Posted on 03/04/2011 12:41:56 PM PST by verdugo
Foreword
by Gary North
In December of 1979, the Soviet Union launched a lightning-fast military offensive against the backward nation of Afghanistan. It was after this invasion that President Jimmy Carter admitted publicly that it had taught him more about the intentions of the Soviets than everything he had ever learned. Never again would he kiss the cheeks of Premier Brezhnev before the television cameras of the West. The Democrat-controlled Senate even refused to ratify his SALT II treaty. (By the way, President Reagan has been honoring its terms unofficially, and he already has ordered the destruction of several Poseidon submarines, including the U.S.S. Sam Rayburn, the dismantling of which began in November of 1985,1 and which cost a staggering $21 million for the destruction of that one ship.2 The Nathan Hale and the Andrew Jackson are scheduled for destruction in 1986.3 To comply with SALT II, we will have to destroy an additional 2,500 Poseidon submarine warheads. "Good faith," American diplomatic officials argue. ("Good grief," you may be thinking.)
The invasion of Afghanistan was a landmark shift in Soviet military tactics. Departing from half a century of slow, plodding, "smother the enemy with raw power" tactics, the Soviet military leadership adopted the lightning strike. Overnight, the Soviets had captured the Kabul airfield and had surrounded the capital city with tanks.4
Tanks? In an overnight invasion? How did 30-ton Soviet tanks roll from the Soviet border to the interior city of Kabul in one day? What about the rugged Afghan terrain?
The answer is simple: there are two highways from the Soviet Union to Kabul, including one which is 647 miles long. Their bridges can support tanks. Do you think that Afghan peasants built these roads for yak-drawn carts? Do you think that Afghan peasants built these roads at all? No, you built them.
In 1966, reports on this huge construction project began to appear in obscure U.S. magainzes. The project was completed the following year. It was part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Soviet and U.S.' engineers worked side by side, spending U.S. foreign aid money and Soviet money, to get the highways built. One strip of road, 67 miles long, north through the Salang Pass to the U.S.S.R., cost $42 million, or $643,000 per mile. John W. Millers, the leader of the United National survey team in Afghanistan, commented at the time that it was the most expensive bit of road he had ever seen. The Soviets trained and used 8,000 Afghans to build it.5
If there were any justice in this world of international foreign aid, the Soviet tanks should have rolled by signs that read: "U.S. Highway Tax Dollars at Work."
Nice guys, the Soviets. They just wanted to help a technologically backward nation. Nice guys, American foreign aid officials. They also just wanted to help a technologically backward nation... the Soviet Union.
Seven Decades of Deals
The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed, so as not to protect the guilty.
In the mid-1970's, the original version of this book led to the destruction of Antony Sutton's career as a salaried academic researcher with the prestigious (and therefore, not quite ideologically tough enough) Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. That was a high price for Sutton to pay, but not nearly so high as the price you and I are going to be asked to pay because of the activities that this book describes in painstaking detail.
Lenin is supposed to have made the following observation:
"If we were to announce today that we intend to hang all capitalists tomorrow, they would trip over each other trying to sell us the rope."
I don't think he ever said it. However, someone who really understood Lenin, Communism, and capitalist ethics said it. This book shows how accurate an observation it is.
Perhaps the best-informed American scholar in the field of Soviet history and overall strategy is Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard University. In 1984, his chilling book appeared, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (Simon & Schuster). His book tells at least part of the story of the Soviet Union's reliance on Western technology, including the infamous Kama River truck plant, which was built by the Pullman-Swindell company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of M. W. Kellogg Co. Prof. Pipes remarks that the bulk of the Soviet merchant marine, the largest in the world, was built in foreign shipyards. He even tells the story (related in greater detail in this book) of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont, which sold the Soviet Union the ball-bearing machines that alone made possible the targeting mechanism of Soviet MIRV'ed ballistic missiles. And in footnote 29 on page 290, he reveals the following:
In his three-volume detailed account of Soviet purchases of Western equipment and technology . . . [Antony] Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as "extreme" or, more often, simply ignored.
Prof. Pipes knows how the academic game is played. The game cost Sutton his academic career. But the academic game is very small potatoes compared to the historic "game" of world conquest by the Soviet empire. We are dealing with a messianic State which intends to impose its will on every nation' on earth — a goal which Soviet leaders have repeated constantly since they captured Russia in their nearly bloodless coup in October of 1917.
Sutton identifies the deaf mute blindmen who sell the Soviets the equipment they need for world conquest. But at least these deaf mute blindmen get something out of it: money. Not "soft currency" Soviet rubles, either; they get U.S. dollars from the Soviets, who in turn get long-term loans that are guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers. Their motivation is fairly easy to understand.
But what do the academic drones get out of it? What do they get for their systematic suppression of the historical facts, and their callous treatment in book reviews of works such as Sutton's monumental three-volume set, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development?
For two decades rumors have surfaced that critics of aid to the Soviet Union have been silenced. Back in the 1930s General Electric warned its employees in the Soviet Union not to discuss their work in the USSR under penalty of dismissal.
In the 1950s and 1960s IBM fired engineers who publicly opposed sale of IBM computers to the USSR...
Bull.
Russia is a paranoid, Mafia-type nation-state with a society and culture medieval in origin and practice. It has endured for centuries and is not the creation of the U.S.
When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the U.S. helped the struggling nation financially. We didn't know until later that Russia continued to develop WMD and the means to deliver it.
The old USSR was always willing to help nations plagued with smallpox outbreaks. What they were really doing is collecting samples to use in their biological weapons program. Their agents would collect samples of the most dangerous types, like black pox (a pneumonic form of small pox that kills nearly 95% of those infected), bring it back to Russia and create WMD.
In the 1990s Russia created a ballistic missile warhead that was refrigerated. That was puzzling until a WMD scientist defected and provided the facts of Russia's ultimate paranoid action: black pox bioweapons delivered by ICBMs. (Per the book, Demon in the Freezer.)
To say or think we created the Russia that would do this is horrifying. They have a thoroughly bloody history, both as victim and aggressor, extending back through time.
Note: I worked for NAVSECGRU between 1980-1986 as a crypto-linguist, mostly on intelligence involving the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa.
My dad use to say:
Where were the rifle and ammunition manufacturing plants of the American Indians? How did they come up with the technology?
Russia is a paranoid, Mafia-type nation-state with a society and culture medieval in origin and practice. It has endured for centuries and is not the creation of the U.S.
When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the U.S. helped the struggling nation financially. We didn't know until later that Russia continued to develop WMD and the means to deliver it.
The West built their Industrial Military complex, the power behind the warped ideolgy. Read the book. You could not have read much in the few minutes that they were posted. No way one could say "We didn't know until later that Russia continued to develop WMD and the means to deliver it". The West gave them everything.
I didn’t know Antony Sutton’s background before you posted it above, but did know from reading his work that he knows what he’s talking about, and meticulously documents his sources.
“The West gave them everything.”
This is your insight on this informative book, and you are making it into insidious propaganda. You’re blaming the United State and its citizens for everything wrong in the world including the actions of other nations.
We didn’t “give” them everything; a Hell of a lot they stole or bought on the open market or from so-called U.S. allies. And it sure didn’t help the U.S. when internal enemies managed to get proscribed goods to the USSR, either.
But trying to lay the blame our citizens is wrong.
WALL STREET AND THE RISE OF HITLER
from INTRODUCTION:
"Whatever you call the collectivist system — Soviet socialism, New Deal socialism, corporate socialism, or National socialism — it is the average citizen, the guy in the street, that ultimately loses out to the boys running the operation at the top. Each system in its own way is a system of plunder, an organizational device to get everyone living (or attempting to live) at the expense of everyone else, while the elitist leaders, the rulers and the politicians, scalp the cream off the top."
SPOT ON! I'll be reading it tonight. Thanks.
You should really start o thread of it by itself! If not, I'll do it another day.
Neither the author, nor Oliver North (who writes the Forward), nor I are blaming the ENTIRE United States and ALL it's people. Read the book.
I lost my country because of these people who will sell their own mother for a quick profit. I don't blame the average American. The book tells you exactly who is to blame, and it isn't 99+% of the population of the USA.
You’re right, we didn’t “give” them everything. We sold it to them. “We” being American companies and corporate interests. Where did the Nazi’s get the technology for tetraethyl lead for their messerschmidts? Dupont. Who built a substantial part of the truck fleet for the wehrmacht? Ford. You might want to read the above mentioned books. Sutton didn’t pull this stuff out of his backside, it’s documented history.
An interesting exercise: read the forward to “Best Enemy...” and replace the USSR with China. History may not precisely repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
Thank you.
Attacking Sutton’s facts? No.
I’m criticizing those who takes facts, such as those in this book, and charge ALL Americans as somehow guilty for the actions of other nations.
I was in foreign trade business for 20+ years. AMAZINGLY, THE BIGGEST DOOR OPENERS INTO CHINA ARE THE TAIWAN BUSINESS PEOPLE! They are HUGE trading partners with the Chicoms. AMAZING! They trade with their worst enemy! One day the USA may have to go to war to defend Taiwan and for what?
You don't see the Cubans in Miami doing that, even now 50+ years after the Castro takeover.
I think you are unfairly accusing the original poster of perpetuating some sort of baseless anti-US propaganda, that the average joe sixpack willingly helped the soviets or something like that. He made no such blanket indictment. Just check out the book(s). Evaluate their content and factual merit. Personally I think the author is a true patriot. A “woodward and bernstein” of the right that has blown the lid off the incestuous profit mongers that have given our enemies (then USSR, now China) virtually everything they need to wage war on us on a silver platter all in the name of a good quarterly report, but hey, that’s just me. Also, it’s not just “us”, western european nations will sell despotic regimes anything they want... for a price too. Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector noted our suicidal policies that generously feed our enemies also. He didn’t write a whole book about it, but the take home message was the same.
This is going to be a good read
I’m not accusing the poster of this thread of anything nasty, and we’ve already come to negotiated peace treaty.
But now I’m going to deal with you!
The United States isn’t made of perfect people nor is everyone living within its borders 100% patriotic. Businessmen want to make money and what may look like a sound business deal can, within months, look a lot like treason, and if you’re looking back decades, even more so. Too bad people in the past weren’t clairvoyant, huh?
Right now we’ve got labor unions shilling for world socialism and a president’s administration brimming with lovers of Islamo-fascism. And I should worry over crap that happened before 1986 (the date of publication for Sutton’s book)!
A lot has happened in the past 25 years. I don’t dispute the importance of Sutton’s book nor with his careful research, but I do take umbrage with the ‘holier than thou’ attitude some on this thread have displayed in ripping Americans in general.
Like modern-day liberals who disparage our founders because they had slaves (something acceptable in the 17th & 18th centuries) some posts here sneer at past business deals which at that time in history seemed like the right thing to do.
My maternal grandfather’s relatives, all German-Americans and rabidly anti-fascist, worked the convoys supplying the Russians with food and war material during WWII. Many of them died aiding a nation they perceived then as an ally and we view today with much ambivalence.
Businesses in the United States, and I might add our Government, have tried to enhance peace in this world through commerce. I think this is, to a limited point, acceptable but, like Sutton’s book exemplifies, it has been in many cases royally stupid and hasn’t worked - only shamed us in the eyes of the rest of the world and our own citizens.
In the past 60 years huge international corporations have sprung-up world-wide and almost all of them are guided by executives educated, usually Ivy leaguers, with the idea that the power a global business wields should be for the global common good in order to bring about global peace - even if it is to the detriment of the home nation. Google comes to mind, cooperating with the Chinese government’s censorship of its own citizens. So, that’s what they do; business with just about everyone, no matter the politics, no matter the human rights abuse.
For more information about what I’m talking about in the last paragraph, try reading The Pentagon’s New Map, written by an advisor to G.W.Bush following 9/11, who is a self-avowed Globalist and left-wing liberal. After reading it I had nightmares for months.
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