Why FDR leaving the USSR alone actually helped the U.S.

[NAO]

If we would have invaded the USSR and made all of Eastern Europe capitalist in the 1940's there would have been no cold war, no massive Keynesian military spending, no space race, no "evil empire" for Ronald Raygun, no need for SDI/missile shield...

It would have been a catastrophe for the military industrial complex and the architects of US foreign policy.

Look what drastic means they had to resort to (9/11) after the fall of Communism just to get the American public back into a siege mentality and get behind massive military spending.

[Pepperbelly]

1. anyone who thinks fighting the Soviets at the close of WWII

is psycho.

That sort of revisionism from these creeps makes me sick.

Bush is an idiot tutored by idiots.

[jus_the_facts]

2. It all goes sooo much DEEPER than any want to realize.....

.......THE $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ throughout history tells the tale...in the same hands THEN and NOW...tip o'the preverbial iceburg snip here....please read the entire site...don't just take my word for it...

http://www.winterboy.com/dejavuintro.html

*snip*

As the Depression deepens............


As the Depression deepens, America becomes obsessed with sensational crime. The flamboyant bootlegging empire of Al Capone looms larger than life. Newspapers, magazines and movies celebrate crimes and criminals. Law enforcement looks dull and ineffectual- as does President Herbert Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover steals for himself credit that belongs to others. When Charles Lindbergh's infant son is kidnapped and murdered, Hoover is told by the head of the New Jersey State Police, Norman Schwartzkopf, Sr (father of the Desert Storm General Norman Schwartzkopf) to mind his own business.
Hoover pulls strings in Congress and the Lindbergh Law passes, giving the FBI jurisdiction in kidnapping cases. Hoover then persuades Roosevelt to give the Bureau sole jurisdiction in the Lindbergh case.

On July 2, a committee of the Prussian State Health Council advises and recommends that a law on sterilization be brought in under the title: 'Eugenics in the Service of Public Welfare.' The law is to permit the 'voluntary' sterilization of the same groups of persons (with the exception of alcoholics) as were later specified in the law of 14 July 1933.

Howard Hughes forms the Hughes Aircraft Company division of Hughes Tool. The company pioneers many innovations in aerospace technology.


After Andrew Mellon becomes US Ambassador to Great Britain, he meets with a high-ranking member of the British Foreign Office and advocates regularly, on behalf of Gulf Oil, for the Red-Line agreement to be amended.

On August 21, The Third International Congress on Eugenics is held at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Congress proceedings are dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother, who had paid for the founding of the race-science movement in America.

In September, Thyssen invites a group of elite German industrial tycoons to his castle to meet with Hitler. They spend hours questioning Hitler, who answers all their questions to their "utmost satisfaction," Thyssen remembers. The money pours in again from industrial circles, largely because of Hitler's "monarchist attitude" towards labor and class issues.

By November, however, German voters are suspicious of Hitler's anti-democratic tendencies and turn to the Communist party, which gains the most seats in the fall election. The Nazis lose a sweeping 35 seats in the Reichstag, but since the Nazis are already secretly negotiating a power sharing alliance with Hindenberg, the outcry of German voters is politically insignificant.

1933 Final arrangements for Hitler to enter government are made at the Berlin office of Kurt von Schroder’s Bank on January 4- a meeting attended by Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys John Foster Dulles and Allen W. Dulles- future CIA Director under JFK. Kurt von Schroder, vice-president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, has just sent his grandson to New York to tour Brown Brothers Harriman offices in December.

Allen Welsh Dulles becomes director of the New York branch of the Schroeder Banking house- a post he holds until 1944.

The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 propose federal supervision of securities traded over state boundaries, and establishes the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), empowered to enforce the regulations. Some of the abuses that the Commission will address are those that had led to the recent Stock Market crash- insider trading, bear raiding, and manipulating stocks to create the illusion of activity. One of the most alarming propositions to Wall Street players is that companies selling stocks will have to reveal their financial histories to the public.
In choosing a chairman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt needs a man who will strike a balance between the more radical, anti-business theorists of the New Deal, and the entrenched business interests whose support Roosevelt needs. Confiding to his advisors: “I’ll set a thief to catch a thief,” brand new President Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints Joseph P. Kennedy as the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
With this appointment Kennedy becomes responsible for drafting legislation which will regulate the business dealings of his former Wall Street colleagues. The Kennedy name becomes anathema to the reactionary business element like the Bushes, Walkers and Harrimans- who have a vested interest in the unregulated pursuit of greater wealth.

The German-American Bund (Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund) is formed in the US by Fritz Kuhn, a chemist at the Ford Motor Company.

The Bund, which calls itself an 'American citizens' group is really a Nazi organization. It spreads propaganda claiming that the Roosevelt administration has fallen into the hands of Jews and Communists. The German-American Bund doesn’t appeal much to non-Germans, so they establish and join other pro-fascist groups; some 750 will spring up throughout the ‘30s.

The American progressive wave had peaked around 1912, and was soon buried under a deluge of World War tensions. But the ideas unleashed by it continue to forge the politics of the 20th century. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt argues that the real enemies of enlightened capitalism are "the malefactors of great wealth," from whom capitalism would have to be saved by reform and regulation. Progressive government becomes an embedded tradition of Democrats- the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, honored even by Dwight D. Eisenhower. a moderate Republican who didn't want to tear down the house progressive ideas had built- only to put it under different managers.

On the night of February 27, a huge fire destroys the Reichstag, the seat of German government. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, is arrested after he is found bare to the waist inside the Reichstag. During interrogation, the young radical confesses that he set the fire "as a protest," but denies any connection with the Communist Party and swears he alone had set the fires inside the Reichstag. Rudolf Diels, chief of the Prussian political police, tells Hitler that van der Lubbe's confession rings true, but Hitler refuses to believe the arsonist had acted alone and blames the Communist movement as a whole for the troubles that continue to plague Germany. Hitler and Goebbels work from midnight to dawn at the "Völkischer Beobachter" offices preparing the next day's edition, which accuses the Reds of a plot to seize power and setting fire to the Reichstag.

In response to the devastating Reichstag fire, Hindenburg signs the ‘Decree for the Protection of the People and the State,’ which has been quickly drafted by Hitler and his aides. This emergency decree suspends all the civil liberties granted by the Weimar Constitution. Free speech, free press, sanctity of the home, security of mail and telephone, freedom to assemble or form organizations and the inviolability of private property are all abolished. The Decree also allows the Nazis to put their political opponents in prison and establish concentration camps.

Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak had helped Franklin Roosevelt gain the majority of voters in Chicago during the 1932 Presidential election. On February 15, Cermak appears with President Roosevelt at Belmont Park in Miami. An Italian immigrant and alleged anarchist, Guiseppe Zangara, fires five shots at Roosevelt. They all miss the President but one hits Cermak in the stomach. On the way to the hospital Cermak tells Roosevelt, "I'm glad it was me and not you, Mr. President."
Anton Cermak dies three weeks later on March 8. Guiseppe Zangara claims in court he was trying to kill Roosevelt, but J. Edgar Hoover mouthpiece Walter Winchell spreads the story that Cermak was the real target. An FBI investigation concludes that Zangara is a 'mentally deranged loner' and is not involved in any conspiracy.

Hitler tells a large audience in Frankfurt that he "will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. I won't have to worry about justice, my mission is only to destroy and exterminate."

Prior to the Nazi seizure of power this year, worker protests had spread all across Germany in response to the Great Depression. During his drive to power, Hitler exploited this social unrest by promising workers he’ll strengthen their labor unions and increase their standard of living. But these are empty promises; privately, he is reassuring wealthy German businessmen that he will crack down on labor once he achieves power.
Hitler shows his true colors by promptly breaking all his promises to workers. The Nazis abolish trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike. An organization called the 'Labor Front' replaces the old trade unions, but it is an instrument of the Nazi party and doesn’t represent workers. According to the law that created it, "Its task is to see that every individual should be able… to perform the maximum of work." Workers indeed greatly boost their productivity under Nazi rule, but they are also exploited. Between 1932 and 1936, workers wages fall over 20%, yet workers do not protest. This is partly because the Nazis have restored order to the economy, but an even bigger reason is that the Nazis crack down on any protest.

Before WWI, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was the largest merchant fleet in the world, with at least 175 ships, all of which were seized during the first War. By 1932 Hamburg-Amerika owns 118 oceangoing ships, and North German Lloyd shipping line has also regained its former status. Under official Nazi supervision, the Hamburg-Amerika Line (Hapag) and North German Lloyd Company approve a merger in a joint board; the German Reich becomes majority shareholder of both shipping lines.
Prescott Bush's ‘American Ship and Commerce Corp’ installs Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines Hapag-Lloyd on 4 November.

Hitler appoints Joseph Goebbels Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. He quickly begins ‘coordinating’ all aspects of cultural life, the press and communications under the control of the Nazi Party. Day after day, Goebbels drills home the messages of blood, race, and glory, all cleverly designed to appeal to the broadest segment of the German masses. Anti-Semitism is one of his most useful tools and fueling it one of his highest priorities.

As the Depression deepens through the ‘30s, rampant anti-Semitism increases, driven by the Ku Klux Klan and the 750 plus pro-Nazi/fascist grass roots organizations springing up all over America.
William Dudley Pelly, the son of a Methodist minister who believes that Jews are the children of Satan, founds the ‘Silver Shirts’ on January 31, in Asheville, NC (the day Hitler takes power in Germany). He describes the group as a ‘Christian militia.’ Throughout the ‘30s, the Silver Shirts become one of the largest and most violent of the pro-Nazi/fascist groups and are most popular in areas of the country where the Klan is well established.
In the Pacific Northwest they assume dominance among groups after the Klan splits apart in Oregon and Washington. The Silver Shirts are openly pro-Hitler and form alliances with the American Bund and the Klan.
Many of today's far right groups can trace their ancestry directly to the Silver Shirts. The Posse Comitatus’ founder Henry Lamont Beach was a leader of the Silver Shirts in Oregon. Likewise, Richard Butler, the founder of the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, ID was also a Silver Shirter (as well as former Klansmen).
Gerald L. K. Smith, one of the founders of today’s Christian Identity religion- common to the Posse, the Aryan nations and many of the militias and Klan groups- is perhaps the most influential former Silver Shirt member. It is the intolerance and blinding racism of religious fundamentalists that binds the fascists groups of the 1930s to today's right-wing extremists groups.


The May 20 New York Times reports that upon Hitler reaching power, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America is reached after negotiations in Berlin between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles. As a result, the Harriman International Co, managed by Averell 's first cousin Oliver Harriman, forms a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals to conduct all exports from Germany to America.

Max Warburg's son, Erich, sends a cable to his cousin, Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system, asking him to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc."

In one of the oil industry's more daring capital ventures, Socal (Standard Oil of California, later Unocal) obtains an exclusive sixty-year concession in the new desert Kingdom of Saudi Arabia- the only principality in the area not under British control. Three years later, the need for additional capital and market outlets persuades Socal to take in Texaco as a partner in its new venture. The revenues from the first Arabian oil exports in 1939 so impress King Ibn Saud that he increases the acreage of the American concession to 444,000 square miles, giving the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company a monopoly over a piece of real estate the size of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico combined.

A wave of crime sweeps over the American Mid-West. Names like John Dillinger,’Machine Gun’ Kelly, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, ‘Baby Face’ Nelson and ‘Ma’ Barker capture the imaginations of millions of Americans. The media romanticizes criminals into popular Robin Hood-esque characters. When some of these criminals rob banks they also destroy mortgage and loan records, thereby rationalizing their crimes by helping out the 'little guys,' who face the loss of everything they have.

FDR picks Homer Cummings as Attorney-General. Cummings creates the new ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation’ by merging Hoover’s BI, the Prohibition Bureau, and Bureau of Identification; Director J. Edgar Hoover now has 266 agents and 66 accountants. In the next decade, Hoover will pick high-profile cases and arrange for himself to be photographed making arrests or even shooting it out with gangsters, until he is considered America’s Number One Hero and a national celebrity. He begins to see himself as the guardian of the country's laws, citizens and morals.

A US Senate arms-traffic committee investigates Samuel Pryor and Remington Arms, which they determine is a member of an explosives cartel that includes Germany's IG Farben; the Committee further finds that nearly all the Nazis and other German political groups are armed with American guns, shipped from America on the Bush-Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line (now Hapag-Lloyd) to the Antwerp harbor, then moved by river barges through Holland without police interference.


Max Warburg is selected by Prescott Bush to be the American Ship & Commerce Line's official representative on the board of the Hamburg-Amerika Line- now Hapag-Lloyd. Warburg is a long time advisor of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Economic Minister and an executive in the Reichsbank. Warburg is also a close friend with Bush family friend Montagu Collet Norman

Prescott Bush's personal friend William S. Farish is appointed chairman of Standard Oil by John D. Rockefeller. Farish is also close to Hermann Schmitz, chairman of IG Farben. Farish hires publicist Ivy Lee to write pro-IG Farben/pro-Nazi propaganda and insinuate it into the US press. He employs Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers, and hires the chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line to chair the Standard Oil Company German subsidiary. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, becomes a top-level Farish-Standard manager in Germany. Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann are authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a special Standard Oil account. This account is managed by Kurt von Schroeder. According to US intelligence documents reveal, post-war, that Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-IG Farben Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not his personal contributions-they were corporate Standard Oil funds.

1934 On 1 January, Hitler writes a note of thanks to Ernst Roehm, leader of the National Socialists’ revolutionary army- the SA (also known as the Brown Shirts):
"I thank you my dearest Ernst Roehm, for the services which you have given to the National Socialist Movement and the German people, and to assure you how very grateful I am that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow fighters."
The SA numbers about two million- twenty times more than the real army. The SA are mostly working class and unemployed. They are zealouly Socialist (young German students favor the Communist Party, soon to be abolished by Hitler).
The SA, having helped Hitler gain power, now pose several real dangers for him:
1. Roehm and many other SA men want a second, and Socialist, revolution- as promised.
2. The rowdy, violent, thuggish SA is unpopular with businessmen and Hitler's financial backers.
3. The SA is despised by the German army, who see it as an unqualified but dangerous rival, and Hitler needs the army's support if he is to take over as President when Hindenburg dies.

Pro-Nazi/fascist groups begin spreading the rumor that Franklin Delanor Roosevelt is in reality a Jew named Rosenfeld.

On the opening day of the 73d Congress, Samuel Dickstein introduces a resolution calling for the formation of a special committee to probe into fascist and pro-Nazi activities in the US. The 'Dickstein Resolution' (H.R. #198) is passed in March, with Samuel Dickstein Vice-Chairman (Dickstein had refused the chairmanship of the Committee, feeling that his Jewish ancestry might have an adverse effect on the proceedings.)
Throughout the rest of the year, the newly-named Special Committee on Un-American Activities conducts hearings, bringing before it most of the major figures in the US fascist movement. Dickstein, who proclaims as his aim the eradication of all traces of Nazism in the US, personally questions each witness. His flair for dramatics and sensationalism, along with his sometimes exaggerated claims, continually capture headlines across the nation and win him much public recognition.

When several FBI agents are killed in a gangster escape attempt, Congress passes nine major crime bills that give Hoover much more authority and money to go after criminals. Hoover starts to add special agents who are not only investigators with law and accounting degrees, but are also comfortable making arrests and chasing after criminals, pistol in hand.
J. Edgar Hoover has always been very jealous of publicity showered on others, however, just as he’s angered by the glorification of gangsters in the press. The Bureau makes several high-profile captures, but it takes Special Agent Melvin Purvis tracking down and killing the escaped John Dillinger to really put the Bureau in the limelight. The press portrays Purvis as national hero, and Hoover deeply resents it.
To Hoover's further annoyance, Purvis then tracks down Pretty Boy Floyd and kills him, too. Hoover makes sure he himself is in the pictures this time, but Purvis is now on the wrong side of Hoover for “hogging all the glory.”
Purvis doesn’t get the message, or openly defies Hoover, and next sets his sights on Baby Face Nelson.
Hoover harasses Purvis until he resigns from the FBI. Hoover doesn't stop there, however, but continues to interfere in his career, behind the scenes, until Purvis commits suicide in 1960 with the same gun he used to shoot Dillinger. Purvis' widow thanks Hoover for not attending the funeral.

In March, Hitler announces his plans for a vast new highway system, connecting the entire Reich with an unprecedented wide road design- especially around major ports. Hitler wants to bring down unemployment but, more importantly, needs the new roads for speedy military maneuvers.
Against treaty provisions, Hitler orders a 'rebirth of the German army' and contracts with Thyssen and United Steel Works for the overhaul.
Thyssen/Flick's profits soar into the hundreds of millions, and the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart and Bush-Harrimans Union Banking Company in NYC are soon awash with new cash.

On March 19, the New York Times reports that the Polish government is applying to assume control over Bush-Harriman's holding company, Consolidated Silesian Steel Co, and its one third ownership of Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company, because of rampant "mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities." The Polish government requires the company, which accounts for over 45% of Poland's steel production, to pay at least its full share of back taxes. Bush-Harriman hire John Foster Dulles to help cover up improprieties. The case will drag on until Hitler invades Poland.

According to documents recovered by the Allies after WWII, Hitler and Dr. Joseph Goebbels want to 'Germanize' America in order to eliminate it as a military threat. Goebbels writes: "Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in North America. No other country has so many social and racial tensions. We shall be able to play on many strings there."
“Undermining morale, warping public opinion. It is a secret war directed against the mind and spirit of the people,” writes Germany’s ‘strategist of terror,’ Dr. Ewald Banse; he continues: "The enemy nations’ originally solid, powerful and well-knit fabric must be gradually disintegrated, broken down, rotted, so that it falls apart like a fungus treaded upon in a forest."
Weapons of the Axis psychological saboteurs include: disruptive propaganda; malicious rumors and lies; artificially created opposition movements; deliberate exploitation of genuine opposition movements, bribery, corruption and intimidation.


In the US the psychological saboteurs have five major objectives: use race hatred to disrupt the American people; undermine confidence in the government, especially the Roosevelt Administration; isolate and prevent US from joining any anti-Axis alliance; keep the US (especially the Navy) unprepared for the Second World War; build an American fascist party as a fifth column ally to the Axis.

Hitler orders the entire SA to take a month's leave in July. A meeting of SA leaders is set for 30 June at a village inn near Munich. Hitler promises to attend.
The next morning all the SA leaders at the inn, and in Berlin, are arrested and executed, most on the spot. Roehm himself is shot in his prison cell after he refuses to commit suicide. Hitler later says he is sorry that he had to destroy Roehm.
Hitler officially claims seventy-seven dead, but the actual number is likely much higher. Less than half the dead are SA members; many private quarrels were also settled that night- which is named Night of Long Knives."
President Hindenburg sends Hitler a telegram: "I see that through your determined intervention and bravely risking your own person, you have nipped all plots in the bud. I express to you my deepest thanks.”
One month later, Hindenberg is dead; the next day, Hitler rules Germany.

Radio personality Walter Winchell, a lifetime personal friend and one of the FBI's biggest promoters, introduces Hoover and Clyde to the Stork Club in NYC, the ‘place to be seen’- further enhancing Hoover’s celebrity status- where he will occasionally rub shoulders with mobsters, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Grace Kelly, the Chinese anti-communists Chiang Kai-sheks, and others. J. Edgar’s food and drink are always paid for by the club.

After the Nazis take power, they quickly establish a tightly controlled war economy. Like many war economies, this one booms, making Germany the second nation to recover fully from the Great Depression (the first is Sweden...following Keynesian-like policies, the Swedish government spends its way out of the Depression, demonstrating that state economic policies can be successful without resorting to dictatorship or war).

The Southern Baptist minister M. E.Dodd, of Louisiana, makes headlines by attending the 1934 Baptist World Convention in Berlin. Dodd is a racist even more extreme than Smith or Coughlin and praises the Nazis. Dodd justifies Hitler's gestapo tactics against the Jews by linking Jews with Communism. He considers the Jews in Germany to be outside agitators similar to the racial agitators in the US South. Some Southern Baptists do denounce the Nazis, but the Alabama Baptists follow Dodd's views.

1935 When alleged Baby Lindbergh kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann is finally captured, it’s not due to any scientific investigation on the part of the Bureau (to this day, many researchers believe Hauptmann was simply scapegoated because of anti-German sentiment, or to cover up Lindbergh’s own role in the baby’s death).
When the New York City Police Commissioner announces the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann, Hoover rushes to New York for the photo-op. While the Bureau has done almost nothing on the case, Americans are led to believe that master detective J. Edgar Hoover triumphs once again.

America has, by now, achieved some measure of recovery from the Great Depression, but businessmen and bankers are turning increasingly and more intensely hostile towards Roosevelt's New Deal program. They fear his economic experiments, are appalled because he takes the Nation off the gold standard and allows deficits in the budget, and dislike the many concessions to organized Labor. Roosevelt responds with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthiest, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

Hoover helps Warner Bros produce the film G-Men, with Jimmy Cagney. Many more such movies follow, and J. Edgar becomes a media darling, Public Hero Number One. New censorship laws allow gangsters on the screen only if they are being captured or killed by FBI men. The public sees the Bureau as a self-contained agency, not as answerable to the Justice Department.

By the time the Dicksteins's Special Committee on Un-American Activities report is issued in February, its conclusions are known to most Americans: the Committee finds that while Nazi Germany is indeed giving both financial and ideological support to the Friends of the New Germany (the American Bund), the American Bundists are not in violation of any existing federal law. In reaction, Germany officially denies any affiliation with the American Bund and prohibits all German nationals from joining the Bund.

The German American Settlement League buys the Long Island property of recently deceased, 100% flag waving American Jim Coombes. The new owners of the property, all of German ancestry, are initially assumed to be loyal Americans of the sort Jim Coombes would approve.
Ernst Mueller, head of the German American Settlement League, prepares a letter that is sent to members of the League, the German-American Bund and other organizations of German Americans, inviting all to visit this beautiful lakeside property, now named Camp Siegfried. The members of these various societies are post-WW I immigrants living in the New York City area.

The Governor of Oregon announces that he will not pardon any convicted sex criminals unless they are sexually sterilized (castrated). He also declares that, following the lead of Nazi Germany, he will expand the state’s sterilization law to include all “moral degenerates and sexual perverts (as well as the retarded),” whether they have committed a crime or not.

Andrew Mellon’s income-tax return for the year of 1931 becomes the subject of a federal fraud/tax evasion investigation; he’ll be exonerated in December, 1937, four months after he dies.

John Foster Dulles writes a long article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'The Road to Peace.' He excuses Germany’s secret rearmament as a justifiable action, the Germans taking back their freedom. Knowing what we now know about his relationships with Germany’s munitions industry, Dulles is obviously attempting to mislead the American public

1936 FDR is re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he is armed with a popular mandate, he seeks legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which has been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt loses the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law takes place and the US government wins the legal right to regulate the economy.

In August, FDR calls for a private meeting with Hoover to discuss what Hoover later describes as "subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism." No notes remain from that meeting, but Hoover reports that FDR wants him to discreetly provide him with a "broad picture" of both movements.
Hoover interprets this presidential request as permission to resume domestic surveillance activities.

A young law student named Richard Milhous Nixon, close to graduation, goes job hunting in NYC. William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the founding attorney of Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irvine, is a leading Republican who will later run the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) during WWII, and who prefers to recruit bankers, businessmen and lawyers for intelligence work. Donovan meets with Nixon personally, likes very much what he sees, and requests Nixon return for a second interview.
According to Nixon, he declines the opportunity to join Donovan's firm.
Nixon’s highest hope on this NY trip is to secure a position at Smith and Cromwell; the Dulles brothers are part of the panel that interviews Nixon.

Billionaire Howard Hughes builds the Texas Theater, a movie house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald will be arrested there in 1963. It’s all but certain that the Texas Theater becomes a clandestine meeting place for underworld elements, FBI agents- who often frequent Jack Ruby’s strip club, Dallas cops, and even local CIA assets. Dallas is rife with all these characters, and other Hughes properties are put to similar use.

While future right-wing publisher Henry Regnery is in Germany studying and dabbling in fascism and Eugenics, Hitler invades the Rhineland and the Sudetenland. He accelerates his persecution of non-Aryans in Germany.

Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund, visits Hitler in Germany. Upon his return to Long Island, the weekend meetings at Camp Siegfried begin to repeat the anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and anti-Labor Union tirades of Nazi Germany.
The German American Settlement League initiates a boycott of Jewish merchants in NY; all German-Americans are encouraged to patronize merchants displaying the DKV sign (indicating that merchant is a member of the pro-German merchants). The Jewish community responds with a boycott of German operated shops, although some of the vendors supplying the Camp Siegfried restaurant are Jewish and continue to provide services.

Palestine’s Arab population revolts against the flood of Jewish immigration, but there is no suppression by the British forces until 1939. 385,000 Jews and 980,000 Arabs now live in Palestine; the Jewish population ratio has nearly quadrupled, from 11% to almost 40%, in just over a decade.
Great Britain suggests that Palestine should be divided into a Jewish and an Arab state.

[ibid]

5. I like the winterboy site - perhaps the last paragraph above is a bit

out of place (the balfour agreement and the events 70 to 1930 seem missing - it is an extremely complicated history), but in general an excellent summary.

[jus_the_facts]

7. just a snipet...there's much more.....

....the context of what I chose to post may not be the ideal response to this thread...but it is indeed all there to see and learn from...sure wish more would take the time to read it through...sigh. :hi:

[whistle]

3. I disagree, the USSR is gone and we have all the build up.....

...and tension that anyone could want. The temptation would have been for the U.S. to become fascist in the 1950's as I'm sure they would have teamed up with the defeated Germans who were far less extreme than Hitler' National Socialist Party to establish a world U.S. Empire. FDR was fighting the fascist elements in the U.S. up to the beginning of the war and with his death came a re-emergence which Truman held in check (VP Henry A. Wallace was forced out of power in 1944 election as too extremist) by appealing to the right wing factions which brought on Korea and the cold war.

H.A. Wallace would have made a great president for the working class people of the United States.

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/henry_wallace.pdf


<on edit> This assumed that the U.S. continued on after the defeat of Hitler to invade the USSR and bring down communism.

[kenny blankenship]

4. If we'd have tried invading E. Europe and Russia in 1945

there's an EXCELLENT chance we'd all be speaking Russian and addressing each other as 'comrade' right now.

And if we had tried to bomb/invade Cuba in response to the missile crisis, as the right wing and the entire military establishment of the United States advocated at the time, there's an even better chance we'd be speaking NOTHING right now. (there were nuclear missiles already there, waiting to go: rash moves against Cuba such as Dulles and the Joint Chiefs were urging Kennedy to take would surely have set off WWIII, even though noone wanted it on either side.

Nothing turns out perfectly, however the way things did turn out (the absence of a great power showdown) and the fact that we survived maniacs like Stalin, Curtis LeMay, Alan Dulles and Ronald Reagan ought to be cause for relief and Deity-directed gratitude.

[ibid]

6. Amen - speaking Russian is hard! - and as you say that was a likely result

of Bush's alternative to that "evil/stupid" FDR's Yalta agreement.

How mainstream media can today report that Bush has a valid thought in his Baltic state comments is beyond me.

But RW media is the state media is the main stream media in the US these days.

[pretzel4gore]

8. russia beat the shit outta the west unless we used nukes...

jeez man they lost 25 million people!....when the red army was rolling outta the east, even death camp inmates shivered in terror (the largest loss of life ever in a ship sinking was a german ship loaded with refugees that russian subs sank in '45, nearly 9000 people died)...many of the russians had seen hell, and even those in the way who knew nothing of the story knew enough to be deathly afraid of them....no american soldier has ever faced anything remotely like what desperate german troops were trying to hold off in eastern europe (in the tv series 'hogans heroes' about a fake pow camp ruled by a cartoonish german army commandant and sad sack guards etc the threat the commandant always used on recalcitrant guards was to send them to the 'eastern front' as if it was a bogeyman...but the terrified guards always immediately obeyed him no matter how dense his ideas were, which was thus hogan's ace in the hole and the reason he looked so cool and unruffled in comparison to the germans)

[applegrove]

9. Also, as wacky as the communists were in the Soviet Union, they

had not stolen the ingredients for the 'bomb' until just after WWII. So they were allies before the War ended. Then the sociopath Stalin did what sociopaths always do... and he started attacking anyone who got to his ego or in his way and the murders & purges started.

I believe Kruschev tried a few times to dial down the arms race.

But really, nobody to blame but the Soviets themselves for being Utopian, totalitarian & hypocrites. Hey that reminds me of someone?

Bush!