The Cold War That Never Took Place – Thoughts About the Sham Cold War

Dispatches from
G a i t h e r
Stewart
European Correspondent • Rome

There is an alignment of NATO countries, largely directed by the US, to militaristically encircle Russia leading to discussions of a “new” Cold War. Interestingly, my memory of the Cold War was more of a stand off rather than persistent shoving matches (at least not directly).  In other words, while there were numerous conflicts with others serving as proxies for the USSR and the US, there seemed to not be a lot of direct provocation. That does not seem to be the case today when the US, and its vassal states, are being out right provocative.

History from the US looks different that other places, and definitely different from reality.  In the minds of most folks from the US, there is an almost complete omission that the US and the USSR were once allies. Or if acknowledged it is so sublimated that there is something like a grey amnesiatic fog over that period when (somehow) the USSR went from being an ally to being the “evil empire.” So for those who lived and grew up in the WWII and post war up to about 1985 or so, the USSR aka Russia was not be trusted. For those growing up after 1985 (or so) Russia has not been particularly a big issue, but there has consistently been a thread of negativity towards Russia. Of late, that has been reinforced by a constant pounding of the “bad” Russians and the “bad” Putin, leading anyone paying attention to assume that the US is itching for a fight with Russia. There is little that is “cold” about the current environment, though there is talk about the “new” Cold War. The push in Europe and the US to the right has moved directly into the Neo-Nazi emergence and political legitimacy in a number of European nations, and in the US. It is this shift from the “old” to the “new” Cold War that Mr. Stewart illuminates here. -rw

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The Cold War the Never Took Place – Thoughts About the Sham Cold War

Gaither Stewart

A bit of authentic European history not yet widely recorded  in books: in the 1960s and extending into the 1980s there was widespread concern, preoccupation and discontent in Germany. Europe  in general was infected by unease and a sensation of insecurity. It is true that to many people the Communist East appeared as an ominous threat, although it  was to a great extent a propaganda bugaboo created artificially by CIA and its ex-Nazi cohorts already enlisted in America’s mounting attack on the USSR.

The Cold War raged to be sure, though  today something about it seems false and unreal, cinematographically romantic. People ate and drank and danced and fell in love easily. It is as if it never took place. In my mind it was a well-controlled, coordinated and monitored battle between two systems in which neither side overstepped certain agreed upon limits.

It was also a battle of attrition. A period of spymasters and secret agents for whom life was action on a treadmill, for right up to the end CIA never knew for certain what was really happening in Russia. The atmosphere was one of action for action’s sake. No wonder that in the wilderness of propaganda, conspiracy and anti-Communism neo-Nazi parties mushroomed here and there and their various fronts and battle groups popped up with the new spring. Who stood behind them, one might well wonder. The answer is now clear. The American Minute Men and Tea-baggers of today are nothing new.

An American academic friend, Jack Aigler, Professor of European History at the Munich branch of University of Maryland, was obsessed with the imminent recrudescence of Nazi Germany. For him it was a socio-political certainty, its ideology inherent in the German people, he believed, only superficially cloaked by America’s hypocritical democratization of the defeated enemy as a consequence of the exigencies of the Cold War. “We wanted anti-Communist allies in Central Europe,” he pontificated to his students those evenings I sat in on his class, “Well, we’ve got them. But we’ve got a tiger by the tail. Let’s arm them all and give them the green light. Then we’ll have a real bulwark against Bolshevism,” he said. My friend’s thesis was linked to an old story I had heard many times from Germans: why had America not united with Germany and whipped the Russians? Many like two-gun General Patton considered the alliance of America and Germany without Hitler the natural order of things. According to Jack, America and the ex-Nazis got their wish.

Not that Jack was a leftist or even a liberal far ahead of his times but he saw aspects of the Cold War which I still did not understand. An iron bastion against the Commies! “Hah! You see all those gray Bundeswehr uniforms around town!,” he said in the 1960s. “And everywhere you hear Deutschland Deutschland über alles. Just wait till the Nazis kick out Adenauer and take over. Then we’ll see the tail wagging Europe. They’re too powerful a people; their instincts and their destiny are for expansion.”

For him the Föhn winds he hid from symbolized the threat of renascent Nazism. When the Nazi-Föhn winds blew down from the Alps he sealed his apartment with hermetic shutters so that night reigned there constantly. He believed the beguiling, malefic Föhn had the same effect on people as Nazism. On such days when surgeons refused to operate and mechanics wouldn’t adjust a carburetor and judges refused to judge, Jack locked himself in, dressed in a long robe and red silk scarf high around his neck, wore heavy sunglasses over his steel-rimmed eye glasses, plunged rubber plugs in his ears that he boasted reached to his eardrums and passed the day drinking Pernod. The wind that departs quietly from the Sahara, whips across the Mediterranean and serpentines through the Alps ruining the snow for skiing and descends on the plains of Bavaria like the arm of capricious Fate was for Jack a physical enemy, inimical and inexorable, to be combated with all possible weapons. He needed the Föhn-Nazism, and spared nothing to defend all of us with the Pernod and the Fundador brandy he bought by the case at the PX.

One wonders how Europe can permit the resurgence of Nazi parties, not only in Ukraine but in every corner of Europe, evil people who overthrow legal governments as in Ukraine and assassinate at will, even parliamentarians as in England in these days. Actually those parties, movements, people are not simply resurging; they have been here all the time. They never vanished during the fake de-nazification in the post- war. As a journalist roaming around Europe in the 1980s I met them in Germany and Italy and France, I attended their rallies, was threatened by Nazi bullies just for asking questions, for example, about the NATO/CIA organized Operation Gladio.

I can testify that the Nazi-Fascist is another breed. Claims that Nazism and Communism are today the same is pure bullshit propaganda. Official Nazi-Fascist political parties have continued to exist and today they either already share power as in Ukraine or they are legal contenders for political power.

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