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2.

The early days: Geopolitical configuration

Labor injustice, its tabooization and the systemic crisis of the EU have deep roots. Their widespread obscurity, repression, distortion are part of this taboo and this crisis. The capitalists, with their new transatlantic links in and after World War II, did a great deal to prevent the liberation of labor that had become historically possible. The pro-capitalist, anticommunist and then failed reorganization of Europe led by Hitler was taken over and strategically reshaped by the new Western superpower, the United States of America, using more modern means.

Since the 1920s, US corporations and governments did everything they could to prevent Germany's economic, political, and technological alliance with the Soviet Union: Such an alliance, it was feared, would have created the largest competitor. For this reason, against the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 - establishment of diplomatic and economic relations of Germany with the Soviet Union - the USA installed the countermeasure: the Dawes Plan (1924): Generous loans were intended to help the German Reich, but also to promote US investment activity. With the intermediate step of the Young Plan of 1929, the Marshall Plan of 1947 was then the decisive sequel, subsequently further reinforced by NATO.

Like no other territory, West Germany, which was initially occupied by the Western Allies, and then the Federal Republic, which was further occupied from 1949 onward, could be rebuilt and rearranged according to the ideas of the US superpower. This was the cumulation of the pivotal decisive system conflict of world society at that time This was also part of the establishment of a global anti-communist, pro-American trade union movement on all continents, in other words, the global organization of labor injustice - with consequences to this day.⁸⁶

Suppression of the democratic resistance movements

During World War II, anti-fascist movements in all countries occupied by Hitler's Wehrmacht had developed concepts for a democratic postwar order. This was particularly true of the Western European and Scandinavian countries, especially France and Italy, but also of Germany itself.⁸⁷

Thus, the notion of a “Europe of Fatherlands”, taken up by Charles de Gaulle and developed together with the Résistance against Hitler, was dismissed along with explicit anti-fascist notions such as those of Altiero Spinelli: European federal state with constitution. Altiero Spinelli, like Antonio Gramsci and other members of the Italian Communist Party, was among those imprisoned or exiled by Mussolini's fascist government in 1927 until its end in 1943. In his place of exile, the island of Ventotene, he wrote the “Ventotene Manifesto” in 1941 with fellow prisoners Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni.

They wanted a European federation, a federal state with a supranational military and supranational organs for the soon-to-be-founded post-war Europe: These were intended to disempower the forces from the corporate world that had repeatedly promoted totalitarian regimes in various states, such as those of Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Hitler, Piłsudski and Pétain. “The European revolution must be socialist to meet our needs; it must work for the emancipation of the working class and the creation of more humane living conditions.” This would have to be achieved through the direct participation of Europe's citizens and through a constitutional act.⁸⁸

This and all other democratic, anti-fascist, socialist concepts for the reorganization of Europe were suppressed, stifled.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel had played an important role in financing Hitler Germany's war. It had been set up by Wall Street in 1930 to maintain the national debt and repayment obligations of the German Reich, resulting from the Treaty of Versailles, for an initial 55 more years, until 1986, after the Reich governments stopped repayments. All the major warring parties were represented in the BIS until the end of the war, across the military lines of conflict - Germany, Italy, Japan, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States, etc. It practiced money laundering for the benefit of Hitler's Germany and facilitated much of the war financing: Under the leadership of Wall Street banker Thomas McKittrick, representatives of militarily hostile states cooperated here. Like other Swiss banks, BIS converted Nazi looted gold and looted shares for the benefit of the German Reich into foreign currencies important to the war effort, such as US dollars, Swedish kronor, Swiss francs and Portuguese escudos.⁸⁹

European economic integration under German leadership: a failure

German corporations in particular had been developing pro-capitalist concepts of Europe since the 1930s. For example, Carl Duisberg, chairman of the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (RDI) and chairman of the supervisory board of the chemical monopolist IG Farben, declared in 1931, with reference to even older plans of German industrialists: “Only a united economic bloc from Bordeaux to Odessa will give Europe the economic backbone it needs to assert its importance in the world.”⁹⁰ In 1936, the NSDAP Reich Commissioner for Economic Policy, Werner Daitz, declared that “Germany in the center of Europe” must build “a continental European large-scale economy.”⁹¹

With the occupation of Western Europe, Nazi Germany achieved the so-called “European economic integration”. It consisted, for example, of German corporations awarding paid contracts to French car, chemical, and steel companies such as Renault and Citroën for the production of military vehicles for the Russia campaign, for barbed wire and poison gas in German concentration camps, and the like.⁹² The appropriate raw materials, machinery, agricultural products, and labor were extracted from other occupied countries and distributed throughout Europe. In addition, associated “neutral” states such as Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal also supplied raw materials, products and financial resources essential to the war effort. German banks coordinated the acquisition of company shares throughout Europe - either through regular share purchases or through Aryanization.

USA as regulatory power I: Marshall Plan

After the Second World War, the USA was the new Western superpower. Not only Germany was substantially weakened, but also the other imperialist states of Europe, especially Great Britain and France, but also the smaller ones like Italy, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. Great Britain, in particular, was deeply in debt to the United States and politically dependent on it.

The reorganization of (Western) Europe organized by the USA did not bring peace: neither peace and security for the dependent workers, their organizations and their culture, nor peace and security between the peoples. There was no peace treaty, neither between capital and labor nor between East and West. The potential for the liberation of labor, strengthened in the anti-fascist struggle, was largely contained, partially destroyed: There were only pacifying concessions for a time - from 1990 onwards this period gradually came to an end, with the EU now also playing a more active role.

The economic boom of the Second World War, the biggest the USA had experienced up to that time, was to be continued after the war. The Marshall Plan (1947) was launched for this purpose. The aim was to gain access to a large area that was as uniformly organized as possible for US needs - exports, currency simplification, investments - with supranational, authoritarian decision-making bodies.⁹³

Marshall-Plan: (Western) Europe in the US global market strategy

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 included, in addition to the Marshall Plan, war and military aid to Greece, Turkey, and the fascistoid General Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese island of Taiwan (Formosa) that he had annexed since the 1920s.

The Marshall Plan was a partial instrument for the military-civilian domination of Europe. This is also reflected in the functions of its eponym: General George Marshall was the supreme commander of US forces in Europe and Asia during the war, in 1947 he championed the Marshall Plan as head of the State Department, in 1949 he became president of the American Red Cross, always very important to US civilian (post-)war management, in 1950 he was US Secretary of Defense and, in practical terms, head of NATO.

A precursor of the European Union

The driving motive of the Marshall Plan - 1948 to 1952 - was not the much-vaunted “aid” for destroyed Europe, because, for one thing, only capitalist Western Europe was meant, not the Soviet Union which had suffered the most destruction. Above all, (Western) Europe was to be molded as a prosperous sales market for US products. This included the following objectives, which were to be implemented in all 16 beneficiary states in as similar a manner as possible, and which proved to be an important model for the European Union:

1. Single currency area and currency stabilization, with reliable exchange rates in relation to the dollar (payment and monetary union);

2. Uniform trade provisions (single market, customs union),

3. Uniform regulations for lending and investment,

4. Safeguarding of capitalist private property: no nationalization!

The BIS, headed by Wall Street banker McKittrick during the war, now took over the monetary and financial responsibilities of the Marshall Plan.⁹⁴ For example, in order to protect US corporations, oil processing in the recipient countries was stopped and taken over by US corporate subsidiaries. US shipping companies had to be given preference for the maritime transatlantic transport of goods. The focus was on the production and export of goods of which the USA had a shortage. In particular, export-geared companies were promoted. The Marshall Plan authorities - from their headquarters in Paris - used quotas to control exports and imports among the recipient countries and also in relation to the United States. As a result, imports and exports between the US and the European recipient countries rose sharply. The colonies of the Western Europeans at that time were also included. For example, chrome mining in the British colony of Rhodesia (Africa) and uranium mining in the Belgian Congo were promoted.⁹⁵

Exclusion of socialist parties and states

To receive Marshall aid, recipients also had to perform an anti-communist cleansing of the political, party and trade union systems. No communist - and not even the bourgeois Charles de Gaulle - was allowed to become a member of the government. Socialists and social democrats were allowed to participate in government only if they were also anti-communist. This was often achieved through CIA infiltration and bribery.

Socialist or people's democratic states neither wanted nor were able to join the Marshall set-up. The USA had planned this from the outset. It excluded the Soviet Union as early as 1944 when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were founded.

Opening for the Marshall Plan: US war in Greece

When deemed necessary, the US instrumentalized and intensified civil wars, not only in Asia, such as in China, Vietnam and Korea. These then turned out differently than would have been the case given the balance of power in the country itself. 300 agents of the then US Secret Service (OSS), 450 US military advisors, and 1,200 US economic advisors were brought together in 1947 as the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG). They supported nationalist and monarchist militaries in Greece (some of which had cooperated with the Nazi occupiers) with money, dive bombers, and napalm bombs. Wealthy Greek business families, including shipowners like Aristotle Onassis, were given US ships cheaply and awarded transportation contracts. The colonial power Great Britain, unable to defeat the anti-fascist resistance, ceded the field to the new super-power.96

Thus, in the middle of “peacetime”, the anti-fascist liberation movement of Greece was destroyed economically, militarily and in intelligence terms. The USA waged the “Cold War” as a hot war if necessary, even in the middle of Europe. The US consolidated the monarchy in Greece, discredited by its Nazi complicity, and installed a puppet government under Prime Minister Alexandros Patagos, a nationalist civil war general. Between 1948 and 1952, tens of thousands of communists and leftists were imprisoned, and over 1,500 executed.⁹⁷ Then the Marshall Plan money started flowing as well.

Location Benelux: On the road to the EU

The Marshall Plan focused on four groups of countries. 1. The UK and France received the most. 2. Then came the FRG and Italy. 3. Turkey and Greece. Under the Truman Doctrine of March 12, 1947, Turkey and Greece were seen as being threatened by the Soviet Union. 4. The largest per capita share of aid went to the small monarchical states of Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium (Benelux). They were small, powerless, only half democracies, suitable as courteous vassals. They had offered no military resistance to the German army – despite or rather because of this, Belgium and the Netherlands were upgraded to occupying powers in post-war Germany for the benefit of the USA and were allowed to let their troops sit around pointlessly in a united Germany until the 2000s.

The first Western European institutions were established in Luxembourg and Belgium (European Coal and Steel Community - ECSC, European Atomic Energy Community, European Commission, European Parliament, Courts of Justice), plus later the US-led international financial institutions such as Clearstream (transnational financial transfers between banks and companies) and SWIFT (transnational cash payments), and last but not least NATO. This has remained the case to this day.

Surge in US investment

The Marshall Plan triggered a wave of US investment far beyond the scope of the planned aid: While US investment between 1950 and 1970 increased threefold in Latin America, fivefold in Asia (including Japan), and sixfold in the traditional neighboring market of Canada, it increased fourteenfold in Western Europe.⁹⁸

In the EEC Treaty (1957, Article 70), it was then stated: “For the movement of capital between the Member States and third countries… the highest degree of liberalization” shall be aimed at. Customs duties were abolished even more rapidly, and the cross-border movement of services, people and capital was simplified.

As a result, US investors shifted their previous focus away from the UK, which was not part of the EEC, to the EEC founding states. Thus, the US became the most important foreign owner of companies in the Federal Republic as well, in the areas where the US led anyway: automobiles, petroleum, electronics, agricultural and office machinery, pharmaceuticals, and food.

US corporations mostly invested in several EEC countries simultaneously: General Motors, Ford, DuPont, Esso, Mobil Oil and Standard Oil, Caterpillar, 3M (industrial holding company in health, safety, food), Goodyear, General Electric, Standard Electric, National Cash Register, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Monsanto, Texaco, National Carbide, John Deere and International Harvester, Kodak, Woolworth, Maizena, Singer, Libby, ITT, Firestone.⁹⁹ The Wall Street banks now also arrived, first and foremost Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Citibank and JPMorgan.¹⁰⁰ This represented a doubling of the pre-war level.

Focus on the Benelux countries

In per capita terms, however, the Benelux countries were streets ahead, and among the three states, Luxembourg in turn was way out front.

After the war, the Netherlands offered particularly low wages and an extremely favorable location for raw material procurement by sea and onward transportation. Dutch cities and municipalities granted US companies hefty tax perks.¹⁰¹

In Belgium the government set up an office to attract investors from the USA. Caterpillar, General Motors, Ford, Monsanto, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, National Distillers und Union Carbide came. Investment was concentrated in Flanders because unions there were “more conservative” than in French-speaking Wallonia, where there was more strike activity - something “American investors were particularly sensitive about.”¹⁰² Thus, the domestic government and US companies reinforced the division of the Belgian regions.

The 51st US State: Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

In Luxembourg, the ratio of US investment per capita was 10 times the EEC average. Several factors came together here: Since the end of the First World War, the Grand Duchy had developed its location as a financial oasis; here, following the example of Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein, foreign companies could set up shell companies.

Goodyear, DuPont, Monsanto and Continental Fertilizer were granted favorable terms for investment.¹⁰³ Bankers Trust settled in Luxembourg. Covert financial operations of the Marshall Plan - in addition to the BIS in Basel - were handled through Luxembourg. No head of state visited a Western European country as often as Dwight Eisenhower, US president from 1953 to 1961, was in Luxembourg. Later, leading US Republicans such as Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger, and George Bush Sr. all visited the country.¹⁰⁴

Springboard for US banks

US banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bank of Boston and Overseas Development Bank established branches in the small Grand Duchy. In 1970, Wall Street founded the clearing institution Cedel (Centrale de Livraison des Valeurs Mobilières – clearing house for securities) here: This was the first center for timely transnational stock and securities transactions.

All the major banks and corporations in the US sphere of influence were involved in Cedel, including those from Switzerland, London, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Branch offices were gradually established in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Dubai, Frankfurt and Sao Paulo. Secret to illegal business was also conducted here, bribes for major projects, party donations for the German FDP, for example, funds from the Vatican and the fascist Italian Lodge P2. Most significant financially and politically, however, were US defense contractors such as Lockheed, Raytheon, and Northrop, which sought representation in Luxembourg for their sales to Gulf sheikdoms and other less prestigious US allies. In 1981 US President Ronald Reagan organized the ransom for US hostages in Iran through Cedel. Cedel was renamed Clearstream in 1999 and is now owned by Deutsche Börse and thus BlackRock & Co. The largest US management consultants, such as Arthur Andersen, set up large branches here; later, PwC and others did the same - leading to the “Luxembourg Leaks”² in 2014.¹⁰⁵

Jean-Claude Juncker, later Luxembourg's finance minister and prime minister from the Christian Social People's Party, i.e. the representative of a tautologous populism, subsequently became president of the European Commission. He thus finally elevated Luxembourg's toadyism toward the US to the pan-European level. For instance, he refused to have the tax evasion of corporations organized by PwC via Luxembourg at the expense of the EU states investigated or, banish the thought, banned; in 2019, he concluded an agreement with US President Trump on the increased purchase of US liquefied natural gas, which was not only designed against strategic European interests, but was also environmentally harmful on several counts. Hence, since 1949, the small, secretive Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the central founding state of the EU, has been considered the 51st state of the United States.¹⁰⁶

Single market and competition between states

Thus, US investors took advantage of the unification of the market that began with the EEC. But the EEC conferred only minor sovereign rights to the European Commission – under pressure from the USA.¹⁰⁷

The Benelux countries granted the highest tax perks and other subsidies. The exact extent of the benefits could not be determined at the time because the EEC did not record them and the US attached importance to non-transparency: they preferred bilateral double taxation agreements that were not submitted to the respective parliaments.¹⁰⁸

Some US company management boards complied with European labor and union laws, some did not. As a result, disputes over layoffs (for example, in the case of restructuring after company acquisitions), cuts in wages, social benefits and work breaks were much more frequent than in purely European corporations at the time.¹⁰⁹

EC and EU: The extended “globalization”

The US and the capitalists in core Europe it protected bided their time. They gradually shored up their power, let Nazi collaboration be forgotten. It was not until the early 1970s that new members were admitted to the EEC - subsequently renamed the European Community (EC), and ultimately the European Union (EU): Denmark and the UK in 1973, the poorer southern European states of Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s, then Finland, Austria and Sweden in the mid-1990s.

The three Baltic states and Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the meanwhile important financial havens Malta and Cyprus did not follow until 2004, then the poorest states Romania and Bulgaria, and finally Croatia (2014). At the same time, loose forms of association were developed, on the one hand to sweeten up new aspirant states, to discipline them, even to exploit them and, for example, to siphon off migrant workers, but not least to instrumentalize them militarily. This applies to varying degrees to Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

1980s: European companies step up investment in the US

Starting in the 1980s, companies from Western Europe stepped up investment in the United States. The superpower was considered “economically” successful even though, or rather because, the working poor had established themselves as a permanent systemic phenomenon during this period: A growing share of the dependent workforce, and not only the black but also the white population, remained poor despite work: Wages and social security had been lowered, and trade unions were already severely weakened, unlike in Western Europe.¹¹⁰ In particular, all European - as well as Japanese - car companies, and also the pharmaceutical companies set up production plants. All major banks in Western Europe established branches in New York.

This was repeated after the financial crisis of 2007. Western European companies again accelerated their investments in the USA. Pharmaceutical groups such as Novartis, Bayer and BASF, automotive groups such as BMW, VW and Daimler, the technology groups Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, automotive suppliers such as Continental, Deutsche Telekom and now 3,500 German SMEs are in some cases notching up higher sales and profits in the USA than in Germany itself. In the US, they also donate to the two pro-capitalist parties that take turns in government. But in 2016, while the high and mighty in the EU along with the German government were still sticking to the Democrats and their presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, German, English and Swiss corporations swung their campaign donations to the nationalist class warrior, the oaf Donald Trump.¹¹¹

Increased US dominance, Americanization of labor conditions

Despite increased investment by Western European corporations in the US, US dominance in the EU has not only been maintained, but has been expanded further since the beginning of the 21st century.

Wall Street investment banks such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, partly brokered via the European Commission, were used from the mid-1980s onward for the privatization of major state-owned enterprises such as the postal service, railroads, media, and their IPOs, first in Great Britain by the Tory governments from Thatcher to Major, then also in Spain and Italy, for example, and by the German government led by Chancellor Kohl. In 1990, Kohl brought them into the Treuhandanstalt as key advisors to sell the ex-GDR's businesses to Western investors.¹¹²

At the beginning of the 21st century, with the program “Unbundling of Deutschland AG”, the German government of SPD and Greens under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder promoted the purchase of German mediumsized companies and public housing stocks by private equity investors (“locusts”) such as Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle, Texas Pacific Group, Fortress, Cerberus. By 2019, they had bought and disposed of around 10,000 well-performing, unlisted SMEs in Germany alone. After the incursion in Germany, a similar process was also seen in the other EU countries.

With the financial and economic crisis of 2007, the bigger capital organizers of the premier league then joined in: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard & Co. They are now the major shareholders of the most important 500 or so stock corporations in Germany - including the largest five new housing groups. To a lesser extent, this is now also the case in France, Italy, Spain and also Switzerland.

With the new investors, who now also own the formerly powerful banks, the “civilian private army of transatlantic capital” - from the US the rating and PR agencies, management consultants, business law firms, 'auditors', union busters - has also established itself in the EU, in Brussels and in the capitals of the important EU Member States as a permanent assistant to the governments.¹¹³

This has also served to “Americanize” working conditions in the EU: The regulated full-time and lifelong workplace is being replaced by the highly flexible US-style “job”. (see page 184ff.)

United States as Regulatory Power II: NATO

What was later called the “Cold War”, already began during World War II: The Soviet Union (again) went from being a military ally to an enemy of the system. One trigger was the unforeseen victory of the Red Army over the Wehrmacht in the decisive Battle of Stalingrad in 1943.

NATO: The founding lie

In the run-up to NATO's formation, US leaders knew: the Soviet Union posed no military threat. Even if it wanted to, the weakened power could not sustain an attack on Western Europe: The Soviet Union's economy is too weak; its transportation system too primitive; its underdeveloped oil industry far too easy to attack. The men in the Kremlin were clever tyrants, judged the chief planner in the State Department, George Kennan, who would not risk their domestic power with military adventures abroad. “They want to win the battle for Germany and Europe, but not through military action.” From 1948 onward, Kennan recorded all this repeatedly in various memoranda for Secretary of State Marshall, for President Truman, and for US ambassadors.¹¹⁴

USA: Push 'defense' line forward to Europe

In March 1943 Walter Lippmann, the father of neoliberalism, wrote: Having conquered North America, Central America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and several islands in the Pacific (Wake Islands, Guam, Hawaii, Japanese mandate islands), the US has so far been forced to “defend two-thirds of the earth's surface from our continental base in North America”. Now, however, with the foreseeable defeat of the Axis powers Germany, Japan, Italy and their allies and collaborators, much more intensive access from new locations was opening up.

The US can no longer “defend” its conquered territories from its North American territory and scattered islands in the Pacific alone, according to the geostrategist. From Europe, the US could move to “active defense” of its national interests.¹¹⁵

Thus, the intensified military expansion was now being passed off as “defense”. From 1776, since its founding, the US literally had a War Department: Through wars - if necessary with genocide - the North American continent, Central America, the Caribbean, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, etc. were conquered. But precisely at the peak of its military expansion to date, the War Department was renamed Defense Department in 1947.

NATO: Twin of the Marshall Plan

From 1947, all subsequent founding members of NATO received aid from the Marshall Plan: Even Turkey, which suffered no war destruction at all. In some cases, Marshall Plan aid was reallocated for military purposes.¹¹⁶ On April 4, 1949 - a few weeks before the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany - the military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, was founded in Washington. It was passed off as a “defense” alliance, in line with US language protocol. All other members were dependent on the US, not only through the Marshall Plan, but also through additional loans, military aid, and investments. Until 1952, NATO's headquarters were in Washington.

NATO was the twin of the Marshall Plan. The military-civilian dual character was embodied, as already mentioned, by George Marshall: first foreign minister, then 'defense' minister and de facto NATO chief. In 1950, he organized brutal interventions, including napalm bombings, against liberation movements around the globe, in Korea as well as in Greece.

War against liberation movements in the European colonies

NATO's founding members were majority Christian-racist colonial powers, much as the US itself, but the latter embodying the more modern variety. It supported the wars waged by the European colonial powers against the liberation movements in the colonies, which had gained strength after World War II. The colonial powers there promoted the exploitation of the local workers to the point of slave-like conditions.

United Kingdom

The US took over the military suppression in Greece from the British. At the same time, they financed three-quarters of the cost of the British occupation forces in West Germany, so that - like France - Britain could also appear as a seemingly powerful occupying power.¹¹⁷

During the war, Great Britain had ceded several military bases in the Commonwealth to the United States. At the time of NATO's formation, the Labour-led government was also fighting the liberation movement in Ghana in the African colonies, calling the leader of the Convention People's Party, Kwane Nkrumah, a “little local Hitler” and putting him in prison in 1950. It was not until 1957 that Ghana was able to become independent with Nkrumah, but he was overthrown in 1966 with the help of the CIA.¹¹⁸

France, Belgium, Netherlands

The World Bank under Wall Street lawyer John McCloy granted a loan to France even before the Marshall Plan, on the condition: De Gaulle and the Communists must not switch from the provisional government to the regular government! US Secretary of State Byrnes, Marshall's predecessor, promised a 650 million loan and the additional supply of 500,000 tons of coal.¹¹⁹ The US rearmed three French divisions in 1948 so that France could act as a serious occupying power in its occupied territory in West Germany.¹²⁰

From May 1945 until independence in 1962, the French military killed hundreds of thousands of independence fighters and civilians in the annexed colony of Algeria. A racist apartheid system prevailed there. But Algeria immediately became NATO-covered territory. At the same time, the French government demanded military aid against “communism” for its colony Indochina: The Democratic Republic of Vietnam proclaimed in September 1945 by the Viet Minh independence movement under Ho Chi Minh was to be destroyed - the US helped with military advisors, food and arms.¹²¹ McCloy, as president of the World Bank, also approved a loan for this purpose in 1949, the year NATO was founded.¹²²

Similar things happened in the colonies of Belgium (Congo) and the Netherlands (Indonesia). Hundreds of thousands of natives were murdered.¹²³

Denmark

In Denmark, after the Nazi period, a government was formed that included the Communist Party. With the help of social democracy and the Marshall Plan, the original plan for non-alignment was banished. The Danish colony of Greenland, where the US had established military bases as early as 1941, was declared a NATO defense area in 1951. The US military base at Thule was, and has been ever since, expanded to explore the Arctic and spy on the Soviet Union and then Russia. Although Greenland is now “independent”, its foreign and security policy remains under the wing of the particularly loyal NATO member Denmark. For this reason, the Danish government, due not least to US intervention, has prevented the Greenlandic government, from developing economically with the help of China (substituting for the declining importance of fishing).¹²⁴

Norway

In Norway, the Social Democratic government, which had an absolute majority, wanted to remain non-aligned after the German occupation. But with the help of the Marshall Plan and additional rearmament aid, the US maneuvered Norway, like Denmark, into NATO.

Federal Republic of Germany

In 1950, shortly after the founding of the separate state of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), its chancellor Adenauer promised the USA rearmament (secretly). As early as 1950, the US was already promoting FRG arms production for the needs of the war against the People's Liberation Movement in Korea. The majority of West German arms industrialists were in favor of NATO. In September 1950, NATO included the FRG in the NATO defense area - five years before the Bundestag formally decided to join NATO.¹²⁵

Spain and Portugal

Franco's fascist dictatorship was a good premise to include Spain in the anti-communist 'defense' alliance. Although formal NATO membership was initially postponed for cosmetic reasons, the United States provided economic support and expanded military bases. Spain and Portugal formed a “special bulwark” for the United States in postwar Europe, according to the US ambassador who resided in Madrid until 1945.¹²⁶

The US returned the Asian colonies of Timor and Macau, which had been occupied by Japan, to the colonial power Portugal.¹²⁷ The US and NATO could now use Portugal's Atlantic islands, the Azores, as military bases.

US economic incursion in the European colonies

Not only militarily and in terms of intelligence, but also economically, the USA infiltrated the colonies of the Europeans. The Marshall Plan headquarters in Paris maintained the “Strategic Commodities” division. It reconnoitered and inventoried in the colonies of the European colonial powers, for example, manganese and graphite in Madagascar; lead, cobalt, and manganese in Morocco; cobalt, uranium, and cadmium in the Congo; tin in Cameroon; chromium and nickel in New Caledonia; rubber in Indochina; oil in Indonesia;¹²⁸ besides industrial diamonds, asbestos, beryllium, tantalite, and columbite.¹²⁹

1990: No peace treaty for Europe

The victory over socialism was only an intermediate step towards the aspired position of the USA as the “sole world power” (according to the US strategist and geopolitician Zbigniew Brzeziński).³ The goal was not only the domination of Western Europe from Lisbon to Berlin with the help of the EU, but the domination of all of Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The Eurasian landmass, its strategic position and resources, proved to be an even more urgent object of capitalist desire for the US since the People's Republic of China emerged as the most successful economy and increasingly cooperated with Russia.

That is why the USA and the obedient EU refused to sign a peace treaty for Europe even after 1990. The war guilt and the war debts of Nazi Germany remained unpunished and forgotten as well as the collaboration of the German and Western European industrial and financial elite and of US corporations with Nazi Germany.

Thus, Germany was spared the regulations covering war reparations, which had been repeatedly postponed for 45 years with reference to a peace treaty yet to come. In the 2+4 treaty between the FRG and the already dying GDR on the one hand and the four military powers USA, France, Great Britain and the also already dying Soviet Union on the other hand, neither international law nor universal human rights were installed in 1990.

The 2+4 Treaty was an international treaty and was called the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany”. It authorized the reunification of Germany. All previous restrictions on Berlin and Germany by the four occupying powers were lifted. Germany was finally to be a sovereign state.

The treaty was not referred to as a “peace treaty” in the text of the treaty itself, but was nevertheless portrayed as such in the populist presentation, although it isn’t. This is shown, for example, by the fact that only “East Germany”, i.e. the former GDR, was defined as a nuclear-weapon-free zone. So West Germany was not supposed to be a nuclear-free zone. Why, actually? Because the treaty said: Germany renounces nuclear, biological and chemical weapons finally and forever! So where do the nuclear weapons come from, which nevertheless continue to be stationed in West Germany?

Forced labor – was that a thing?

Universal human rights do not apply either. They prohibit forced labor. The millionfold forced labor practiced in occupied Europe and especially in Germany by German and US companies was not even mentioned in the 2+4 Treaty, let alone compensated or punished or banned for the future. The Coal and Steel Community, the EEC and the EU never addressed the various forms of forced labor either, including that of Jewish concentration camp prisoners.

The UN Social Covenant from the 1960s with labor and social rights, which had been ratified by France and Great Britain and the Federal Republic, was also not included. The 2+4 Treaty made peace with the capitalists, but not with the dependent workers, neither for the past nor for the future.

In convoy: Eastern Enlargement of EU and NATO

NATO was and is an alliance that, under US leadership, from the start violates the UN Charter, Article 1 “Self-Determination of Nations”, in principle and permanently.¹³⁰

Today, the EU is obediently following the call imposed under President Barack Obama to increase the 'defense' spending of its Member States to two percent of economic output. Even the boorishness of Obama's successor Donald Trump, repeatedly criticized by EU representatives, did not prevent the governments of the EU states from fulfilling this call.

The “greater independence” from the USA demanded by the French and German heads of government Macron and Merkel is not accompanied by a peace policy in conformity with international law, but by increased claims to their own world power status: The former German 'defense' minister von der Leyen, who was boxed through as the new president of the European Commission in 2019, stands out prominently here. The increased military spending of the European NATO countries merely serves to take pressure off the USA, which since Obama has been pivoting towards Asia, against the new enemy number one, China.

“More European independence ”?

The US continues to maintain its own military bases in numerous EU and NATO countries, including the Baltic States, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Poland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and above all in the most powerful state, Germany. And the US is building new military bases like the one in Ulm (for the deployment against Russia) and expanding them technologically. From here, in contravention of the German Basic Law and international law, worldwide military operations and drone assassinations continue to be carried out, for example from Ramstein/Rhineland-Palatinate and from AFRICOM/Stuttgart. The German Parliament's Academic Service has identified about two dozen US military bases in Germany, but admits that the exact number cannot be determined because the US side does not respond to questions.¹³¹

The EU concurs with the expanded deployments, maneuvers, and stationing of US military, particularly in the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine. The EU raises no objection to the establishment of an “Eastern NATO” undermining EU unity, with reactionary and nationalist anti-Russian Poland at its core. The Eurasian region including the Arctic is finally to be conquered and economically developed - if necessary again with war, and this time also (again) with nuclear bombs.¹³²

Global political conspiracy theory

Nor does the new “European Defense Union” (PESCO, Permanent Structured Cooperation) - a new edition of a concept developed as early as the 1950s - represent any competition to NATO.¹³³

In the declaration on the 70th founding year of NATO in December 2019, Trump, Macron, Merkel, von der Leyen, etc. agreed that, in addition to terrorism and Russia, China is now part of the new threat. On the great global political conspiracy theory, there is agreement.

Conquer Russia at last

In Kosovo, the US maintains Camp Bondsteel - named after a highly decorated Vietnam veteran - its second-largest military base outside its own territory, after Ramstein/Pfalz. The region had been seceded from Serbia by the USA together with the EU in violation of international law. The fact that the government is corrupt, that its president is accused of the most serious war crimes before the special international tribunal on Kosovo in The Hague, and that the majority of the population is poor does not bother them. Russia is to be conquered, regardless of whether it is run communistically or capitalistically with Putin - that has been the core of NATO from the beginning.

The NATO edifice of lies, nurtured for decades, is more fragile than ever. Today's Russia is militarily incomparably weaker - at least in terms of offensive potential, not in terms of defensive capability - than the former Soviet Union and compared with today's even more highly upgraded NATO. All the more intense is the fake fabrication about the alleged “Russian danger” and the “evil Putin”.

Poor EU states with the highest military spending

When it comes to military spending, the poorest EU states are at the forefront.

State	Military spending as percent of GDP:
USA	3.42 percent
Greece	2.24
Estonia	2.13
UK	2.13
Romania	2.04
Latvia	2.01
Poland	2.01
Lithuania	1.98134

US harms its EU vassals

The IMF under Christine Lagarde granted loans to over-indebted Ukraine that, measured against the same criteria, were denied to Greece.¹³⁵

The US-imposed boycott of Russia is harming the German economy, for example through the loss of 60,000 jobs at German companies and suppliers in Ukraine. German companies initially protested, but then backed down. The German vassal accepts the damage - albeit not so much at the expense of shareholders, but of dependent employees, both in Ukraine and in Germany.¹³⁶

Nationalism, ethno-politics

The USA and NATO not only waged a military war against Yugoslavia. They promoted nationalist, ethnic and religious fundamentalist, right-wing and post-fascist movements, individuals and parties in this previously multi-ethnic state. In Poland and Croatia, this also includes the Catholic Church. In doing so, the US-led West, beginning in 1990, also drew on traditions of anti-Semitic, monarchist, and nationalist forces that had cooperated with the Nazi Wehrmacht and the fascist occupation forces of Italy during World War II.¹³⁷ Anti-communist exiles, who had fled to the anti-communist West after their defeat in 1945, were brought back from the Federal Republic of Germany, USA, Canada, Australia.

This was professionally promoted with the help of Western PR agencies, especially from the USA, such as Hunton & Williams, Patton Boggs, Global Enterprises Group, Rudder Finn, Waterman Associates, White & Case, The Washington International Group, Burson Marsteller, Van Kloberg Associates, Herzfeld & Rubin:¹³⁸ Nationalism, racism, fake production on the highest professional level!

Thus, Yugoslavia was broken up into several small states, whose wars against each other were promoted with agitation, advice, weapons, and intelligence and Catholic Church assistance from the West. The symbolic figure of the Polish-born Pope Karl Woytyla stands for the old and new ecclesiastical connections - to no other state did he make so many official visits as to the small Catholic-nationalist and ethnically cleansed reborn state of Croatia. (see page 206).

The new nationalist mini-states continue their non-military conflicts and rivalries under the umbrella of the EU and NATO, which can thus exercise their supremacy all the more easily. The “globalizers” and propagandists of a “united Europe” prefer and rule best with the help of nationalist mini-states.

² With its branch in Luxembourg, the ‘auditing’ group Pricewaterhouse Coopers, preferred advisor of the European Commission, had helped 300 companies, mainly from the USA, notch up “tax deals” up to zero tax. The two whistleblowers who uncovered this were convicted in Luxembourg.

³ The Polish-born Brzeziński advised US presidents from Nixon to Reagan to George Bush on Eastern European policy. German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote an extremely laudatory foreword to Brzeziński's German edition: Die einzige Weltmacht. Amerikas Strategie der Vorherrschaft, Weinheim 1997.