Tribute to Michael Kreca

Gun Control, Fiat Money - National Security?

2006-05-27T16:04:00.000-04:00

by Michael Kreca

The US Gun Control Act of 1968 was lifted nearly word for word from the German Weapons Control Law enacted exactly 30 years before. The supreme irony of GCA68 was that many US firearms manufacturers had supported it at the time--mainly because their market share was being cut into significantly by less expensive but equally high-quality imported firearms, especially small-caliber handguns (not to mention cut-price surplus US firearms being reimported back into the USA from several European and Latin American countries.) Moreover, Ruger & Co. supported the Clinton Administration's 1994 "assault weapons ban" and in exchange got its popular "Mini-14" rifle deleted from the BATF "hit list" of "prohibited assault rifles" while Colt Industries' equally popular competing product, the similar "AR-15," stayed on the list.

Foolishly, the NRA supported GCA68 at the time (something it doesn't like to discuss these days,) and was editorializing on and off for such a law for some six years, two justifications being the desire to preserve the domestic firearms industry in the interests of "national security" (how convenient those two words are!) and to presumably protect it from cheaper foreign imports (see the "American Rifleman," Aug. 1962 edition.) (So that's how the auto industry got the idea for "domestic content legislation" in the early 1980s!) NRA membership took a massive hit in reaction to GCA68 and stayed flat for years afterward. JPFO founder Aaron Zelman has done a great deal of research in this area.

The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was modeled after the 1934 National Firearms Act, the first federal gun control law in US history (actually, the NFA is a tax law, and that is why most pro-gun people have the wrong approach to getting it repealed.) The NFA and MTA are both unconstitutional if one uses as a precedent a 1968 USSC decision called US vs. Grosso, when a 1950 federal law imposing a tax on gamblers was ruled unconstitutional on 4th and 5th Amendment grounds, accepting the plaintiff's argument that those who complied with this law were being specially targeted by the government for surveillance, harassment and criminal investigations as "criminal suspects," (and many were) even if there was no evidence of any lawbreaking.

I recall reading long ago about one Merrill Jenkins, who, by the late 1950s was a renowned mechanical engineer at a St. Louis-based firm called National Rejectors Inc., a firm that designed and made mechanical coin acceptance devices for vending machines, pay phones and the like.

In 1959, Jenkins received a visit from some Treasury agents who were apparently concerned about the possibility of counterfeiters making large quantities of inexpensive phony slugs that could be easily used in machines that NR manufactured. Jenkins, believing he was helping protect the public from counterfeiters, told the T-men that a nickel-plated copper disk (costing only a few cents each to make) of the same size, shape and mass of each of the present silver coins in circulation could "fool" coin acceptance devices.

Six years later, under the auspices of the 1965 Coinage Act signed into law by LBJ, our silver coinage was replaced by the exact cupronickel disks described by Jenkins. Three years later, all remaining silver certificates in circulation were recalled and exchanged for Federal Reserve Notes (not silver as required by law.) In reaction to what he believed was the further "fiatization" of US currency, Jenkins quit NR and self-published numerous books on money, two of the most notable being "Treatise on Monetary Reform" and "Free Money."

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Note: It is not known whether this work has ever been published.
Thank you Aeryn-Sun for contributing this piece.

Letter to Wendy McElroy

2006-05-27T15:37:00.000-04:00

Thank you for the outstanding piece you wrote published by Fox News, "War Comes With Unintended Consequences." Tragically, the warmongers and the jingoists in the USA are now ruling the day, bamboozled by the classic scaremongering tactics which have echoed down the ages from Caesar's "Spartacus approaches" to the "Reichstag Fire," to "vast right wing conspiracies," the "globally ambitious Red Chinese" and latest on the scene of all-encompassing evil--Washington, DC's former best Cold War friend and 21st century version of Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden.

It comes down to this. Our government is interested in one thing, more and more power for itself and will stop at nothing, including deliberately taking the lives of its own citizens to do so. First the Weavers at Ruby Ridge. Then the Davidians at Waco. Then OKC. Now, four planeloads of innocent airline passengers. And the perpetrators on the planes are also conveniently dead. The body count just somehow keeps going up, doesn't it? All we are getting are endlessly repeated images of crumbling skyscrapers, a prolonged "Two-Minutes Hate" directed at Osama bin-Goldstein and blather about how the four destroyed airliners' "black boxes" are somehow destroyed or unsalvageable. Meanwhile, our anti-Islamic Pope George has said nothing about ending years of US support for the barbaric Albanian Moslem KLA "freedom fighters" (infested with bin-Laden-trained operatives) waging a war of extermination against the Serbs and Macedonians.

We have another Reichstag Fire on our hands--and already, even as the smoke and dust has barely cleared, people are listening to calls for martial law, mass expulsion of all foreigners and police state legislation; look at the Constitution-busting "antiterrorist" legislation we in the USA got after OKC, where another "lone nut Oswald" Timothy McVeigh supposedly did all of the damage he did solo. And a lot of good that legislation did, if the media's initial claims of what really happened are true. Like Oswald, McVeigh is dead, as are the skyjackers, and the dead can't talk. The OKC bombing left far more troubling questions than it ever answered, as probably will this conflagration. JFK lied about Cuba, LBJ lied about Vietnam. Dick Nixon lied about Watergate. Bill Clinton lied about everything including his shoe size. Jimmy Carter couldn't tell the difference.

The US government freely piled sophisticated arms, military training and billions of dollars in financial aid on these Islamic countries for decades. This, as part of our longstanding Mideastern policy of "arms for oil," (or, in the classic Kissingerese of the era--"enabling the energy-rich nations to recycle their surplus oil revenues"--is bearing bitter fruit. We give away tons of complex military weaponry on the US taxpayer tab to any yahoo who claims to be a "freedom fighter" while politicians here quake in their boots at the thought of the average Joe and Jane having a firearm magazine that can hold more than ten measly rounds. The song from DC will remain the same--spew some hot air, launch a few missiles, give the strutting Walter Mitty warmongers and corporate socialists their vicarious thrills, then fast dispose of the whole thing down the memory hole when the opinion polls head south. Bush and Co. are spinning this for their own purposes and those dead air travelers and occupants of the wrecked WTC are their convenient "Bloody Shirt" to wave at the public. Bush AG John "I Don't Dance" Ashcroft babbles about "increased security" in the USA. Defense Secretary and former chief G.D. Searle pill-pusher Don Rumsfeld tells our GIs to "make more sacrifices." Everything is a big psychological test to gauge our reactions. For what, is the $64,000 question. The final touches of a fascist police state?

Our government snuffed Vickie Weaver, it incinerated the Davidians less than a year later and probably was instrumental in killing the occupants of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building two years to the day after that. It gleefully (and pusillanimously) carpet bombed innocent Serb civilians from 15,000 feet and is playing cat and mouse with what's left of Macedonia--and there is still no call for cutting off aid to the KLA or pulling our troops out of the Balkans. Our Drug Warriors and jack-booted thugs continue their depredations, the deaths in Santa Clarita, Calif. and Vandalia, Mich., now utterly forgotten. Rep. Gary Condit got the best "get out of jail free card" any crook could ever dream of. The day late and a dollar short dolts at the FBI and CIA are quickly labeling bin Laden as the culprit, but their claims sound strangely more like off-key ass-covering (amid solid evidence both agencies ignored several warnings of the disaster in advance) than thoughtful analysis.

Recall the German "Operation Himmler" on August 31, 1939? After weeks of Goebbels' propaganda against Warsaw, German troops dressed in Polish army uniforms crossed into Poland in the dead of night, crossed back into Germany and torched a Rundfunk commercial radio station near the town of Gleiwitz, leaving behind the body of a concentration camp inmate dressed in a Polish army uniform. Berlin shouted about "Polish aggression" and W.W. II began the next day. Could another sort of "Operation Himmler," this time larger and much more sophisticated, have been carried out? Were the actual executors of the 9/11 disaster the "Polish uniforms," so to speak? What's to stop our government from doing or allowing something like what happened on that fateful day for its own complex and nefarious purposes? I am certain that there are various types of well-supported agents provocateurs who in the interests of covering their tracks, employ various scattered groups in temporary "blind alliance" covers, groups who, after the fact, are truly surprised that another, diametrically opposite group was involved. For all we know, at the moment, the culprits could be little green men from Mars, disgruntled Bob Marley fans or Colombian narco-terrorists, which would cast a whole new light on the situation. And isn't it strange our smug and shrill but dumb and dangerous Drug Warriors haven't chimed in with their pet "international drug dealer theory" yet? Our government has repeatedly lied to us about so many things for so long, why should this calamity make any difference in the spin? Don't count on ever finding out anything for certain.

In reaction, the 2001 version of the "Remember the Maine" crowd is in full bloom and the spin (from a mainstream media who had bleated that Bill Clinton's crimes in office "did not rise to the level of impeachment") is vicious. Those like Captain Charles Sigsbee (the USS Maine skipper who unsuccessfully tried to quash Hearst/TR-led war fever in 1898 by demanding that no one be blamed until a full investigation of the battleship's explosion and sinking was complete) are again being labeled as traitors and degenerates and other off-color names that too many infantilized, video-vitiated, self-absorbed Americans use against anyone anywhere who intelligently and constructively disagrees with them in any way. Note: A 1976 Navy investigation directed by the famed Admiral Hyman Rickover (the renowned father of the US "nuclear-powered Navy") found the Maine was actually destroyed and sunk by an explosion and fire started when fine coal dust in its fuel bunkers ignited which also, in chain-reaction, detonated munitions stored in adjoining ammunition lockers, not by "a Spanish mine" as the Hearst papers of the day screamed.

Chancellor Bush and friends will try to get more restrictive legislation of some kind enacted, sooner or later--and the self-proclaimed "patriots and constitutionalists," phony tough and crazy brave, deluded by momentary bloodlust and by decades of the mindless deification of an unconstitutionally ever-more powerful US executive branch, will gleefully give it to him, no questions asked. Can't happen? It already has. On Sept. 15, 2001, Congress passed a resolution giving President Bush broad and unlimited authority to wage war against terrorism anywhere in the world--the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution meets Nazi Germany's 1934 Enabling Act. Calls for national ID cards with implanted personal and biometric data have arisen. Many ISP's that staunchly opposed installing the FBI's "Carnivore" surveillance system are now reversing course. The US Senate, days after the disaster, passed a measure intended to massively expand federal warrantless wiretap and surveillance powers (the House of Representatives has yet to vote on the measure.) And don't be surprised if that massive illegal alien amnesty bill that Dubya and his corporate buddies in industries ranging from software to underwear want so badly and is the ticket for turning the US Southwest into an giant American Kosovo is quietly tacked on as a rider to a huge defense appropriations bill as well as a massive tax hike.

Bush, Clinton and the rest are on the same team of UN globonazis. What's next, bluehelmets coming to a neighborhood near you? Henry Kissinger said a decade ago that Americans would soon welcome UN peackeepers in their communities.

We knew what could possibly happen. We chose to ignore it for a long time. Our thoughtless greed and overweening imperial arrogance are biting us back, hard. More specifically, our past decade's trinity of pampered, loathsome Ivy League degenerates and their minions in the White House and elsewhere have the blood of thousands on their hands and their only concern is the next election. And the worst is yet to come. Ohio GOP Senator Robert A. Taft's August 1943 jeremiad that imperialism abroad, no matter how well intentioned, eventually leads to totalitarianism at home has tragically come to pass, as has proof that poet Robinson Jeffers' long ago view that the USA does indeed suffer from a severe "introversion complex."

One thing I have learned during this entire debacle is who one's friends really are. The phony "conservatives" who secretly love state power when it fulfills their camo-clad Rambo wannabe fantasies (which seems to be the case right now--look at the appalling wholesale bigotry, censorship and saber-rattling at FreeRepublic.com, for example) are worse than the "liberals"--who at least are upfront and consistent about their nefarious statist motives and goals. I wonder what the hadcore "keep and bear arms" types will do when Dubya asks that Americans "turn over any unused or extra firearms" for the needs of the "war effort?" Probably gleefully comply.

This "beer commercial patriotism" now tragically infests much of our nation, exhibited mainly by those who act out their infantile anger over their personal insignificance and neurotic need for some bizarre kind of "celebrity" by indulging in a bogus "TR-style" swagger. A lot of these people live in small, molecular worlds--I'll bet a lot of them have never left their home county much less their home country, and, like the character of Chance, the poorly educated gardener Peter Sellers brilliantly played in the 1979 film "Being There," they have all of their views of the world moderated through the idiot box, their minds rubbish heaps of cotton-candy trivia and moronic sound bites passed off (and thoughtlessly accepted) as definitive knowledge about and understanding of the world around them. Plato had these sort of people in mind in his dialogue, "Allegory of a Cave."

The greatest threat to liberty are people just like that, ones Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand called "the second-raters," the well-fed, smug, unmoored, clueless folk like the character of Peter Keating in her novel "The Fountainhead"--whose deliberate self-absorption, haughty cultivated ignorance and obsessively self-referential chauvinism keeps a society mindlessly slouching toward totalitarianism.

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Note: This work is undated and it is not known if it was ever sent to Ms. McElroy, or if it was ever published.
Thanks to Aeryn-Sun for this contribution.

Kreca on International Intelligence Organizations and State-Sponsored Terrorism (Untitled, Unpublished)

2006-05-27T15:04:00.000-04:00

"If Jesus Christ were to stand up today, he'd be gunned down cold by the CIA."
- The The, "Armageddon Days", Mind Bomb, Epic Records, 1991

A major strategic principle states that the success of most domestic rebellions, insurgencies or revolutionary movements is closely dependent upon the level of interest by or aid from an outside power. History has confirmed this principle-- that, with few exceptions, any insurgency, regardless of its size and extent, cannot survive without the support of a wide spectrum of the native populace and some kind of sympathetic and influential external ally. Rebels cannot successfully undermine the state's authority unless they possess the financial, logistical and political support of agents whose influence equals or surpasses the domestic government's power. These agents may be internally based (like the French anti-Gaullist resistance), but, in general, they tend to be an external third power.

In the West, this hypothesis has always been used to explain the existence of Soviet-Chinese backed "left-wing" terrorism in the 1970s and Islamic-backed terrorism today and is a worldview still held by the US-based Center for International Affairs (a favorite home-away-from-home for Nixon national security adviser Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski) an institution that endorsed Center member David Galula’s statement that "no revolutionary war can remain a purely internal affair." The Center for International Affairs (and its close cousin, Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies--CSIS) employed this worldview to promote the perception the USSR (or in some cases, China) lay behind all incidents of international terrorism. The prestige and influence of CSIS disciples in the US intelligence community was so great that when the CIA's own analysts couldn't find documented proof of a global Soviet-led terrorist conspiracy, Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, chose to rely solely on the information of journalist Claire Sterling in her sensationalistic 1981 book, The Terror Network, one which made the preposterous and unverified claim the KGB was somehow behind every terrorist act on the planet since at least 1968.

Director Casey once shouted to his analysts in fury, "I paid $13.95 for this (Sterling's book) and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." The irony was that Sterling's book had made extensive use of source material that was in fact already part of a long-running CIA disinformation scheme. The Agency’s 'wise old men' also enthusiastically pushed the "Kremlin did it" assertion, one that soon morphed into the widely belief that Iran and Libya (and in some cases, Iraq and Syria--both conveniently onetime Soviet Mideast client states) were solely responsible for the promotion of radical Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world.

However, while the mainstream media has been willing to exaggerate and even fabricate the truth of these claims, they have remained silent in regard to the US government's deep involvement in the active promotion of that very terrorism they claim to bemoan. A deeper look into the issue clearly shows the key players in this terrorism originate from regions that are firmly in the Western sphere of influence. Although the Islamic Jihad has numerous Iranian and Iraqi members (and has used Iran, Iraq Syria and Libya as safe havens), its major influences (and leaders) come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria--nations where Western political and cultural influence is extensive. Moreover, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamic fundamentalism could not have bloomed without the CIA's deliberate covert assistance--a fact that is apparent when one examines the recent history of the region.

Those who have employed religious faith to justify endless war are thus much closer to the White House, UN headquarters and 10 Downing Street than they are to Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus or Tripoli. However, it isn't just among Islam's minority that racism or arrogance is exploited. A huge global network of government intelligence agencies, a self-styled “anti-Communist” element in the Vatican, multinational corporations and banks, the underworld and powerful fugitive Nazis has been in place for over a half-century.

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, the new totalitarians have manipulated the world's ethnic, political and religious tensions by using this huge clandestine network to surreptitiously gain more power for themselves. The influence of this network reaches Latin America, the USA and Western Europe, and, today, in Russia, China and in the conflict within the former Yugoslavia. There are even indicators that elements of this espionage monster have reached as far as Africa and Australasia. Through a combination of governments and their authorized enforcers, powerful individuals, corporations, banks and various secret societies, the liberty of the world’s peoples are being gradually destroyed. State-sponsored terrorism, direct or indirect, has become the new means by which the aspiring dictators' old strategy of divide and conquer is being implemented on a global scale.

In July 1977, Pakistan's prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed (and later executed) in a CIA-backed coup led by Bhutto’s army chief of staff, General Mohammed Zia Al-Haq. Zulfikar's daughter, Benazir, placed under house arrest by Zia, believed the motive behind this coup and her father's subsequent death sentence was a reaction to his desire (with French technical assistance) to turn Pakistan into a nuclear power in response to neighboring India's similar program inaugurated three years before, one in which he succeeded. Henry Kissinger warned that Bhutto's nuclearization policy would result in Pakistan being turned into a "horrible example."

Once Zia had taken over, the CIA moved in, and its overseas station in Islamabad soon became its largest while Congress paradoxically imposed an arms embargo on the country. Carter Administration National Security Adviser Brzezinski wanted to use Pakistan as a base to help turn the nearby USSR’s Moslem provinces against the Kremlin and thus eventually destabilize the entire country. Thus, despite Congress’s arms embargo, the CIA and Pakistan's secret service, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in CIA history, two years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Radical Islamic fundamentalism was to be deliberately promoted to attain specific Cold War political objectives. In return, General Zia, banking on his image as the great Islamic crusader, built up a loyal following amongst the Pushwar people who inhabited the Pakistani-Afghani border and was quick to staff his military and security forces with numerous Pushwars.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner, via Pakistan’s ISI, included Afghans fighting the Soviets in their pro-Islamic/anti-Soviet policy as part of trying to transform the conflict into a large-scale holy war, an Islamic jihad. This action, it was believed would make this war the USSR’s Vietnam. In a way, it did, but Afghan conflict soon turned out to be much more than that. For the next decade, the CIA and the ISI recruited, armed, trained and funded almost 100,000 hardcore muhajedin from 40 different Islamic countries, commanded by a then-obscure Harvard educated civil engineer and Arab construction tycoon named Osama bin Laden, as crusaders for the USA's proxy war. This Islamic Foreign Legion’s rank and file was largely unaware its jihad was actually being fought on behalf of and paid for by Uncle Sam. (The irony is that the Uncle Sam was equally unaware that it was foolishly financing a future jihad against itself.)

The arrival of Soviet glasnost and perestroika amid the bloody military stalemate in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s meant nothing to General Zia and he continued to publicly preach that he had secured his power as the world leader of militant anti-Communist Islam. Zia appeared not even to have had a glimmer of suspicion when in 1984 the Reagan Administration, via the CFR (another refuge for Kissinger, Brzezinski and their globalist allies), strenuously lobbied for Benazir Bhutto’s release from her seven-year-long house arrest. The three front men for this task were Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island as well as State Department official Peter Galbraith (a onetime college classmate of Benazir’s.) The Kennedy clout aside, it was an interesting selection. The former Sen. Pell had been a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee while Galbraith later became US Ambassador to Croatia.

Benazir Bhutto's release had proved useful in undermining the “increasingly uncooperative” General Zia, and in 1985 she won the seat of Chairman of the General Assembly. Zia contested the election results and remained a political threat to Bhutto (and an embarrassment to the USA) until his sudden death in a mysterious (and possibly deliberately caused) 1986 plane crash. It wasn’t until 1993 (after two dissolved governments and two assassination attempts later) that Benazir was able to wrest presidential power away from Zia's sidekick and successor, President Ghulam Ishaq Kha (Chairman of the Senate under Zia's administration). As time passed, her comparatively secure presidential position was attributed by many to be as a result of her belief in the extensive use of human intelligence (spies and informers) and her ruthless approach to geopolitics. Despite Benazir Bhutto's assistance in unseating both Zia and Kha, she was clearly not the “puppet leader” the CFR and the CIA had in mind.

Meanwhile, in 1989, after being severely bloodied by 10 years of relentless, inconclusive warfare, the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving behind a civilization reduced to rubble. The CIA continued to send funds and arms, but the expense had become astronomical, and more money was needed. In response, the muhajedin ordered local farmers to plant, harvest and process opium as a form of what they called a "revolutionary tax". Over the next six years, the ISI set up hundreds of small opium processing plants across Afghanistan. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border had become the world’s biggest producer of heroin, and is now the single biggest source of the heroin on North American and European streets. The annual profits, estimated to be about $150 billion yearly, were invested in the continued training and arming of Islamic militants who eventually graduated into staffing radical Moslem insurgencies from the Middle East to the Balkans.

Benazir knew full well who was behind the promotion of Islamic terrorism. Just before her spring of 1995 visit to the USA she had held a news conference where she stated, "The question that arises is, who was the mastermind that saw that the World Trade Center should be bombed and that I should be eliminated from the [1993] elections...? I would think that it is those individuals who were involved in the Afghan jihad because they were then brainwashed to believe that it was the duty of any Moslem to spread Islam through terror."

Her remarks, in politicoese, translated as "I have a secret: shall I reveal it?," pinched a nerve in the world's press. The 18-year long US arms embargo that had been imposed upon Pakistan in the Carter administration in reaction to Islamabad's refusal to halt nuclear weapons research was lifted shortly before her 1995 visit. The slim majority in Congress's authorization to do so indicated the presence of intense lobbying on the issue. Pakistan then received the $368 million in military equipment originally purchased under the Zia administration, and the revival of tens of millions of dollars worth of economic aid and US loan guarantees. It also meant increased International Monetary Fund assistance. As far as Congress and the public knew, Pakistan wasn't required to do or offer anything in return for this largesse.

The Clinton Administration's sudden goodwill towards Pakistan at the time was evidence that all interested parties didn't want the issue of the February 1993 New York Trade Center bombing to ever resurface--in particular, the CIA’s connection to the accused Egyptian and Pakistani bombers. Years before, in October 1981, following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the US and Egyptian governments had chosen to step up their infiltration of the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist groups--a move that occurred partly in response to the CIA's desire to avoid another Sadat assassination, and partly to use it as a propaganda weapon against Libya and Iran (and now Iraq). Thus, by 1990, the situation in Egypt was such that no Islamic militant could take a bath without the Egyptian or US intelligence services knowing about it.

The actual degree of this infiltration's success is best demonstrated by the 1995 trial of the accused New York World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution evidence included videotape recorded by an FBI informant, a former Egyptian army officer who offered to defuse the planted truck bomb but was refused by the FBI. The witness denied that he was an Egyptian intelligence agent; however, US officials admitted at the time, "He's no choirboy." The informer received over $2 million for his "assistance." This is an interesting contradiction of a US law that states that it is illegal to use American taxpayers' money to pay a bribe to a convicted murderer.

In 1996, the Taliban--then one of many small marginal sects of dangerous, hardline Islamic fundamentalists supported by the US government--had shot and terrorized its way into absolute power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old friend of the CIA, and supported by many Pakistani political parties. The Taliban unleashed a reign of terror and its first victims were, unsurprisingly, their own people. The Taliban closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's lousy human rights record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its subjects.

Afghanistan was not the only nation whose Islamic fundamentalists were deliberately aided by the West. In Algeria and France, powerful forces with ulterior motives have also long encouraged Islamic guerrillas. Algerian Moslem fundamentalists received intelligence data and logistical support from elements within France's own government. In 1996, the Police Judiciae (the French version of the FBI) accused Jean Louis Dèbre, the French Interior Minister, of misdirecting the security forces for "political motives." Likewise, French police have been accused of cooperating with the Spanish secret service in the creation of the GAL (anti-terrorist liberation group) death squads in their war against Basque separatists. Witnesses have stated under oath French police, police informers and former OAS members assisted with GAL activities within France.

The OAS was a large French terrorist organization violently opposing attempts at Algerian independence during the 1950s and early '60s, a group which counted numerous Corsican gangsters as members and its close links to Islamic Algerian radicals. As far back as 1961, Senior OAS Commander Jean-Jacques Sysini discussed with the CIA's Paris station chief the possibility of a French-Algerian Moslem alliance. President Kennedy, though, quashed the CIA-OAS-Muslim Republic scheme on the advice of his political advisers before it could be implemented.

However, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, a crime which some believe involved as a triggerman (among others) one Rene Soutre, a powerful Corscian mobster and OAS member who was killed by an unknown assailant in Mexico City nine years later. JFK was barely in his grave when the CIA's use of covert operations increased dramatically. The CIA took advantage of Kennedy’s sudden and bloody death as well as Lyndon Johnson’s thorough disdain for the subtleties of foreign policy to increase aid to the OAS and other non-governmental Moslem groups in France and Algeria to ensure neither the French nor an "unfriendly" (read: Soviet-influenced) government would obtain control of the large Algerian oilfields. The exposure of OAS involvement puts another perspective upon the Algeria-related terrorist attacks within France and Algeria itself. The French have long accused Paris and US/British oil companies of collaborating in support of the OAS and Moslem rebels.

However, the OAS wasn’t the only government-backed underground goon squad of the era. During the 1954-62 Algerian crisis a similar but separate group gradually emerged from the shadows. Like the OAS, it was a large cabal comprised of many powerful individuals with apparent (if not necessarily real) staunch religious based anti-Soviet beliefs and the OAS’s (and the CIA’s) desire to rid France of the nonaligned Charles de Gaulle, a group named Il Gladio ("The Sword"). In 1990, then-Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti briefed Parliament in open session on Il Gladio--a covert but influential network of an estimated 15,000 agents provocateurs that operated under various guises in many other European nations, not just in Italy. He explained Il Gladio had been originally set up as the CIA's Operation Stay Behind in 1947 and, nine years later, was renamed "Operation Gladio."

Stay Behind’s/Gladio’s initial mission was to reduce the considerable influence of French and Italian Communists right after W.W.II via hefty cash payments to "cooperative" Italian and French politicians, diplomats and influential businessmen (later, this would include Belgian, Austrian, German, Spanish and Greek ones as well) and by employing what was called a "strategy of tension." This “strategy” made frequent use of scare tactics, media smear campaigns as well as the services of freelance mercenaries, government intelligence officers, hardened career criminals and Mafia hitmen to carry out bloody shootings and bombings where groups like the Italian "Red Brigade" and the German “Baader-Meinhof Gang” were either blamed directly or infiltrated and used as “fronts” for these activities.

These deadly attacks included the Mafia’s orchestration of the Red Brigade's notorious 1978 kidnap and murder of staunchly anti-Mafia Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The strategy in these high-profile crimes was to manipulate citizens' fear of "terrorism" to push for more government police power. Gladio employed many former Axis intelligence officers who, under former General Reinhard Gehlen and Eisenhower's CIA director, Allen Dulles, had been recruited immediately after W.W.II to help create the CIA. One of these officers was the infamous Licio "The Puppetmaster" Gelli, a former high-ranking Italian Fascist "Blackshirt" and longtime head of the powerful Vatican-Mafia Masonic Lodge founded in 1895, called "Propaganda Due" or P2.

Gelli, who had served with Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War, helped organize the underground "ratlines" responsible for smuggling scores of powerful Nazis and their sympathizers out of Europe immediately after World War II. He was aided by Father Krunoslav Draganovich, a Croat Catholic priest and close friend of fascist (Ustasha) Croatia's notorious wartime leader, Dr. Ante Pavelich. While Gelli worked with the respective intelligence agencies (which included those of the CIA, MI5 and fugitive Gestapo officials), Fr. Draganovich secured generous Vatican support for the ratline plan.

Gelli and Draganovich charged the fleeing fascists up to 40 per cent of their money that they split between themselves. Nazi SS Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Klaus "The Butcher of Lyon" Barbie (a longtime member of the influential neo-pagan Thule Society) was also helped to flee in this manner, and US Army picked up the tab (via unwitting US taxpayers) as part of their recruitment of Barbie as an agent. In 1954, Gelli himself took advantage of his own creation, escaping from a Swiss prison and fleeing to Argentina where he resided as a friend of Argentine dictator Juan Peron. Another of Gelli's longtime friends, Dr. Pavelich (who had arrived in Buenos Aires with Gelli's help seven years before) served as Peron's secret police chief until his death in 1957, while Klaus Barbie, who fled Europe a year after Gelli had, held a similar position in bordering Bolivia under the alias of Klaus Altmann.

During the 1970s, both Gelli and Barbie/Altmann (along with California investment swindler and CIA operative Ronald Rewald) were instrumental in helping Argentina secure large numbers of sophisticated French Exocet antiship missiles, one that sank the British frigate HMS Sheffield during Argentina's 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands (Islas de Malvinas.) Funds for these missiles were obtained by Rewald from a bogus but cash rich Napa, California real estate investment trust called Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, simply known as BBRDW, a CIA front which laundered drug money and scammed scores of ordinary Napa and San Francisco Bay area homeowners and investors out of millions of dollars.

On July 17, 1980, Barbie/Altmann, commanding secret police and military officers loyal to the corrupt General Luis Garcia Meza, and aided by P2, the CIA, Colombian drug lords and Argentine military intelligence, prevented the inauguration of freely-elected incoming President Siles Zuazo and his Democratic Popular Unity Party in a bloody debacle that came to be popularly called "The Cocaine Coup." General Meza was installed as president while Barbie's men hunted down and killed as many pro-Zuazo government officials, journalists, students and labor leaders as they could find, though Zuazo himself survived the purge. One Argentine intelligence officer who participated in the coup, Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, later described to German journalist Kai Hermann Barbie's role in the matter:

"Before our departure [to Bolivia], we received a detailed dossier on [Barbie]," Mingolla said. "There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against Communism."

The Barbie-led “Cocaine Coup” gave Bolivian narcotics traffickers full run of the country and helped to consolidate the power of the rising Colombian Medellin cartel. Bolivian cocaine exports reportedly totaled an estimated $850 million in the two years after the "Cocaine Coup." In October 1982, angry voters weary of brutal military rule returned the redoubtable Siles Zuazo to the presidency. A few months later, Zuazo quickly approved the extradition of Barbie to France. In 1987, Barbie was tried and convicted of war crimes (chief among them his sadistic torture-murder of highest-ranking French Resistance member ever captured by the Nazis, Jean Moulin) and sentenced to life in prison where he died in September 1991.

As noted above in the Bolivian example, both Latin American and Caribbean nations have been badly harmed by the deeply corrosive effects of these odious CIA/P2/Vatican/Ratline exports, becoming homes to some of the worst cases of state sponsored terror in existence--aided by corrupt governments in those nations, by groups like Alpha 66 and Omega 7--both “anti-Castro” Cuban exile organizations based in south Florida, and by CIA goons like William Walker. Walker, who organized and led the bloodthirsty government “death squads” in El Salvador during the late 1970s, also fabricated the “Racak Massacre” hoax. This hoax (conclusively exposed as such by Finnish forensic physicians and French journalists) claimed heavily armed Serb police wantonly massacred hundreds of unarmed Albanian villagers in the Kosovo village of Racak in August 1998. Walker’s hoax was employed by the Clinton administration to smear the Serb government in the world press—a government that was fighting hardcore Albanian Moslem KLA insurgents trained and armed by the US government—as a “brutal ethnic cleanser.”

Before the likes of Walker hit the scene, another of the Agency’s golden boys was the late Dan Mitrione, a former Richmond, Indiana police chief, graduate of the infamous International Police Academy in Washington DC (closed in 1974) and "interrogation" (torture) specialist. For ten years, the appallingly sadistic Mitrione, working undercover as a US Agency for International Development official, taught torture techniques to the Brazilian and Uruguayan secret police. In 1970, Mitrione, a lifelong close friend of the notorious Rev. Jim Jones, founder and head of the ill-fated "People's Temple" religious cult, (which had been manipulated by the CIA in some form since at least the early 1970s) was kidnapped and then killed by Uruguayan Tupamaro guerrillas. Actor Yves Montand played the Mitrione character in Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras' 1972 production, State of Siege.

Meanwhile, back in Italy, P2 had been for years suspected of clandestinely carrying out terrorist acts for which other groups were blamed and was also suspected of being behind the 1976 assassination of Italian judge Vittorio Occorsio. At the time, Judge Occorsio was investigating P2 links to neo-Nazi organizations. His death killed his P2 investigation but not before he had uncovered evidence that Operation Gladio and P2 operatives were instrumental in the 1969 Piazza Fontana and 1974 Bologna train station bombings (a total of 113 dead and some 185 injured.) In reaction, P2 officially "dissolved" itself--perhaps in name but not in substance.

Even so, however, the supposedly defunct P2 was dealt a severe blow in 1981 when Italian police, attempting to clarify Licio Gelli's business connections to powerful Banco Ambrosiano (BA) officials and P2 members, financier Michele Sindona and bank president Roberto Calvi, discovered a P2 membership-roll document bearing 962 names. The list included over 50 Italian generals and admirals, two cabinet members, 36-plus senior Carabinieri (police officers) as well as numerous journalists, Catholic clergymen and entertainers.

These revelations toppled Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani's administration and sent shock waves through NATO headquarters in Brussels. Yet Tina Anselmi, director of the now disbanded Italian parliamentary commission investigating P2 and its activities, was quoted by David Yallop in his 1984 book, In God's Name, as saying, "P2 is by no means dead. It still has power. It is working in the institutions. It is moving in society. It has money, means and instruments still at its disposal. It still has fully operative power centers in South America. It is also able to condition, at least in part, Italian political life." In turn, if events in France (whose secret service, the SDECE, prevented Gelli's arrest in 1982 by the Italian secret service SIFAR) and Spain were any indicators, it would appear this colossal web of espionage and terror is far from untangled and is in fact growing exponentially.

If Gladio operatives were the front line troops in Gelli's operation, then P2 was its "shadow government." It was expensive to operate all of this, however, and one insight into how Gelli was intimately connected with ruling circles is demonstrated in his secret 1974 meeting with Alexander Haig, retired Army general and former NATO Supreme Commander who had become Nixon's White House chief of staff. Haig assured Gelli of continued funding for both P2 and his various black ops. This is where the doomed Roberto Calvi entered the picture. Both Calvi's BA and the Vatican's Instituto per de Riligione (IOR) became conduits for laundered money of all sorts from all over the planet. Under the direction of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of Cicero, Ill., head of the IOR, money was flowing into the Holy See's coffers from a number of sources, and included funds for Operation Gladio/P2 and drug money from organized crime figures.

There have been several published reports that Cardinal Albino Luciana, elected Pope John Paul I in July 1978, was intent on ending the crooked activities of the IOR as well as the tenure of Archbishop Marcinkus. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain how 33 days after his election to the papacy, an otherwise healthy John Paul I had been found in his bed dead of an apparent and sudden heart attack. In any case, the new Pope -- Cardinal Karel Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II -- was elected as successor, and he continued the "business as usual" agenda. The failed May 1981 attempt on John Paul II’s life by one Mehmet Ali Agca, a member of the “radical Islamic” Turkish Gray Wolves organization, didn’t affect "business as usual" at the IOR either. American Enterprise Institute member and former Reagan administration aide (and Freeper) Dr. Michael Ledeen received $100,000 from the Italian military intelligence officer and P2 member Francesco Pazienza for deliberately creating and disseminating the widely accepted but patently false "Agca-Bulgarian/Soviet connection" to the failed papal assassination. Ledeen, who is also believed to be a P2 member along with Henry Kissinger and Alex Haig, had also helped convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard originally get his job in the Department of the Navy.

Meanwhile, BA was in dire financial straits. Calvi began skimming from illicit funds flowing through BA to prop up existing bad loans, and even agreed to "launder" drug money for gangsters. He reportedly sought financial aid from a Catholic organization called the Opus Dei ("God's Work") a secretive but large and politically influential masochistic/self-flagellation cult of which John Paul II is a member (as is FBI Director Louis Freeh), and traveled to London to meet with group's treasurer in hopes of selling it a minority stake in BA. But Calvi’s good luck had run out. He’d double-crossed too many powerful people for too long and his wholesale skimming operation threatened to set off a massive political scandal. On June 17, 1982, Calvi was found hanging by a rope around his neck from a bridge in Rome, dead. A decade later, a Mafia defector told investigators Calvi had been killed on the orders of a British drug dealer named Francesco DiCarlo.

Two years after Calvi’s death, in 1984, the Vatican received official diplomatic recognition from the U.S. government, and soon over $12 million in American covert ops funds were being funneled through the Vatican Bank to aid the underground Solidarity trade union in its battle against the tottering Communist regime in Poland, and to help ensure both the breakup of the USSR and solidify the Roman church's position in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

Italian court documents made public in July 1998, four months before Licio Gelli's death, traced the flow of illicit funds during the 1970s and 1980s from powerful Sicilian mobsters to investments in the Vatican Bank. In connection with the "spectacular failure" of BA, the London Daily Telegraph reported, "The Holy See resisted all attempts by magistrates investigating the crash to force the now-retired Marcinkus to submit to Italian justice over the crash." Another twist involved a new probe by Italian authorities into Calvi's murder, and a Daily Telegraph story that a "Vatican finance figure" (possibly Bishop Marcinkus) was present at the meeting where the plan to kill Calvi was discussed.

Why does the Vatican's involvement in the BA/Calvi affair, like CIA involvement in the Islamic Jihad, keep cropping up? The criminal organizations behind the scandal had links to the IOR and the Vatican hierarchy. In late August 1998, it was announced Michele Giordano, Archbishop of Naples, was under investigation for usury, extortion and membership in a criminal group." Government prosecutors and members of Italy's Finance Guards (tax agents) served the archbishop with a search warrant at his "palace.” In reaction, Giordano threatened a diplomatic incident and claimed his residence, being an office of the papacy, enjoyed diplomatic immunity and extraterritorial status. Even so, investigators still seized a large number of paper documents and electronic files on floppy disks.

The Cardinal's younger brother, Mario, had been arrested earlier that month in connection with Rome’s probe of the Bank of Naples. Two other Bank of Naples officials--including a former manager--were charged with extortion and running an illegal loan-sharking operation that charged interest rates as high as 400%. "Investigators have traced back to the cardinal and his administration cheques totaling more than 250,000 pounds cashed by his brother...” noted the Telegraph at the time.

P2 isn’t the only force of covert global totalitarianism that remains at large and in business. Similar groups are prevalent throughout Europe and the world as a whole. German, US, British and Austrian mercenaries served with Croat Ustasha and Bosnian Moslem troops in 1994-95 in their brutal campaign to kill or forcibly expel some 300,000 ethnic Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia and Bosnia. Yet again, the Balkans is serving its long-running historical role as a laboratory for “the great powers” to develop and test new methods of civil war, genocide and state-sponsored terror, with potentially deadly international consequences. The US and British governments denied the predominance of diehard Ustasha and radical Moslem elements within the respective Croat and Bosnian governments while, along with Germany and Israel, were both secretly supplying arms to those same elements from day one. Germany had sent nearly all of the Soviet-style arms used by the defunct East German forces (ranging from Kalashnikov assault rifles and 130mm field guns to SAMs and attack helicopters) to the Croats.

A great deal of weapons and funds also came from Pakistan, Indonesia and possibly even from Iran and Iraq. Logistical support was provided to the Croat and Bosnian armies by the USA, allied UN troops and, according to local rumors, members of the French Foreign Legion in Sarajevo. According to the relative of a high-ranking Indonesian military official, one such airlift took place in August 1994 when New Zealand UN troops brought, along with their own gear, Indonesian-made small arms earmarked for the Bosnian Moslem forces.

This report has not been positively verified. However, it is on record that in early September 1994, shortly after the arrival of New Zealand troops in that former Yugoslav republic, Bosnian Moslem forces launched a brutal counteroffensive against the Serbs using large stores of munitions and large numbers of new heavy weapons, previously noticeable only by their absence. How did they get so many of these arms so suddenly? Perhaps it is just coincidence that, a week later, Indonesia awarded New Zealand Telecom an NZ$600 million contract to develop Indonesia's wireless communications network.

At the same time, New Zealand television had run an investigative report on the connection of a joint NZ-Israeli airline, Pacific Express, to the illegal arms trade. The documentary cited the airline's flight routes and destinations that included Islamabad, Christchurch, Sarajevo and Somalia—flight paths closely matching the developing heroin trafficking routes running into North America at that time, echoing the messy Iran-Contra affair (and the nefarious activities of the CIA airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia and, later, in Latin America) where promotion of large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking and terrorism and the pursuit of more political power were justified in "the interests of national security."

While Pope Bush declares a holy war on Islam after the calamitous Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks (oddly enought, for which no group, Moslem or otherwise has yet claimed responsibility and amid allegations US authorities ignored several warnings of just such an attack months ago) and continues business as usual with Moslem Syria and a nuclear-armed Moslem Pakistan, the US government still freely supports the murderous Albanian Moslem KLA in Kosovo and Macedonia, a US government which even terror bombed Serbia in 1999--the same Serbia that was being attacked and terrorized by that very KLA, a terrorist organization which controls a huge and rapidly growing regional prostitution, extortion and narcotics trafficking network—the heroin coming from those highly profitable Taliban-controlled opium poppy fields along the Afghan-Pakistani border—and is exporting it to the rest of Europe, all on the US taxpayer’s tab.

What does all of this mean? Well, it seems to mean that the USA today is the late Roman Empire. Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee once explained that Rome, after defeating the Carthaginians, Phoenicians and quelling Spartacus's slave revolt (which destroyed the last vestiges of a republican Rome as well) became what he called "the universal state"--an imperial entity, much like China became after the "Era of Competing States." (480-222 BC.) The USA became the world's latest "universal state" after the collapse of the USSR in 1991--alias the "world's sole superpower." A universal state is like a shark--it cannot stop swimming or eating or it will die--an empire needs constant expansion and plunder or it too will die, and guess what, in the case of empires—in a given era there's only so much territory to go around and only so much plunder to be had.

In order to help keep this process of plunder in motion, foreign “straw man” enemies have to be constantly created, (Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Chinese, etc.) even if out of thin air and then aggressively “pursued,” but not necessarily destroyed. Police state methods then have to be used domestically to force “consensus” as to these “enemies” and what to be done or not done with them. Dissent is labeled “treason” because it resists “commonly agreed upon” imperial objectives. Ohio GOP Sen. Bob Taft said in August 1943 that interventionism abroad, no matter how well-intentioned, eventually leads to totalitarianism at home.

Moreover, those being conquered and plundered by this "universal state" soon get quite resentful and aggressive and by definition, over time, there are more and more resentful subjects--just like the barbarian “hordes” who eventually sacked an overextended and tottering Rome for the final time in the 400s and the subjugated Mexican Indian tribes who gleefully allied with the invading Spaniards to destroy the oppressive Aztec civilization in the 1520s. So, was Sept. 11, 2001 the first "sack" of the "New Rome?" It sure seems like it. Ruby Ridge and Waco were possibly the USA's "failed 1905 Revolutions"--echoes of far bigger things to come?

We as a people are so comprehensively manipulated. Our leaders have had a lot of practice, since before the days of Ivan Pavlov and his dogs. The "hit" on World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, like it or not, brilliant examples of sophisticated unconventional warfare. From a psychological viewpoint--it was even more effective. In psychological warfare— a group or person maintaining or gaining control of or destroying widely recognized monuments, territories or buildings is vital to convincing the populace of that group’s or person's effectiveness or legitimacy. It's why Richard Nixon tried to hold on to the White House (Presidency) and it's why Bill Clinton would not resign. It's why the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace, and why Gen. MacArthur returned with his troops to the Philippines in 1944, even though strategically it was not necessary for the US victory over Japan, and in fact may have prolonged the war in the Pacific. These and similar acts create solid psychological foundations supporting the legitimacy of and justifying anything that follows from these actions.

This leads me to believe the whole Sept. 11th disaster was some kind of elaborate psychological operation, that US government intelligence agencies were involved indirectly somehow. Thinking back to Germany's actual "Operation Himmler" in August 1939 (where German troops in Polish army uniforms burned a German radio station in the German-Polish border town of Gleiwitz to justify invading Poland) and the CIA's proposed "Operation Northwoods" in 1962 (where Cuban Communists would be blamed for the sudden bombing of a jetliner or hotel in Miami or for the failure of any US manned space mission)--I don't hesitate to entertain the notion that power-hungry, out-of-control Medusa-like Moloch of the US government will employ as many "Reichstag Fires" and kill scores of innocent people as necessary to extend its own power. Since the days of the demonization of Spartacus by Crassus, Caesar and Pompey and Robespierre's and Danton's deliberate use of violent "agents provocateurs" in the French Revolution to advance their own autocratic power--the song remains the same.

______________

Contributed by Aeryn-Sun at Liberty Forum. Many thanks!

Film and Book Reviews by Michael Kreca

2006-05-18T03:42:00.000-04:00

A collection of well-thought-out, expertly-written reviews by Michael Kreca, evaluating several interesting cinema and literary works.

Link to them here: Reviews by Michael Kreca at Amazon.com

Thanks to Shaman at nolajbs.net for alerting me to these.

Autobiography of Nikola Tesla - Translated by Michael Kreca

2006-05-17T15:18:00.000-04:00

The unpublished autobiography of Dr. Nikola Tesla, as translated by Michael Kreca.

Available here:
Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (PDF)

Thanks to Aeryn-Sun at Liberty Forum for contributing this work.

How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA

2006-05-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

by Michael E. Kreca | April 19, 2001

"The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written." - Dr. Sidney Gottlieb,
CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program
Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.

In September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry Anslinger.

The OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan’s Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.

Donovan’s team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn’t feel physically threatened, some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.

In May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia’s most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names of several high ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results of White’s tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly, the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold’s work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during 1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr. Strughold’s barbaric "medical experiments," for which his subordinates were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)

Sandoz Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However, the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that of Dr. Hofmann’s. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security" expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the pharmaceutical industry’s pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric treatment – actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision – is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles’s favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program's "official termination" eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP – also called "angel dust"), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords--making the US government and Lilly the first illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These were distributed via the agency’s sometime allies in organized crime and through the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA’s Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain&becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is condemning one’s opponent publicly for doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre "Dr. Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.

Meanwhile, George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war’s end and continued to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a high ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White’s team secretly filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA’s bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed Earman’s charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments were frightening:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on (Some) Drugs?

By the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA’s LSD research pioneers as:

Dr. Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
Dr. Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However, there were prominent critics of the US government’s activities, the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another novel entitled [i]The Doors of Perception[/i] in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."

Obviously, this isn’t a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley’s incredible mind, creative vision and compassion, we’re not talking about a moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they’re being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.

As author Marks noted:

"It would become supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous search for weapons among drugs – fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines – would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral’s son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother’s Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans’ Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer’s professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer’s influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During 1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary’s, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he remained for three years. Leary’s Harvard associates included former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray’s many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

Even so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught as an key part of the process.

However, much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to the public. One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During 1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.

Edgewood also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown acid."

BZ (some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones which aid the brain’s transfer of messages and instructions across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days, although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior – could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.

In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe’s 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine – the trademark "bad acid" of the day – which they were all on when, on Manson’s orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark’s numerous intelligence contacts.

These were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks – this is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of "the interest of national security" is used to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (in which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.
________________

Short Bibliography
Bowart, Walter; Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
Delgado, Jose, Physical Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
Lee, Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid Dreams, 1986.
Marchetti, Victor, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
Marks, John, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
Masters, Robert & Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
Meerloo, Joost, The Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
Smith, Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven – LSD and the American Dream, 1998.

_______________

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

Originally published at LewRockwell.com

The Needless US Pacific War with Japan - Courtesy of Stalin and FDR

2006-05-14T23:17:00.000-04:00

By Michael E. Kreca
web posted October 9, 2000

"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet…" - Rudyard Kipling

When Kipling penned those immortal words during the height of Pax Britannia in the 19th century, he believed East and West were so different in their respective civilizations and outlook that there would be no basis for any real understanding between the two hemispheres. True or untrue, at the times they each have met, it has often sadly been in the cauldron of warfare, and at least in the case of the United States, has consequently been expensive and largely fruitless.

Officially, the reason an expansionist, resource-poor Japan attacked the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii without warning on Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1941, was to quickly forestall any US potential interference in Tokyo's drive to seize and retain the resource rich possessions of the USA, Britain, Holland and France in the south Pacific Ocean. On surface, this is true. But to paraphrase famed British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, what lay "behind the scenes?"

Since the 1920s, the Soviets planned and hoped for a USA-Japan war because they believed such a conflict (one that they knew the USA would likely win) would help create a large Asian power vacuum which could then be quickly filled by Communism. The elimination of significant Japanese military, diplomatic and economic influence in the region, which dated back to the 1880s and was expanded by Japan's humiliating and conclusive military defeat of Russia in 1905, would give the Reds the opportunity they wanted. And thanks to FDR and Stalin, they got it.

Benjamin Gitlow was a founding and prominent member of the US Communist Party but was permanently expelled from the organization in 1933 for daring to openly criticize the crimes of Josef Stalin. He soon became a staunch anti-Communist and died at age 74 in 1965. Gitlow wrote in his revealing 1940 book entitled "I Confess: The Truth About American Communism:"

"As far back as 1927 when I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Soviet leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two. The Russians were hopeful that the war would break out soon, because that would greatly secure the safety of Russian-Siberian borders and would so weaken Japan that Russia would no longer have to fear an attack from her in the East. Stalin's hopes, through the activities of the US Communist Party, to create a public opinion in the United States that would favor a war, presumably in defense of democracy against the encroachment of fascism, but actually one against Japan. Stalin is perfectly willing to let Americans die in defense of the Soviet Union even if they are not members of the Communist Party..."

Roosevelt's predecessor Herbert Hoover had successfully resisted pressure to send US troops and military aid to China (other than maintaining the small contingent of US Navy river gunboats present there off and on since the mid-1850s to guard US economic assets) when the Japanese first occupied Manchuria in 1931. His reason was that the Chinese would eventually wear down Japan, just as they had eventually worn down every other invader throughout their history.

The Japanese premier during most of the crucial 1940-41 period was a member of the royal family, Prince Konoye Fuminaro. Konoye--whose power base lay with big business that was suffering under the burdensome costs of the inconclusive land war in China and US economic sanctions--proposed a meeting with FDR in Honolulu in August 1941 (breaking centuries of Japanese tradition and rigid protocol by meeting with a foreigner outside of Japan) in order to get the US to lift its embargo on longtime petroleum, iron ore and scrap metal exports to Japan. In exchange, Konoye was willing to withdraw Japanese troops from Indochina and sharply reduce its military presence in China.

The US and British ambassadors to Japan, Joseph C. Grew (a Herbert Hoover appointee) and Sir Robert Craigie, respectively both urged FDR to confer with Konoye and to agree to his terms. Grew especially was trying to avoid war with Japan and did everything he could to do so. Grew wrote:

"It seems to me highly unlikely that this chance will come again or that any Japanese statesman other than Prince Konoye could succeed in controlling the military extremists in carrying through a policy which they, in their ignorance of international affairs and economic laws, resent and oppose. The alternative to reaching a settlement now would be the greatly increased probability of war and while we would undoubtedly win in the end, I question whether it is in our own interest to see an impoverished Japan reduced to the position of a third-rate power."

Craigie agreed with Grew, stating tersely in a dispatch to London, "Time suitable for real peace with Japan. Hope this time American cynicism will not be allowed to interfere with realistic statesmanship." Churchill (whose own Foreign Office was riddled with Soviet spies, among them the notorious "Kim" Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was incensed with Craigie's conciliatory stance toward Tokyo. He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden:

"He (Craigie) should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent."

Moreover, there were four close Roosevelt advisers who, according to the US Army's 1940-48 communications surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Washington (a operation commonly known as "Venona"), were Soviet spies or sympathizers. These four spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew's and Craigie's negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s puppetmaster) New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and "adviser" to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR's "China expert"--one whom Mao Tse-tung's sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as "quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists."

All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a "united front against fascism." FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye.

Meanwhile, German Communist Richard Sorge's high-level Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, which had substantial influence on ranking Japanese military officers and numerous cabinet officials as well as close contacts with several German diplomats, helped steer Japanese strategy toward its existing Navy-based "Strike South" approach--conquest of the fruitful Pacific possessions of the West and away from the Army-based "Strike North" approach which targeted Siberia and Soviet Central Asia.

The "Strike North" strategy had already largely fallen from favor after Japan's massive defeat by the Red Army at Nomonhan, Mongolia in August 1939. This defeat led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact which ensured the security of the Soviet-Chinese border until the final days of W.W.II and enabled the Kremlin to later immediately transfer some 250,000 seasoned troops from the Far East westward to battle the invading Germans.

Soon, Konoye, the victim of a near-fatal assassination attempt, was forced out as premier in the early fall of 1941 and replaced by the pro-German, openly aggressive General Tojo Hideki. The Japanese militarists were now fully in control of events and cared little about negotiating with the USA or anyone else. The stage was being set in Washington, Moscow and Tokyo for the US-Japan war that Moscow had wanted since the 1920s. All that remained was to drag the USA into World War II, which FDR, Churchill and friends failed to do with Germany after numerous provocations but successfully did with Japan at Pearl Harbor.

On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, "I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents."

An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954:

"Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan -- to get out of China, for example --were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way -- and we knew their overall import – pointed that way."

Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote:

"There the President...brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

Sir Oliver Lylleton, Churchill's war production minister, knew all of Churchill's and FDR's plans and decisions to force the USA into the war. In a June 20, 1944 speech to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, he stated:

"America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history, even to say that America was forced into the war."

Moreover, there was a persistent undercurrent of fear in the Kremlin that Great Britain would make a separate peace with Germany. These fears were intensified after Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess's mysterious May 1941 solo flight to Scotland supposedly to meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton, (six weeks before the German invasion of the USSR) but Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor seven months after Hess's inexplicable odyssey, among other things, helped scuttle any chances of a separate Berlin-London peace treaty, another major benefit to Moscow.

Even after Pearl Harbor, Joseph Grew, by then Undersecretary of State for Asian Affairs, still hoped for some kind of negotiated settlement:

"At the same time I believe that it is important that we bear in mind that the defeat of Japanese aggression does not necessarily entail, as many Chinese think, our crushing Japan militarily. The complete elimination of Japan as a force in the Far East would not be conducive either to order or prosperity in this area."

Well, we certainly crushed Japan militarily, finally finishing the job with two atomic bombs in August 1945. What did we get for it all? Scores of GIs killed from Oahu to Okinawa, billions of postwar taxpayer dollars spent rebuilding a completely wrecked and humiliated Japan, keeping it militarily weak in the face of an appallingly genocidal and increasingly assertive Red China with both nations eventually becoming the USA's fiercest foreign economic competitors.

Barely eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USA wound up with some 33,000 US dead in a still divided and tense Korea, and some two decades after that, 58,000 troops killed in a still Communist Indochina--the last courtesy of a fruitless eight-year conflict (which some have called the US version of the Boer War) that severely damaged US social, economic and political institutions. We then were treated to Pol Pot's notoriously barbaric Cambodian "Killing Fields," scads of desperate Vietnamese "boat people," thousands of US troops and a string of warships permanently deployed in the Far East, and, finally, Chinese Long March ICBMs aimed at the US West Coast.

All to avenge the loathsome FDR and his pro-Soviet disciples' self-serving and cleverly premeditated "day of infamy" and to fulfill the bloodthirsty Josef Stalin's totalitarian fantasies. Well, hey, winning is everything, right, sports fans?

But what did we win?

________________

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Business Week, Knight-Ridder and the Financial Times of London. He can be reached at mkreca@connectnet.com

Originally posted at EnterStageRight.com

Clinton A Cult Leader?

2006-05-14T23:09:00.000-04:00

by Michael E. Kreca
1999-Mar-1

"For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.'' - Matthew 24:24

Bill Clinton is a cult leader. Like The Unification Church's Rev. Moon or the People's Temple head guru Jim Jones.

What else can accurately explain to the adoration so many have for a leader who is so obviously and appallingly criminal, abusive, vengeful, depraved and power-hungry?

Cult leaders very easily deceive many folks who lack a clear sense of self. The USA's socioeconomic and legislative history in the last few decades seems to have as its key principle that individuals can do nothing for themselves and need a huge, expensive government program, law or entitlement to help them get by from day to day. Hence, a significant number of people brought up in the past 35 to 40 years have been indoctrinated, overtly or subconsciously, with this sense of "dependency."

When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died in March 1953, many had thought the Soviet people breathed a massive sigh of relief. Not so. Even after years of Stalin's ruthless purges, savage political oppression, endless state terror, total war and horrible privation, many people were saddened their "Great Father Stalin" was finally gone. A number of attendees at his funeral were actually trampled to death.

Thousands of mourners present wept aloud saying, "Our great father is dead, what do we do now?"

The king is dead. Long live the king. So to speak.

Clinton's biggest defenders, like those Soviet mourners and Uncle Joe's international sympathizers, are those who are of a generally leftist orientation. Leftists' habitual fixation on centralized collectivist government and obsessive focus on if not intense identification with the problems and presumed needs of those deemed "disadvantaged" in some way reflect their own deeply rooted beliefs in their own inadequacy and inferiority. And they believe the same of those "disadvantaged'' persons for whom they reflexively claim to have so much "compassion.''

They want government to lead them and everyone else because they believe they cannot live their own lives, or be truly self-reliant or personally accountable for anything in any way.

Presto! Perfect suckers for a Slick Willie, a Great Father Clinton.

And, to the Great Fathers satisfaction, one is born every minute.

Leftists and their sympathizers cannot or will not separate the President as the person from the Office of the Presidency. To them, they are one and the same.

Dictatorships are like that too. They are also called "personality cults.''

That is exactly why Clinton gets so much shameless, fawning adoration although he has repeatedly shown nothing but colossal contempt for the intelligence and decency of the American people whose "work" he obsessively claims to be "doing." The most recent was his snotty Buffalo speech last month in which he arrogantly intoned that average Americans are too stupid to spend or invest their money "right" and must have government do so instead. Bill Clinton's chameleon-like performances appeal most to those with low self-esteem, unresolved dependency needs, nagging personal insecurities, high levels of ignorance or just monumental stupidity. Thus, his populist, class-warfare rhetoric, despite the absence of meaningful content or little connection with daily reality, usually does also.

Witness the reactions of seemingly thoughtful, intelligent people who support Clinton. They suddenly suspend their reasoning faculties when Clinton's name is spoken. They use words like "love," "caring," and "so what" and "he has done so many good things," almost like children fascinated with a flashy but rigged carnival game they cannot win no matter how often they play. Ironically, these people are the very same ones who can't understand why so many Germans blindly followed a former German Army lance corporal of Austrian extraction surnamed Schicklgruber.

A further irony is that Clinton probably needs his followers even more than his followers need him, emotionally that is. They have the ideal codependent relationship--he gets the adoration and power he needs to survive, they get the appearance of security, "belonging," and comfort they need to function.

I just hope that the congregation of the Church of Clintonology isn't too shocked or outraged if and when it comes time to "prove its undying love and loyalty'' via pistol, poison or spiked grape Kool-Aid.

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has written for Business Week, the Financial Times of London and Knight-Ridder Financial News.

from the Common Conservative

National Sovereignty: The Next Target of Clinton's "Politics of Personal Destruction"

2006-05-14T22:51:00.000-04:00

"Woe to any brotherhood and unity imposed by force of law." - Serb proverb

By Michael E. Kreca
web posted April 1999

The Empire of Japan unprovokedly and unilaterally bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, US sovereign territory, in 1941, an act of war that made that Sunday, December 7th truly a "Day of Infamy" in the USA if not the world.

And Day of Infamy II premiered March 23, 1999 when Bill Clinton and his evil Eurotwin Tony Blair, hiding behind NATO, unprovokedly and unilaterally began bombing a sovereign nation (and a Christian one too, during Lent and very close to Easter) that has invaded no one, much less a NATO member. All in a region that saw the eruption of World War I nearly 85 years before--also when "foreign powers" intervened.

Worse, for the first time in NATO's fifty-year history, the alliance is taking offensive actions in direct violation of its own charter and of international law. NATO's acronym can now be defined as "Newest Aggressive Terrorist Organization." Clinton's 1999 "Operation Allied Force," meet Hitler's 1941 "Operation Punishment." Both had bombing Belgrade in common.

The whole NATO charade (other than helping keep news of Clinton's treasonous satellite sellout to Red China off the front pages) is Bubba's insurance policy that when things go terribly wrong in the Balkans (as they most assuredly will) he can do what he has always done best throughout his life. That is, escape all personal responsibility by blaming someone or something else and then walk away laughing after some phony, lip-biting, on-camera "I'm sorry."

Watch the barrage of finger-pointing and denials begin, especially if and when lots of flag-covered aluminum caskets start showing up at Dover AFB in Delaware, with the corpses of men and women who needlessly fell in a civil war in a nation that most Americans can't even find on a map. (Sound familiar?)

I wonder what those roasted-alive Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas and the hapless 18 Army Rangers in Somalia who were killed and disfigured thought about "sometimes having to use force to keep things under control." Especially in regional conflicts with no bearing on US national security with our intervention in such serving only the selfish, power-mad interests of our despicable Arkanfuehrer. Why no troops to Sierra Leone, to the Sudan, to Burma, to Tibet? Where was the media-fed rage over the slaughter in Rwanda and Chechnaya and Turkish Kurdistan and of rural villagers in southern Mexico? Should we have unilaterally tossed tons of Tomahawks at those countries too? We did at an aspirin plant in the Sudan, but only to help Clintigula stave off another sex scandal that eventually got him impeached.

Where was the administration's "inclusive humanitarianism" when ethnic Serbs were brutally and summarily expelled from their ancestral homes in Croatia by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims in 1994-95? Where was "concern for the children" when ethnic Serbs in Bosnia (fresh from being made homeless in Croatia) were carpet bombed and artillery barraged to death by our glorious "defensive alliance?" I imagine if our our digitized, real-time satellite-borne yellow journalism (so much like its predecessor, the Hearst newspapers' fiendish 1898 "war fever" against Spain) and spin proffered by scabrous creeps like Turner, Rivera, Brokaw, Jennings and Rather is just grist for the mill of the latest White House opinion poll, and that some of the world's "ethnic refugees" are more important (or fashionable) than others.

Are we a constitutional Republic in which our first President warned about permanent entangling alliances and mindless interference in the affairs of other nations and how our stance was a shining example and inspiration to the world?

Or are we the late Roman Empire, a collection of complacent, gluttonous, materialistic, smug, self-righteous, aggressive boors who always "know better" for everyone else in the world and are all too willing to "demonstrate" that at the push of a button?

Sadly, I am being forced to admit the latter is more and more becoming distressingly true and there will be a terrible price paid by our country for that state of affairs.

Roman legions, finely equipped and well trained, occupying most of Europe and parts of the Mideast and North Africa at the time of Rome's zenith of power, eventually met a ragtag "low-tech" collection of “barbarians” in the forests of western Germany led by a man named Arminius. The Romans, despite overwhelming superiority, were brutally slaughtered en masse. Rome, despite its martial might, never was able to conquer the lands east of the Rhine. And that defeat was the first clear indicator of Rome's long and gradual decline.

We are foolishly (and illegally) intervening in a nation (which was a staunch ally of the US and Britain and France in both World Wars) that has a long and well-deserved reputation for fighting long, fiercely and tenaciously and defeating much larger adversaries, and badly. Napoleon Bonaparte tried and failed. Austria tried and failed. Germany tried twice and failed. Stalin never even bothered trying, even after Marshal Tito broke with Moscow in 1948, a similar act, that, two decades later, got Czechoslovakia steamrolled by Soviet tanks.

The present occupants of the White House and 10 Downing St. are turning Slobodan Milosevich into a Balkan Fidel Castro and giving the terrorist, drug dealing, Osama-bin-Laden-backed Moslem/Maoist KLA a solid operating base in Europe with all of the problems that will ensue from such. And if Milosevich and certain of his confederates should stand trial for war crimes, than also should Croat President Franjo Tudjman, Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izbegotovich and the leaders of the KLA.

Clinton's and Blair's laser-guided "love fest" is at bottom about savagely and aggressively crushing a fiercely independent, well-armed people with a rich ancient Orthodox Christian culture and absolutely no desire to be a slaves of anyone, be the putative masters Germans, Austrians, French, Russians, Americans, or worst of all, the "get along or else" UN and its loan sharking minions, the World Bank and the IMF. You can be sure the latter two have their hearts set on grabbing control of Serbia's large coal, lignite and aluminum ore reserves, and wanting to turn that small nation into another disarmed, helpless "loan junkie," trading its priceless natural resources, and its people and their self-respect, at bargain basement prices, for endless streams of low-interest, easy repayment term "fixes."

All for "world peace" and the "safety of our children." Despicable.

The Serbs aren't a dead White House adviser, a state beauty queen, the Whitewater Development Corp., Ken Starr or the former head of the White House Travel Office. Bully Billy, knowing it or not, is up against a real deadly adversary this time.

And we ignore this at our dire peril.

______________

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Business Week, Knight-Ridder and the Financial Times of London. He can be reached at mkreca@connectnet.com.

Originally posted at EnterStageRight.com

Who Really Won World War II?

2006-05-14T22:41:00.000-04:00

by Michael E. Kreca
June 28, 2001

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
~ Sir John Harrington (1561-1612)

War is the health of the State.
~ Randolph Bourne (1886-1918)
_______________

Q: Why did the USA intervene in what became World War II?
A: Because if we didn’t, we’d now all speak German or Japanese.

Q: Who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII?
A: The USA.

This, with variations, has been the standard Q&A about the history of and the events surrounding our entry into that war and usually ends further discussion. But the standard answers, on closer examination, are just plain wrong.

Why?

The first question first, since it takes a bit of detailed explanation.

The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command. Neither nation’s economy was ever fully mobilized for total war to the extent the USA’s and Great Britain’s had been. An invasion of North America would have required a major and early commitment by Berlin and Tokyo of financial, human and material resources to two forms of warfare, the first being large, long-range strategic bomber, transport and fighter escort aircraft, something neither Germany nor Japan had done. Both nations had superb short and medium range fighter/interceptors and medium bombers, but no bombers like the four-engine US B-17 or, later, the British Lancaster.

The second major and early commitment would have to have been to a sizable "blue water" naval "long-range power projection" force. Germany (unlike Japan) didn’t have this and did not seriously plan on acquiring it---something requiring numerous aircraft carriers, auxiliary and amphibious ships, carrier-based combat and reconnaissance aircraft, plus a sizable force of marines. There were minor proposals made early in the war to build an aircraft carrier to be christened "Frederick the Great" along with two large cruisers, all of which "land animal" Hitler soon nixed.

The German submarine threat, although still quite dire in W.W. II (thanks in great part to FDR’s long and controversial delay in ordering the Navy to conduct aggressive antisubmarine warfare operations off the U.S. East Coast), was not nearly as potent as it was in W.W. I. This was in large part due to defensive seagoing escort and convoy tactics developed in 1917-18 and improved submarine detection techniques, like active sonar, created in the interwar years. Submarines alone could not effectively project broad-based, large-scale offensive naval power great distances (something demonstrated brilliantly by Admirals Nimitz, Mitscher and Halsey and the aircraft carrier-based "task force" concept in the Pacific war against Japan).

The goal of the German U-boat campaign remained much the same as that in W.W.I, chiefly defensive "commerce raiding;" attempts to cut off the flow of needed supplies to Great Britain and, this time, to the USSR as well. Its surface navy, consisting mainly of smaller sized "pocket" battleships as well as cruisers and some destroyers and patrol boats, operated in much the same commerce raider fashion – voyaging about individually attacking and sinking tankers and freighters in the North and South Atlantic.

Germany’s navy had not fought a major set-piece surface battle since Jutland in 1916, in which it was tactically victorious against but strategically defeated by the British. The Royal Navy forced the scuttling of one of the war's earliest effective German surface commerce raiders, the pocket battleship "Graf Spee," off the Uruguayan coast at the end of 1939. The German Navy was thrashed by the British in the smaller 1940 naval battle at Narvik, Norway, the former losing several destroyers and patrol craft in that engagement. By the time the battleship "Bismarck" was sent to the bottom by two British warships, the HMS Rodney and King George, in May 1941, the German surface fleet threat was all but eliminated.

This was the illustrious naval record of a nation supposedly planning to and capable of invading and conquering the USA?

Hitler failed to subdue Great Britain in 1940 (in good part due to the moral strength of the Brits, a great deal of US aid, and because conquering Britain was not part of the Fuehrer’s eastern living space plan), so he would have had little chance of succeeding against the much more distant, much larger, more populous, and better-armed USA. Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up.

A successful invasion of North America by both Nazi Germany and Japan would have also required a high degree of interservice and binational coordination and cooperation, something that even in the best of forces and times is difficult to achieve and maintain. The Germans and Japanese, despite appearances, were notorious for the utter lack of that, and given their respective highly xenophobic beliefs in their own complete racial superiority to any other group, there would have been little basis for any significant long-term cooperation between them. Both Hitler and Tojo would have also needed reliable and broad-based intelligence gathering and interpretation assets, and a sizable "fifth-column" of active native sympathizers here, something neither had in sufficient quality or quantity. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was already long compromised by British spies – its longtime director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was an active British sympathizer since the 1930s, while Japan’s military and diplomatic ciphers were quickly and easily broken.

Both nations’ forces featured the glaring absence of sophisticated and secure large-scale supply support and sizable long-range air, sea, and ground transport capable of logistically sustaining a long offensive war which was vital to any attacking force operating over long distances in hostile territory. This major weakness of the Wehrmacht was first confirmed on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 and by Japan early on in its war of attrition in China and later in the Pacific campaigns against the Americans. Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds.

Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer’s erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration, and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real difference in combat. The German "Atomic Association" was a quite pale and poorly funded and staffed version of our Manhattan Project (due in large part to the previous "brain drain" of numerous talented physicists out of Germany and into the USA and Great Britain throughout the 1930s), and even that was directed more toward development of a workable nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion, not an atomic bomb. Japanese advanced weapons research was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was at first glance better prepared to mount an invasion of the USA given its large long-range carrier-based navy. However, Tokyo would have been badly hampered in such an attempt by its key strategic focus on a quickly completed regional land/island war and its unwillingness or inability to exploit large-scale submarine warfare.

Like Germany in the East, resource-poor Japan, via its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," was only interested in securing and consolidating economic and territorial gains in a certain area of its own region (the Asian mainland and the far Western Pacific islands), a politico-economic relationship that Premier Tojo Hideki pointedly referred to as similar to that of the USA’s in regard to Latin America. There was the lack of sufficient training, resources, and tactics to wage a long, decisive, large-scale continental ground war that an invasion of North America would have required — a lack reflected in Japan’s costly and ultimately fatal 1937-45 stalemate in China. There was also Japan’s stunning and bloody defeat by the Red Army’s large combined force of tanks, motorized infantry, and long-range artillery at the pivotal but little-known Battle of Nomonhan (on the Soviet-Manchurian border) in the summer of 1939. This battle exposed several glaring, never-to-be-resolved weaknesses in the quality of Japanese artillery, ground transport, tactics, and logistics and eventually led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact that lasted until the final days of the war.

Even Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor ended up more a fatally botched propaganda stunt than a decisive strategic blow to mortally wound the US Pacific Fleet and keep the USA from presumably getting in the way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It just got Japan in a war with an angry United States that many in Tokyo knew couldn’t be won; Admiral Yamamoto predicting at the time Japan would exhaust its existing petroleum and fuel reserves by 1944. For instance, despite the terrible images of death and destruction, many of the ships sunk at their piers in the attack on Oahu were raised and refitted. Most piers, drydocks, repair facilities, fuel bunkers and supply depots were untouched or only slightly damaged by Japanese bombs.

And lastly, both Germany and Japan were notorious for consistently and severely underestimating their adversaries and for quickly alienating and then oppressing the vast majorities of the native populations of any country they invaded, even ones that may have been initially sympathetic to the invaders.

Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor.

Neither Germany nor Japan planned for or could have launched a successful invasion and occupation of the USA. It's that simple. Even the legions of King George III nearly 200 years before, quite benign in contrast to those of Berlin and Tokyo, were eventually worn down and booted out of what soon became the USA.

But, again, why did we really intervene in what became World War II and who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan?

By 1937-38, FDR's New Deal welfare state was an expensive, widely unpopular and abject failure and was in serious danger of being all but thoroughly dismantled by a hostile public and Supreme Court (which FDR openly and foolishly tried to "pack" at the time, alienating many of his staunchest supporters) and an increasingly combative Congress, many of its bitterest critics being among Roosevelt's own ruling Democrats. So Franklin tried another form of domestic socialism, a "warfare state" inaugurated under the auspices of a pricey pork-barrel caper called "Lend-Lease," and he and his successors had hit the jackpot for decades to come. Germany and Japan were the perfect and convenient excuses for both FDR and Stalin to flex their muscles on a global scale in a way that Marx and Lenin would have envied (and, as Winston Churchill desired, to keep both of those nations from emerging as major world players in their own right).

The conduct of the war all but guaranteed that. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as expected, quickly flattened a strong and influential US noninterventionist movement that the Roosevelt administration (which probably knew of Tokyo's plans well in advance and did everything it could, legally and illegally, to provoke Tokyo into that "sneak attack") was already viciously and unfairly trying to destroy, smear and discredit. Our enemy was then presumably Japan, a nation to whom we had long sold large subsidized amounts of our iron ore, scrap metal, and petroleum, all under the provisions of a 1911 trade treaty that FDR had personally and suddenly abrogated two years before.

While our GIs fought fiercely and died en masse in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Island in the face of the invading Japanese, FDR blatantly wrote them off and pursued a "Europe First" policy. A key feature of this policy included the immediate transfer of huge amounts of financial and material aid to the recently-former German ally, Stalin’s USSR, a nation whose leaders, like those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, openly cared little for the supposed "democratic spirit" of the Atlantic Charter, and to which FDR (with the traitorous Alger Hiss in tow) made an all but open invitation at Yalta in February 1945 for it to occupy Eastern Europe.

Despite FDR’s "Europe First," no US troops set foot in the subjugated portions of the continent in any strategically significant numbers until Operation Overlord in June 1944, by which time the Soviets were midway through their massive broad-front push westward toward conquest of most of Eastern Europe and a sizable portion of eastern Germany. The latter was literally handed to the Soviets while our GIs were ordered to pull back and let the Red Army grab Berlin and the surrounding areas, actions which publicly infuriated Gen. George S. Patton and others. The notorious "Operation Keelhaul," which forcibly sent millions of by then fiercely anti-Communist Soviet POWs back to certain death in the USSR, was next put into play.

In July 1945, at Potsdam, FDR/Churchill successors Harry Truman and Clement Attlee respectively certified Stalin’s hold on Eastern Europe as originally proposed at Yalta. They also permitted him to break his 1941 nonaggression pact with Tokyo and sweep into Manchuria, northern Korea, and Sakhalin Island in the final days of the war against an all-but-beaten Japan. This final act ensured Moscow an easily obtained, major role in the carving up of the Far East into various spheres of influence. Japan’s eventual self-defeat in China (predicted by then-President Herbert Hoover in 1931 as part of his refusal to ask Congress for US troops to aid the Chinese against Japanese encroachment) and its collapse in the western Pacific opened up a large power vacuum in Asia. In less than five years, this vacuum was quickly filled in large part by Stalin’s brutal trio of Asian Communist proteges – Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-Sung, and Ho Chi Minh – all with the prior blessings of FDR and his Red-riddled "brain trust."

The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we’ve been speaking a different language, and it’s not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it’s the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned.

_____________

Michael E. Kreca [send him mail] lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

Originally posted at LewRockwell.com

The Militia Question, Resolved: Second Amendment 101

2006-05-14T22:27:00.000-04:00

by Michael Kreca

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order." - Adolf Hitler, April 11, 1942, in “Hitler's Table-Talk at the Fuehrer's Headquarters 1941-1942”, Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn, 1951)

Twenty-seven words first published in 1790 are now the source of the bitterest controversy the USA has seen since the 1960s if not since the War Between the States a century before that. They are central to an issue that splits left and right, male and female, white and nonwhite, North and South, East and West, wealthy and not-so wealthy.

They are:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Let’s get this straight right away. First of all, the inalienable right of individuals to keep and bear arms as a check on a tyrannical government predates our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This, among other things, was clearly and eloquently expressed in Sir William Blackstone's 1768 "Commentaries On The Laws of England.” Hence, the Founders were operating within a long historical tradition based upon English common law.

Secondly, the term “well-regulated” meant something quite different two centuries ago. It is not today’s definition of “controlled,” “limited,” or “restricted” but was instead defined as “having proper kit and provisions” or in the case of objects or machinery, “properly maintained and kept in good repair.” The next is the Constitutional definition of the “militia,” and this what requires detailed explanation. The militia issue was extensively debated during the 1787-89 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and today has sadly been ignored by both sides in this issue.

Founder George Mason explicitly wished to have it clearly spelled out that the militia was “of the whole people," in effect, a “general militia” that was affirmed in the Second Amendment and the 1792 Militia Act. Mason and his supporters feared the development of "special militias"—ones much like the Puritan "Roundheads" led by Oliver Cromwell and their opponents, the “Cavaliers,” in the English Civil War of 1642-57. Special militias are nothing more than state-sanctioned paramilitary groups--witness the German Nazi SA and its successor the SS as well as the Italian Fascist "Blackshirts." In those cases, Nazi/Fascist Party membership was strictly required to join them as well as to legally own a firearm of any kind in either of those countries at the time.

These two groups were little different than standing armies. The difference is that they were created and used by the German and Italian governments to bypass any laws against using the military domestically against the people (or in the absence of such laws, to forestall the military’s unwillingness to do so)—in order to crush dissent and terrorize opponents. (Sound familiar?) Cromwell used his Roundheads to do much the same thing, even having King Charles I beheaded after a bogus trial, later closing Parliament and then invading Ireland with plans to wipe out the Catholic population, killing those of his comrades and anyone else who refused to comply.

Distressingly, we now have a lot of special militias in the USA—the Secret Service, FBI, BATF, DEA, IRS, the National Guard and today’s "near federalized" status of most state and local police departments--to name but a few. And they are all unconstitutional, if the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment and the 1792 Militia Act is correct. George Mason's fears about them were well placed and have come tragically true. All these alphabet-soup special militias can do and have done (other than freely lapping up taxpayer money in ever-increasing amounts) is be responsible for numerous cruel and meaningless tragedies. These range from spying on, harassing and ruining the lives of anyone deemed an “enemy of the state,” to brutally breaking strikes, violently disrupting demonstrations and killing innocent people in places ranging from Kent State to Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Even the courts are beginning to revive this long forgotten but crucial “general vs. special” militia distinction. The 1990 Supreme Court case Perpich vs. Department of Defense is a case in point. Then Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich claimed the DoD violated the Constitution when it ordered the Minnesota National Guard (which he claimed was the 'state militia') to duty outside the state without his consent or that of the state legislature.

The Supreme Court ruled against Perpich. It held the National Guard is an integral component of the US Army Reserve system (it has been since 1916). It further supported its ruling by specifying the difference between the “special militia” (in this case the Minnesota Guard) instead of the “general militia” (citizens with privately procured and owned arms) as expressed in the 2nd Amendment. Also in 1990 the Court in another case affirmed the definition of “the people” expressed in the Bill of Rights as meaning individual persons, not a group.

So the statist left has its “militia” and the rest of us have ours. No wonder so many of them can’t free themselves from the false but mesmerizing aura of the “Militia=National Guard” equation. The statist left doesn’t want to because it’s interested not in the right of individuals to protect their lives and liberty against a tyrannical federal government, but in giving that tyrannical federal government a blank check, figuratively and literally, to indulge in state-sponsored terror under the tautological trinity of “crime prevention," "anti-terrorism" and "national security.” And Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen has all but told us to “get used to the idea.”

So there it is. General militia versus special militia.

Which are you?

Think about that question the next time you are cajoled by otherwise-idle Million Mom March mavens to support “sensible gun laws” or are exhorted by the denizens of the pseudo-patriotic “law-and-order” crowd to “back the badge.”

___________

Michael E. Kreca is a staff writer for Ether Zone. Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Business Week, Knight-Ridder and the Financial Times of London. He can be reached at mkreca@connectnet.com

Published in the May 26, 2000 issue of Ether Zone. Copyright © 2000 Ether Zone. Reposting permitted with this message intact.

Originally posted at KeepAndBearArms.com

The Rifles of Yugoslavia and Serbia

2006-05-14T22:08:00.000-04:00

by Michael Kreca and Dan Reynolds

Yugoslavia means "land of the southern Slavs". Before World War II it was spelled Jugoslavia in English publications. The "J" in Serbo-Croat is pronounced as "Y" in English. Yugoslavia from its founding in 1918 until 1929 was officially called "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats & Slovenes".

The Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, along with the Macedonians, Montenegrins and the Bosnian Moslems, are the main peoples of Yugoslavia with the Serbs being the largest in number. The Montenegrins are in fact ethnic Serbs, often called "mountain Serbs". The Bosnian Moslems are Serbs or Croats who were forcibly converted to Islam by the Ottoman Turks centuries ago. Ethnic Hungarians; Germans, many from the German region of Swabia; Albanians; Vlachs, (ethnic Rumanians) as well as Gypsies and Jews formed significant minority ethnic groups within the country.

The native Yugoslav languages are all Slavic in their derivation, the chief dialect being Serbo-Croat. The only significant difference between the two is that the Serbs traditionally use the Russian style Cyrillic alphabet, while the Croats employ the standard Latin script. The other two main Yugoslav dialects are Slovene and Macedon, both differing significantly from Serbo-Croat. As recent historical events show, there are many long running, deep seated conflicts among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Ones that were in many cases, deliberately fueled by foreigners and that go back many centuries. A brief overview of the history of this area of the Balkans will place in context the subject of this article.

Human habitation of the Balkans can be traced back nearly 10,000 years. The Danube River Valley and those of its many tributaries provided the basis for a rudimentary regional agricultural civilization leading to the formation of a number of small cities. The archaeological remains of one of these ancient communities, Lepenski Vir, were discovered on the southern bank of the Danube southeast of Belgrade in 1965.

Over time, larger scale agriculture, animal husbandry, regional trade, rudimentary industry, iron and copper mining and, smelting developed causing various tribal groups from the north and east to migrate into the area. One of these tribes was the Illyrian, who settled mainly in the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula. The Illyrian farmed as well as mined and smelted metals and traded with distant areas such as Greece in the period about 3000 BC.

The Romans began expanding into the area toward the latter part of the 3rd Century BC, but more than 200 years of bitter struggle were required to completely subjugate the restive native peoples. In 9 AD, the area formally became the Roman province of Illyricum, although because of the intense civil war and constant tribal infighting, it was never completely garrisoned by Roman troops as was customary with other conquered lands. In 395 AD, Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, and who made Christianity the new official religion of the realm, divided the large increasingly troubled and difficult to rule Empire into Eastern and Western portions.

Both the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire (Byzantium) had its own ruler, located in Rome and Constantinople (called Istanbul since 1930) respectively. Constantine's splitting of the Christian Roman Empire into East and West set in motion a long series of important events which have had a profound influence on European history.

By the late 5th Century AD the Western Empire had collapsed and Byzantium had been weakened to the point thateffective control of the Balkans was abdicated. Warlike tribes of Slavs moving from the northeast into the region drove out many of the remaining descendants of the Illyrian. The Slavic newcomers were, in turn, briefly ruled by a tribe of nomadic raiders, the Avars, believed by some to be descendants of the Scythians, a barbaric tribe from the far eastern Russian steppes, who participated in numerous attacks on Constantinople. In 625 AD, a resurgent Byzantium allied itself with two largest Slavic tribes already in the Balkans, the Serbs and Croats, and gradually pushed the Avars eastward and completely out of the old Roman Illyria.

Around 850 AD, the first Serbian nation under Tsar Vlastimir was formed as a Byzantine province ruled by Emperor Michael III. Two brothers, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, were sent by the Emperor in Constantinople to Christianize the Serbs and other Slavs. To preach and to teach in the native Slavonic tongue, Cyril developed a script, derived from the ancient Greek, which eventually became what is now known as Cyrillic. He based his modified Greek script on the phonics of an ancient dialect spoken by the Slavic tribes in Macedonia, a dialect known today by Slavic Orthodox Christians as "Old Church Slavonic."

Present day Slovenia and Croatia in the western Balkans eventually gravitated to Rome, adopted the Latin alphabet and became Western Christians. Later many Slovenes became Protestants during the Reformation, but were forced back into Catholicism by the Croats. The Serbs and Macedons in the eastern Balkans, as well as the more distant Bulgarians and Russians, used the Cyrillic script and became Eastern Christians, along with the Ukrainians, Romanians and Greeks, under the tutelage of Constantinople. This action has had a permanent effect on the culture and history of the peoples in these areas. Further accentuating this division, in 1054, ongoing bitter doctrinal differences caused a wide and still unrepaired schism between the eastern and western Christian churches. As a result of this schism, the Western church is the Roman Catholic (meaning "universal") Church and the Eastern Church is the Eastern Orthodox (meaning "original") Church.

Orthodox Christian Serbia was a strong independent state by the 11th century, as was its Slav neighbor, Croatia. In 1102, Hungary absorbed Catholic Croatia, which it would rule for more than 800 years in conjunction with Austria. Serbia, often called "Servia" in many older publications, was unified and ruled by the Serb Nemanjich dynasty of emperors begun by Tsar Stefan Nemanja in 1159 and reached its peak size, cultural influence and power during the 24-year reign of Tsar Stefan Dushan (1331-55), when it ruled an area from northern Greece northward to the Danube and into modern day Hungary. During this time a highly developed Serbian literary, political, musical and artistic culture, which helped preserve and enrich traditional Greek learning, was defined and unified by the Serb Orthodox Church. The church was founded by Stefan Nemanja's younger brother, St. Sava the patron saint of Serbia) in 1219.

After Tsar Dushan's death in 1355, the Serbian empire gradually declined with land and power being divided, King Lear-like, between two inept successors, Urosh and Vukasin. The Serb Empire, led by the one of the last rulers of the Nemanja dynasty, Tsar Lazar and Crown Prince Milos Obilich, was badly defeated by the much larger and more mobile forces of the Ottoman Sultan Murad I at the bloody and hard-fought Battle of Kosovo. Translated roughly as "Plain of Blackbirds" in Vidovdan (St. Vitus' Day) June 28, 1389. This battle, which claimed the lives of Lazar, Milos Obilich and Murad, was the Waterloo of the old Serb empire. Since that time, the Kosovo region known as "Old Serbia", that fateful battle and the many events surrounding it have a deep cultural and spiritual meaning to all Serbs, even today.

In 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople and destroyed the remnants of Byzantium.Six years later, they swallowed the remnants of Serbia and the rest of the Balkans, occupying the region for the next 400 years. As part of the Ottoman occupation, the Serbs, who the Turks called "giaours" (subhuman dogs), were disarmed and the Serb Orthodox Church outlawed. They bitterly refused to submit to Turkish rule and convert to Islam.Conversion was required for employment and school attendance. They resisted the heavy property and poll taxes imposed upon them and most importantly, fought bitterly against the notorious annual Ottoman "blood tax" ("devshirme" in Turkish) in which young Serb children each spring were forcibly taken from their parents. The children were converted to Islam and sent to Turkey, never to be seen again. Little more than slaves, Serb boys were sent into lifelong service in the Ottoman military (Janissaries) while the girls were forced into various sultans' harems.

In response to these and other cruelties and abominations, tens of thousands of Serbs fled Serbia proper over the next 300 years. Large numbers of them soon settled in the Lika, Slavonija and Krajina areas of Austrian and Hungarian ruled south-central Croatia, where most of the men over the years served in the Austro-Hungarian army as border guards on the Austrian/Ottoman frontier. They were rewarded with plots of farmland in the region upon their discharges.

The Ottoman Turks had reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1683, and their imperial high water mark, before beingdefeated by Austrian troops (many of whom were ethnic Serb conscripts) led by a Polish field marshal, JanSobieski. After a long siege and being gradually driven back, Karadjordje ( Black George), a Serb who had served with the Austrian army battling the Turks in 1788 and who had been deeply inspired by the success of the French aided American Revolution against the British, led a large and violent Russian supported 1804 insurrection against the Sultan in the area around Belgrade. However, Black George's Serb insurgents were forced to flee to the northern (Hungarian) side of the Danube in 1813 when Russian support was withdrawn.

Turkish troops then carried out bloody reprisals. This led to renewed bitter revolt over the next two years. Ottoman Turkey, under increasing economic and military pressure from a rapidly industrializing Western Europe, was soon forced to restore important rights to the Serbs beginning in 1815. The Serbs' rights to keep and bear arms, freedom of assembly, and local home rule, abolished in the mid-1400s, were gradually reinstated. By 1830, the Ottomans granted full political autonomy to Serbia within the Empire and the ban on the Serbian Orthodox Church was lifted. In 1850, neighboring Montenegro, a small mountainous nation largely populated by Orthodox ethnic Serbs, became independent of the Ottoman Empire and came under the rule of a series of Orthodox Christian bishoprics.

Milosh Obrenovich, a wealthy, self-made Serb merchant who had managed to retain his Orthodox Christian faith while gaining a great deal of influence with Ottoman authorities, had been given the title of prince and granted limited powers by the Turks in 1817 to rule and defend the newly autonomous Serb nation. The country relied on an armed peasant militia that was transformed into a standing army, the Polje Vojska (Field Army), in the 1830s and led by Russian trained officers. In 1839, the increasingly anti-Russian Prince Milosh was dethroned and his son, Michael II, acceded to power. At that time a larger Field Army of 4000 men and 63 officers, outfitted by the Serb government, was authorized. It was tasked with guarding the borders and maintaining internal order. The only uniform was a government issued cap and percussion muzzle loading rifles were the chief long arm. The Serb National Assembly voted Michael II out of power in 1843 and crowned Alexander I Karadjordjevich (son of Black George) prince.

In 1853, the Vojna Tehnicka Zavod (Military Technical Institute) was established at Kragujevac in central Serbia. Initially established to cast and test cannons, it would soon become Serbia''s version of the USA''s Springfield Armory. In 1858 Prince Alexander was removed from the throne by a vote of the Serb National Assembly who also returned Milosh I to power, but two years later Milosh died and was succeeded by his son, Michael III. Michael''s long-term goal was to unite all the Balkan South Slavic peoples in an effort to drive the Ottomans back to Constantinople, independent of any assistance of the Great Powers of Europe. Each of these powers had their own political agendas that were not necessarily favorable to the peoples of the region.

As part of his strategy, Prince Michael established the Narodna Vojska (People's Army) in 1861 and the War Ministry a year later. The People's Army, a sort of active reserve that supported the Field Army, established in the mid-1830s was composed of 17 regiments (pukove) each commanded by a colonel (pukovnik.). A regiment was stationed in each of then-17 Serb ""okruge"" (provinces). Provinces were subdivided into ""srez"" (counties) that provided a battalion to each regiment. The smallest administrative area was called an ""opstina"" (township). Each township, depending on population size, was required to muster one or more companies (rote). Each fighting man was responsible for providing his own food, shoes and clothing as well as a rifle, 60 rounds of ammo and a bayonet. Many Serb soldiers used sporting pattern rifles with no available bayonet, so a short sword with curving blade could be substituted.

All able-bodied males from 20 to 50 years of age were liable for service in the People''s Army. The People''s Army was divided into two groups, the First Levy (Prvi Ban) consisting of 50,000 troops at the time and included those men ages 20-35. The Second Levy (Dvaje Ban) of men 36-50 were the reserves used to staff forts and garrisons, guard roads and bridges, act as transport personnel and support the First Levy. Only the regulars were paid.

Prince Michael had realized as early as 1863 that Serbia's motley collection of small arms types, numbers, quality, serviceability and ammunition compatibility were chaotic and woefully inadequate. He knew that the average peasant could not afford to buy an adequate rifle despite the legal requirement that he do so. In 1863 the War Ministry had in stock only 7,000 percussion muzzle loading rifles. The Russians promised delivery of 70,000 obsolete percussion muskets and only 31,000 were delivered after 1865. At that time, the Military Technical Institute began converting these rifles to breech loaders. These "new" rifles, based on an English design, were called the M1867 and nicknamed "Grnovace". Maximum monthly M1867 production was 5000 weapons.

By 1870 it became clear that expelling the Turks via a mass armed uprising of the Balkan peoples was no longer feasible. In response, Prince Milan IV, who had succeeded to the Serb throne after his father Michael III''s death in 1868, began to secure foreign political and economic support of some of the European Powers to help gain Balkan independence from the Turks. Up to this point in its 19th century history, the newly autonomous, but not yet independent, Serbs had used mainly rifles of the type issued in the Ottoman armed forces and second hand purchases smuggled in from ports on the Adriatic Sea. Types, calibers and serviceability varied widely. Many Serbs could not afford to buy rifles of any kind while others still had venerable flintlock muskets (duplonke) and pistols (kubare).

The M1867 conversion was of poor quality, unreliable, and detested by those forced to use it in combat. About 1870 some 55,000 Peabody dropping or pivoting block breech loading rifles were imported from a European source, possibly France, and production machinery was acquired. Foreign engineers and technicians, totaling 1500, arrived at the Military Technical Institute to oversee production of this design. A monthly production rate of 500 rifles was achieved and the final production run is unknown. These new Peabody rifles were used to arm the People''sArmy First Levy and were similar to the model built by the Providence Tool Company, Providence R.I., for Rumania a few years earlier. It was known as the M1870 "Srpski Pushke" (Serb Rifle) caliber 11.43 mm. It is unknown if this cartridge was the same as the Rumanian cartridge. By 1875, the People''s Army First Levy numbered between 75,000 and 90,000 men, the Second Levy about 50,000 men.

In July 1876, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey in reaction to the widespread mistreatment of Orthodox Christian Serbs in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina by the local Turkish nobility. Only 60,000 troops organized into six divisions were able to take to the field. Most were armed with the M1870 Peabody, but many had been issued the unpopular M1867, whose unreliability was now legendary and was believed to be a major factor in Serb battlefield defeats. Worse, an Ottoman vassal, the Khedive of Egypt, had provided troops and 40,000 British made .450 (11.43mm) Martini-Henry Mark 1 breech loading rifles to the Sultan for the war in the Balkans.

This Peabody derivative proved superior to the existing Serb M1867 conversion rifles, although most of the Sultan's troops were outfitted with the .577 caliber (14.66mm) Snider-Enfield breechloader conversion rifle, also of British origin. The Turks were so impressed with this rifle that they sought to purchase a large quantity from the British who, as it turned out, were unable to supply them in the quantity and time frame required. The Sultan then turned to Providence Tool Co. in the USA and ordered 600,000 of these rifles. Financial problems plagued the Ottomans and delayed delivery of the rifles, the shipment not completed until 1882. The Turks received sufficient numbers for their 1877 war with Russia.

Aided by the Bulgarians and Serbs, the Russians, despite losing the Battle of Plevna to a large Turkish force,armed with US Martini-Henry breech loading single shot and Winchester Model 1866 and 1873 .44-40 repeating rifles, finally defeated the Turks and forced them to accept the Treaty of San Stefano. The despondent Sultan did not live to see this as he had killed himself with a pair of scissors.

The major powers of Europe decided that the San Stefano settlement was unacceptable for geopolitical reasons, and a revised agreement, the Treaty of Berlin, was devised a year later. As a result of this revised agreement, Serbia assumed complete independence as a kingdom, Turkey lost a large portion of its Balkan territory and an autonomous Bulgaria was formed within the Ottoman Empire. Austria got control of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro received additional territory. The Sanjak, a mostly Moslem area between Montenegro and Serbia was put under Austrian protection. This event caused a great Serb resentment of Austria, one that would help cause World War I.

It was now time for the newly independent Kingdom of Serbia to standardize on a modern military rifle. Wilhelm Mauser from Oberndorf, Germany, arrived in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, in July 1879. He brought samples of his Model 1871 11mm single-shot bolt-action breech loading black powder rifle adopted by many of the states of the newly unified German Empire. He was a good salesman with a first rate, reasonably priced product. To close the deal he accepted a string of design changes proposed by a Serb army ordnance officer, Major Koka Milovanovic (pronounced mee-lo-VAHN-ovitch.)

A torch light parade was held in Belgrade celebrating closure of the deal. Mauser received an order on 14 February 1881 for 120,000 Model 1878/80 Mauser Milovanovich rifles. The delay between Mauser's initial sales pitch and the Serb government order was due to testing of sample rifles, developing and testing modifications, and designing and testing the new cartridge. This latest ""Serb Rifle"" was also known as the "Mauser Koka" or "Mauser Milovanovic," the ""M1878/80C" and the"M80C"". The "C" is Cyrillic for "S" which stands for Serbian. This use of the Cyrillic "S" in model designations, along with its use on all markings on later and now extremely rare Serb Mauser models manufactured in Germany and Austria, would become standard for most Serb Mausers.

Among the modifications the Serbs made to the basic Model 1871 was the slightly smaller caliber, 10.15mm as opposed to the German 11mm a tapered barrel breech to muzzle, grooves in rifling, a better manual safety, improved extractor and ejector. The most noticeable feature is the raised receiver tang, to guide the cocking piece stud as the bolt is drawn rearward, to prevent the bolt head from rotating excessively. The next major purchase was for 4,000 10.15mm Mauser Milovanovic Model1884 repeating carbine, known popularly as the "M84C". This M84C used the existing 78/80 type turn bolt action and was a short barreled carbine, stocked to the muzzle Mannlicher style, with shorter distance rear sight, a pointed pistol grip tip, a tubular magazine and turned down bolt handle.

Despite these notable technical advances, Serbia remained chronically short of weapons and funds and was always surrounded by potential enemies. It looked to the fellow Orthodox Christian and Slavic Russians for assistance, but was wary of becoming dependent on them. Between 1878-1914, the Serb government tried to foster good diplomatic and trade relations with Tsarist Russia as well as with Imperial Germany and the detested Austria- Hungary, but this policy was difficult to maintain and was unpopular with many Serbs.

With the advent of Frenchman Paul Vielle's revolutionary smokeless powder in 1886 and his country's adoption of the Lebel M1886 8mm bolt-action magazine rifle shortly afterward, Serbia was even further degraded in relative military potential. In response, the Serbs field tested the German Model 1888 "Commission" Rifle in 7.92x57mm and the Model 1890 Steyr Mannlicher in 8x50R with its straight pull bolt action, but could not get adequate financing to purchase these new rifles.

The Serbs were forced to settle for surplus or outdated weapons wherever they could find them. In 1895 Russia supplied an estimated 60,000 obsolete 10.67mm Berdan Model 1870 and Berdan II single shot bolt action black powder rifles to both Serbia and Montenegro. The independent Kingdom of Montenegro, which had adopted a similar rifle, the 10.66mm Austrian Steyr Werndl Model 1873, received half of the Berdans, but included were some of the revised M70/78g rifles with longer range sights. It appears further deliveries of these surplus Berdans were made after the initial 1895 shipment.

Smokeless powder and small bore repeating rifles were the cutting edge in small arms technology at the time, and by the late 1890s, given Serbia's size, geographic position and political stance, a pressing necessity. Several manufacturers and designs were considered. When financing became available, the German Mauser Model 1895, already in production for Chile, was selected along with the 7x57mm rimless cartridge. The Serbs adopted this type, labeling it the Model 1899 or "M99C".

The M99C was made in Berlin by Deutsche Waffen und Munitions Fabriken. DWM was formed by the banking firm of Ludwig Loewe which owned Waffenfabrik Mauser, an ammunition company and the Ludwig Loewe rifle and machine tool works.This reorganization allowed Waffenfabrik Mauser to continue operating as an autonomous corporate subsidiary, but merged the other assests into a single firm. After late 1896 all rifles made at the Loewe plant in Berlin were marked on the left receiver wall with Deutsche Waffen und Munitions Fabriken, and the Loewe name was no longer used. Only long rifles were purchased, but deliveries were insufficent to satisfy Serb ordnance department requirements as insufficient funds kept Serbia from buying modern rifles fast enough, so M99C series production and deliveries were phased in over a period of years, ending in 1906.

In the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Francis Bannerman a prominent New York City war surplus dealer, had purchased all the 7x57mm Spanish Model 1893 Mauser rifles and Model 1895 carbines captured by U.S.forces from Spanish troops in Cuba and the Philippines. During the summer of 1902, as work was progressing to produce the new .30 caliber U.S. Rifle Model 1903, commonly called the "Springfield" after its place of development, Springfield Armory in Springfield, Mass. Bannerman contracted with that armory to recondition the captured Spanish weapons he had purchased at an auction.

In the late spring of 1903, Bannerman took a sample rifle and carbine with him to Europe. He planned to go to Belgrade to sell the whole lot of them to Serbia. These Spanish rifles were quite similar to the M99C, the chief difference being the bolt face design which would not allow the bolts to interchange with existing Serb Mauser bolts. Despite this shortcoming, it would have still seemed to be an excellent deal for both parties, but, as Balkan history has repeatedly demonstrated, other events intervened.

On the evening of May 29, 1903, the king of Serbia, Alexander Obrenovich, whose family had ruled Serbia for nearly 70 years and was considered by many Serbs at the time to be a pretender to the Serb throne as well as being too pro-German, was brutally killed in Belgrade by a cadre of 28 junior army officers along with his wife, Queen Draga, a widow and a commoner. These officers were incensed with the king's erratic foreign policy that had diplomatically isolated Serbia, and were angry about his recent suspension of Parliament and the reformist 1901 Constitution. The officers had bombed the palace with dynamite, trapped the royal couple behind some drapes, shot them 48 times, hacked the corpses to pieces with their swords and flung the bloody remains from a balcony and into the street. King Peter I of the Karadjordjevich line, the grandson of Black George, was restored to power.

When Bannerman arrived in the Serb capital by train from Germany, the political situation was so unstable that no deal could be made and he left for home to sell off the rifles elsewhere. The next group of Serb Mauser rifles, the Model 99/07C, also known as "M99/07C" and "M07C", was purchased from the Steyr firm in Austria. These were based upon the small ring M99C, but the chambered cartridge's base was fully supported by a ring of steel formed by a section of shallow flange machined on the barrel breech face mating with a complimentary flange on the recessed bolt face as the bolt was turned down and locked. This feature may not be present on the earliest delivered rifles. The design was modified for some reason, or perhaps the improved breeching was thought to rate a new designation and a new Model 99/08C was adopted. The 07C and the 99/08C both were long rifles.

A new carbine, the M08C, was also purchased from Steyr. It had a pointed Mannlicher-style pistol grip stock, a 17.7" (45cm) barrel and a Mauser 1895-type adjustable rear tangent sight calibrated from 300 to 1500 meters. It was issued to police in the central Serb city of Nis (pronounced Neesh). Markings on all these Mausers are in Serb Cyrillic and they bear the Serbian royal crest and the words "Model 1908" in Cyrillic on the receiver ring.

During this period, a cost reduction measure was adopted to convert old M1878/80C black powder rifles to five shot single column box magazine feed using the standard smokeless powder 7x57mm cartridge, a scheme which turned out to be impractical and dangerous. The first model, the M80/06C, was proven unsuitable and a strengthened model was developed and called the M80/7C or M80/07C. The M80/7C featured an adapter fitted to the receiver to provide a bearing point for an additional locking lug on the bolt guide rib and charger clip guides for the standard Mauser M99C stripper clip are fitted to the receiver bridge. To begin production of this conversion, 50,000 new 7x57mm barrels were ordered from Steyr in 1907.

Meanwhile, early in 1908, Serbia learned the British and Russian governments were conspiring to establish an independent Macedonia. Macedona is a mountainous area of the Balkans south of Serbia and bordering on Greece, which was still under Ottoman control. Ethnic Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Jews, Vlachs and other minorities also called Macedonia their home. The Serb, Bulgarian and Greek governments all had laid claim to some or all of the area.

A progressively weakening Turkey became popularly known as the "Sick Man of Europe." The once powerful Ottoman Empire was dying fast and many expected a fight over the corpse. When it became known in Constantinople that Macedonia was about to be lost, a group of dissident junior army officers deposed the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and adopted a new constitution. Calling themselves the "Young Turks," these young officers implemented reforms in an attempt to modernized and strengthen the empire and army. German advisers were brought in to reorganize and upgrade the Turkish military along Prussian lines.

In the wake of events in Turkey, Austria Hungary, with the tacit consent of Russia, quickly annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, formally incorporating what they had received via the Treaty of Berlin 30 years before. Belgrade threatened to declare war on Vienna, but relented when it learned the Russians had already agreed not to contest Austria's action.

Serb fears of an invasion were escalated in September when Bulgaria declared its formal independence from the Ottoman Empire. Belgrade believed this act might inspire Sofia to invade and occupy Macedonia, an action that would fully surround Serbia with potentially hostile enemies. In response to Belgrade''s bitter opposition to Vienna''s Bosnian annexation, Austria suspended delivery to Serbia of the final batch of 15,000 of the original 50,000 7x57mm Steyr rifle barrels ordered the year before.

In reaction to this series of distressing events, on October 8, 1908, a group of Serb generals, diplomats, businessmen and legislators met in Belgrade and formed a clandestine nationalist group called "People's Defense," its goal being to bring as many Balkan regions populated by ethnic Serbs into a "Greater Serbia." The Serbs determined to take over what they considered "Serb Macedonia." By 1909, in part due to the success of People's Defense propaganda and espionage efforts, the Turks were gradually losing what little remained of their once huge Balkan Empire.

The former subject peoples of the mostly Orthodox Christian areas of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria had by then formed independent or autonomous nations. Each nation contained minorities of neighboring peoples, and all claimed other lands housing people of their own ethnicity and these claims often conflicted. One thing they all agreed upon was that the rotting Ottoman Empire had to be pushed out of Europe once and for all so that each Balkan nation''s territorial claims could be settled and their respective security increased.

War was coming fast. In the wake of these increasing political tensions, Serbia realized it needed even more modern rifles and Steyr completed deliveries for the 7x57mm Mauser M99/08C in 1910. A year before, 10,000 M80/7C conversions had been completed with the Steyr 7x57mm caliber barrels first ordered in 1907. Once financing could be arranged, the Serb government ordered an improved Model 98 with the Mauser Co. factory in Oberndorf, Germany, the Model 1910 (M10C) in 7x57mm. Deliveries of this new "Serb Rifle" began in 1911.

The M10C looked at first glance like the M99C long rifle, but with a tangent rear sight and large ring Mauser 98 action. It featured "the ring of steel" full cartridge base support of the M99/08C, a standard Mauser 98 five round staggered magazine assembly, and no recoil cross bolt in the stock. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and other Latin American nations purchased this same model. Serb Cyrillic markings and the Serb royal crest identify the new "Serb Rifle."

In 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro signed a series of clandestine agreements forming what was called ""The Balkan League."" The League's aim was to drive the weakened Ottoman Turks out of Europe once and for all. Montenegro declared war on Turkey on October 8, 1912, followed by Serbia and Bulgaria, and the First Balkan War was underway. A tottering Turkey was soon decisively beaten by the combined powers of the League. After much wrangling, in May 1913 the Treaty of London was signed and the Ottomans lost their few remaining European lands except for a small region on the western shore of the Dardanelles bordering on Bulgaria and Greece, which it retains to this day.

The land taken from the Ottomans was divided up among the victors. Bulgaria thought itself cheated with its small portion of Macedonia and subsequently, with Austrian logistical and financial support, attacked Serbia and Greece in June 1913. This set off the brief but bloody Second Balkan War. Bulgaria lost, and the resulting Treaty of Bucharest in August 1913 gave Montenegro the entire Austrian controlled Sanjak. Serbia got the lion's share of Macedonia, Greece got the coast of Salonika and Kavala and southern Macedonia. Smarting from its loss of the Sanjak, Austria-Hungary insisted on the establishment of an Austrian ruled Albanian state on the territory Serbia and Montenegro had seized during that war.

As a result of the last action, tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary reached new heights. By midsummer 1913, the Serbian High Command had to face harsh political and logistical realities. There was grave internal dissension within the military and between the two major Serbian political parties, the ruling hardline Radicals and the more conciliatory Progressives. Basic foodstuffs, especially grain, were in short supply because the mobilization of tens of thousands of young men for both Balkan Wars had left an acute farm labor shortage. Many rifles had been lost or rendered unusable. Artillery and small arms ammunition stocks were gravely low. Ammunition for captured nonstandard Bulgarian and Turkish rifles was even scarcer.

Once again Serbia needed modern infantry rifles, and fast. The country had to face the unpleasant fact that obtaining the desired new Mauser pattern rifles in the required quantity was no longer a viable option. The Mauser Company, via its holding company, DWM, which controlled production licensing and sale of Mauser riflesworldwide, was German owned and Germany was a formal ally of Austria-Hungary. In the event of war with Vienna, the supply of rifles and spare parts from Steyr would be cut off. Moreover, there was insufficient hard currency to pay for these new rifles, and, to make matters worse, the Serb government under Radical Party Prime Minister Nikola Pasich had terminated the Serbs' trade agreement with Austria-Hungary that would have made a cost-effective deal possible.

Given these numerous unfavorable conditions, the Serb High Command decided that, as a stopgap measure, it would temporarily rearm with the "Ruski Pushka" (Russian Rifle) the Model 1891 Mosin Nagant bolt action rifle. It would become Serbia's new "substitute standard" as soon as adequate quantities could be obtained. It is not known how these rifles were paid for, but Russia began supplying or had promised to supply them. However, once again, political events suddenly intervened to disrupt these plans.

In Sarajevo, on Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, a Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed Crown Prince Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) throne, along with his wife Sophie. He used the popular Belgian made Browning Model 1910 pistol in 9mm Browning Short (.380 ACP.) Several of these handguns had been supplied by Serbian military intelligence, on orders of its commander, one Col. Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijevich, to a three year old Serb nationalist movement named "Unity or Death," commonly called "The Black Hand." The Black Hand was a clandestine group of ethnic Serb nationalist conspirators scattered throughout Austria-Hungary's Balkan provinces of which Princip, who died of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison a few months before W.W. I ended, was a member. Four of the pistols recovered by Sarajevo police were serial numbered 19074, 19075, 19120, and 19126. The pistols were "liberated" from an Austrian museum in 1945 and are presently believed to be somewhere in the U.S.A.

In reaction to the assassination, Vienna issued an ultimatum to Belgrade. Serbia approached Russia for material support while rejecting Vienna's demands. Serbia was still in poor shape economically and the military forces were gravely short of vital supplies of all types. The Tsar's government promised 120,000 M1891 Mosin Nagant rifles to be delivered in August, despite the fact that Russia itself was also chronically short of adequate numbers of small arms. It is likely most of these came from Russian Army arsenals and were not new production. It is unknown whether any rifles were delivered before August 1914 when the promised 120,000 rifles showed up in Serbia. Further deliveries followed, but no information is available on quantities. A British Army document from early 1915 had reported that 150,000 Russian Mosin Nagants were in Serb service at that time.

When war with the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria to be followed by Turkey, began on 28 July 1914, Serbia was able to field an estimated 425,000 trained and equipped troops. The military intelligence department of the Imperial Army of Austro-Hungary estimated that a minimum shortfall of 150,000 serviceable military rifles, needed to arm called up reservists, existed in Serbia at the start of the war. The actual number in fact was well over 200,000. Roughly 25% of all Serb troops lacked rifles of any kind and other soldiers were armed with obsolete black powder rifles for which little ammo or spare parts were available.

The regular Serbian Army and the First Levy, male draftees between 21-30 years of age serving 18 months of active duty, were supplied the following rifles, Serb Mausers M10C, M99C, M99/07C, M99/08C, Carbine M08C and some Russian M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifles in 7.62x54R. They were also outfitted with Browning M1910 .380 ACP and Mauser M1896 7.63mm "Broom handle" autoloading pistols and 7x57mm Model 1909 Maxim water-cooled, belt fed medium machine guns as available.

The Second Levy, reservists between 31-40 years of age who had already completed their 18 months of active duty, was issued the following weapons, M80/7C rifle, M95 carbine, M90T, M99T, M03T, M10T rifles, the M05T carbine and Austrian Steyr Mannlicher M1895 rifles and carbines in 8x50R. The "T series" of Mauser rifles and carbines had been captured from the Turks during the First Balkan War and converted from 7.65mm to 7x57mm. The Steyr Mannlichers had been captured from the Bulgarians in the Second Balkan War. The Regular Army along with the First and Second Levies constituted the Field Army. Only regulars and First Levy would have uniforms, ammo pouches and belts.

The Third Levy (Trije Ban), composed of reservists aged 41-50, was issued any remaining Second Levy weapons plus surplus 10.67mm Russian Berdan M1870 rifles. An estimated 75,000 of these Berdans were accounted for in 1909, but after the two Balkan Wars, some 50,000 serviceable examples of these rifles would be a generous estimate. In addition, Mauser Milovanovic M1878/80C, Winchester 1866 & 1873 in .44-40, Sniders, Gras, Peabodys, Martini Henrys, M87T's, anything that could shoot, were put into service.

The Chetniks, irregular local village forces, usually not uniformed and sometimes barefoot, were armed chiefly with captured Austrian-made Bulgarian Steyr Mannlicher M95 rifles and carbines at the outbreak of war. Ammunition availability was a key factor in issuing rifles. Sometimes only one packet, 20 cartridges in four five-round clips, or one round per rifle, was issued.

The Military Technical Institute could turn out 120,000 rounds of the standard 7x57mm per day, but periodically had to switch production over to make various calibers of artillery shells, obsolete 10.15mm black powder rounds, 8x50R cartridges for captured Bulgarian Steyr-Mannlicher rifles as well as prepare to manufacture the 7.62x54R cartridges for the proposed new substitute standard Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle.

Ammunition availability also dictated which type rifle would be issued to each unit. Should a squad or platoon be transferred to another company or battalion for example, its members had to trade their rifles for the type in issue in the new parent unit to avoid logistical problems. The Military Technical Institute was, by that time not only Serbia''s chief arsenal, but was also the largest manufacturer in the country. It turned out machine tools and gauges, repaired artillery guns and small arms, produced horse drawn carts, wagons and saddlery, crafted small arms and artillery ammunition and also acted as the Serb military's ordnance school. It employed 300 full-time production workers in addition to the technical staff and army personnel assigned there.

Meanwhile, initial Serb battlefield successes against invading Austrians, whose commander, Gen. Oskar Potiorek, bragged at war''s outbreak he would have little trouble conquering ""that kingdom of pig breeders"", had secured them large quantities of Steyr-Mannlicher M1888/90 and M1895 8x50R rifles and carbines, Steyr Model 1907 and 1912 autoloading pistols, Schwarzlose M1905 and M1912 belt fed water-cooled medium machine guns in the same caliber as well as vast stocks of ammunition for all of them. However, as time passed, the Serbs, facing the ravages of typhus and cholera combined with persisting severe food, clothing and ammunition shortages, lost their capital city, Belgrade, to attacking Austrian troops on December 2, 1914. Ironically this was the birthday of Austrian emperor Franz Josef.

Despite their desperate straits, the battered and outnumbered but valiant Serbs the next day launched one last desperate offensive against the now, overconfident Austrian forces. Incredibly enough after 10 days of ferocious fighting, they drove a stunned Gen. Potiorek and all of his remaining troops back across the Danube. Belgrade was recaptured on December 15. Austria-Hungary had sustained more than 100,000 casualties and lost even more weapons valuable to the Serbs, but the badly weakened Serbs could not take full advantage of their surprising victory, a situation that caused a nearly year-long stalemate in the region. By February 1915, about 50,000 serviceable Austrian M88/90 and M95 rifles and carbines with adequate stores of captured 8x50R ammunition were in formal Serb issue.

Despite these slight improvements in the Serbs' logistical situation, in October 1915, their still rebuilding army was eventually smashed after being surprise attacked by an overwhelming combined force of invading German, Austrian and Bulgarian troops. Some 150,000 Serb fighting men successfully embarked on a long and difficult retreat southward across the mountains of south Serbia and Macedonia into Greece where the Allies reequipped them with significant amounts of French gear such as the Rifle M1907/15 in 8mm Lebel and some Chauchat and Hotchkiss machine guns in the same caliber. The French also supplied a large number of Winchester Model 1907 .351 caliber semiautomatic carbines that France had initially purchased from the USA as aircraft armament before its airplanes were fully fitted with machine guns. These Winchester carbines were used by Serb special operations troops.

In September 1916, the refreshed, reorganized and refitted Serb armies resumed combat operations against the German, Austrian and Bulgarian occupiers, driving slowly northward into Macedonia and back through Serbia proper until the Central Powers surrendered 26 months later. The Allies supported formation of a unified multi ethnic South Slav state as was stated in Point 11 of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points," but Italy had been promised lands inhabited by many of these peoples as part of the deal for entering the war on the Allied side in 1915. Many Croats and Slovenes actively supported unification while other members of those two groups opposed it on grounds the new union would be dominated by Serbs.

The fiercely independent King of Montenegro, Nicholas I, fearful of Croat and Slovene influence in the new unified nation, abdicated his throne and left the country shortly after W.W. I ended. The Serb Army formed the nucleus upon which the new army of the unified kingdom would be built. The elderly King of Serbia, Peter I Karadjordjevich, who had been in power since 1903, assumed the throne of the new Kingdom, although his son, Alexander II, had ruled as regent since 1914. Alexander II formally assumed the throne upon Peter I's death in 1921.

Serviceable military small arms remained in short supply in the newly formed nation. All the previously discussed rifles were held in greatly diminished numbers and these were far the worse for wear. Additionally, war booty from the Central Powers included many of the following types of rifles, the Mannlicher M1886 11mm, M88, M88/90, M95, all in 8x50R, and Mauser M1912 7x57mm, German Gew. 98 and Kar. 98a in 7.92x57mm as well as various Turkish Mauser rifles in 7.65mm. Rifles of Allied Powers lost to Central Powers and recaptured by the Serbs consisted of Mosin Nagant M1891s 7.62x54R, 11mm M1874 Gras andKropatscheks , M1891 Mosin Nagants converted to 8x50R by Austria, various Italian M1891 series Mannlicher Carcano rifles and carbines in 6.5x52mm, Romanian Model 1893 Mannlichers in 6.5x53R. Rifles of acceded states included the Montenegrin Steyr Werndl M1873 10.66mm rifles, 10.67mm Berdan II and 7.62x54mmR Mosin Nagant M1891 rifles.

In the wake of the hard logistical lessons learned in 1914-18 and in the presence of scores of types of captured small arms, Yugoslavia (like Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Poland) decided to standardize on the Mauser 98 type rifle in the German rimless 7.92x57mm caliber. Existing Serb and Turkish Mausers in 7x57mm and 7.65mm respectively with badly worn or pitted bores could be rechambered and rebored to 7.92mm and restored to service using existing barrels, a major savings in money, effort and time.

In 1922, 50,000 "short action" 98 type short rifles were purchased from Fabrique National (FN) in Liege, Belgium along with machine tooling and a technical support package to manufacture these rifles at Kragujevac. FN engineers and technicians set up the Military Technical Institute production line for an upgraded pattern of this weapon, the well-known Serb M1924 model "short rifle", after the FN design was modified by Yugoslav ordnance engineers to incorporate the full cartridge base support feature on the M10C bolt head and also to allow the safety switch to be applied with the bolt uncocked. It was planned that serviceable existing surplus rifles would be reworked as closely as possible to the new Model 1924 pattern.

As always, funds were in short supply, so, to cut costs, existing Serb M10C and M99C Mauser rifles were shortened to the M24 short rifle dimensional specifications and rebored to 7.92x57mm. Remaining Turkish Mausers from the Model 90T upward as well as existing supplies of Austrian Steyr Mannlicher rifles from the Model 1888/90 onward were also reworked into short rifles generally resembling the M24 specifications and converted to 7.92x57mm. The Steyr-Mannlicher Model 1895 was shortened and renamed the M95M, the second ""M"" denoting Mauser, as it was converted to use standard Mauser stripper clips, given a tangent Mauser rear sight while its outward appearance was made to resemble that of the standard M24 Mauser short rifle.

In 1925, another 50,000 Mauser M24 short rifles were ordered from FN. Also around this time, Austria delivered a large number of surplus 7x57mmM1912 Steyr Mausers it had used to arm reserve troops in W.W.I. These were Mausers originally destined for Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela but W.W. I broke out in 1914 and halted deliveries to these nations. Austria Hungary had considered a transition to the 7x57mm cartridge shortly before 1914 and had even produced a prototype Mannlicher-Schoenauer short rifle for production but war's onset canceled the plan. A few hundred of these Mannlicher-Schoenauers were allegedly made but only two specimens are known to exist today.

Yugoslavia shortened and converted these Steyr Mauser M1912s to the accepted general 7.92x57mm M24 pattern,wiping the Austrian markings and replacing them with the Yugoslav royal crest. These were marked "Model 24B", the Cyrillic "B" corresponding to the Latin "V", on the receiver ring below the crest. The actual definition of the "V" designation is unknown; some claim it stands for Vojna (army) while others claim it stands for Vien, the Serbo-Croat pronunciation of Vienna, from where these particular Steyr Mausers were originally shipped. In 1929, Yugoslavia purchased an additional 40,000 standard Model 24 (Vz24) short rifles in 7.92mm from Ceskoslovenska Zbrojovka (CZ) in Brno, Czechoslovakia.