NATO’s Fascist Inheritance & the Long War On the Third World, w/ Pawel Wargan
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To understand how this new Cold War might play out, we have to understand the foundations of the original Cold War of the 20th century. What was NATO’s role? What did it mean for the Third World back then? What does it mean for the Third World today, particularly those countries that seek an independent, sovereign path? What is the danger of rising fascist movements? And what are the lessons for anti-imperialists who live and organize in the imperial core? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Paweł Wargan, an organizer and researcher based in Berlin, the coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International and author of the recent Monthly Review article “NATO and the Long War on the Third World,” in which he looks to the past for lessons about the future, concluding that capitalism cannot be overcome until the arteries of imperial plunder are severed. Article discussed in this episode: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/01/01/nato-and-the-long-war-on-the-third-world/ Listen to every episode of Rania Khalek Dispatches anywhere you get podcasts. Apple: https://apple.co/3zeYpeW Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3za9DRK #BreakThroughNews

[I]f you look at the formation of NATO, first of all, NATO was explicitly designed as an anticommunist alliance, much like the Fascist project emerged explicitly as an anticommunist project, and it began with the rehabilitation […] of various unsavory forces in Europe, including figures like the [para]fascist António Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, who was one of the founding of NATO, right?

And then Amílcar Cabral, who was leading revolutionary struggle in Guinea‐Bissau and other places, wrote that they would find weapons of war from Portugal, from Germany, from Spain, from across the NATO bloc. So there was an implicit, already then, an implicit understanding that NATO is an extension of the colonial project, and a kind of collectivization of the colonial project.

Events that happened today (August 6):

1944: The Axis continued brutally suppressing the Warsaw Uprising; the Gestapo, fearing of another uprising, ordered a round‐up of all able‐bodied young men in Kraków.
1945: The Empire of Japan was devastated when the United States B‐29 Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, massacring approximately 70,000 people (mostly civilians) instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
2001: Wilhelm Mohnke, Axis general, finally perished.