Capra’s Battle With the Deep State and Hollywood’s Role in the Cold War Era

Capra’s Battle With the Deep State and Hollywood’s Role in the Cold War Era

by Matthew Ehret

December 21, 2019

For those who find themselves with excess time this holiday season which they would prefer not to squander with idleness or Netflix binges, then I’d like to offer this serving of Frank Capra films to uplift the soul.

Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20^th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It’s a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:

“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”

ERIC ZUESSE -- How the U.S. Created the Cold War

How the U.S. Created the Cold War

Posted on September 9, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

There was a speech that the Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the U.S. aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,533,691 views. The transcript is here. His speech said that the U.S. must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the U.S. regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide U.S. foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The U.S. did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any land in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the U.S.S.R., which was the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The U.S. lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population. Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the U.S. CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the U.S.S.R. was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the U.S.A. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the U.S. itself. It brought them to America whenever the U.S. regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the U.S.S.R. Right away, the U.S. was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the U.S. conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the U.S. as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the U.S.S.R.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the U.S., which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the U.S. regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the U.S. regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the U.S. rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually?

The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him. Here is how that happened:

SPUTNIK -- NATO London Summit Day One Highlights: Trump-Macron Row, S-400, Syria, Avoiding Cold War With Russia

NATO London Summit Day One Highlights: Trump-Macron Row, S-400, Syria, Avoiding Cold War With Russia

EUROPE

07:01 04.12.2019

Get short URL

The two-day NATO summit of heads of state and government titled "NATO Engages: Innovating the Alliance", kicked off on Tuesday in London. US President Donald Trump, who has previously slammed European bloc members for not spending enough on weapons for the alliance, arrived in the United Kingdom on Monday night.

The arrival of the US president was accompanied by anti-NATO rallies that engulfed the central part of London beginning early Tuesday. Protesters also chanted anti-Trump slogans. A local resident, who took to the streets of London with hundreds of demonstrators, told journalists that Trump's "racist policies" have lead to barriers and entry restrictions into the US for people from seven countries.

Anti-Trump protests were also held in London during the US president's first and second visits to the UK, in 2018 and 2019.

Some protesters also opposed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who, in their opinion, has been serving the interests of the US and not Great Britain.

The protests have not spoiled the planned schedule of the NATO summit.

Trump-Macron Row

The summit began with a meeting between Trump and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. After the official introduction and exchanges of commandments about the progress done within the bloc, reporters pounded the US president with questions. One much-anticipated comment was Trump's reaction to the recent controversial statement by French President Emmanuel Macron, who had described NATO as "brain dead".

"I heard that President Macron said NATO is “brain dead”, I think that’s very insulting to a lot of different forces, including the man that does a very good job in running NATO", Trump said before changing the subject to criticize France and its domestic policies.

"France is not doing well, economically, at all. They’re starting to tax other people’s products, so therefore, we go and tax them. That’s just taking place right now, on technology, and we’re doing their wines and everything else. And it’s - it’s a very tough statement to make when you have such difficulty in France. You look at what’s happened with the yellow vests, or you look at what’s going on during certain parts of their season. They’ve had a very rough year. And you just can’t go around making statements like that about NATO", Trump said.

Stoltenberg was more diplomatic in answering the question.

ERIC ZUESSE -- Misrepresentations of American & Soviet Roles in WWII and the Cold War

Misrepresentations of American & Soviet Roles in WWII and the Cold War

Eric Zuesse

October 1, 2019

© Photo: Flickr / GPA Photo Archive

INTRODUCTION

The Soviet Union contributed more than did any other nation to the defeats of Germany and Japan in World War II, but America and Britain together defeated Italy. Many prominent Western ‘historians’ white-out the Soviet roles in defeating Hitler and especially Hirohito, and they overstate the importance of America’s victories to the ultimate outcome, and ignore or underplay Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strong rejection and repudiation of Winston Churchill’s imperialistic agenda, not only for a continuation of empires, but for a continued postwar exploitation of colonies, as being acceptable goals for the future. Those ‘historians’ are actually propagandists — no real historians, at all — because they fundamentally misrepresent; yet they dominate in the ‘historical’ profession, and they have produced in the US and in its allies a widespread and profoundly warped ‘history’ of the war and of its aftermath, and of Twentieth-Century history, and of our own time. This ‘historical’ distortion has continued even after 1991 (it even accelerated) when the Cold War between the US and Russia ended only on the Russian side, but not actually on the US side. These ‘historical’ lies accelerated because ‘historians’ continue, even today, to hide this crucial fact, that the US side of the Cold War secretly continued — and still does continue — to try to conquer Russia. Ever since the time of America’s vile, bloody and illegal actual coup against Ukraine in February 2014 onward, Russia has been responding increasingly. This is especially so because of yet another American-and-allied aggression against a nation that has cooperative arrangements with Russia, Syria, 2012-. The purveyors of fake ‘news’ and fake ‘history’ display the gall to cry foul and to lie and allege that Russia’s necessary defensive actions against America’s aggressions are, instead, themselves, aggressions, to which America and its vassal-nations have the right to respond, and should respond, by what then would actually be yet more aggressions (violations of international law) — instead of to quit its string of aggressions, and to apologize, not only for the aggressions, but also for the lies, that the US regime and its propagandists have been perpetrating, against Russia, and against nations that cooperate with Russia. The reality has been that US foreign policy is, and has been, driven by one overriding and obsessive goal for a hundred years: first, to conquer any nation that’s friendly with Russia, and thereby to isolate Russia internationally; and, then, finally, to grab Russia itself. This entire US geostrategy is based upon lies.

THE ‘HISTORICAL’ LIES, v. THE HISTORICAL TRUTHS

EDITORIAL | 30.03.2018 | EDITORIAL

The New Cold War and the Endless Criminalization of Russia

The mass expulsion this week of some 130 Russian diplomats by Britain, the United States and other NATO allies is but the latest step in a long campaign to criminalize Russia. Like past ruses to demonize Russia, this latest effort will also fail. Because they are based on lies and deception.

However, it is absolutely reprehensible that these anti-Russian states are ramping up international tensions by trampling all over legal and diplomatic norms with wild, unsubstantiated accusations against Moscow.

On the back of British claims that Russia was somehow involved in a murder plot against a former Russian spy living in England, and his daughter, a whole host of NATO and European Union member states have compounded diplomatic sanctions against Moscow.

This is way more dangerous than the old Cold War. Because the erosion of legal and diplomatic norms by the US-led NATO powers are making repercussions unpredictable and unrestrained.

The whole affair is bizarre beyond words; yet, largely at the behest of the British government, international relations with Russia have been plunged into dire condition. Russia is being condemned without any evidence or due process. This is a dangerous anti-Russia witch-hunt conducted on a global scale.

This week, the British government published a six-page briefing on the March 4 incident in Salisbury, where Sergei Skripal (66) and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia were apparently exposed to a nerve poison. The briefing issued by London was the basis for some 25 other states joining in the campaign to expel Russian diplomats from their territories, and to echo British accusations that Moscow is guilty of an assassination attempt.

Any objective reading of Britain’s so-called “intelligence briefing” could only elicit a response of contempt and derision. It is but a superficial sketch, containing errors and based on the usual tenuous innuendo and assertion that the British government has been proffering since the March 4 incident. There is no verifiable proof to support the very grave allegations Britain is making against Russia. Yet this risible “briefing” is the supposed basis for an international campaign to criminalize Russia.