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ecame certain, Mussolini would have been welcomed by<br />
the Allies ... "<br />
In Italy, Greece and other nations the "liberating"<br />
U.S.-British forces put the local fascists back into power<br />
while savagely repressing the anti-fascist guerrillas who<br />
had fought them. In Greece the British had a problem since<br />
the German Army had pulled out in September 1944,<br />
harassed by guerrillas who had installed a new, democratic<br />
Greek government. The Allies invaded already-liberated<br />
Greece in order to crush the independent government;<br />
Greece was "liberated" from democracy and returned to<br />
being a fascist neo-colony of Britain and the U.S. The<br />
mercenary collaborators and the fascist "Security Battalions"<br />
organized by the German occupation were<br />
preserved by the British Army, which used them to conduct<br />
a campaign of terrorism against the Greek people. By<br />
1945 the British were holding some 50,000 anti-fascist activists<br />
in prisons. The Allies killed more Greek workers and<br />
peasants than the Germans had. (1 1)<br />
the Nazi death camps, U.S. imperialism still refused to interfere<br />
with the genocide. And this was when the Nazis<br />
were feverishly slaughtering as many as possible - at<br />
Auschwitz as many as 24,000 per day!<br />
U.S. imperialism posed as being anti-fascist, but it<br />
was U.S. imperialism which had helped put Nazism in<br />
power. Henry Ford was an important early backer of<br />
Hitler, and by 1924 had started pouring money into the<br />
tiny Nazi party. Fokd's portrait hung on the wall in Hitler's<br />
Party office. Every birthday until World War I1 Ford had<br />
sent Hitler his personal greetings (and a gift of money).<br />
Even during the War the Ford Motor Company delivered<br />
vital parts to the German Army through neutral<br />
Switzerland. On October 20, 1942 the U.S. Embassy in<br />
London complained to Washington that Ford was using<br />
his plants in Switzerland to repair 2,000 German Army<br />
trucks.<br />
Ford was just one example out of many. GM<br />
President Willian Knudson told a press conference on October<br />
6, 1933, that Nazism was "the miracle of the 20th<br />
century." GM in Germany contributed !h of 1 % out of all<br />
its employees' wages as a weekly mass donation to the Nazi<br />
Party.<br />
While the Allied Powers wanted to defeat Germany,<br />
it had nothing to do with being anti-fascist. Both<br />
President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston<br />
Churchill favored Mussolini and his Fascist regime in Italy.<br />
Even after the European war broke out in 1939,<br />
Roosevelt privately urged Mussolini to be neutral and try<br />
to mediate a British-German detente. Churchill, for his<br />
part, wanted to preserve the Mussolini Fascist regime since<br />
"the alternative to his rule might we& have been a communist<br />
Italy. " Churchill saw Fascist Italy as a possible ally.<br />
He later wrote regretfully about Mussolini:<br />
"He might well have maintained Italy in a balancing<br />
position, courted and rewarded by both sides and<br />
deriving an unusual wealth and prosperity from the struggles<br />
of other countries. Even when the issue of the war<br />
The main focus of Amerika's military interest had<br />
nothing to do with democratic or humanitarian concerns,<br />
but with expanding the Empire at the expense of its German<br />
and Japanese rivals. Not only was a stronger position<br />
over Europe aimed at, but in the Pacific a show-down was<br />
sought with Japanese imperialism. In the 1930's both U.S.<br />
and Japanese imperialism sought to become the dominant<br />
power over Asia. Japan's 1937 invasion of China (Korea<br />
was already a Japanese colony) had upset the Pacific status<br />
quo; giant China had long been an imperialist semi-colony,<br />
shared uneasily by all the imperialist powers. Japan broke<br />
up the club by invading to take all of China for itself. The<br />
Roosevelt Administration, the main backer of Chiang Kai-<br />
Shek's corrupt and semi-colonial Kuomintang regime, was<br />
committed to a decisive war with Japan from that point<br />
on.<br />
Both the U.S. Empire and the Japanese Empire<br />
demanded in secret negotiations the partial disarmament<br />
of the other and a free hand in exploiting China. The<br />
Roosevelt Administration and the British had secretly<br />
agreed in mid-1941 for a joint military offensive against<br />
Japan, the centerpiece of which was to be a new U.S.<br />
strategic bomber force to dominate the Pacific. We know<br />
that President Roosevelt's position was that all-out war in<br />
the Pacific was desirable for U.S. interests; his only problem<br />
was: ". . . the question was how we should maneuver<br />
them into the position of firing the first shot ...' (12)<br />
Political necessities demanded that Roosevelt be able to<br />
picture the war as innocent "self defense."<br />
The New Deal started embargoing strategic war<br />
materials - notably scrap iron and petroleum - going to<br />
Japan. There was a coordinated Western campaign to deny<br />
Japanese imperialism the vital oil, rubber and iron its war<br />
machine needed. With 21 divisions bogged down trying to<br />
catch up with the Red Army in China, Japanese imperialism<br />
had to either capture these necessary resources in<br />
new wars or face collapse. The move was obvious.<br />
To make sure that this shove would work,<br />
Roosevelt asked U.S. Admiral Stark to prepare an intelligence<br />
assessment of the probable Japanese response.<br />
In his memo of July 22, 1941 (over four months before<br />
93 Pearl Harbor), Admiral Stark reassured Roosevelt that