DailyRadical

As part of my upbringing, I was taught
that the men and women who fought against the fascists in the
Spanish Civil War were giants. As a child eating in Ratner's
restaurant on New York's Lower East Side, I remember being told
in reverential tones that a person I just met had fought in Spain
with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. My parents, who were members
of the Communist Party during the civil war, could not enlist
in the Brigade because they had dependents. The Communist Party,
as gatekeeper for volunteers, prohibited anyone with dependents
from going to fight in Spain. I like to think they would have
gone if allowed. When I got older I was also taught about the
"bastards," mostly capitalists, who supported Franco
during the fascist revolution against the democratically elected
leftist republicans.

Currently, as the giants die
off the importance of the Lincoln Brigade is being recognized
in the U.S. The Tamiment Library of New York University has become
the repository of all things relating to the Brigade. Last year
the Museum of the City of New York mounted an important exhibit,
"Facing Fascism: New York and The Spanish Civil War."
Also in 2007, The International Center of Photography in New
York City held an exhibit of Spanish Civil War photographs by
Robert Capa and his wife Gerda Taro, who at 26 was killed while
photographing in Spain. Yet while recognizing the heroic efforts
of the Brigade, these institutions are minimizing the role of
the Communists and other leftists who were the majority of the
fighters and organizers of the Brigade. These institutions are
also ignoring the capitalist forces at work in the U.S. that
nurtured and financed fascism from its infancy in Italy and Germany
and supported Franco's seizure of power and abduction of Spain.
Without the corporate support for German and Italian fascism,
Spanish fascism would have been stillborn or handily defeated.
Instead, the U.S. had to contend with three fascist countries
and a world war that killed at least 50 million people.

The Lincoln Brigade was supported
by the Soviet Union and whatever small donations the global working
class could contribute during the Depression. It took three years
and the money and support of fascists from all over the "free
world" to defeat democratic Spain. The U.S. was officially
neutral, but the purpose of that so-called neutrality was actually
to support the Spanish fascists. U.S. corporations easily subverted
the two U.S. neutrality acts of 1937 by using their global network
of subsidiaries, affiliates, boards of directors, banks and direct
control over U.S. extraterritorial production as conduits to
send money and war materiel to the Spanish fascists. GM, Ford,
Standard Oil, IBM and others had manufacturing plants in Nazi
Germany. It isn't possible that the supporters of the neutrality
acts didn't know this. Enough of them were sympathetic to fascism
to allow the laws--irrelevant to Franco's supply lines but not
to the desperate Republicans--to pass. When war materiel was
sent directly from the U.S to the Spanish fascists, U.S. corporations
had the help of Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under President
FDR, the "Saint," to cover for them (see this excellent
piece by Vincent Navarro).

The principle myth for explaining
U.S. support of fascism was fear of the Soviet Union and the
spread of "repressive" communism. In fact, the only
criterion the U.S. has ever had for supporting or rejecting any
regime or policy is whether it would welcome, if not foster capitalist
profit needs.

In Britain's American colonies
and later in the newly founded U.S., racism and genocide were
tolerated and encouraged as long as profits poured in. Slavery
enriched plantation owners in the south and merchants, shippers
and corporations in the north. For 246 years the death, pain
and suffering of African American slaves was legal and institutionalized.
The U.S. Constitution legalized black inferiority (Article 1,
sec. 2, P 3). "Scientific" racism flourished. The journal
Eugenical News: Current Record of Human Genetics and Race
Hygiene, published many "scientific" articles
verifying hierarchical racism. Thousands were lynched, and thousands
were sterilized when the technology became available. Native
Americans were slaughtered and their cultures vilified by Christian
missionaries funded by capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and
J.P. Morgan. Driven off their land, the Native Americans were
put onto concentration camps called "reservations"
or, deprived of their main source of food and clothing, allowed
to starve to death. After Chinese workers finished the western
half of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, they were rewarded
with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Passed on May 6, 1882, it blocked
Chinese immigration to the U.S. until 1943, when China was our
World War 11 ally against Japan, whose immigrants and descendents
in the U.S. were also put en masse into concentration camps.

At the time of the Spanish
Civil War, the U.S. military was segregated and only whites were
promoted to higher ranks. When the European fascists began legalizing
their own brand of oppressive racism, they used the U.S. model
to fashion their laws. Only the human target changed. The laboratory
of horror of the demented Nazi doctor Josef Mengele had its precedent
in the horrors perpetrated on young African American slave women
by Dr. J. Marion Sims. In Harriet Washington's book Medical
Apartheid, she wrote that Sims performed vaginal operations
without anesthetic on these women. Sims was attempting to perfect
a procedure to correct a gynecological problem, but only rich
white women enjoyed the benefits.

In the October 1937 edition
of Story magazine, playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote
that fascism would drag down Western civilization if it remained
"only the latest mask of capitalism." Writer George
Orwell was perfectly right when he said the Spanish Civil War
was a class war. Democratic Spain offered the promise of a better
life for its citizens. The Republican government instituted land
reform, breaking up the feudal like giant estates into smaller
sections and turning them over to the impoverished farmers. The
Republicans initiated free secular education. Social Security
became a national priority. Fascist Spain, on the other hand,
offered profit for the landowners and the urban capitalists,
promising a return to the pre Republican status quo ante, the
"good old days" when working people were kept in their
place. Under capitalism, profits must come before people's needs.
Even before the need to support fascist Spain arose, American
capital was busy helping develop other fascist countries like
Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. They, in turn, helped
the fascist rebels to defeat democratic Spain with rerouted American
money and resources.

Italy was the first modern
fascist state. When Mussolini started "organizing"
Italy, the world was watching. He made the trains run on time,
got the problematic trade unionists under control, murdered the
political opposition and pledged allegiance to U.S. financial
concerns. His violence against the opposition was accepted as
necessary to remove the elements that interfered with the further
development of corporate totalitarianism. For Americans like
Henry Luce, founder and publisher of Time, Life
and Fortune magazines, this outlook was as natural as
plowing before planting. For Luce, the only purpose of government--or
any other institution--was to promote business. Any social organization
concerned with the welfare of working people was an enemy. In
1928, Luce proclaimed, "The outstanding leader in the world
today is Mussolini."

Earlier, in 1925, J. P. Morgan
had loaned fascist Italy $50,000,000 to stabilize its currency.
The New York Times reported the event on June 2, 1925,
stating that Italian Finance Minister de Stefani "announced
in the Chamber of Deputies this evening that a consortium of
Italian banks of issue, headed by the Bank of Italy, had been
granted a credit of $50,000,000 by J. P. Morgan & Co. of
New York. Part or the whole of this sum, he added, will be used
as occasion arises to check fluctuations in Italian exchange."
Soon afterward, rumors were circulating of another large loan,
this time as much as $200,000,000. The New York Times
reported on August 15, 1925: "Rumors that J. P. Morgan &
Co. would float a loan for the Italian Government some time in
the autumn have been in circulation in the financial district
for several months. So far as could be learned last night there
have been no new developments in the situation." The "new
developments" came in November 1925 "and carried the
approval of the American Government," less than one week
after the "funding of Italy's debt to the United States."
A $100,000,000 loan, "which was offered to the public yesterday
by a nationwide syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan & Co., went
with a rush. It was quickly announced that books were closed
and unofficial estimates placed the subscriptions for the $100,000,000
issue as high as $400,000,000." Italian Finance Minister
Volpi lost no time in assuring the American financial world that
austerity measures would continue in Italy and were "bringing
contentment to its people and stable economic and political conditions."

Henry Ford, another early promoter
of fascism, was an admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler. The
December 20, 1922 edition of The New York Times states,
"Berlin hears Ford is backing Hitler. Bavarian anti-Semitic
chief has American's portrait and book in his office. Spends
Money Lavishly." The article continues: "A rumor is
current here that Henry Ford, the American automobile manufacturer,
is financing Adolph Hitler's nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement
in Munich. Indeed the Berlin Tageblatt has made an appeal
to the American Ambassador in Berlin to investigate and interfere."
From Detroit, Ford's general secretary E. G. Liebold said Ford
knew nothing about the reports circulating about him in Berlin.

On April 21, 1924, after a
failed coup attempt, Hitler was sent to Landsberg prison, where
he wrote Mein Kampf. He included special praise for Henry
Ford: "It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of
the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling
masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty
millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still
maintains full independence."

U.S. bankers, industrialists
and their politicians provided a blueprint for fascism on how
to deal with working people who had the nerve to stand between
them and the profits they wanted. Racism was often a key element
in their planning.

On November 7, 1938, Herschel
Grynzpan, a teenaged German Jewish refugee, walked into the German
Embassy in Paris and killed the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath.
The killing was in protest against the persecution of the German
Jews, including the youth's father. The Nazis used Grynzpan's
actions to stage a "spontaneous" race riot against
the German Jews on the night of November 9. The results of the
riot were horrible: Hundreds of Jews were murdered and hundreds
more were injured; 7,500 shops were looted and another 815 destroyed;
171 homes and 119 synagogues were set on fire and 76 more synagogues
were burned to the ground.

This reprehensible event is
often presented as uniquely Nazi because of its viciousness.
However, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 17 years earlier (and in at least
25 other American cities at other times), similar "spontaneous'"
race riots broke out against equally peaceful and successful
African American communities. The Tulsa attack occurred on May
31, 1921, in retaliation for an event the day before. Dick Rowland,
a teenaged African American, tripped and fell into a white woman
while on his way to a segregated men's room. The woman was not
injured and ultimately refused to press charges. The local police,
the National Guard and a mob of at least 10,000 "fascist
minded" whites launched a chain reaction of rapes, murders,
arsons and aerial bombings in the prosperous African American
section of Tulsa known as "Negro Wall Street." Thirty-five
square blocks were leveled. At least 301 African Americans were
murdered, many more were injured, and 10 white people were killed.
In addition, 1500 homes were destroyed as well as 600 businesses,
21 churches, 21 restaurants and libraries, and schools, stores,
a bank, a hospital and a U.S. post office. Martial law was declared
and a house-to-house search for African Americans ensued. More
than six thousand people were interred for their own "safety"
in three separate concentration camps. For two months they were
allowed to leave only to go to work. After martial law was revoked,
African Americans were forced to wear green cards signed by their
employers on their outerwear. If they were caught on the street
without their cards, they were arrested. When the physical and
economic destruction was completed, "Negro Wall Street"
had been decimated.

In Spain on Monday, April 26,
1937, over two-dozen Nazi Condor Legion warplanes bombed the
Basque "capital" city of Guernica. It was the world's
introduction to blitzkrieg. There were military targets nearby,
but unbelievably none were targeted--the bridge, railways, and
arms factory remained unscathed. Civilian targets, however, were
easy prey because Monday was market day and the market place
was crowded with shoppers and merchants. While Santa Maria Church
and other buildings were being reduced to rubble, two dozen or
so fighter planes strafed the unarmed civilians with machine
gun fire. The German flyers made many passes over the hysterical
crush of people trying to escape certain death. When the attack
ended, the killed and wounded numbered over 1500. Guernica burned
for three days, destroying almost three quarters of the town.
Luftwaffe pilots flew the war planes, but U.S. capitalists helped
them get off the ground, commit their acts of terrorism and return
home. Henry Ashby Turner, Jr, in his book General Motors and
the Nazis, wrote that Du Pont-controlled General Motors (GM),
Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the German
company IG Farben, produced tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) at German
plants under the new company name Ethyl G.m.b.H. Tetra-ethyl
lead was used to boost low-grade German gasoline made from coal
into high-grade aviation fuel.

GM produced airplane engine
parts for the German company Daimler-Benz and airplane parts
for the German Junker war planes, including the JU-88, the Luftwaffe's
most widely used fighter-bomber. The Nazi planes that decimated
Guernica were JU-52/3m, originally powered by U.S. Pratt &
Whitney engines. The fuel used to power the planes that destroyed
Guernica may have been produced by U.S. corporations in Germany
burning in engines probably made by Pratt & Whitney of Connecticut.

On July 30, 1938, a little
over a year after the barbarism committed at Guernica, Henry
Ford was awarded the Nazi's highest civilian medal in appreciation
of his long-term support of fascism and Hitler. Also in 1938,
James D. Mooney, president of GM's Overseas Division, who personally
approved GM's war materiel production, was awarded the Nazi "Order
of Merit of the Eagle." He was a reserve officer in the
U.S. military at the time. Even after accepting this award, Mooney
remained a close confidant of FDR.

The man who flew across the
Atlantic Ocean for the first time, Charles Lindbergh, was given
a tour of German aircraft plants on October 19, 1938. He was
very impressed with how advanced they were. Because of Lindbergh's
pro-Nazi, anti-British, anti-Semitic, white supremacist views,
he was awarded the "Order of the German Eagle with Star"
by his tour guide, Commander and Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann
Goering. When Lindbergh returned home, he spent much of his time
touring the U.S. and preaching his views that white racial dominance
was equal to a nation's success, and survival of the white race
was more important than survival of democracy in Europe.

Despite the much-touted U.S.
"neutrality," FDR's liberal administration allowed
GM, Ford, Texaco (Texas Oil Company) and others to send war materiel
to the Spanish fascists. I remember listening to Brigade veterans
at a reunion in New York City "joking" about running
away from a column of Ford trucks carrying a detachment of Franco's
troops. Corporate America may have provided more vehicles to
the fascists than any other group in the world.

The desire of the great democracies,
including the U.S., to stop fascism was a myth. Too many big
capitalists in those countries supported fascism. Nothing was
done when the Germans marched into the Rhineland on March 7,
1936, thereby tearing up the Versailles treaty. We know now that
the German generals were fearful of a military response because
they would not have been able to repel it at that time and their
push toward remilitarizing Germany would have been severely curtailed.
When the Italians attacked Ethiopia, the fiction that some sort
of negotiated settlement could be brokered by the League of Nations
was laid to rest by Gaetano Salvamini's January 1936 article
in Foreign Affairs, "Can Italy Live at Home?"
He wrote that when the French ambassador offered Mussolini a
way of "solving" the Italian-Ethiopian crisis peacefully,
Mussolini's response was: "If you brought me Abyssinia on
a silver tray, I would not accept it, for I am resolved to take
it by force."

Fortunately, French journalist
"Pertinox" overheard and published the exchange. The
League of Nations imposed an embargo, including oil, against
Italy. You don't have to be a Von Clausewitz to know that a modern
army runs on oil. Without lubricants and fuel, planes, tanks
and trucks stay in the parking lot. In support of Mussolini,
one of the commodities the U.S. let slide through the League
of Nations embargo was oil.

Italy occupied the Ethiopian
capital of Addis Ababa on May 2, 1936. The League of Nations
ended its embargo against fascist Italy on July 4, 1936, despite
Pertinox's revelation. In its July 20, 1936 edition, Henry Luce's
Time magazine hammered away at Ethiopia and lionized fascist
Italy. Time wrote: "the attitude of Italians toward
conquered Ethiopia is Christian in its readiness to collaborate
with and convert the heathen and Roman in its drastic finality
The Pax Romana over Ethiopia has always been envisioned
by the Dictator as something to be attained and consolidated
in a matter of some 25 years, if indeed Ethiopian savages can
be brought to civilized citizenship so soon." Even after
its brutal assault on Ethiopia, Italian fascism continued to
have complete support from this representative of the so-called
U.S. free press. Italy's next move was to extend its military
tentacles into Spain. On July 16, 1936, the fascist revolt started
against democratic Spain. Spanish fascist troops left Morocco
by boat for the trip across the Mediterranean to Spain. The Italian
fascist air force, Regia Aeronautica, provided cover.

Ethiopia was a training ground
for the Italian alliance with fascist Spain against the Spanish
democratic forces. In Ethiopia, Italy's Lieutenant General Luigi
Frusci led two small units of Italian American volunteers in
April, 1936 at Ethiopia's southern front. The volunteers were
stopped in their tracks at Sassa Baneh by Ethiopian freedom fighters.
At the same time, a heroic African American soldier was training
and leading Ethiopians. Col. Hubert F. Julian, nicknamed "The
Black Eagle," would have been relegated to washing pots
in the segregated U.S. military of that time. In the Spanish
Civil War, another African American, Oliver Law, was a commander
in the Lincoln Brigade. He was killed in action while leading
the first integrated unit of American troops.

By 1937, on another front,
General Frusci was second in command of Italian "volunteers"
in the Spanish Civil War, This time Frusci's force numbered between
60,000 and 70,000 troops with war planes, tanks, trucks and everything
else needed to maintain a force of that size, including of course,
lots of oil. One financial contributor to this effort was IG
Farben. IG ledgers seized after World War 11, showed huge sums
of money transferred to the Spanish fascists. Josiah E. Dubois,
Jr. in his book The Devil's Chemists lists Americans among
members of the board of directors of Farben's U.S. subsidiary
during the 1930s. Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil of
New Jersey; Charles Mitchell, president of the National City
Bank of New York; and Edsel Ford. Other support came from Rockefeller
managers. Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the
Enemy, that Joseph J. Larkin, vice-president for European
affairs of Rockefeller's Chase National Bank, was another enthusiastic
supporter of the Spanish fascist rebels. When the Spanish Republican
ambassador, Fernando de los Rios, tried to open a Chase account
in October 1936 "to be used to raise local assistance for
the Spanish government, including the Lincoln Brigade,"
Larkin refused. Larkin also closed an existing account for Republican
Spain at the Chase National branch in Paris. To emphasize his
pro-fascist position, "Larkin took on the Franco account
and the Reichsbank account, though the Reichsbank was under the
personal control of Hitler." The Nazis wound up spending
about 500 million marks to support the Spanish fascist rebels
and supplied a huge quantity of war materiel. How much of this
putrid contribution began with Ford, GM or Rockefeller money
is unknown to me.

Continuing to support fascism
was Luce's meat and potatoes. After Italy's violation of Ethiopia,
Luce's Time turned its approving eye toward the Spanish
fascist rebels and their leaders. At first, Time correctly
referred to the fascists as rebels and the democratic forces
as loyalists. In later reports, it changed the labels to "whites"
for the fascists and "reds" for the democratic forces.
The last incarnation I found called the fascists "right"
and the democratic forces "left." (Ernest K. Bramsted
wrote in his book Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda
1925-1945 that the Nazi press was directed to use the terms
"Spanish Reds" for the Republican Government and "Nationalists"
for the fascist rebels.) In addition to this name game, the positive
stereotyping of the fascist rebel leadership as brave, calm,
determined, even tempered and patient, and the negative stereotyping
of the democratic government leadership as cowardly, fat, frog
faced and impulsive', made it difficult at times to understand
who was the elected government and who were the rebels. Not satisfied
just with its support of the fascists, Luce's Time sallied
into gender bias that to this modern day reader seems loony.
On August 10, 1936 Time ran a photomontage of female government
troops called "War Women of Spain." Using the insane
reactionary notion that women are ruled by their hormones and
are therefore irrational and that everyone "knows"
that both males and females with Spanish blood have more than
their share of hormones, Luce the "endocrinologist"
ran the following copy: "In this year's revolution correspondents
have stressed the savage cruelty of fighting Spanish females.
Even Spanish males bullfight lovers all, are appalled by the
bloodthirstiness of their sisters-in-arms." The photos,
however, show only groups of happily armed and determined women
soldiers. In the center of the montage is a photo of a fallen
fighter, presumably a fascist. Finally, and perhaps most important,
is the fact that the "War Women of Spain" were not
proponents of "this year's revolution" but defenders
of Spain's democratically elected government.

At its peak, the International
Brigades numbered perhaps 32,000 troops from all over the world.
The Lincoln Brigade boasted 2,800 American soldiers and 250 Irish
fighters. By the summer of 1938, there were only about 450 Americans
left among the 3,000 international volunteers still fighting.
During a surprise offensive by the democratic forces that captured
Fatarella, the locals told the Brigade's troops how the Spanish
fascists were killing captured Brigade fighters. The fascists
were largely inefficient as murderers, however. It took IBM president
Thomas Watson to arrange to have his minions teach them how to
use IBM technology to round up and murder large numbers of unarmed
anti-fascists efficiently. Before the civil war ended in 1939,
Watson sold the Spanish fascists 700,000 keypunch cards and Hollerith
machines necessary for locating our comrades. In IBM and the
Holocaust, Edwin Black explains that throughout Europe IBM
held an absolute monopoly on keypunch cards, thoroughly enforced
by Watson. If the fascists couldn't buy the cards from IBM, the
machines were useless, and roundups became more difficult and
inefficient. Between 1939 and 1945. the Spanish fascist rebels
murdered at least 200,000 people located with the help of Watson's
IBM cards.

Earlier on, Watson had praised
Mussolini enthusiastically. Watson also received a special Nazi
medal in June 1937. "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle
with Star was created for Thomas Watson," Black wrote, "to
honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the
German Reich" It was the Nazis' second highest civilian
honor. What made Watson so "deserving" was his support
for Nazism, including the sale of countless IBM punch cards to
help the Nazis roundup opponents, and his access to FDR with
pro-Nazi information.

On April 3, 1939, before the
gun barrels cooled that had killed so many anti-fascists, FDR
recognized Franco's fascist regime. European fascism now had
another country, Spain, with its resources on its side. The Franco
government immediately started working with the Axis powers.
In the fall of 1939, the new Spanish ambassador to France sent
information to the Germans regarding the French lack of concern
about the recent blitzkrieg against their Polish allies. Undoubtedly
this information encouraged the Nazi war machine to make its
next move. In the summer of 1942, the Spanish fascists sent a
division of troops to the eastern front to fight our then ally,
the Soviet Union. That act helped prolong the war. Spain itself
became a haven from which Axis spies could monitor Allied movements
in strategically important British Gibraltar. They could also
monitor the movement of all ships in and out of the Atlantic
Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. In the fall of 1942, while General
Eisenhower was assembling an Anglo-American force to land in
North Africa, German intelligence dutifully kept Berlin informed
about the size and scope of the armada and the departure day.
How many allied troops died as a result of that intelligence
transmission? Probably the greatest loss to the democratic struggle
was the murder between 1939 and 1945 of 200,000 anti-fascist
Spaniards, by Franco's fascists, with the help of Thomas Watson
and IBM. The effort they could have made fighting for the Allied
cause is immeasurable.

Unfortunately, many popular,
progressive governments and movements have been overthrown or
undermined by the U.S. since the defeat of the Spanish democracy.
"Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to
overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more
than 30 populist nationalist movements struggling against intolerable
regimes," William Blum wrote in the third edition of Rogue
State, A Guide to the World's Only Superpower: "In the
process, the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million
people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and
despair." These actions were supported by the same "great
democracy" that supported Italy, Germany and Spain and the
same corporations that supported Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.
The reason is also the same: to America's corporate elite, "democracy"
means having a market economy, and little else. Colin Powell
said this more than once when he was Secretary of State from
2001 to 2005.

We are constantly being told
by the "polite left" that it's all W's fault, that
we need our country back. "Back to what?" is a reasonable
response. Five hundred thousand dead children in Iraq during
the Clinton administration? Countless U.S. veterans after the
Vietnam war suffering from war related illnesses and not getting
treatment, or the blitzkrieg in Guernica rather than shock and
awe in Baghdad?' Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Tulsa? Make your own
list.

On another, earlier 9/11, September
11, 1973, a smiling Henry Kissinger appeared on TV with General
Augusto Pinochet, the new leader of the junta that had just overthrown
the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende.
Despite President Allende's murder, recognition of the junta
by the U.S. came with the speed of light. As soon as Pinochet
took office a reign of terror spread like a miasmic fog across
Chile and South America. It was financed by the U.S. and carried
out by the Chilean junta with a gang of fascists they formed
named the Directorate of National Intelligence, (DINA). Thousands
of leftists of all ideologies were rounded up, tortured, raped,
disappeared and murdered. Kissinger was smiling because the dawn
of a reinstated market economy was being nursed with the blood
of those progressive activists. The big change was in style rather
than content. Fascism was no longer praised in public, but its
techniques were still used. Fascism was renamed authoritarianism.
It has a strict but paternal feeling.

Barbarism was nothing new to
Pinochet. He was a great admirer of Franco and his tactics and
went to Spain for Franco's funeral in November, 1975. Unlike
Franco, he would not live out his life without being held responsible
for his inhuman acts. By the time of his death on December 10,
2006, there were at least 300 legal actions brought against him
by progressive Chileans and others. In the spirit of the Lincoln
Brigade and the other International Brigades, Spanish Judge Baltasar
Garzon reached across national boundaries and indicted Pinochet
for his murder of Spanish citizens in Chile in the 1970s. On
October 16 1998, while in an English hospital recovering from
an operation, he was arrested by the British police. Unfortunately,
he did not die in jail.

On December 12, 2006, Alvaro
Vargas Llosa wrote an obituary entitled "Pinochet"
in The Wall Street Journal. Although Pinochet was disgraced
in Chile and around the world, Vargas Llosa's first five paragraphs
condemned the left in general and Fidel Castro in particular
for the bloodbath in Chile, without any evidence. He didn't blame
Pinochet's right wing revolution against the democratically elected
government of the Republic of Chile. USA TODAY outdid
the WSJ inaccuracies in its "Death of a Tyrant" on
December 11, 2006 by failing to mention Pinochet's revolution
against Chile at all. Again on December 11, Pascale Bonnefoy's
piece "Joy and Violence at Death of Pinochet" in The
New York Times, reported in its first paragraph police efforts
to control the "violent" demonstrators celebrating
Pinochet's death. Bonnefoy didn't write a word about Pinochet's
violence in that lead paragraph.

To its credit, the Los Angeles
Times in its December 11 edition published an article by
Marc Cooper and another by staff writers Sebastian Rotella and
Patrick J. McDonnell that outlined much of the U.S. role in Pinochet's
overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government. On
another December 11--December 11, 1941-- the U.S. declared war
on fascists in Germany and Italy.

When we found out why Henry
Kissinger was leering at us in 1973, what price did we demand
for the war crimes committed by the U.S. government and the multinational
corporations? It was the same price we demanded from our government
after the defeat of democratic Spain in 1939, at the end of World
War 11 in 1945, when Franco died in 1975, when Pinochet died
in 2006. Nothing.

We must emulate the courage
of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon and the giants of the Lincoln
Brigade by naming the war criminals in our midst. We must try
to give them the punishment they so richly deserve for their
crimes. Unless we raise that demand, we can expect nothing from
the institutions that supposedly honor the Lincoln Brigade except
more of the same silence. Our silence will also encourage the
next U.S. administration to plan and carry out with impunity
next year's "regime change" in the name of a supposed
free market democracy, whose market and democracy is dominated
by corporate monopolists.

Edwin Krales SIZE="-1" FACE="Verdana"> can be reached at: edwinkrales@hotmail.com