THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 15

    Once the cold war got underway in the years immediately after World War II ended, the business establishment in the USA entered into a joint venture with the military to get rich off of war. If the industrial-military complex could scare the shit out of the people, the people would agree to their tax dollars going to defense contractors in greater amounts each year.  We can actually pinpoint the date when the U.S. switched priorities from spending money to aid strapped farmers to enriching the weapons manufacturers and the military bureaucracy. It was March of 1947. Here's a bit of the story. 

   Great Britain Handed The Role of World Leadership To U.S.

Following the severe winter of 1946-47, financially strapped Great Britain asked the United States to take the lead in aiding Greece to defeat the insurgents trying to change their government and in modernizing the Turkish army. One State Department official later commented, "Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership . . . to the United States." But the war-weary public and Republican -- controlled Congress, which naturally was intent upon reducing taxes and cutting back U.S. international commitments, stood in Truman's way. The Republicans had trounced the Democrats in the November 1946 congressional elections, employing the kind of Red-baiting tactics that would become so familiar over the next decade. The Republican National Committee chairman declared the election a choice between ""communism and Republicanism" and charged that "alien-minded radicals" had seized control of the Democratic Party. 

Congress was reluctant to foot the bill for Truman's costly Greek and Turkish initiatives. Soviet military probes in the Mediterranean had largely ceased, and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had again abated. Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he would have to "scare the hell out of the country" if he hoped to win approval for a global anti-Communist campaign that would change foreign policy "from top to bottom." Dean Acheson took the lead in crafting the administration's message, framing it as a struggle between FREEDOM and TOTALITARIANISM. Only a few months earlier, he had complained about supporting the "reactionary regime" in Greece. But the Turkish crisis had convinced him otherwise. The son of a clergyman, Acheson believed that life was a "pilgrimage from birth to death through a battleground between good and evil." He told a group of congressional leaders, "like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten rotten one, the corruption o Greece would infect Iran and then all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe." He called it an "Armageddon." 

George Kennan, who was head of the State Department policy planning staff, and others, including General George C. Marshall, whom Truman had picked to replace Byrnes as secretary of state, George Elsey, and Soviet expert Chip Bohlen, found this farfetched. Truman sided with Acheson against those who advised him to tone down the rhetoric. Addressing both houses of Congress, Truman appealed for $400 million to finance efforts in Greece and Turkey and DECLARED THAT THE UNITED STATES MUST SUPPORT "FREE PEOPLES WHO ARE RESISTING SUBJUGATION BY ARMED MINORITIES OR OUTSIDE PRESSURE," thence to be known as the TRUMAN DOCTRINE.  

After a heated debate, Congress fell into line. Many members, however, were troubled by Truman's call to arms and support for  blatantly undemocratic and unpopular governments. Bernard Baruch described the speech as "tantamount to a declaration of . . . ideological war or religious war." Marshall criticized Truman's exaggerations. Walter Lippmann was so upset with the Truman Doctrine's overblown rhetoric and apparently open-ended commitment to intervention that he and Acheson almost came to blows at a Washington dinner party. Some, including Kennan, rejected Truman's justification for aiding Turkey, which faced no overt Soviet threat, and feared that Stalin would respond the way Truman would if the Soviets sent military aid to Mexico. 

THE POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH WE HAVE LIVED FOR ALMOST 70 YEARS BEGAN WITH TRUMAN'S SPEECH IN MARCH 1947 TO THE JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS.