29-07-2009, 03:59 AM
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
Stop NATO
July 14, 2009
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
Rick Rozoff
The reunification of Germany in 1990 did not signify a centripetal trend in
Europe but instead was an anomaly. The following year the Soviet Union was
broken up into its fifteen constituent federal republics and the same process
began in Yugoslavia, with Germany leading the charge in hastening on and
recognizing the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the nation that grew out
of the destruction of World War I and again of World War II.
Two years later Czechoslovakia, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a
multiethnic state created after the First World War, split apart.
With the absorption of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal
Republic, which since 1949 had already claimed an exclusive mandate to govern
all of Germany, the entire nation was now subsumed under a common military
structure and brought into the NATO bloc.
Wasting no time in reasserting itself as a continental power, united Germany
inaugurated its new claim as a geopolitical - and military - power by turning
its attention to a part of Europe that it had previously visited in the two
World Wars: The Balkans.
With military deployments and interventions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Macedonia from at least as early as 1995-2001 onward, the German Bundeswehr had
crossed a barrier, violated a taboo and established a new precedent that
paralleled the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the latter in flagrant
contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's sending the Wehrmacht
into the Rhineland in that year has been observed by historians to have marked a
decisive turning point in plans by the Third Reich towards territorial expansion
and war. In fact, the standard argument runs, the provocation in 1936 made
possible the next year's bombing assault on the Spanish town of Guernica, the
Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss takeover of Austria in 1938,
the attack on Poland in 1939 and with it the beginning in earnest of a second
European conflagration which wouldn't end before some fifty million people had
been killed.
The comparison between German military deployments in the Rhineland in 1936 and
later ones in the Balkans in the 1990s will only appear extreme if the history
of the years immediately following World War II are forgotten.
In the last of three meetings of the leaders of the major anti-Axis powers in
the Second World War - Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States - in
Potsdam, Germany after the defeat of the Third Reich, Winston Churchill [later
replaced by his successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee], Joseph Stalin and
Harry Truman met and discussed precise plans for Europe in general and Germany
in particular for the post-war period.
The Potsdam Conference issued a Protocol which stipulated that there was to be
"a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany" and all aspects of
German industry that could be employed for military purposes were to be
dismantled. Additionally, all German military and paramilitary forces were to be
eliminated and the production of all arms in the nation was prohibited.
It is now evident in retrospect that two nations whose heads of state were
present either had no plans at the time to adhere to the Potsdam Agreement or if
so quickly abandoned them.
A British document from the months preceding the surrender of Nazi Germany in
May of 1945 and the subsequent Potsdam Conference of July 17-August 2 called
"Operation Unthinkable: 'Russia: Threat to Western Civilization'" was
declassified and made public in 1998. A photocopy of the Joint Planning Staff of
the British War Cabinet report identified by the dates May 22, June 8, and July
11, 1945 is available for viewing on the website of Northeastern University in
Boston at: http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/pages/002.htm
"The overall political objective is to impose upon Russia the will of the United
States and the British Empire.
"A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will....That is for
the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have
it."
A few years ago a Russian appraisal of the document would state "This was the
groundwork for the notorious Operation Unthinkable, under which World War II was
to develop immediately, without interim stages, into a third world war, with the
goal of ensuring the total defeat of the Soviet Union and its destruction as a
multinational community." [1] The total defeat of the Soviet Union and its
disappearance as a multinational community in fact occurred in 1991.
The British wartime document consistently refers to the then Soviet Union as
Russia, incidentally, and as such suggests plans not only for war but for a
change of political system and a vivisection of the sort seen later in a
post-war - that is, post-World War III - Russia.
When revelations concerning Operation Unthinkable became public in the late
1990s the strongest response to them came, not surprisingly, from post-Soviet
Russia.
In March of 2005 Russian historian Valentin Falin was interviewed by the Russian
Information Agency Novosti website in a feature called "Russia Would Have Faced
World War III Had It Not Stormed Berlin" and spelled out the details of
Churchill's plans:
"The new war was scheduled to start on July 1, 1945. American, Canadian, and
British contingents in Europe, the Polish Expeditionary Corps and 10-12 German
divisions (the ones that had not been disbanded and kept in Schleswig-Holstein
and Southern Denmark) were supposed to participate in the operation." [2]
In further observations that provided the article its title, Falin added,
"Behind the determination of the Soviet leadership to capture Berlin and reach
the demarcation lines established during the 1945 Yalta conference attended by
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill was a task of great importance - to make all
possible efforts to foil a political gamble envisioned by the British leader
with the support of influential US circles, and to prevent the transformation of
World War II into World War III, where our former allies would have turned into
enemies." [3]
The Russian scholar, author of the book The Second Front, argued further that
the taking of Berlin, which cost the lives of 120,000 Soviet soldiers, preempted
Western plans for what may well have triggered a continuation of the Second
World War into a third one.
"The battle for Berlin sobered up quite a few warmongers and, therefore,
fulfilled its political, psychological and military purpose. Believe me, there
were many political and military figures in the West who were stupefied by easy
victories in Europe by the spring of 1945.
"One of them was US General George Patton. He demanded hysterically to continue
the advance of American troops from the Elbe, through Poland and Ukraine, to
Stalingrad in order to finish the war at the place where Hitler had been
defeated.
"Patton called the Russians 'the descendants of Genghis Khan.' Churchill, in his
turn, was not overly scrupulous about the choice of words in his description of
Soviet people. He called the Bolsheviks 'barbarians' and 'ferocious baboons.' In
short, the "theory of subhuman races" was obviously not a German monopoly. [4]
In a subsequent interview with the same source, Falin provided more information:
"U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew wrote in his diary in May 1945
that as a result of the war the dictatorship and domination of Germany and Japan
passed over to the Soviet Union, which would present as much threat to Americans
in the future as the Axis powers. He added that a war against the Soviet Union
was as imminent as anything in this world can be. Grew was supposed to be a
friend of the late President Roosevelt." [5]
Recalling the dimensions of the proposed Operation Unthinkable - the
combined attack (and invasion) force was to consist of 112-113 divisions
including 10-12 Wehrmacht divisions - the Russian historian added that "The file
on Operation Unthinkable declassified in 1998 says nothing about the propaganda
chimeras about Moscow's alleged plans of occupying 'defenseless Europe' and
pushing to the Atlantic coast, as the Chiefs of Staff worked on practical
operations directives." [6]
Falin wrote an article a year later titled "Cold War an offspring of 'hot war'"
in which he says that the British "MI5 head, Sir Stewart Menzies, held a series
of secret meetings with his German counterpart, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, in the
unoccupied part of France to discuss making Germany a friend and the Soviet
Union an enemy." [7]
Sixty five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany there is more rather than less
examination of the accusation that American and British government and military
figures conspired with the Nazis before World War II and with German Defense
Ministry and Wehrmacht officials in the waning days of the war.
In commenting on the rising tide of WWII revisionism in the West, reaching its
nadir - to date - on this July 3rd with the passage of a resolution called
Reunification of Divided Europe by the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which in effect makes
the former Soviet Union (and by implication current Russia) co-responsible for
provoking WWII, veteran Russian journalist Valentin Zorin reminded his readers
of several events usually swept under the carpet by leading Western circles and
their compliant media and scholars:
"The infamously failed Munich conspiracy of the western politicians and the Nazi
Fuehrer sought to make the German Army march against the Soviet Union. In those
days Moscow was pressing for forming an anti-Hitler coalition and invited a
British and French delegation to that end. The talks proved long and fruitless.
London and Paris actually sabotaged the talks while urging the Fuehrer to attack
the USSR.
"Even after the war had broken out, top-echelon leaders in London and Paris
would not give up their attempts to make Hitler's divisions turn about and
attack the Soviet Union. A several-month-long period of strange developments
came to be known as a Phoney War. While deliberately inactive at the front, the
British and French rulers engaged themselves in secret bargaining with Hitler.
"The secrecy of the bargaining was buried for a good half century later, on the
17th of August 1987, when Hitler's Deputy in the Nazi Party Rudolph Hess,
tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, died at Berlin's Spandau
Prison in unexplained circumstances. 10 days before Germany attacked the Soviet
Union Hess flew solo to Scotland to start secret talks with the circles close to
the British government. It later transpired that the talks focused on ending
fighting between the UK and Germany and agreeing on joint action against the
Soviet Union...." [8]
It's important to point out that neither the academician Falin nor the
journalist Zorin is invested in invoking the events of 1939-1945 in defense of
the former USSR and its leadership at the time or in settling scores regarding
conflicts of past decades. Instead they and others, including Russia's current
political leadership, are far more concerned - more alarmed - about matters of
the present and the impending future.
With the NATO Alliance, which in recent years has come to refer to itself
routinely as Global and 21st Century NATO, encroaching upon contemporary Russia
from most all directions and with increasingly brazen historical revisionism
growing out of Western post-Cold War triumphalism reaching the point that Nazis
and their collaborators are being exonerated while modern Russia is being
tainted ex post facto as a villain in the Second World War, the prospect of a
"transformation of World War II into World War III" mentioned above is not so
far-fetched.
As Valentin Zorin's article also says, "Some quarters would like to redraw the
post-war boundaries in Europe and the Far East, question the validity of the UN
Charter and bury the Nuremberg Tribunal rulings in oblivion. It is these
modern-day revenge-seekers that channel and obviously fund the large-scale
propaganda campaign of falsifying the history of the Second World War." [9]
It's been seen above that the leaders of Britain, the United States and Soviet
Russia agreed in the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference to the total
demilitarization of Germany. All indications were that once that systemic
disarming of the nation was completed Germany would never militarize again.
Instead in 1950, while fighting a war in Korea which included troops from most
of its new NATO allies and which escalated into armed conflict with China, the
United States started the process of forcing the rearming of West Germany and
its eventual incorporation into NATO. Members of the US-led military bloc pushed
for the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC) with an integrated army,
navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of all its member states.
A European Defence Community treaty was signed in May of 1952 but defeated by
Gaullists and Communists alike in France. With that nation in opposition, the
EDC was dead but the US and Britain found other subterfuges to remilitarize the
Federal Republic.
With the creation of the Western European Union in 1954 West Germany was
permitted - for which read encouraged - to rearm and was given control over its
own armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The following year the Federal Republic of Germany was inducted into NATO. The
Soviet Union and its allies responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact later in
1955.
Two of the fundamental purposes in launching the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance
in 1949 were to base nuclear weapons, which the US had a monopoly on at the time
of the bloc's founding, in Europe and to rearm Germany as a military bulwark on
the continent and for use abroad.
Anyone still in thrall to the notion that NATO was planned as a defensive
alliance against a Soviet military threat in Europe would do well to recall
that:
The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after and in response to NATO, especially
to NATO's advance into Germany.
The Warsaw pact, already long moribund, officially dissolved itself in 1991.
Eighteen years later NATO still exists without any pretense of a Soviet or any
other credible threat.
In the past decade alone it has expanded from 16 to 28 member states, all of the
twelve new ones in Eastern Europe and four of those bordering Russian territory.
During the same ten year period it waged its first air war, against Yugoslavia,
outside the bloc's own defined area of responsibility and its first ground war,
in Afghanistan, a continent removed from Europe, half a world away from North
America and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean.
That NATO officially expanded into the former Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Poland at its sixtieth anniversary summit in 1999 while in
the midst of its first war, the 78-day bombing onslaught against Yugoslavia -
ten years after the end of the Cold War - is an irrefutable retroactive
indictment of its true nature and purpose since inception.
The bloc continues to maintain nuclear warheads in Europe, including on air
bases in Germany, with long-range bombers and missiles able to deliver them.
NATO recently renewed the commitment to its nuclear doctrine, which continues to
include the first use of nuclear weapons.
The world's largest and only surviving military bloc, one which now takes in a
third of the planet's nations through full membership or various partnerships,
was born out of the last days of World War II in Europe. It's fundamental
purpose was to unite the military potential of the countries of the continent's
west, north and south into a cohesive and expanding phalanx for use at home and
abroad. Victors and vanquished of the most mass-scale and murderous conflict in
history - Britain, the US and France and Germany and Italy - were gathered
together under a joint military command.
If the transition from WW II to a far deadlier, because nuclear, WW III was
averted, an argument nevertheless exists that the Second World War never ended
but shifted focus. As an illustrative biographical case study of the seamless
adaptation, the New York Times ran a reverential obituary three years ago from
which the following is an excerpt:
"Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German Panzer division officer
during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces in Central
Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in Bonn. He was
99....By the start of World War II, he was commander of a Panzer, or armored,
division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France, sweeping
around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern France and rushing
to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian front, he joined the
General Staff in Berlin. Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in
western Germany...." [10]
It would be intriguing to learn what Count von Kielmansegg thought at the end of
his nearly century-long life about the return of his homeland to the ranks of
nations sending troops to and waging war against others both near and far.
It would prove equally edifying to hear whether he thought that his career as a
military commander ever truly changed course or rather pursued a logical if not
inevitable path from the Wehrmacht to NATO.
Lastly, it doesn't seem unjustified to believe that the Count might at the end
of his days have been proud of a Germany that had become the third largest
exporter of weapons in the world, one which had arms agreements with 126 nations
- over two-thirds of all countries - and that had troops deployed to war and
post-conflict occupation zones in at least eleven countries at the same time and
would soon, at this year's NATO summit, use its army at home again.
Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world\
-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff[/URL]
1) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
2) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 28, 2005
3) Ibid
4) Ibid
5) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
6) Ibid
7) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 3, 2006
8) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
9) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
10) New York Times, June 4, 2006
Stop NATO
July 14, 2009
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
Rick Rozoff
The reunification of Germany in 1990 did not signify a centripetal trend in
Europe but instead was an anomaly. The following year the Soviet Union was
broken up into its fifteen constituent federal republics and the same process
began in Yugoslavia, with Germany leading the charge in hastening on and
recognizing the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the nation that grew out
of the destruction of World War I and again of World War II.
Two years later Czechoslovakia, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a
multiethnic state created after the First World War, split apart.
With the absorption of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal
Republic, which since 1949 had already claimed an exclusive mandate to govern
all of Germany, the entire nation was now subsumed under a common military
structure and brought into the NATO bloc.
Wasting no time in reasserting itself as a continental power, united Germany
inaugurated its new claim as a geopolitical - and military - power by turning
its attention to a part of Europe that it had previously visited in the two
World Wars: The Balkans.
With military deployments and interventions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Macedonia from at least as early as 1995-2001 onward, the German Bundeswehr had
crossed a barrier, violated a taboo and established a new precedent that
paralleled the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the latter in flagrant
contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's sending the Wehrmacht
into the Rhineland in that year has been observed by historians to have marked a
decisive turning point in plans by the Third Reich towards territorial expansion
and war. In fact, the standard argument runs, the provocation in 1936 made
possible the next year's bombing assault on the Spanish town of Guernica, the
Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss takeover of Austria in 1938,
the attack on Poland in 1939 and with it the beginning in earnest of a second
European conflagration which wouldn't end before some fifty million people had
been killed.
The comparison between German military deployments in the Rhineland in 1936 and
later ones in the Balkans in the 1990s will only appear extreme if the history
of the years immediately following World War II are forgotten.
In the last of three meetings of the leaders of the major anti-Axis powers in
the Second World War - Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States - in
Potsdam, Germany after the defeat of the Third Reich, Winston Churchill [later
replaced by his successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee], Joseph Stalin and
Harry Truman met and discussed precise plans for Europe in general and Germany
in particular for the post-war period.
The Potsdam Conference issued a Protocol which stipulated that there was to be
"a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany" and all aspects of
German industry that could be employed for military purposes were to be
dismantled. Additionally, all German military and paramilitary forces were to be
eliminated and the production of all arms in the nation was prohibited.
It is now evident in retrospect that two nations whose heads of state were
present either had no plans at the time to adhere to the Potsdam Agreement or if
so quickly abandoned them.
A British document from the months preceding the surrender of Nazi Germany in
May of 1945 and the subsequent Potsdam Conference of July 17-August 2 called
"Operation Unthinkable: 'Russia: Threat to Western Civilization'" was
declassified and made public in 1998. A photocopy of the Joint Planning Staff of
the British War Cabinet report identified by the dates May 22, June 8, and July
11, 1945 is available for viewing on the website of Northeastern University in
Boston at: http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/pages/002.htm
"The overall political objective is to impose upon Russia the will of the United
States and the British Empire.
"A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will....That is for
the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have
it."
A few years ago a Russian appraisal of the document would state "This was the
groundwork for the notorious Operation Unthinkable, under which World War II was
to develop immediately, without interim stages, into a third world war, with the
goal of ensuring the total defeat of the Soviet Union and its destruction as a
multinational community." [1] The total defeat of the Soviet Union and its
disappearance as a multinational community in fact occurred in 1991.
The British wartime document consistently refers to the then Soviet Union as
Russia, incidentally, and as such suggests plans not only for war but for a
change of political system and a vivisection of the sort seen later in a
post-war - that is, post-World War III - Russia.
When revelations concerning Operation Unthinkable became public in the late
1990s the strongest response to them came, not surprisingly, from post-Soviet
Russia.
In March of 2005 Russian historian Valentin Falin was interviewed by the Russian
Information Agency Novosti website in a feature called "Russia Would Have Faced
World War III Had It Not Stormed Berlin" and spelled out the details of
Churchill's plans:
"The new war was scheduled to start on July 1, 1945. American, Canadian, and
British contingents in Europe, the Polish Expeditionary Corps and 10-12 German
divisions (the ones that had not been disbanded and kept in Schleswig-Holstein
and Southern Denmark) were supposed to participate in the operation." [2]
In further observations that provided the article its title, Falin added,
"Behind the determination of the Soviet leadership to capture Berlin and reach
the demarcation lines established during the 1945 Yalta conference attended by
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill was a task of great importance - to make all
possible efforts to foil a political gamble envisioned by the British leader
with the support of influential US circles, and to prevent the transformation of
World War II into World War III, where our former allies would have turned into
enemies." [3]
The Russian scholar, author of the book The Second Front, argued further that
the taking of Berlin, which cost the lives of 120,000 Soviet soldiers, preempted
Western plans for what may well have triggered a continuation of the Second
World War into a third one.
"The battle for Berlin sobered up quite a few warmongers and, therefore,
fulfilled its political, psychological and military purpose. Believe me, there
were many political and military figures in the West who were stupefied by easy
victories in Europe by the spring of 1945.
"One of them was US General George Patton. He demanded hysterically to continue
the advance of American troops from the Elbe, through Poland and Ukraine, to
Stalingrad in order to finish the war at the place where Hitler had been
defeated.
"Patton called the Russians 'the descendants of Genghis Khan.' Churchill, in his
turn, was not overly scrupulous about the choice of words in his description of
Soviet people. He called the Bolsheviks 'barbarians' and 'ferocious baboons.' In
short, the "theory of subhuman races" was obviously not a German monopoly. [4]
In a subsequent interview with the same source, Falin provided more information:
"U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew wrote in his diary in May 1945
that as a result of the war the dictatorship and domination of Germany and Japan
passed over to the Soviet Union, which would present as much threat to Americans
in the future as the Axis powers. He added that a war against the Soviet Union
was as imminent as anything in this world can be. Grew was supposed to be a
friend of the late President Roosevelt." [5]
Recalling the dimensions of the proposed Operation Unthinkable - the
combined attack (and invasion) force was to consist of 112-113 divisions
including 10-12 Wehrmacht divisions - the Russian historian added that "The file
on Operation Unthinkable declassified in 1998 says nothing about the propaganda
chimeras about Moscow's alleged plans of occupying 'defenseless Europe' and
pushing to the Atlantic coast, as the Chiefs of Staff worked on practical
operations directives." [6]
Falin wrote an article a year later titled "Cold War an offspring of 'hot war'"
in which he says that the British "MI5 head, Sir Stewart Menzies, held a series
of secret meetings with his German counterpart, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, in the
unoccupied part of France to discuss making Germany a friend and the Soviet
Union an enemy." [7]
Sixty five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany there is more rather than less
examination of the accusation that American and British government and military
figures conspired with the Nazis before World War II and with German Defense
Ministry and Wehrmacht officials in the waning days of the war.
In commenting on the rising tide of WWII revisionism in the West, reaching its
nadir - to date - on this July 3rd with the passage of a resolution called
Reunification of Divided Europe by the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which in effect makes
the former Soviet Union (and by implication current Russia) co-responsible for
provoking WWII, veteran Russian journalist Valentin Zorin reminded his readers
of several events usually swept under the carpet by leading Western circles and
their compliant media and scholars:
"The infamously failed Munich conspiracy of the western politicians and the Nazi
Fuehrer sought to make the German Army march against the Soviet Union. In those
days Moscow was pressing for forming an anti-Hitler coalition and invited a
British and French delegation to that end. The talks proved long and fruitless.
London and Paris actually sabotaged the talks while urging the Fuehrer to attack
the USSR.
"Even after the war had broken out, top-echelon leaders in London and Paris
would not give up their attempts to make Hitler's divisions turn about and
attack the Soviet Union. A several-month-long period of strange developments
came to be known as a Phoney War. While deliberately inactive at the front, the
British and French rulers engaged themselves in secret bargaining with Hitler.
"The secrecy of the bargaining was buried for a good half century later, on the
17th of August 1987, when Hitler's Deputy in the Nazi Party Rudolph Hess,
tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, died at Berlin's Spandau
Prison in unexplained circumstances. 10 days before Germany attacked the Soviet
Union Hess flew solo to Scotland to start secret talks with the circles close to
the British government. It later transpired that the talks focused on ending
fighting between the UK and Germany and agreeing on joint action against the
Soviet Union...." [8]
It's important to point out that neither the academician Falin nor the
journalist Zorin is invested in invoking the events of 1939-1945 in defense of
the former USSR and its leadership at the time or in settling scores regarding
conflicts of past decades. Instead they and others, including Russia's current
political leadership, are far more concerned - more alarmed - about matters of
the present and the impending future.
With the NATO Alliance, which in recent years has come to refer to itself
routinely as Global and 21st Century NATO, encroaching upon contemporary Russia
from most all directions and with increasingly brazen historical revisionism
growing out of Western post-Cold War triumphalism reaching the point that Nazis
and their collaborators are being exonerated while modern Russia is being
tainted ex post facto as a villain in the Second World War, the prospect of a
"transformation of World War II into World War III" mentioned above is not so
far-fetched.
As Valentin Zorin's article also says, "Some quarters would like to redraw the
post-war boundaries in Europe and the Far East, question the validity of the UN
Charter and bury the Nuremberg Tribunal rulings in oblivion. It is these
modern-day revenge-seekers that channel and obviously fund the large-scale
propaganda campaign of falsifying the history of the Second World War." [9]
It's been seen above that the leaders of Britain, the United States and Soviet
Russia agreed in the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference to the total
demilitarization of Germany. All indications were that once that systemic
disarming of the nation was completed Germany would never militarize again.
Instead in 1950, while fighting a war in Korea which included troops from most
of its new NATO allies and which escalated into armed conflict with China, the
United States started the process of forcing the rearming of West Germany and
its eventual incorporation into NATO. Members of the US-led military bloc pushed
for the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC) with an integrated army,
navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of all its member states.
A European Defence Community treaty was signed in May of 1952 but defeated by
Gaullists and Communists alike in France. With that nation in opposition, the
EDC was dead but the US and Britain found other subterfuges to remilitarize the
Federal Republic.
With the creation of the Western European Union in 1954 West Germany was
permitted - for which read encouraged - to rearm and was given control over its
own armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The following year the Federal Republic of Germany was inducted into NATO. The
Soviet Union and its allies responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact later in
1955.
Two of the fundamental purposes in launching the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance
in 1949 were to base nuclear weapons, which the US had a monopoly on at the time
of the bloc's founding, in Europe and to rearm Germany as a military bulwark on
the continent and for use abroad.
Anyone still in thrall to the notion that NATO was planned as a defensive
alliance against a Soviet military threat in Europe would do well to recall
that:
The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after and in response to NATO, especially
to NATO's advance into Germany.
The Warsaw pact, already long moribund, officially dissolved itself in 1991.
Eighteen years later NATO still exists without any pretense of a Soviet or any
other credible threat.
In the past decade alone it has expanded from 16 to 28 member states, all of the
twelve new ones in Eastern Europe and four of those bordering Russian territory.
During the same ten year period it waged its first air war, against Yugoslavia,
outside the bloc's own defined area of responsibility and its first ground war,
in Afghanistan, a continent removed from Europe, half a world away from North
America and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean.
That NATO officially expanded into the former Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Poland at its sixtieth anniversary summit in 1999 while in
the midst of its first war, the 78-day bombing onslaught against Yugoslavia -
ten years after the end of the Cold War - is an irrefutable retroactive
indictment of its true nature and purpose since inception.
The bloc continues to maintain nuclear warheads in Europe, including on air
bases in Germany, with long-range bombers and missiles able to deliver them.
NATO recently renewed the commitment to its nuclear doctrine, which continues to
include the first use of nuclear weapons.
The world's largest and only surviving military bloc, one which now takes in a
third of the planet's nations through full membership or various partnerships,
was born out of the last days of World War II in Europe. It's fundamental
purpose was to unite the military potential of the countries of the continent's
west, north and south into a cohesive and expanding phalanx for use at home and
abroad. Victors and vanquished of the most mass-scale and murderous conflict in
history - Britain, the US and France and Germany and Italy - were gathered
together under a joint military command.
If the transition from WW II to a far deadlier, because nuclear, WW III was
averted, an argument nevertheless exists that the Second World War never ended
but shifted focus. As an illustrative biographical case study of the seamless
adaptation, the New York Times ran a reverential obituary three years ago from
which the following is an excerpt:
"Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German Panzer division officer
during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces in Central
Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in Bonn. He was
99....By the start of World War II, he was commander of a Panzer, or armored,
division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France, sweeping
around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern France and rushing
to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian front, he joined the
General Staff in Berlin. Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in
western Germany...." [10]
It would be intriguing to learn what Count von Kielmansegg thought at the end of
his nearly century-long life about the return of his homeland to the ranks of
nations sending troops to and waging war against others both near and far.
It would prove equally edifying to hear whether he thought that his career as a
military commander ever truly changed course or rather pursued a logical if not
inevitable path from the Wehrmacht to NATO.
Lastly, it doesn't seem unjustified to believe that the Count might at the end
of his days have been proud of a Germany that had become the third largest
exporter of weapons in the world, one which had arms agreements with 126 nations
- over two-thirds of all countries - and that had troops deployed to war and
post-conflict occupation zones in at least eleven countries at the same time and
would soon, at this year's NATO summit, use its army at home again.
Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world\
-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff[/URL]
1) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
2) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 28, 2005
3) Ibid
4) Ibid
5) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
6) Ibid
7) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 3, 2006
8) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
9) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
10) New York Times, June 4, 2006
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.