Context: translation of an article published on a Romanian blog, which you can view here. The blog is aimed at Romanians, but some of its articles are relevant to people of all nations, so I am publishing one of them here ─ a short history and analysis of NATO these days.
Purpose of the North Atlantic Organisation. Words and deeds.
April 4 marked the 73rd anniversary of the founding of NATO in Washington, initially comprising the US, UK, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Portugal, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.
The purpose of this military alliance, according to the West, was to defend the “free world” against a possible Soviet invasion. NATO was thus to be purely defensive against the Red aggressor.
In reality, Western governments had no evidence that the Soviet Union was going to invade Western Europe after World War II. At the same time that they were talking about the threat from the East, the Pentagon and the British government were making plans to strike - with more than 300 atomic bombs and 20,000 conventional bombs - strategic points in the Soviet Union that had been depleted after World War II[1]. To draw the right conclusions, however, the following facts must be remembered
The USSR suffered most from the war, having alone to deal with three-quarters of the divisions of the fascist armies, with the Soviets losing over 20 million men in the fight against fascism, so its primary interest was economic reconstruction;
The Warsaw Pact was not established until 1955, in response to Western armaments, which had begun to militarise Germany and Japan again in order to oppose the socialist camp;
The USSR had no aggressive intentions after the Second World War, and in fact demobilised its army at a much faster rate than the West, so that in 1951 France had 22 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, the USA 18, and the Soviet Union 12[2];
The USSR spoke out against nuclear armament[3], and the only country to use nuclear bombs was the United States - targeting civilians, not military targets. Moreover, the only country to threaten to use atomic bombs was also the latter, in three cases to be precise: in the French-Vietnam War, the US offered to help the French and sent aircraft carriers carrying atomic bombs[4]; in the Korean War, when General MacArthur wanted to bomb China; during the 1965 US intervention in the Vietnam War;
CIA and British services had intervened in Western Europe to stifle Communist influence in several countries - they rigged the Italian elections and were prepared to bring in the army to stage a coup if the Communists won the 1948 elections [5]; they defeated Communist forces in the Greek civil war and installed a right-wing regime; they armed the Italian and Corsican Mafia to destroy the Communist dockworkers’ unions in Italy and France [6]. In none of these cases did the Soviet Union intervene militarily;
After the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, NATO not only was NOT dismantled, but even added thousands of kilometres to its sphere of influence, contrary to its promises not to expand by even one inch [7].
Moreover, according to data provided by William Blum in his book Killing Hope, the United States, from the end of World War II to the present, has:
The overthrow of more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were elected by democratic vote without any kind of fraud;
Fraudulent elections in at least 30 countries to ensure victory for politicians sympathetic to the US government;
Attempting to assassinate at least 50 leaders;
Bombing more than 30 countries;
Suppressing popular movements against authoritarian governments in 20 countries.
Even from these facts alone we can conclude that all the talk of defence against communist aggression is unfounded, especially if we consider that most of the governments overthrown by NATO forces were not led by communists nor had they engaged in military aggression. Naturally, the bourgeois will always be worried about the communist movement threatening to destroy the very system that keeps the capitalists as a class, so the fight against communism is one of the objectives, but the Soviet Union in Stalin’s time did not in any way provoke the NATO member countries, but did everything possible to keep the peace. However, we still need to illustrate certain aspects of NATO’s history to reveal its true character.
From enemies to friends. NATO collaboration with Italian, German and Japanese fascists after the war
As World War II drew to a close, Western governments considered using Nazis and fascists in all countries to fight communism and eventually invade countries in the East after the war was over. In this respect, the words of the American General Patton, who, seeing the inevitability of a war between socialist and capitalist countries, wanted to rearm several Waffen SS divisions to turn them against the Soviets, are very instructive. He calculated that they would reach Moscow in 30 days[8].
Also, while the Soviets had disarmed and imprisoned all German POWs, Britain was holding captured Germans in combat readiness, presumably to soon use the former Nazi armies for aggressive purposes.[9]
After the war, the US recruited thousands of German war criminals under Operation Paperclip to use for scientific research, espionage, anti-communist propaganda, and to suppress strikes and popular movements in many countries. Former Nazis were given new documents and therefore new identities and lived their lives in luxury in the United States. The US military also made use of the research of Japanese scientists of the famous Unit 731 to cause epidemics that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people during the Korean War[10].
In the late 1940s, Operation Gladio was implemented in Western Europe, which involved the creation of a network of secret armies throughout Western Europe, supposedly to defend the West in the event of a Soviet invasion. In reality, the secret armies were made up of groups of fascists - many of whom had served in the armies of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini - who received training and weapons from NATO to commit terrorist acts[11]. The true purpose of Gladio was revealed by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo - proudly bearing the label of a Nazi organisation - in an interview with the BBC:
You had to attack civilians…women, children, innocent people, away from any political game. The reason was simple enough. It should have compelled these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to demand more security. This is the political logic behind all the massacres and bombings that go unpunished, because the state cannot condemn itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.
Ekaterina Blinova, From 1945-49 the US and UK planned to bomb Russia into the Stone Age https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/from-1945-49-the-us-and-uk-planned-to-bomb-russia-into-the-stone-age ↩︎
H.D. Meyer, The Last Illusion, New York, 1953, pg. 301 ↩︎
I. Stalin, Prohibition of Atomic Weapons, 1951 ↩︎
William Blum, Killing Hope, pg. 122 ↩︎
William Blum, ibid., pg. 27 ↩︎
Michael Parenti, Democracy for The Few, 10th edition, pg. 145 ↩︎
Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed: Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal–20160530-snap-story.html ↩︎
E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1972), pg. 57–58 ↩︎
Georgi Zhukov. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 657 ↩︎
Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony (Yen Books, 1996), p. 125–126; ↩︎
Paul Cudenec, The Sordid History of NATO-Sponsored Terrorism https://nevermore.media/2022/02/25/the-sordid-history-of-nato-sponsored-terrorism/?fbclid=IwAR0INZyGrVf-XbuIryApVgzfnuBz-C2f6ZCZrTTkHlkUCN4vg3f85bbtJ5M ↩︎
link to part 2 https://lemmygrad.ml/post/247314