Consortium News Topic: Alger Hiss and Russia-gate

By -
Jeremy Kuzmarov argues the Cold War case has enduring relevance to American political culture and provides clues to the motives and machinations underlying the new Russophobia.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a former State Department employee and director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. The sentence, of which Hiss served 44 months, culminated a frenzied political trial that catapulted Richard Nixon to fame, undergirded the advent of McCarthyism and heated up the Cold War.
Today, it is worth looking back at the Hiss case because it offers important clues to the motives and machinations underlying the similarly politicized Russia-gate investigations. In both cases, powerful political players appear to have attempted to deflect acts of malfeasance by falsely accusing political adversaries of treasonous behavior while igniting anti-Russia hysteria and paranoid fears of subversion that threatened war between the major nuclear powers.

Hiss testifying in 1950. (Wikipedia)
Hiss was the embodiment of the liberal, New Deal establishment, which had promoted a major expansion of domestic social welfare programs. Educated at Harvard Law School, Hiss clerked for Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and worked for the State Department before moving on to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Supportive of President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy ofaccommodation towards the Soviets, Hiss had been present at the 1945 Yalta conference, which resulted in a spheres of influence agreement.
Hiss had also worked as a legal assistant for the Nye Committee in the 1930s, a congressional investigation into war profiteering led by Gerald Nye, a Republican senator from North Dakota. The investigation exposed high-level corruption and connections between American companies and the growth of the Nazi war machine.
For instance, it revealed how United Aircraft sold commercial airplane engines to Germany for use in Luftwaffe fighter planes. It showed how Nazi troops were armed with American guns, and how Union Banking Corporation had engaged in a cartel agreement with the German chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben, soon to be gas maker for Holocaust gas chambers.
Because of his work on the committee, Hiss made many powerful enemies. The Republican Party at the time was looking to revive its fortunes through red- baiting tactics that would deflect attention from their anti-labor program. The Justice Department also had begun to investigate alleged treasonous activities by GOP power brokers.
Among them was Thomas McKittrick, a former agent of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA) who was the wartime president of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. He was also an executive with Chase Manhattan Bank and a Marshall Plan administrator who allegedly conspired with his friend, the future CIA Director Allen Dulles, to move looted Nazi gold to Argentina.

The Dulles brothers.
Another official under DOJ investigation was Sen.Prescott Bush, a managing director of the Union Banking Corporation, which helped provide financing to Nazi industrialists in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act during World War II. Bush was the father of President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.


Continue reading at
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/08/alger-hiss-and-russia-gate/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship" by Caitlin Johnstone

By -
Image
  MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship The United States received a very small  taste of its own medicine  today as rioting Trump fanatics temporarily  forced their way into the nation’s Capitol building , and now the whole nation is freaking out. I am being generous when I say that America was given a very small taste of its own medicine; unlike the horrific coups and violent uprisings the US routinely orchestrates in noncompliant nations around the world, this one stood exactly zero chance of seizing control of the government, and only  one person was killed . I am also being generous when I say the rioters “forced their way” in; DC  chose not to increase its police presence  in preparation for the protests despite knowing that they were planned, and there’s  footage  of what appears to be cops actively letting them through a police barricade. There was  some fighting  between police and protesters, but contrasted with the  unceasing barrage of pol
Read more

The Deforestation Process

By -
Image
  The Deforestation Process Deforestation is too often reduced to what’s most conspicuous. But deforestation is complex and a lot more than raising beef cattle or growing soybeans. To begin with, despite all the biodiversity especially of plant life, rain forest soil isn’t very fertile. Nope, it’s actually very oxalic. Oxalic soils are acidic. Acidic soils are full of iron, bauxite and other minerals.  So not only are trees in the forest chopped down for their precious hardwood, the soils these trees grow in are mined for minerals including aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, gold and iron. Do you know where the aluminum in your water bottle came from? What’s one of most electricity intensive things to do? Convert bauxite into aluminum. It’s an electrostatic process to remove oxygen from the alumina (Al2O3). This electricity is also one of the largest costs of producing aluminum. So that’s why hydroelectricity is often used to reduce the costs of refining bauxite to alumina to aluminum.
Read more

Reporter Uncovers History-Changing Manson Family Connections to CIA and Hollywood

By -
Image
Reporter Uncovers History-Changing Manson Family Connections to CIA and Hollywood By  John Vibes The crimes of the Manson family resulted in one of the most famous murder trials in history, but new research has come to light that could totally change the history of the case. Much of what was believed to be true about the Manson murders and the cult that carried them out comes from a narrative that was spun by prosecutor Vince Bugliosi, both during the trial and in his book  Helter Skelter — the best selling true crime novel of all time. Nothing about the murders made any sense. There was a strange cult of hippies that were killing celebrities for apparently no reason, and the young people carrying out the crimes seemed to be under the spell of a charismatic lunatic and failed musician named Charles Manson. Bugliosi created a narrative that Manson and his followers had no personal motive in the killings, but were attempting to instigate a race war by framing the Black Pant
Read more