Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
4.4 Containing the anti-Fascist Resistance: From Death Camps
to Death Squads
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
304
In pursuit of its actual global geopolitical objectives, the US turned at
once to a major post-liberation task: dispersing or destroying the antifascist
resistance in favor of more trustworthy elements, often fascist
collaborators. The victors in World War II had plans for the postwar
world that conflicted with the vision of leading forces in the countries
they were liberating from the Axis yoke. We easily recognize this in the
domains conquered by the Red Army, but our ideological institutions,
once again, protect us from perceiving the systematic pattern of US
behavior in the regions it controlled, or comprehending the reasons for
it.
One of Churchill’s most trusted advisers, South African Prime
Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts, warned him in August 1943, with regard
to southern Europe, that “with politics let loose among those peoples,
we may have a wave of disorder and wholesale Communism set going
all over those parts of Europe.” The reason, as British historian Basil
Davidson comments, was that with the collapse of traditional ruling
classes or their collaboration with the Nazis, “large and serious
resistance came and could only come under left-wing leadership and
inspiration”: “the self-sacrifice and vision required to begin an effective
resistance, and then rally others to the same cause, were found only
among radicals and revolutionaries,” most of them men and women who
“followed the hope and vision of a radical democracy.” 53 Plainly the US
would have none of that. It took serious efforts to reverse the trend.
The pattern was set in the first area liberated by US forces, North
Africa, where in 1942 the US placed in power Admiral Jean Darlan, a
leading Nazi collaborator who was the author of the Vichy regime’s anti-