Search Results for: sutton

Capitalists Tripping Over Each Other To Sell the Rope To Hang Capitalists

The foreword by Gary North, to “The Best Enemy Money Can Buy” By Antony C. Sutton

In December of 1979, the Soviet Union launched a lightning-fast military offensive against the backward nation of Afghanistan. It was after this invasion that President Jimmy Carter admitted publicly that it had taught him more about the intentions of the Soviets than
everything he had ever learned. Never again would he kiss the cheeks of Premier Brezhnev before the television cameras of the West. The Democrat-controlled Senate even refused to ratify his SALT II treaty. (By the way, President Reagan has been honoring its terms unofficially, and he already has ordered the destruction of several Poseidon submarines, including the U.S.S. Sam Rayburn, the dismantling of which began in November of 1985 (1), and which cost a staggering $21 million for the destruction of that one ship (2). The Nathan Hale and the Andrew Jackson are scheduled for destruction in 1986 (3). To comply with SALT II, we will have to destroy an additional 2,500 Poseidon submarine warheads. “Good faith,” American diplomatic officials argue. (“Good grief,” you may be thinking.)
The invasion of Afghanistan was a landmark shift in Soviet military tactics. Departing from half a century of slow, plodding, “smother the enemy with raw power” tactics, the Soviet military leadership adopted the lightning strike. Overnight, the Soviets had captured the Kabul airfield and had surrounded the capital city with tanks (4).
Tanks? In an overnight invasion? How did 30-ton Soviet tanks roll from the Soviet border to the interior city of Kabul in one day? What about the rugged Afghan terrain?
The answer is simple: there are two highways from the Soviet Union to Kabul, including one which is 647 miles long. Their bridges can support tanks. Do you think that Afghan peasants built these roads for yak-drawn carts? Do you think that Afghan peasants built these roads at all? No, you built them.
In 1966, reports on this huge construction project began to appear in obscure U.S. magazines. The project was completed the following year. It was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Soviet and U.S. engineers worked side by side, spending U.S. foreign aid money and Soviet money, to get the highways built. One strip of road, 67 miles long, north through the Salang Pass to the U.S.S.R., cost $42 million, or $643,000 per mile. John W. Millers, the leader of the United National survey team in Afghanistan, commented at the time that it was the most expensive bit of road he had ever seen. The Soviets trained and used 8,000 Afghans to build it. (5)
If there were any justice in this world of international foreign aid, the Soviet tanks should have rolled by signs that read: “U.S. Highway Tax Dollars at Work.”
Nice guys, the Soviets. They just wanted to help a technologically backward nation. Nice guys, American foreign aid officials. They also just wanted to help a technologically backward nation… the Soviet Union.
Seven Decades of Deals
The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed, so as not to protect the guilty.
In the mid-1970’s, the original version of this book led to the destruction of Antony Sutton’s career as a salaried academic researcher with the prestigious (and therefore, not quite ideologically tough enough) Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. That was a high price for Sutton to pay, but not nearly so high as the price you and I are going to be asked to pay because of the activities that this book describes in painstaking detail.
Lenin is supposed to have made the following observation:
“If we were to announce today that we intend to hang all capitalists tomorrow, they would trip over each other trying to sell us the rope.”
I don’t think he ever said it. However, someone who really understood Lenin, Communism, and capitalist ethics said it. This book shows how accurate an observation it is.
Antony Sutton is not about to offer the following evidence in his own academic self-defense, so I will. Perhaps the best-informed American scholar in the field of Soviet history and overall strategy is Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard University. In 1984, his chilling book appeared, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (Simon & Schuster). His book tells at least part of the story of the Soviet Union’s reliance on Western technology, including the infamous Kama River truck plant, which was built by the Pullman- Swindell company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of M. W. Kellogg Co. Prof. Pipes remarks that the bulk of the Soviet merchant marine, the largest in the world, was built in foreign shipyards. He even tells the story (related in greater detail in this book) of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont, which sold the Soviet Union the ball-bearing machines that alone made possible the targeting mechanism of Soviet MIRV’ed ballistic missiles. And in footnote 29 on page 290, he reveals the following:
In his three-volume detailed account of Soviet purchases of Western equipment and technology . . . [Antony] Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as “extreme” or, more often, simply ignored.
Prof. Pipes knows how the academic game is played. The game cost Sutton his academic career. But the academic game is very small potatoes compared to the historic “game” of world conquest by the Soviet empire. We are dealing with a messianic State which intends to impose its will on every nation’ on earth — a goal which Soviet leaders have repeated constantly since they captured Russia in their nearly bloodless coup in October of 1917.
Sutton identifies the deaf mute blindmen who sell the Soviets the equipment they need for world conquest. But at least these deaf mute blindmen get something out of it: money. Not “soft currency” Soviet rubles, either; they get U.S. dollars from the Soviets, who in turn get long-term loans that are guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers. Their motivation is fairly easy to understand. But what do the academic drones get out of it? What do they get for their systematic suppression of the historical facts, and their callous treatment in book reviews of works such as Sutton’s monumental three-volume set, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development? What was in it, for example, for C. H. Feinstein of Clare College, Cambridge Unversity, who reviewed Sutton’s first volume, covering 1917-1930? He could not honestly fault Sutton’s basic scholarship, nor did he try:
… he has examined a vast amount of information, much of it previously unknown to scholars, regarding the trading contacts and contracts between the U.S.S.R and the West, notably Germany and the United States. The primary sources were the fascinating and extraordinarily detailed files of the U.S. State Department and the archives of the German Foreign Ministry, and these were supplemented by a wide-ranging and multilingual selection of books and journals.
He even wrote that “Sutton’s prodigious researches (and this is apparently only the first of three projected volumes) have provided students of Soviet economic development with a detailed survey of the way in which Western’ technology was transferred to the Soviet Union, and for this we are indebted to him.” But having admitted this — thereby preserving the surface appearance of professional integrity — Feinstein then lowered the academic boom:
Unfortunately, his attempt to go beyond this, and to assess the significance of this transfer and of the concessions policy, is unsatisfactory and overstates the extent and impact of the concessions as well as their importance for Soviet economic development …. the defects of Sutton’s approach … a similar lack of understanding… Sutton exaggerates… He further indulges his fondness for exaggeration… (6)
You get the basic thrust of the review. “Facts are fine; we are all scholars here.” But even the mildest sort of first-stage conclusions concerning the importance and significance of such facts are anathema, for the facts show that the Soviet economy should have this sign over it: “Made in the West.” Sutton’s subsequent two volumes were never reviewed in this specialized academic journal — the journal, above all other U.S. scholarly journals, in which it would have been most appropriate to include reviews of scholarly books on Soviet economic history. The information blackout had begun, and it was augmented by the publisher’s own blackout beginning in 1973, a blackout discussed in this book.
Less than three years after Feinstein’s review was published, Bryant Chucking Grinder Co. sold the Soviets the ball-bearing grinders that subsequently placed the West at the mercy of the Soviet tyrants. At last, they possessed the technology which makes possible a relatively low-risk first-strike by Soviet missiles against our missiles and “defenses.”(7) Until Bryant supplied the technology, the Soviets couldn’t build such offensive weapons, which is why they had lobbied from 1961 until 1972 to get the U.S. government’s authorization to buy the units. Within a few years after delivery, they had the missiles installed. Then they invaded Afghanistan. So much for Sutton’s “exaggerations.”
This book is not really designed to be read word for word. It is a kind of lawyer’s brief, filled with facts that none of us will remember in detail. But if the facts were not included, the book’s thesis would be too far-fetched to accept. He therefore includes pages and pages of dull, dreary details — details that lead to an inescapable conclusion: that the West has been betrayed by its major corporate leaders, with the full compliance of its national political leaders.
From this time forward, you can say in confidence to anyone: “The United States financed the economic and military development of the Soviet Union. Without this aid, financed by U.S. taxpayers, there would be no significant Soviet military threat, for there would be no Soviet economy to support the Soviet military machine, let alone sophisticated military equipment.” Should your listener scoff, you need only to hand him a copy of this book, it will stuff his mouth with footnotes.
It probably will not change the scoffer’s mind, however. Minds are seldom changed with facts, certainly not college-trained minds. Facts did not change Prof. Feinstein’s mind, after all. The book will only shut up the scoffer when in your presence. But even that is worth a lot these days.
From this day forward, you should never take seriously any State Department official (and certainly not the Secretary of State) who announces to the press that this nation is now, and has always been, engaged in a worldwide struggle against Communism and Soviet aggression. Once in a while, Secretaries of State feel pressured to give such speeches. They are nonsense. They are puffery for the folks out in middle America.
You may note for future reference my observation that Secretaries of Commerce never feel this pressure to make anti-Communist speeches. They, unlike Secretaries of State, speak directly for American corporate interests. They know where their bread is buttered, and more important, who controls the knife.
When it comes to trading with the enemy, multinational corporate leaders act in terms of the political philosophy of the legendary George  Washington Plunkett of Tammany Hall: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ’em.” Plunkett was defending “honest graft”; our modern grafters have raised the stakes considerably. They are talking about bi-partisan treason.
Footnotes:
1. Washington Times (Dec. 24, 1985).
2. Howard Phillips, Washington Dateline (Dec. 1985), p. 6.
3. Washington Post (Nov. 27, 1985).
4. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), ch. 1.
5. “Rugged Afghan Road Jobs Fill Gaps in Trans-Asian Network,” Engineering News-Record (Nov. 3, 1966).

6. Review of Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-1930 (Stanford: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, 1965), in The Journal of Economic History, XXIX (December 1969), pp. 816-18.

7. Actually, the United States has no defenses. What we have is an arsenal of retaliatory offensive weapons aimed at Soviet cities, not at Soviet military targets. This is the infamous strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which was implemented by former Secretary of Defense (!!!) Robert Strange McNamara. If Soviet missiles were to take out the bulk of our land-based missiles in a first strike, we would have little choice but to surrender, since our submarine-launched missiles are too weak and too inaccurate to destroy hardened Soviet missile silos, and the Soviets could threaten a second wave of missiles against our cities if we were to attempt to retaliate. On our present position of military inferiority, see Quentin Crommelin, Jr. and David S. Sullivan, Soviet Military Supremacy (Washington, D.C.: The Citizens’ Foundation, 1985). This book was a project of USC’s Defense and Strategic Studies Program.

The end.
P.S., I wrote about the ubiquity of these goings-on earlier here on the site, as well.

Wars Are Only Make Believe

I know Americans young and old haven’t the time to listen to the late Professor Antony C. Sutton’s 39-minute interview that runs counter to what has been taught in school about America, the land of the free.  Modern history schoolbooks portray the U.S. as a hero country that saved millions from despots that dominated foreign lands.

So, allow me to summarize what Dr. Sutton said a few years ago: US industry was behind the re-arming of Russia – -the “cold war” was contrived; and U.S. companies financially and industrially backed Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.  America profits from both sides of wars.  Young American army soldiers were dying for what?  Understanding these facts may provide Americans a better understanding of the pre-planned COVID-19 pandemic now underway.

…

Dr. Stan Monteith had occasion to interview British-American economist, historian and author Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002).

  • In 1972 the U.S. was in Vietnam and we were supplying the Soviets who were in turn supplying the North Vietnamese with trucks.

  • In 1933 U.S. industry and banking funded Hitler’s rise to power, which includes General Electric, Osram, Ford Motor, Standard Oil, the latter supplied tetraethyl to raise the octane level of gasoline essential for Germany’s aviation.

  • American corporations used subsidiaries to transfer technology, materials, before the Germans could manufacture these themselves. Germany did not have access to natural oil resources and used synthetics from coal, which came from the U.S.   G. Farben, a German company, obtained from Standard Oil technology to make explosives.

  • Saturation bombing targeted German industrial and electrical plants, but the U.S.-owned plants were not bombed.

Excerpted from here.

We have written more about this.

Not Just IBM: How American Industry Collaborated With the Nazis

Companies like Standard Oil, ITT (telephony), Chase and Morgan, Ford, etc.

Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler 148 page book is available in full on Voltairenet.org.

(While the subtitle implies this collaboration only took place in preparation for the war, the book itself shows it never stopped.)

Major, modern “wars” are highly unreal. We have written about this before here.

[And here regarding the Russia-Ukraine War.]

Again, find the book here.

Is Evolution Jewishly ‘Fixable’? – Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan

Aryeh Kaplan on Evolution- A Missing Chapter of The Handbook of Jewish Thought

Posted on October 24, 2019 by 

In honor of Bereshit, here is Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan on reading Genesis as presenting the truths of 20th century science, as discussing a world 2 billion years old with humans as existing for 25,000 years.

This is part VII in a series on Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan- for biography see Part I, Part II, Part III, for Kabbalah see Part IV  Part V  and Part VI Much of the prior biographic discussion has already been incorporated into Wikipedia.

Aryeh Kaplan’s Handbook of Jewish Thought has become a classic of synthesizing the classic positions of Jewish thought into an order fashion both an introductory guide and simultaneously a reference book

Below is a pdf of a full chapter of Aryeh Kaplan’s Handbook of Jewish Thought left out of the published work because he presents evolution as part of the basic tenets of Judaism. The already typeset chapter has an editor’s note across the top asking if the chapter is “fixable” and “true kosher”? There is also an editor’s note that dates the chapter to 1968 when Kaplan was leading a Conservative congregation in Dover NJ.

The Handbook of Jewish Thought was published in two volumes, the first, containing 13 chapters, appeared in the author’s lifetime in 1979. The second volume edited by Avraham Sutton, was published posthumously in 1992. This volume has 25 chapters. While the first volume had no introduction from the author, the second volume contains the following statement:

The bulk of the present volume is from the author’s original 1967- 1969 manuscript that consisted of 40 chapters. Thirteen of these chapters were prepared for publication by Rabbi  Kaplan himself and published in 1979 as the Handbook of Jewish thought – Volume I. It is clear that the remaining chapters were set aside with the thought of eventually preparing them for publication. Of these remaining chapters, 25 are presented here

Despite the assertion that the first volume was called “volume 1”, no such statement is to be found in the original Handbook of Jewish thought.

Quick arithmetic – 13 (volume 1) and 25 (volume 2) indicates that 2 chapters of the original 40 were suppressed. In the end, they – Moznayim – or the Kaplan family concluded to leave these chapters out of the book.  Generally, the works published by Moznayim are much more circumspect than the audio recording of his lectures. Here is an extreme case.

Moznayim assigned people to edit Kaplan’s writings  or tapes of his lectures who were not there at the lectures or had left for other teachers years before.

I thank Rabbi Ari Kahn for providing access by sending me the pdf of this gem. If someone has the final – 40th chapter – I would love to see it.

Evolution      

Kaplan is explicit in his affirmation of evolution in this piece.

In the first three paragraphs, he states that the creation account in Genesis is not literal and not science but narrated to teach the history of Israel. He believes that new concepts in science are always being discovered beyond the limited science known in the Biblical and rabbinical era.  We are, according to Kaplan, to continuously interpret the Biblical text according to currently available knowledge.

Even though the explicit text is to narrate Israel’s history, nevertheless Kaplan states that the scientific knowledge is hinted at in the Masoretic text through “subtle variations”. In addition, we have traditions that aid in our discovering the scientific truth in the text. Maimonides and other medieval commentators interpreted the text based on Aristotle. Maimonides in his Guide II:29 explains how he would be willing to read texts based on current science. Similarly, Kaplan footnotes Ramchal in his commentary of the Aggadot.

Kaplan considers the creation of the universe as billions of years ago when there was the initial creation as the creation of matter as well as the initial creation of time/space. The creation at the start of Genesis was billions of years ago according to Kaplan, even if the Torah does not explicitly state it.

Kaplan explicitly rejects the 19th century Gosse theory, a theory that the world only appears to be older because God created it that way. Kaplan writes: “God does not mislead humans by making the world appear older.” Many of the members of the Association of Orthodox Scientists of his era did accept Gosse as did the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Kaplan defines the creation with the date of 3761 BCE as only the date when Adam (the new being with intelligence) was created. The world itself is billions of years old and various species of men, including Neanderthals and Homo Erectus, pre-date this created Adam.  People generally assume the creation of the world, creation of men, and creation of the intelligent descendants of Adam occurred at the same time; Kaplan differentiates these events.

The metaphoric sixth day was only when Adam was created in Divine thought as the plan for creation, not the actual date of his creation- see below on Kaplan’s acknowledging humanoids before Adam. (Berakhot 61b  Eruvin 18a)

Kaplan makes a general statement that the “time of creation is not essential to our thought.” He proves this from a citation in Yehuda Halevi’s  Kuzari,1:60-61”

Al Khazari: Does it not weaken thy belief if thou art told that the Indians have antiquities and buildings which they consider to be millions of years old?” To which the Rabbi in the dialogue answers: “The Rabbi: It would, indeed, weaken my belief had they a fixed form of religion, or a book concerning which a multitude of people held the same opinion, and in which no historical discrepancy could be found. Such a book, however, does not exist.”

Kaplan takes this to mean that Halevi would only be bothered if they had a form of religion accepted by the multitude with discrepancy, but not about the claim concerning civilization and ancient books.

Continue reading…

From Kavvanah, here.