Sunday, March 22, 2009
By Alex
Constantine
Sunday, March 22, 2009
On his November 9, 2003 broadcast of "Sunday Salon," Pacifica's Larry Bensky (a veteran of the CIA's Paris Review cultural/political propaganda front) heaped scorn on a caller who asked, innocently enough, if Paperclip Nazis had any influence on the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. KPFA's Bensky ridiculed the caller, apparently unaware that McCarthy travelled with old guard Nazis and fascists in the intelligence community, and the hysteria was their group effort.
The caller really irked Bensky. He fell into a fit of rage - a "snit" - an
invaluble, tried-and-true prop in the mass opinion formation business.
The caller attempted to explain himself, stammered, but Bensky hung up,
insisting hotly, "nothing is really certain," after all - the mention of Nazis
suddenly led him to question the sum of human knowledge - spitting
condescensions at the poor caller’s suggestion that the German and East European
imports, secretly sponsored by the CIA and the military’s Operations Paperclip,
Sunrise, etc., might have influenced the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.
He went on to criticize nameless individuals who have discussed Nazis over
Pacifica airwaves (Alex Constantine, for instance - I'm guilty), blamed these
lunar mollusks for inventing capricious and arbitrary conspiracy theories that
interfered with his own sober, responsible, balanced news reporting.
This insidious approach to censorship is inexcusable, for reasons that will be
discussed at the end of this critique.
Bensky was unaware that Joseph McCarthy, the eye of the sturm und drang, was a
hands-on Nazi collaborator, having freed Germans interred by the Allies at the
end of the war. The late Mae Brussell: "Senator Joe McCarthy's two strongest
supporters [in his Senate campaign] were Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter
Harnisfeger. Both admired Adolf Hitler and made continuous trips to Germany….
Before he went after the Commies in the State Department, he had to release a
few of Hitler's elite nazis lingering in the Dachau prison camp…. In 1949,
during congressional hearings on the Malmedy Massacre … McCarthy invited himself
to take over the entire testimony. He wasn't satisfied until the prison doors
flew open. The most detestable and ugly battle of World War II, an assault upon
Americans and civilians in Belgium, was ignored. Hitler's precious Generals
Fritz Kraemer and Sepp Dietrick, along with Hermann Priess and many others, were
free. With that business finished, McCarthy took on Robert Morris as chief
counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Morris' earlier training
in Navy Intelligence in charge of USSR counter-intelligence and psychological
warfare could be utilized well by Senator Joe. Particularly the psychological
warfare part. After McCarthy died, Morris moved to Dallas, Texas. He was a
judge, and became president of Dallas University…."
One Nazi in particular, Nikolai Poppe, made a massive contribution to the
right-wing furor over communism in the States. Poppe was a spy attached to
Himmler's SS, assigned to the confiscation of Jewish property, director of the
Wansee Institute (a think-tank that conducted studies on the USSR for the SS).
In the postwar calm, Poppe went on to become a scholar at the University of
Seattle, a well-known author on Tibetan Buddhism, a CIA expert on Mongolia.
Nazi
Poppe participated in the most important case in McCarthy's alcohol-soaked
career as an anti-communist. "No influence?" Bensky's scornful refutation is met
directly by Christopher Simpson in Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and
its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988): "An incident during
Poppe's career in the 1950s illustrates the DELICATE INFLUENCE that certain Nazi
collaborators have had on domestic politics in the United States. Early in the
McCarthy era, Professor Owen Lattimore, the director of the Walter Hines Page
School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and a longtime
advisor on Asian affairs to the State Department, was brought before a
congressional investigation committee to face accusations of espionage and
running a "communist cell" in the Institute for Pacific Relations. McCarthy,
whose allegations were already drawing criticism from Democrats and even a few
Republicans, had pledged that HIS ENTIRE ANTI-COMMUNIST CRUSADE WOULD "STAND OR
FALL" on the supposed proof he had in the Lattimore case....
The supposed proofs against Lattimore, and ultimately the fate of McCarthy's
blacklist, rested mainly on the word of Nikolai Poppe. Simpson found that
Poppe's testimony "Proved to be an important element in the resurrection of
McCarthy’s case against Lattimore, who he claims used his influence to block
Poppe’s immigration to the United States prior to 1949." (pp. 118-122).
Lattimore was pursued by Joe McCarthy and his fellow far-right travellers for
years, but eventually the evidence proved insufficient to convict and he moved
to the UK in disgust to take a teaching job at the University of Leeds.
McCarthy’s covert relationship with Nazi imports continued into the Eisenhower
decade thanks to a close partnership with CIA officer John Valentine Grombach, a
domestic fascist who did more to fuel the Congressional anti-Communist
"investigations" of the 1940s and ‘50s than anyone.
Grombach ran his own ultra-conservative, off-the-shelf, international spy
network. One of his most vital assets was General Karl Wolff of the SS.
Christopher Simpson writes in Blowback that Grombach, a fierce anti-communist,
oversaw an imposing intelligence apparat, and it "effectively became the foreign
espionage agency for the far-right." (p. 237) Including and especially Joe
McCarthy’s stumble-bum anti-Communist crusade.
In addition, the Birch society - native fascists funded by the same American
military-industrial syndicates that backed Hitler - supported McCarthy and drove
the hysteria with far-right propaganda. To be sure, Nazis did influence the
reactionary delusions of the Cold War era ... especially if we are willing to
label all fascists, including American ones, as Nazis.
The rise of the Reich, after all, is not such a far remove from the Orwellian
drift of the U.S. since WW II – brought closer by radio talk-show hosts who rush
the anti-fascist left off their phone lines with terse denials and curses.
In the history of the left, the Lattimore case is well known. The background of
McCarthy's anti-communist charade is not, after all, obscure knowledge -
reporters and talk show hosts for Pacifica itself promoted Simpson' Blowback
heavily, and offered it as a fund-raising gratuity more than once. Simpson was
interviewed over Pacifica on multiple occasions. Late at night, "conspiracy
theorists" spent hours reading excerpts of his book over the network's airwaves.
Many of Bensky's own listeners had read the book and would have fielded the
caller's question without having a stroke over it.
That is, the fascist connections are something any serious left-wing scholar
should know, especially one who hails from The Paris Review, a controlled, cold
war CIA propaganda outlet, Bensky's old haunt. And this goes for the fascist
cold war machinations. Bensky's antipathy toward anyone who does research these
significant connections is wrong and wrong-headed - as any responsible, sober,
balanced anti-fascist researcher knows.
Note to Pacifica: Fascism is the traditional enemy of the left.
A left-wing talk show host's "ignorance" and refusal to discuss the subject
publicly is a red warning sign that Mockingbird has landed.