Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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