.23 Besides control by military power, it is the gaining of loyalty through example or intrigue that determines which society will be the dominant power in a region. When example might be found wanting, loyalty is typically gained by creating an enemy.
As in any society after any revolution, there were those within the Soviet Union who were sympathetic to, and subject to manipulation by, outside forces. Thus, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, whole communities of ethnic Germans and other communities that still had ties and loyalties to the West joined the invading army. When that war was over, those entire communities were resettled in Siberia where they could not link up with outside powers still threatening to overthrow the Soviet government. Millions of innocent people (even many dedicated and loyal communists) were rounded up for resettlement; many were executed.§ Struggles for power became mixed with the legitimate battle to defend the revolution, and many within the power structure were swallowed up in that holocaust. But note! It was protecting their country from being overthrown by external powers manipulating internal ethnic groups that created these latest suppressions. Where America faced no such threat after its revolution, the efforts to overthrow the Soviet Union were on-going for seventy years, including direct intervention in their revolution, World War II, covert actions, and being embargoed from world trade. Except for the two world wars which occurred after the United States was industrialized and secure, no such attacks on their sovereignty and freedom were faced by Americans.
Ignoring the background behind the forced migrations to Siberia, the Western press gave the death toll as sixty million, then forty million, then twenty million, then ten million, and the figures are still coming down towards the true number killed under "Stalinism."§§ These are the same principles that peddlers of crisis have been using for thousands of years. The greater the lie the more surely it will be believed by their followers. Even if it is done only verbally and the accuser is in no personal physical danger, the surest way to be recognized as a leader is to lead an attack against an enemy. (Emphasis added by owner of this website)
The Creation of Enemies back
The Creation of Enemies next
The Creation of Enemies (Part I)
* NBC News (Feb. 16, 1987), discussed the twelve thousand troops from Washington and Michigan that went into the Soviet Union through Vladivostok. D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961), pp. 26 and 1038, mentions the fifty-five hundred from Montana who landed at Archangel and Murmansk. See also: Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 197-98; Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 33, ref. 2; Edmond Taylor, Fall of the Dynasties (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), p. 359. Perhaps the best sources are Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1975), chapter 7, especially p. 138, addressing the revolts; Bhm, CIA, p. 1; and Earnest Volkman and Blaine Baggett, Secret Intelligence (New york: Doubleday, 1989), chapter 1. Many of the interventionist troops revolted and shot their officers. General William S. Graves was in charge of the U.S. contingent sent to Siberia under the cover of protecting the Siberian Railway but with the actual purpose of cutting Siberia off from the Soviet Union. General Graves thought the entire project idiotic and interpreted his orders strictly, guardlng the railroad, not backing the local warlords to create another country (see above sources). It is interesting to note that when Graves returned to America he was under FBI surveillance. It can be safely assumed that the instructions to intervene in the Bolshevik Revolution came from the same powers that instituted the Palmer Raids.
† William Blum, in The CIA: A forgotten History, p. 124, claims that the U-2 flights were canceled after Francis Gary Powers was shot down but not the flights of other spy planes.
‡ Michael Ross, "Yeltsin: POWs 'Summarily Executed'," The Spokesman Review (Nov. 12, 1992): p. B1. In 1946 and 1947 alone, thirty such planes were shot down, and twenty U.S. airmen were captured alive, never acknowledged by their government, and finished out their lives in Soviet prisons (Volkman and Baggett, Secret Intelligence p. 187. See also Loftus, Belarus Secret especially chapters 5-8 and pp. 109-10; Blum, The CIA, chapters 6, 7, 8, 15, and 17. In later documentaries and feature articles the admission to over 730 airmen lost over the Soviet Union was downgraded to 130, but, knowing they had been deceived once, they noted there may have been many more. Here we must note one of the primary purposes of intelligence services is to control the writing of history. Much effort must have gone into toning down that explosive story. I watched a documentary on the subject of these downed pilots that showed their routes over the Baltic Sea and claimed that all planes veered off before going over Soviet territory. That falsification of history required both a careful sifting of facts from the Pentagon and a cooperative producer.
‡‡ Between East and West Germany thousands of saboteurs simply walked across the border and far fewer of these were captured.
§ Besides those with ethnic ties to the West who betrayed their new country by joining forces with the Nazi invaders (such as Vlasov's army and Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Polish volunteers for the mobile death squads [Einsatzgruppen, twenty thousand volunteers; the rest were conscripts who were granted amnesty], many of those executed had been contacted by trained saboteurs who were parachuted into the Eastern European countries (or infiltrated across the border) all the way to Byelorussia (Prados, The Presidents' Secret Wars, chapters 2-3; Loftus, Belarus Secret chapters 1- 3, pp. 51-53, 49, 102-03, especially p. 43; Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 156). In comparison, the French Revolution gained quasi-political freedom for the French for only ten years and was far bloodier than the Russian Revolution. But due to the First and Second Estates--both internally and exter- nally-being determined to regain control, there was no real political freedom. As members of the First and Second Estates were the only ones with education or wealth, internal intrigues in coop- eration with external powers gave the new government no peace (Petr Kropotkin's The Great French Revolution (New York: Black Rose Books, trans. 1989). In contrast, the American Revolution was only a few skirmishes. The largest battle involved only about 7,500 American soldiers and--because the balance of power between France, Spain, and England did not permit either in- ternal or external subversion--America's political freedom was real. With this obvious break to freedom, there was still a large population loyal to Britain; 100,000 fled or were killed and some of those who remained were dispossessed of their property. The Soviets faced far more serious problems of internal disloyalty and external subversion than did America.
§§ In 1990, on Larry King Live, I watched a Soviet defector say, with a straight face, that estimates vary between thirty million and seventy million killed. Many such people were spirited over here by the CIA, given financial support by them, assigned a writer, coached on what to write, and then paraded around the country to lecture. As of 1975, over nine hundred such fraudulent books (many in foreign languages) had been published, and today there must be over twelve hundred; that is twenty-five to thirty such books printed per year (1975-76 Church Committee Hearings; Stockwell, Praetorian, pp. 34, 101; Peter Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy [London: Collier Macmillan, 1989], especially Appendix D, lists almost two hundred of these books). Canned editorials were also prepared and sent to newspapers all over the world. They were available for any editor to use as his or her own and virtually tens of thousands of CIA articles based on, and which in turn supported, these fraudulent books were planted in the media around the world. These gross fabrications and crafted propaganda are now a part of Western literature and history and provide a firm foundation of its enemy belief system. This, and much more, is the creation of enemies in action. It is to the credit of academics that they tried to stand up and tell the American people the truth, but they were quickly silenced by McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. British MI6 was teaching the forerunner of the CIA (OSS) how to direct the writing and publication of those fraudulent books as early as 1946 (Blum, CIA, pp. 127-28, 131,185; Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence [New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1980], chapter 6, especially pp. 152-56; Philip Agee, Inside the Company [New York: Bantan Books, 1975], especially pp. 53-54, 62-63, 541-42; Stockwell, Praetorian, pp. 100-01; Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits [New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1983], especially pp. 30, 58, 62, 189; Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work [London: Zed Press, 1978], especially p. 262; David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment [NewYork: Bantam Books, 1978], pp. 256, 257; Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower; and especially Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System [New York: Random House, 1981]). When it was learned that the CIA had supported the printing of these thousands of book, sincere academics sued for the titles to be revealed. But the Supreme Court ruled that this would expose CIA methods and endanger the national security. A few such books that other authors have so described are: The Penkovsky Papers, The Dynamics of Soviet Society by Walt Rostow; The New Class by Milovan Djilas; Concise History of the Communist Party by Robert A. Burton, The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China by Kurt Muller; In Pursuit of World Order by Richard N. Gardner; Peking and the People's Wars by Major General Sam Griffith; a parody of the quotations of Man, entitled Quotations from Chairman Liu, The Politics of Struggle: The Communist Frontand Political Warfare by James D. Atkinson; From Colonialism to Communism by Hoang Van Chi; Why Vietnam by Frank Trager, Terror in Vietnam by Jay Mallin; and Indonesia-1965: The Coup that Backfired.