Wednesday, March 24, 2021

History of antifa

 Anti-fascist seems like a bland title, at least in the U.S. After all, the mythology of American power was based on the largest anti-fascist operation in history, called World War II. Alas, after world war II the U.S. decided to make a sort of posthumous alliance with many many Nazis, who were invited into the war against the Soviets. From the mass murdering scientists who tested poison gasses at Ausschwitz to Eichman's chief subordinate, these characters came to the U.S. and even gained cover stories via a CIA that has never released all its records on this part of American history.

There are many books about this. One of them, The Nazis next door by Eric Lichtbau, chronicles the career of America's first antifa agitator in the Cold War: guy named Chuck Allen. A wasp, a lefty, and an organizer of protests against Nazis, who were now just "anti-communists" - which, according to the FBI, which spied on him, made Allen a communist. He didn't give a fuck. His demonstrations against Lithuanian, Polish, German Hungarian and other Nazis and fascists brought out of the woodwork the ancestors of Trump's people, who would engage in counterprotests and assault. Often revealing, in the meantime, their own far right comittments.

So many reasons that a rightwing intelligence and policing cohort in the U.S. would love the fascists! Here's a story. In the fifties, the military and the state department decided that Hitler's advisor, Dr. Gustav Hilger, who had done exemplary work in the Eastern Front, was just the man to advice America on the Soviet threat. No sooner said than smuggled in, with more than a smidgeon of covering up the record.

"A decade earlier, as the Nazis’ top specialist on Moscow, Dr. Hilger had been with Hitler in the Nazis’ headquarters for the eastern front after Germany’s murderous invasion of Russia. He was He was implicated in the roundup of Jews in Italy as well. After the war he was wanted in Europe for war crimes. Yet George Kennan at the State Department and Frank Wisner at the CIA had arranged in 1948 to spirit him and his family away to safety in Washington, where he became an éminence grise on all things Russian. “We were very glad he was here because we were worried that if we didn’t [bring him over], the Soviets would get him,” Kennan said. At the CIA, Hilger met secretly with analysts every two weeks to assess the latest developments in Moscow and he could often be found at the and he could often be found at the Library of Congress, researching his memoirs as part of his CIA cover story. Raul Hilberg, a leading Holocaust researcher, would sometimes spot the ex-Hitler advisor working nearby in the federal archives, whereupon Hilberg would walk out in silent protest."

Hilberg, so anti-American! My question would be: the denunciation of Stalin in America justly puts heavy emphasis on the pact Stalin made with Hitler in 1939, which revealed the corruption of Stalin's supposed anti-fascism. All true! Yet what does one say about a country that imports genocidal Nazis after the war and gives them cushy jobs and cover stories? Here, silence is in order, some crickets, and then some talk about the free world.

Trump was, in reality, simply taking up a line urged by Edgar Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and a pack of other high officials during the Cold War. When antifa became uncool.


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