August 23 is ‘Black Ribbon Day (BRD).’ This Ongoing Global Crusade — Deeply Rooted in Fascism — is Canada’s Most Successful Cold War Propaganda Export.
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Knowingly, and with the blessing of the Americans, the Canadian elites have elevated a crypto-fascist like Chrystia Freeland to the country 's highest offices in domestic and foreign affairs.
August 23 is 'Black Ribbon Day (BRD).' This ongoing global crusade -- deeply rooted in fascism -- is Cda's most successful Cold War propaganda export. https://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_24-25.htm
Click above for my articles exposing this ever-growing, far-right campaign.
Here is some historical context on Aug. 23, 1939, that BRD's profascist groups would rather we all ignore, such as the meeting at the Kremlin one week earlier when UK and French officials refused Soviet pleas to join them in a military alliance to squash Nazi Germany. https://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_17.pdf
BRD was first spawned in 1985 by pro-NATO, anti-Soviet East European émigré groups in Toronto whose founding leaders were riddled with fascist collaborators, SS veterans, Holocaust perpetrators, and top officials of Nazi puppet regimes. In 2009, Liberal MP (Ontario's former NDP premier) Bob Rae's pro-BRD motion received all-party support in Parliament.
Cda's fascist-rooted grps have never been closer to power! The most egregious of them represent the far-right Ukrainian diaspora with which Freeland was worked for 30+ years.
These groups still get millions in govt handouts for big events, programs, propaganda organs and community centres that aid & abet the glorification of their fascist war heroes.
Please help expose this scandal! Learn more, share online, and order copies of my 64-page, full-colour report ("Defunding the Myths and Cults of Cold War Canada"). https://coat.ncf.ca/P4C.htm
My articles on BRD's history are linked to other resources documenting the far-right groups that were key to gaining mass-media and govt support for this ongoing, global disinformation crusade. For example:
* Estonian Central Council
* Lithuanian Canadian Community
* Latvian National Federation in Canada
* Ukrainian Canadian Congress
* Ukrainian World Congress
* Canadian Polish Congress
* Canadian Slovak League
* Slovak World Congress
* Cttee. of Captive European Nations - Cda (aka Grp of 7)
* National Citizens’ Coalition
* Central and Eastern European Council
My research also links these organizations to the global, CIA-funded "Captive Nations" movement, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the notorious World AntiCommunist League. These networks brought together Nazi collaborators, NATO generals, and US-armed/funded terrorist groups of "freedom fighting" assassins (such as the Afghan mujahideen and Nicaraguan contras), with fascist Third World dictators, and many other virulently Russophobic, anticommunist, and powerfully business-friendly Cold War forces that included politicians from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. https://coat.ncf.ca/P4C/70/70_48.htm
Richard Sanders is a Canadian activist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. He pushes back against all forms of warmongering and NATO Cold War disinformation, regardless of the targets.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
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Class Uber Alles: Meet Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Favorite Spy Who Used CIA Resources To Free Nazi War Criminals
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Gehlen's triumphant incorporation into the top power structure of "the West"—the so-called capitalist democracies—represents chilling proof that no matter their rhetoric, class interest comes first for the ruling oligarchy.
First published November 9, 2020
Ullstein bild/Ullstein bild via Getty Images
An expert spymaster, Reinhard Gehlen surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II in order to work with the CIA before founding Germany’s modern intelligence service with hundreds of former Nazis like him.
Reinhard Gehlen, seated front row with an “O” over his chest, was well-respected among Nazi leaders. He later used this experience to start one of the most notorious spy rings in the Cold War.
At midnight on May 8, 1945, Nazi rule came to an end in Germany. The date, now called Stunde Null or “Zero Hour,” remains one of the most significant moments in modern German history.
The crushing defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies took many Germans by surprise. But others in the country had weighed the possibility of their demise and made their own preparations to ensure that no matter the victor, Nazi rule could again rise from the ashes of their failed nation.
Reinhard Gehlen was one such individual.
An espionage expert and a political opportunist, Gehlen made plans to ensure that the Third Reich would live on after Stunde Null and he created a network of ex-Nazi spies that would go on to form the modern German intelligence community — and he did so in part by scamming the CIA.
Reinhard Gehlen Was An Invaluable Nazi Spy
Reinhard Gehlen is seen here with fellow officers at a camp used to recruit, or coerce, Russian POWs into the so-called Russian Liberation Army. (Ullstein bild/Ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Reinhard Gehlen was born into a family of loyal Prussian militarists on March 3, 1902. Most men in his family had been career army officers for Germany, and Gehlen followed a similar path. As soon as he passed his exams, he was commissioned into the Reichswehr, or Reich Defense, under the Weimar Republic leading up to the rise of Hitler.
Gehlen was reportedly quiet among his fellow soldiers, but nevertheless, he proved himself with his exceptionally sharp mind for facts, figures, and organization. In 1935, he was promoted to captain and assigned to the German General Staff. Here, he developed his skills for fieldcraft and espionage.
The Nazi war machine rolls into the Soviet Union (Wikimedia Commons)
As Hitler’s armies sprawled across the Russian countryside, the German Army’s military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front donned combat gear and disguises to penetrate far behind Russian lines, gathering valuable intelligence.
In 1942, Major Reinhard Gehlen was promoted to commander of the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), or Foreign Armies East, which was a military intelligence organization dedicated to penetrating Russian lines as the Third Reich dominated Europe.
A fervent anti-Communist, Gehlen threw himself into his work and produced key reports which led to Germany’s early successes in pushing the Soviet Union out of its territory.
But even as early as 1942, when Hitler was rapidly becoming a dictator of Europe, Gehlen began to mull the possibility of his country’s defeat. As the tide of World War II shifted and the Allies gradually beat back the Nazis, Gehlen drew up reports that revealed the failures of the German military. These matter-of-fact analyses infuriated Adolf Hitler, who called Gehlen’s findings “defeatist.”
In April 1945, Hitler’s empire crumbled around him and he fired Gehlen, who at the time was his most capable spy. Gehlen, now a major general, shrugged off the dismissal and continued his work copying every scrap of intelligence about the Russians he could find.
According to his 1972 memoir, The Service, mere days before the Allies moved into Germany, Gehlen and his devoted officers buried 52 steel drums packed with microfilm that contained the results of six years worth of espionage work.
He then ordered his men to wait for his signal and quietly surrendered himself to United States troops.
Cooperating With And Exploiting The CIA Through The Gehlen Org
Reinhard Gehlen (center) and staff of Wermacht’s Counter Intelligence Unit. (Via Getty Images)
After interviewing with high-ranking American officers, Reinhard Gehlen brokered a deal with them that protected him from being prosecuted for war crimes in exchange for collecting intelligence on the Soviets for the U.S.
By the end of 1946, the U.S. Army provided Gehlen with funding to build the so-called Gehlen Organization, or “Org,” which Gehlen populated with 350 ex-Nazi officers, some of who were considered war criminals.
Gehlen and his cronies were then allowed to pursue their own agenda on both sides of the West German border — and all under the authority of U.S. Army intelligence. In 1949, the CIA officially absorbed Gehlen’s group and gave them $5 million a year for their own intelligence projects.
Although The Org had value to the American intelligence community, the U.S. Army was nonetheless desperate to be rid of it. Not only was The Org quickly riddled with Soviet moles shortly after its inception, but American officers were wary of Wehrmacht and SS veterans.
Indeed, at least five associates of Adolf Eichmann, the “Architect of the Holocaust” who designed the systematic genocide of European Jews, worked for the CIA. The CIA allegedly also approached 23 other Nazis for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen Org were former SD or Gestapo officers.
The Army struggled to control the group as Gehlen’s men continued to pursue their own agendas, like helping other Nazi war criminals flee Europe via an underground escape network that included transit camps and fake ports supplied by the CIA. The CIA-funded side project helped over 5,000 Nazis flee Europe to South and Central America.
CIA Director Richard Helms opposed the adoption of the Gehlen Organization by the CIA, noting “serious flaws in the security of the operation.”
“We did not want to touch [the Gehlen Organization],” noted Peter Sichel, the CIA chief of German operations. “It had nothing to do with morals or ethics, and everything to do with security.”
Although the CIA distrusted Gehlen, their temptation to strike a blow at Moscow grew, and Gehlen assured American intelligence officers that he could succeed where they had failed. “Given how hard it was for us,” one CIA operative noted, “it seemed idiotic not to try it.”
For eight years, Gehlen gathered some reliable intelligence from wartime informants in Eastern Europe. He also had some success with infiltrating East Germany and collecting valuable information about the Soviet’s military units for the Americans.
But overall, the Gehlen Org often had to resort to fantasy to keep the CIA satisfied with their work. They concocted wild stories based on “confessions” given by POWs returning from the Soviet Union, and told stories about advanced military technology and a nuclear program far ahead of the West’s.
Faced with this phantom of a massively powerful Soviet Union, American intelligence agents felt they had no choice but to stick with their German spies, despite whatever reservations they may have had about the men who populated its ranks.
Heinz Felfe, former German intelligence agent and Gehlen’s longtime adjutant, was so brazen about his role as a Soviet spy that he would use the radio transmissions containing his orders to instruct new recruits to the Federal Intelligence Service. (Mehner/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Founding Germany’s Version Of The CIA
In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was legitimized as the new Bundesnachrichtendienst, or “Federal Intelligence Service,” which was and remains Germany’s equivalent of the CIA. But the triumph would not last.
By 1968, numerous Soviet moles were exposed within the group and many of them had purportedly worked with Gehlen for decades. The moles even included Heinz Felfe, Gehlen’s longtime deputy. The shocking revelation resulted in Gehlen’s dismissal.
While other ex-Nazis were jailed and tried for their crimes, Reinhard Gehlen succeeded in avoiding capture or prosecution. Although well-known in intelligence circles, Gehlen escaped notice, and died quietly in 1979.
Up until the end of his life, Gehlen enjoyed the protection of German and American leaders. They were willing to overlook his Nazi past in order to use his skills. As the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, noted decades after Gehlen’s death: “If there was ignorance on the matter, it was only because no one wanted to know.”
After learning about Reinhard Gehlen, learn about more of Hitler’s top men including Reinhard Heydrich, the “Man with an Iron Heart” who was too cruel even for the Führer. Then, learn about Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer who tried to halt the nightmare of Nazism by assassinating Hitler.
Morgan Dunn is a freelance writer who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine art and art history from Goldsmiths, University of London. His areas of expertise include the Soviet Union, China, and the far-reaching effects of colonialism.
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Anti-communism, authoritarianism and repression are growing in the capitalist world
Authoritarianism in China? A place that nipped Covid in six weeks and ended poverty in 2020? Let's turn the camera, shall we? And let's fix it on the Western/capitalist bloc. Do you see any recrudescence of BOURGEOIS AUTHORITARIANISM in examples from recent times?
1. Slovakia: passes law on 1 Dec 2020 designating Czech and Slovak Communist parties "criminal organizations."
2. Poland: the anti-communist hysteria is well established in the persistent "witch hunt" against the communists that for decades has characterized the Polish bourgeois authorities on a dangerous undemocratic and reactionary ridge, with the complacency and encouragement of the EU. In fact, the persecutions, restrictions and criminal proceedings that have been conducted for years against the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), its daily “Bzrask” and their members are known “for the promotion of totalitarian regimes”. Furthermore, among other things, we remember the interruption of scientific conferences on Karl Marx organized by universities, the use of public institutions such as the National Memory Institute (IPN) for the dissemination of anti-communist propaganda and the establishment of a dangerous legal framework for communist persecution which includes the 2017 “decommunization law”
3. Serbia: they are contemplating and trying to enact an impediment to the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) from participating in elections.
4. Spain: the Popular Party (PP) presented a bill to the Senate - where it has the majority - to ban communist symbols in application of the 2019 European Parliament resolution, equating fascism and communism, and attributing to the Soviet Union the cause of WW2.
5. France: Action Francaise (an old anti-communist/chauvinist org) is campaigning to demand the dissolution of the French CP from the Minister of the Interior.. Emblematic of authoritarian resurgence is the law on "global security" and the constant repression of protests, with the Macron government using the pandemic to amplify anti-people politics. The "global security" law seeks to give free rein to police violence, guaranteeing the police impunity (US cops are largely protected by similar legislation) and prohibiting the filming and broadcasting of images depicting policemen in action, such as the violence perpetrated by the police during demonstrations while another law criminalizes the occupation of university amphitheaters, a traditional practice of struggle of the French student movement. In the last period, there has been an escalation of repression, mistreatment and serious injuries of progressive protesters, workers in struggle, trade unionists, yellow vests and even undocumented migrant and foreign workers, as well as high school and university students.
(Meanwhile Macron, the SOB, gets slapped! And the political henchmen and flunkies of the global plutocracy immediately declare the affront "an insult on French democracy"!)
—The Editor
6. Greece: violent police aggression at the demonstration on November 17 and the arrests of hundreds of militants and cadres of the KKE, KNE and PAME and the proposed laws to further limit the right to strike and demonstrate.
7. Turkey: systematic violation of the right to strike (17 strikes have been banned since 2003).
8. India: strong popular protests, mass workers' strikes and peasant marches against the government's anti-popular policies are repeatedly attacked by police with several dozen arrests of union leaders, numerous injuries and at least 35 dead. (The strikes and mobilizations against the government involved more than 350 million people, dwarfing anything seen anywhere else or previously, and yet the Modi government still claims legitimacy.—Ed)
9. Belgium: 17 trade unionists - including the president of the FGTB trade union - were sentenced to one month in prison with parole for road blocking as part of a national strike
A lifetime writer, activist and revolutionist, Luciana Bohne is a former university Professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, United States
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
ZIONIST MURDER CON
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Paul Edwards ASSOCIATE EDITOR
IDF jet in action: State-of-the-art weaponry. Like shooting fish in a barrel. The Palestinians have no air force nor anything resembling an effective air defense, nor shelters, for that matter.
Because Palestinians resisted having their lands and homes stolen by Israelis, its Zionist government inflicted yet another in their series of murderous assaults on that captive, victim people. This barbarity it pretends to justify on grounds of “self defense”.
Though a child can see through the blatant dishonesty of that absurd claim, American media can’t. The PR arm of our corrupt, deceiving Deep State frames—as it always has—the latest Israeli massacre as a contest of equals, matched opponents, not a clear case of the sadist Zionist army shooting fish in a barrel.
Israel attempts to deflect criticism of the sickening brutality of its Einsatzgruppen military style on grounds that criticism of that sick, evil, murderous state is reprehensible “Anti-Semitism”. This trope, invented by the Holocaust Industry it has assiduously cultivated ever since that grim Nazi horror, is run up the flagpole whenever Zionist governments need cover for the criminal, racist violence they perpetrate at will on demonized Palestinians.
Image management: Israel's IDF is a leader in publicity campaigns often featuring their women soldiers.
It is so ethically corrupt, so logically null and rationally false, that it would be laughable if it were not weaponized to attack, malign, and silence courageous, honest, honorable critics, and stop valid criticism of that profoundly cruel, rabid, racist state and society.
Consider: I’m an American sickened by my own government’s murderous, imperialist/militarist violence which I vigorously condemn. Does that mean I hate fellow Americans? That I’m “anti-American”..? Does hatred of the regimes of Bolsonaro, Modi, and bin Salman make me anti-Brazilian, anti-Indian, anti-Saudi? Clearly, to say so would be a malicious, dishonest slur, exactly what Israel’s bogus accusations of “anti-Semitism” are.
The loud cries of antisemitism, this cynical con—not believed even by Zionist snake-oil hustlers who peddle it—exposes Israel’s real character as a xenophobic, apartheid horror of a state.
This cynical con—not believed even by Zionist snake-oil hustlers who peddle it—exposes Israel’s real character as a xenophobic, apartheid horror of a state. It is not only possible to be violently anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic—q.e.d.—it is ethically mandatory for a person of conscience to be so, given the unending brutality and shameless, inhuman savagery of Israel toward Palestinians.
Tragically, for Palestinians, western governments are themselves enmeshed in the anti-Semitism nonsense, out of serious guilt about the Nazi Holocaust atrocity since not a single powerful nation lifted a hand to prevent it. Zionists parlayed this guilt into illegal de facto title to a land stolen from an innocent resident people entirely blameless in the European Jews’ decimation.
Now, after years of complicity with Israeli crimes and locked into lucrative military/financial ties, governments of the U.S and U.K. are awash in effusions of mock concern at the rape they enabled and funded, as this powerful fascist monster, their protege and partner, wreaks its unbridled animosity on its all but impotent prisoner people. And America is the cynosure of this hypocrisy.
After more than 70 years of unrelenting brutal assaults, and systematic Apartheid repression, the Palestinians remain defiant.
It could not be otherwise. After lift-off of the Zionist Project with the British Balfour Declaration, bloody combat exploded between Brit military and Jewish terrorist guerrillas of Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang when the British mandate ended and the killers assaulted Palestine. As Brits fled, the United States took over as champion of those murdering, raping invaders, tacitly backing every horror of Zionist violence, and turning a blind eye to the bloody ravaging of Palestinians in the nightmare of the Nakba.
Indelible pages from the Nakba: 72 years on
1948
2021
Rubble, death and insecurity everywhere, and a refusal to surrender. (Pepe Escobar)
In that massacre, Zionists drove 700,000 innocent Palestinians at gunpoint from their homeland, obliterated 500 of their villages, and robbed, violated, and murdered hundreds of helpless people.
Zionist Israel has since used the Holocaust as justification for surprise attacks on neighboring Arab states to expand its lebensraum and establish a “Greater Israel”, in the process occupying by armed force lands of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.
All their piratical, so-called “wars” were sold to the world as desperate responses and heroic defenses of poor, victimized Israel, and the American government and press affirmed it, even when America’s own troops were victims of Israeli violence.
Israeli fighter planes attacked and shot up the USS Liberty, which it knew was an American spy ship, in the Six Day War, killing 34 seamen and wounding 171. That Zionist high-command called it a mistake was no shock; that the U.S. government—knowing it was a lie—ate it, buried it, and lied about it to Americans was.
Kowtowing to that rogue state—which has denied having nuclear weapons all the world knows they have, and has refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty—is baked into American policy. The reason, once simple if dishonest, is now complex and dishonest.
Since Israel’s rape of Palestine, the U.S. gifted billions of dollars in commercial, industrial, and military charity to build a hired ally to buttress American hegemony in the Middle East. While this once seemed feasible, events in recent decades have proven decisively that Israel, with its now suspect military chops, is far more a liability to the U.S. than an asset, and that it may be so loose a cannon as to suck America into a catastrophe that will blow what little remains of our gut-shot dominance there to bits.
So, if Israel’s role as U.S. Marshall in Levantine Dodge is dubious, what does keep the murderous Zionist regime on the U.S. take? Well, what is it that keeps our corrupt, imbecile Congress oiled, kneeling, and subservient to Israel? Is that even in question? Have you seen AIPAC’s political donations lately, or the trainloads of money doled out by PACs, individuals, and corporations allied with it? All that loot is from super-wealthy, right-wing, Zionist American Jews for defense of their beloved criminal Israel. In bankrolling it they are subverting and betraying us and our future.
Oh, I can’t say that? It’s anti-Semitic? Bullshit!
PAUL EDWARDS, Associate Editor • Paul Edwards is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and a participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”
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Our main image motif: Painted by famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Glorious Victory is a critical and condemnatory view of the 1954 CIA coup of Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The United States removed Árbenz from power and replaced him with a dictatorial military commander because Árbenz threatened the landholdings of the United Fruit Company with his agrarian reform laws.
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Serbian WWII film smeared by war propagandists in Western media
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BY MAX PARRY
Eighty years ago last month, the Axis powers invaded the former Yugoslavia during the Second World War. A new Serbian film, Dara of Jasenovac, depicts the systematic extermination of Serbs which followed under the Nazi-puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia. Despite consultation with reputable historians during production and a screenplay based upon witness testimony, its release has generated controversy among international film critics. An examination of the English-speaking reception to the Serbian entry for the 93rd Academy Awards shows a boilerplate negative response and pseudo-journalistic pile-on that is part of an anti-Serb bias in Western media ever since the NATO war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Despite recent attempts at closer relations with the West, Serbophobia remains a fixture in corporate media on account of Belgrade’s strong historical ties with Moscow amid the New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.
One such example was a recent article featured in the arts and culture website Hyperallergic contrasting Dara of Jasenovac with Quo Vadis, Aida? (“Where are you going, Aida?”), a recent Bosnian film recounting the infamous 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It is no accident that the Bosnian drama was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars and is widely promoted by popular streaming services while its Serbian competitor has not been as fortunate. Although the Hyperallergic piece (by a Bosnian writer) is slightly more sympathetic than previous scathing indictments in the Los Angeles Times and Varietymagazine wherethe former smeared Dara of Jasenovac as “Serbian nationalist propaganda” and the latter even dared question the historical accuracy of its portrayal of the Ustaša regime, it follows the same lockstep formula. In fact, even the most favorable write-ups include qualifications that as a Serbian state production, although the film may be historically accurate, there must be a hidden agenda behind it.
"An examination of the English-speaking reception to the Serbian entry for the 93rd Academy Awards shows a boilerplate negative response and pseudo-journalistic pile-on that is part of an anti-Serb bias in Western media ever since the NATO war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s..."
What none of these yellow journalists bother to explain is how any Serbian film can faithfully portray WWII history, during which Serbs were disproportionate victims at the hands of their fellow countrymen in collaboration with the Axis invaders, without provoking such accusations of nativism. The trumped-up charge is that the filmic representation of atrocities committed by the Ustaša during WWII is to somehow excuse or legitimate war crimes carried out five decades later during the Yugoslav Wars (of which Serbs were assigned excessive blame), when this too proceeds from a false historical premise. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia resulted in ethnic cleansing on all sides, but killings perpetrated by Serbs were given inordinate attention just as comparable massacres by Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians were minimized and underreported. Morever, the socialist government in Belgrade singled out for regime change by NATO wasn’t responsible for the acts of Serbs within Bosnia and Croatia. More than twenty years later, the censure of Dara of Jasenovac is still cherry-picking worthy from unworthy victims in the Balkans.
The hypocrisy of Western presstitutes could not be more clear than in their coverage of two films depicting two different historical conflicts in the same region where genocide is said to have been committed. Perhaps it is the fact that the vast majority of victims in Jasenovac happened to be four times as many Eastern Orthodox Serbs as Jews that this lesser known chapter of Axis war crimes is rarely shown on the silver screen. Or maybe the reason World War II in Yugoslavia is seldom depicted in Hollywood is the complicity of the Croatian Catholic clergy in the Ustaša regime’s crimes against humanity which Dara of Jasenovac details from the perspective of a ten-year old Serb girl. Even though the film is explicitly clear that it was Ustaše ultra-nationalists who committed barbaric killings of which many Croatians were also victims, Variety’s Jay Weissberg still smeared the film as “anti-Croatian and anti-Catholic.” Nevertheless, it should be noted such Anglophone bias against Serbian cinema is nothing new, as similar criticism was previously leveled against Emir Kusturica’s Underground, despite the epic comedy-drama taking home the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1995.
Meanwhile, Variety had nothing but praise for Quo Vadis, Aida? and its narrative of a Bosnian United Nations translator whose family perishes in the Srebrenica enclave at the hands of Bosnian Serbs, much less any scrutiny toward its historical veracity. In reality, what happened in Srebrenica was a retaliatory slaughter after equivalent war crimes by Bosniak Muslims against Serbs in neighboring villages. Nevermind that the slanderous claim of implicit nativism hurled at Dara of Jasenovac is much more applicable to its Bosnian cinematic counterpart where Serbs as a nationality are relentlessly demonized. But what can you expect from the yellow press of a country which just elected Joe Biden? The then-Senator from Delaware not only supported the NATO assault on Serbia but was previously quoted as saying,“We should go to Belgrade and have a Japanese-German style occupation of that country”, “Serbs are illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers and rapists” and “all Serbs should be placed in Nazi-style concentration camps.” The highway in Kosovo which leads to Camp Bondsteel, the U.S. army base occupying the NATO protectorate, is even named after the American president’s late son, Beau. Anti-Serb racism is normalized from the top down.
The ugly face of Croatia's Ustasha does not fit well with Western contemporary propaganda
Croatia was a fanatical ally of Nazi Germany before and during WW2, something that the Western media, politicians and cultural figures prefer to forget. The image depicts a Croatian soldier in German uniform. Western Ukrainians were also notorious for their collaboration. The new Nazi-protected Croatian state was keenly interested in ethnic and religious cleansing, thereby persecuting Jews, Christian Orthodox Serbs, and Roma.
BELOW: Members of the feared Ustashe, a Croatian far right formation that acted as a Fascist militia in Yugoslavia. Headed by Hitler admirer Ante Pavelic, they committed innumerable atrocities, especially against their ancestral enemies, the Serbs. Their behaviour was so brutal that German and Italian commanders had to intervene to hold them back.
Hitler meeting Pavelic in Germany, 1941.
Mussolini and Pavelic, 1941. Italy also offered strong support for the Ustashe.
An entire Serbian family killed by the Ustashe, 1941.
Increased activity of the bands [of rebels] is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Ustaše have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand.[82]
THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY FOR THE USTASHE NOTES THE FOLLOWING (keep in mind the Wikipedia is usually edited to comply with the Western imperialist narrative):
The Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement (Croatian: Ustaša – Hrvatski revolucionarni pokret), commonly known as Ustaše (pronounced [ûstaʃe]) or by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croatian fascist, ultranationalist and terrorist organization,[2] which was active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945. Its members murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews,[3] and Roma as well as political dissidents in Yugoslavia during World War II.[4][5][6]By 1944 Pavelić was almost totally reliant on Ustaše units, now 100,000 strong. In November 1944 the army was effectively put under Ustaše control when the Armed Forces of the Independent State of Croatia were combined with the units of the Ustaše to form 18 divisions. Fighting continued for a short while after the formal surrender of German Army Group E on 9 May 1945, as Pavelić ordered the NDH forces to attempt to escape to Austria, together with a large number of civilians. The Battle of Poljana, between a mixed German and Ustaše column and a Partisan force, was the last battle of World War II on European soil. Most of those fleeing, including both Ustaše and civilians, were handed over to the Partisans at Bleiburg and elsewhere on the Austrian border. Pavelić hid in Austria and Rome, with the help of Catholic clergy, later fleeing to Argentina.[83] Above: Ustasha thugs sawing off the head of a young serb.
If ethnic cleansing was committed on every side in the Yugoslav Wars, then by definition what occurred was a civil war, not genocide. Coincidentally, another new release, the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes by Haitian director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, The Young Karl Marx), explores the history of European colonialism where various large-scale destructions of entire peoples occurred long before the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin devised the term and the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. Peck’s ambitious project starts strong with a brilliant rethinking of Nazi Germany as a settler colonial state, a refreshing antithesis to the conventional historical narrative established by theorists like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt which typically equate the Third Reich with the Soviet Union and truncates fascism from the timeline of European colonialism. Or as Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?”
Unfortunately, Peck later undermines his own attempt at heterodoxy by toeing the line on the Rwandan genocide, citing a personal friend in American historian Alison Des Forges, a senior advisor at the highly politicized and Western-biased Human Rights Watch. The same NGO also played a key role in building the anti-Belgrade partiality during the Yugoslav Wars and is a perfect example of how so-called ‘non-governmental organizations’ often paradoxically enjoy close connections with Washington. Meanwhile, according to the late Edward S. Herman in his book Enduring Lies, Alison Des Forges was one of the leading spin doctors shaping the popular discourse on the Rwandan conflict and creating support for actual génocidaire Paul Kagame, now a widely acknowledged war criminal. Mr. Peck should know better, having previously made two films about Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo overthrown in a 1961 CIA-backed coup, the same country which Kagame’s regime subsequently invaded and continued atrocities in the late 90s.
Alison Des Forges (right) with génocidaire in Yemen, Samantha Power.
Peck then makes a race reductionist argument in determining the hypocritical reasons for the U.S. failure to prevent the bloody civil war where as many as a million Rwandans were killed while simultaneously launching a “humanitarian intervention” to ostensibly stop the same in Bosnia and Kosovo. While that may be partly true, would an incursion in Rwanda have been at all justifiable or desirable either? Never mind that the U.S. didintervene in covert operations aiding the assassination of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana whose plane was shot down in a probable ‘false flag’ operation by Kagame’s C.I.A.-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the very catalyst for the interethnic violence in the small African country. Like the disinformation during the Yugoslav Wars, the designation of the ethnic majority Hutus as sole aggressors and the Tutsi minority as pure victims was established in advance, even though both sides conducted pogroms.
Peck does not fully comprehend that ‘genocide’ itself has become a tool to justify the use of military force abroad on the basis of ending alleged human rights violations in countries targeted for regime change. On the one hand, the Haitian director does correctly observe that the invention of the phrase came a considerable time after the extermination of Native American indigenous peoples and the Atlantic slave trade where it is seldom applied. However, from its very inception following World War II there was an agenda behind its ratification and not just to give special status to Jewish victims of the Nazis above their inferior slavic and Romani fellow-sufferers so as to give grounds for genocidal Zionism in Palestine. Raphael Lemkin was also a Cold War hawk and peddled the Ukrainian nationalist propaganda and Hitlerite myth of the Holodomor (the real ‘holo-haux’) in order to slander the Soviets as genociders. From the get-go, the g-word was a political football for empire.
Ramsey Clark (L), who defended him before the ICC, shaking hands with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Sadly, the world recently lost one man who did understand the way the notion of “genocide” has become an instrument of war and emptied of its meaning. Last month, former U.S. Attorney General during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Ramsey Clark, died at 93 years of age after a long and storied career from Washington insider to fierce critic of American foreign policy. While most know Clark for his role in the civil rights movement and the Great Society, the human rights lawyer spent his controversial later life as a peace activist and opponent of imperialism. In particular, he was one of the select few on the Western left (along with Michael Parenti, Edward S. Herman, John Pilger, Diana Johnstone, Harold Pinter, Peter Handke and others) brave enough to tell the truth about the war in Yugoslavia while also famously providing legal counsel to former Serbian President Slobodan Miloševiæ during his kangaroo trial in the Hague. At a time when most of the traditional anti-war “left” fell for the anti-Serb newspeak, Clark saw through the distortions used by NATO to justify its own carnage in Belgrade. With any luck, the left will follow his legacy and not gatekeepers who dress up war propaganda under the guise of championing human rights.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
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BRD was first spawned in 1985 by pro-NATO, anti-Soviet East European émigré groups in Toronto whose founding leaders were riddled with fascist collaborators, SS veterans, Holocaust perpetrators, and top officials of Nazi puppet regimes. In 2009, Liberal MP (Ontario's former NDP premier) Bob Rae's pro-BRD motion received all-party support in Parliament.
* Estonian Central Council
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