The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Dedication

Chapter 26: See Saw – The Cold War: 1945 - 1972

Perhaps it was Joseph Stalin’s uncanny ability to properly weigh the human pieces in his global chess game which was his strongest personality plus. This skill would be especially important in the post-1945 world as he would lead the Socialist camp for the first third of this Cold War I period. Equally powerful in his instinct was his overriding belief in the scientific accuracy of Marxism-Leninism and its ability to pull you out of any mess. To Stalin this meant class struggle fought out to the bitter end as the sure-fire always certain final solution. He was going to need both character attributes to deal with the new and nearly as dangerous post-Hitler world Bolshevism now confronted as it faced off against the would-be nuclear aggressors from North America.

Furthermore, the Gringo aggressor was historically off-base. The US acted as if it already owned the capitalist world. In some ways it did. But certainly not in all ways. The US rulers would inevitably confront powerful adversaries in the recovering ruling families of Europe, in the emerging oil producing nations, and certainly not least in a rapidly growing Soviet Camp which many expert economists at the time considered to be an economic miracle in the making. The Americans of the gringo variety demonstrated a remarkable ignorance of reality – a strange kind of naiveté that would have been funny in a child but was rather disturbing in adults.

Truman as Illogical as Hitler

Over night the world had changed from the one we have reviewed several times in this book to one in which there was (1) just-unbridled US imperialism struggling for total hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world while revving-up to attack the Soviet Union just as soon as humanly possible, versus (2)(a) the USSR with massive forces occupying half of Europe establishing cooperative civilian regimes (as the capitalists were in the countries of western Europe they occupied) and (b) Communist led revolutionary wars raging in Asia in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaya and the Philippines. In the midst of this Stalin had to get used to Harry Truman who had replaced his “friend” FDR and Clement Atlee who had replaced his erstwhile “friend” Winston Churchill in the election of 1946.

Stalin did not have to rely on his instinct alone in dealing with either the original giants or their somewhat pygmy successors in post-War Western Europe. He had daily reports coming from his spies in London and Washington, Paris and Berlin, Milano and Madrid. He knew Truman had been blinded, or allowed himself to be blinded, to the power of the Soviet Union and its allied movement, by two things: (1) the great obvious US military-industrial strength emerging from the second world war and the fact that Gringolandia was the only creditor nation in the world (excepting Switzerland) plus (2) what the Gringo bosses considered to be their real trump card, the atom bomb! This apparent atomic monopoly made persons eager to believe in the possibility of a US-ruled world, think it was possible. Indeed the new Truman warmongers seemed to think the task required only a certain degree of gutsy Presidential leadership. This was fantasy land at Disneyland! But the gringos believed it! -And that meant something specific about what had to be done.

The first thing Stalin had had to get used to was this - Truman’s unjustifiable arrogance. This is to say Truman’s completely incorrect view of the relative position of the United States vis a vis the USSR which as we have seen was terribly inaccurate. As was his view of Asia and the relative power of the Communist movement there. Which meant that Truman much like Hitler could not be trusted to use “logic” and would have to be approached in a different way. Stalin had learned how dangerous it was to expect an opponent to act logically when he had mistakenly concluded Hitler was too logical to launch a war against the Soviet Union when he did.

Truman seems never to have considered the possibility that Stalin might have a bomb of his own. Stalin’s poker-face at Potsdam, when Truman told him about the Los Alamos first atomic bomb test explosion, made Truman think Stalin was stupid and unscientific and did not understand the significance of an atomic bomb. Originally (1961) it was Steve Nelson who first told me Stalin had in actuality learned of the Los Alamos successful atomic bomb test even before Truman! Now it is well documented, that Stalin had been told about the Los Alamos explosion before Truman had been!

No Appeasement This Time

Stalin decided to go for broke once again, as he had so many times in the past when the Soviet movement was at cross-roads. He knew from the crisis of 1918 this meant going all the way into making the Soviet Union into nothing more than a military camp – this time for the long term – and confront the USA with an assured ongoing massive military retaliation in the event of war. – And, it meant rebuilding the industrial infrastructure destroyed by the Nazi’s.

As the War wound down and the reconstruction really got underway everyone could see that once again the Party had just the man at the helm to see that the reconstruction would be done and on time and that this would be just the beginning. The New Beginning Lenin had so often spoken of Stalin was going to make a reality. As far as the Boss was concerned, since we had just done this industrialization once we can certainly do it again!

Truman’s arrogance had been based on ignorance. The events of the five years after the collapse of Hitler in his Bunker had led to the disgrace and replacement of the Truman administration by a worldlier US leader Dwight David Eisenhower. Whatever negatives Eisenhower might have had his World War II experience had left him at least “not ignorant”, if not well informed, about the relative power of the Soviet Union in the world, and had called off the disastrous war in Korea and retired McCarthy. The responsible US ruling families were settling-in for a protracted conflict of what we had come to call the Cold War.

Stalin’s strategy of confronting the US imperialists with blow-for-blow tit-for-tat military responses to US aggression worked. As we have seen, within a decade the Soviet Union and its allies in Europe and Asia and Communist China had faced down US imperialism and forced it into a coming many decade’s long “cold war.”  There would be no appeasing US ruling family ambitions for world domination this time. Stalin began a determined campaign to stand up and face down the international bully of US imperialism.

Establishing Gringo Hegemony

Over the Post-1945 Capitalist World

Checkmated by Stalinist Socialism US imperialism found smashing success elsewhere. Namely, in asserting its hegemony over the capitalist world which meant the entire non-socialist globe directly or indirectly. – And, it is that phenomenon, the emergence of one nation’s de facto rule over one entire global sociocultural stage for the very first time in world history, the USA over the capitalist global sociocultural stage, which is the subject matter of this chapter.

Every industry was expanding, and spawning (new industries), as was every science, and this included the now central mineral extraction industry of petroleum and the associated geological sciences. Coal had replaced wood. Now coal was being replaced itself by the petroleum industry, oil and natural gas, the foundation of every form of industrial activity and transportation on land, in the air and on the sea. (– And, on the sea nuclear reactor-run de facto steam engine (special turbines) power was rapidly replacing diesel engines and would eventually replace them all in the world’s greatest navies.) Oil is accordingly, a most useful continuing theater for examining the way in which the US ruling families established and constructed their post-1945 hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world; maintaining it until throwing it away in Iraq at the turn of the century.

Foreign Oil

The US came out of the Second World War as a net exporter of oil to the tune of some 90% of the Allies oil requirements. By 1948 the US had become a net importer. As soon as the balance of payments began to shift in favor of gringo trading partners the cry began to arise in the US to find some way to combat the “evil of foreign oil.” Yet US industrial expansion was occurring at such a rate that more and more oil was needed. In fact oil alone simply could not satisfy the domestic requirements of the US market – it had to be supplemented and soon by natural gas.

Natural gas, or methane, is simply CH4 – one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. It is the simplest of the petroleum molecules. All of the other kinds of petroleum you will ever hear of are simply different agglomerations of CH4 into chains and various snow-flake looking organic molecules. (“Organic” in chemistry does not mean “alive” or “natural” by the way; it simply means anything with Carbon atoms in it. Many carbon containing molecules have never been alive and are certainly entirely “natural.” “Organic” with regard to healthy food is another term originally pirated from science by some greedy and ignorant entrepreneur’s decades ago, and so now we are stuck with it.) When heavy (long-chained) oil is cooked to high temperatures (over 600 degrees Fahrenheit) and several atmospheres of high pressure, the long chains break up into smaller ones until some even break up into CH4 gas – i.e., methane or natural gas.) Between the heavy asphalt molecules and the gas methane molecules are all the other fractions in between, especially Jet Fuel (Kerosene) and Gasoline of varying octane’s including those specific to high performance propeller driven aircraft.

Industrial production was stepping up in Europe and Asia with the continuing massive US investment in these spheres in the decade following Hitler’s defeat.  – And, in place by the mid-1950’s, the new submissive and totally subordinate shock absorbing sub-currencies the gringo regime finally foisted on the rest of the capitalist world in the form of the German Mark and the Japanese Yen. Oil and Gas was in increasingly short supply due to the rapid growth in demand despite the fact that giant fields after giant field was being discovered and brought on line especially in the Near East and Iran.

As an aside I might mention that Mesopotamia, known in the 20^th century as Iraq, was always known as the “Near East” when British Imperialism was running the show over there – after the Americans took it away from them - and everyone else - with the end of the 1950’s rearrangement of the world – it was called by them the Middle East; to them Iraq was “mid-way East” not “near” as it had been with the Brits. West Africa was the “nearest” East for the Yanquis; Mesopotamia was “middle” East; China, the Japans and Indonesia and Indochina were the “far” East.

Terminology in history can change on a dime when the underlying shift in global power is real, complete and final. So it was with the advent of gringo hegemony over the oil of the “Middle East.” But terminological bullying was the least important of the Gringo incursions on the ruling classes of the rest of the now reconstructing post-War capitalist world. On a spectrum of Strict Nanny on the Right to Sado-Masochistic disciplinarian on the Left, the Gringo rulers spent the fifteen years after the end of the War in Europe reinstructing those who would be their “Nome bosses” in a global capitalist order they alone would lead, were trained and tested.

Learning about Hegemony: Gringo Style

1948 was the hinge of fate for the US petroleum export/import ratio. That was the year petroleum imports outpaced exports for the first time. In exactly sixty years the imbalance would be so great as to be one of the key factors precipitating the greatest global capitalist crisis since the one that had begun a generation earlier. It had been obvious to FDR and his highly informed and educated advisors this would happen, and soon after WWII ended. In the event it was Harry S. Truman who had been left to deal with the mess of creating a post-War Petroleum Order.

It wasn’t something that could be done quickly or therefore permanently imposed. There were the natural factors at work – namely those being tackled by petroleum geology. There were political factors at work – namely the USA against the USSR in the redivision of the world’s natural resources. There were class factors at work as North American wealthy families elbowed the less fortunate families, running the downtrodden remnants of the capitalist world war in Europe, out of the way. New North American capitalists arose challenging the old order of the Seven Sisters and in the 1960’s there would be hundreds of independents entering the global search for and production of oil and natural gas.

But in the fifteen years following the end of the War the West European capitalist families and their governments were pretty much told what to do and when to do it with regard to all important strategic economic decisions. An excellent archetypical example of what Harold Wilson would later call “a form of 20^th Century helotry” imposed by the Americans on Europe is the way in which the gringos just pushed the British and French oil companies out of the way in territories that had been theirs before the great change following the War.

The Struggle for Persian and Arabian Oil

The US capitalists emerged from the War in 1945 as the net exporters of petroleum products to Europe from their own native reserves. The US oil monopolies were set on securing foreign sources of supply, keeping their New World reserves and especially the North American reserves held in reserve, being tapped if at all, at low rates, as a form of long-term conservation of the oil supply within their political control.

To supply Europe one needed foreign oil as close to Europe as possible which meant Persia (Iran) and Arabia. Within weeks of Truman’s ascendancy to power US agents were busy fomenting discord in Iran.

Elbowing the Competition out of the Way: Tehran

US agents had four opponents in Iran. The Soviet Union was one. Another was British Petroleum and its allies. Not least was the indigenous Persian cross-class opposition led by Iran’s fiery new nationalist Prime Minister Mossadegh. Finally the gringos had to deal with the division within their own ranks represented by the warmongering Far Right represented by Truman, Nixon and McCarthy on the one hand and the left-over FDR New Deal managers like Secretary of State Dean Acheson. To make a long story short the US engineered a coup managed by the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt, against Mossadegh, in alliance with their puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi and his loyal Army officers.

In mid-August 1953 the gringo cabal kidnapped Mossadegh, and eventually threw him into prison where he would spend the next three years. For the rest of his life he would be under house arrest. The coup d’etat placed the Shah in the position of being an absolute monarch in a country anxious to move in a different direction. But to the imperialists, with their congenitally established inability to think beyond the immediate profit and loss statement for the Quarter, this was immaterial. They would reap the rewards of their short sightedness in another quarter century.

Coming in to the imperialist consortium were just about all of the major independents from the US as well as the Seven Sisters and BP. Considering the Brit capitalists relatively powerless position, their class brothers in the New World had been quite generous in providing BP (Anglo-Iranian then) a good piece of the action.

Saudi Arabia and Aramco

The gringos had waited as long as they had to settle the Iranian situation with their Pahlavi coup because they had far more important irons in the fire in Arabia. Namely in the formation of a cartel of their own – a Consortium if you will – which would include those participating in the original Red Line Agreement. There was far more oil in Arabia than in Iran and the gringos already had it, as we have seen, in the form of ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company – Standard New Jersey, Mobil, Texaco and Standard California) and did not need or really want Iranian oil. However, something had to be done to impose order on the rapidly escalating amounts of oil available on the world oil market. Iranian oil could be diverted to the Soviet Union and it had been that consideration too which speeded up the coup. Emerging was the US led Producers Consortium which signed an agreement with the Iranian National Oil Company. In the consortium were virtually all of the US and European major and minor oil companies. This situation would last until the Islamic Revolution expelled the North Americans in 1978.

Elbowing the Competition out of the Way: Arabia and Clause 10

To begin with…the Rockefeller family emerged as the new principal boss of US petroleum policy in its role as main de facto share-controller in the various Standard companies spawned by the “anti-Trust” Supreme Court decision of 1911. The Red Line Agreement left over from World War I between France, England, and the USA, Clause 10 outlawed any signatory countries petroleum owning families from developing Arabian oil prospects unless all agreed that company X would be allowed to proceed. As we have seen little occurred in the two decades between the World Wars as a result. Not until just before the Second World War when oil was discovered for the first time in Arabia as we have reviewed.

The post-War World Petroleum Order being constructed in the financial and oil capitals of Washington, New York, Houston, Dallas and New Orleans, made a new key player out of the Rockefeller entry in the world oil contest via their company SOCAL, Standard Oil of California. This time the rivalry between the eastern Gringo oil establishment of the now somewhat sophisticated Rockefellers with their Jeb Clampett country cousins in TEXACO had been set aside in favor of cooperation in a joint venture now called ARAMCO. The Arabian American Oil Company was the big prize and the Gringo rulers had it!

However, there were risks. A lot of risks of all types. The best way to ameliorate risk is always to dilute it. The way you dilute risk in financial-industrial endeavors is to spread it around so that failure or cost overruns can be absorbed by the participants in the event they may occur without bringing about the collapse of any one of them.

Enter Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil

The Rockefellers needed oil desperately but not in California. It was their principal company Standard Jersey and its clients which now had to be brought in on the action. Also desperate to enter Arabia was Chicago finance capital owned Mobil (Socony Vacuum) which also had been another signatory to Gulbenkian’s Red Line Agreement (they knew he drew that line around Saudi Arabia in 1928, and they had agreed). As you have seen it was this Red Line Agreement that was the basis of the imperialist oil companies’ gang-land style agreement to split the Arabian take.

However Gulbenkian had bet on the wrong horse with the outbreak of War and gone with the Nazi’s. There was therefore the possibility that the victors in the imperialist contest could impose the law of victory. Namely, they take everything they wanted from the enemy. Gulbenkian had made himself the enemy by going to Vichy France with the outbreak of hostilities. That could have turned out to be the end for him and his many years fought over Red Line Agreement when the Gringo oil companies declared it null and void in 1946. However, Gulbenkian was an expert world-class international lawyer and the companies decided after months of litigation the better part of valor would be to settle the litigation by replacing the Red Line Agreement with a new Group Agreement which kept a place for Gulbenkian, no longer forever nickel and dimeing for his five percent. Now he got more.

– And, now the US imperialists dominated Arabia replacing the hated British, expelled at the insistence of Saudi King Ibn Saud, who had learned well at the foot of St. John Philby the true dangers of British imperialism and preferred the Yanqui version. By 1960 Arabia was an all Gringo concern. But it wasn’t all Ibn Saud. There was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Philosophy of the Revolution: Egypt.

If FDR had lived, or had he been succeeded by Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman, who ousted (with engineering from Meyer Lansky) Iowa progressive capitalist Henry Wallace from the Vice-Presidential spot on FDR’s ticket in the 1944 campaign, it is likely things would have gone a lot easier for those getting out from under the thumb of British and French imperialism after World War II. If, if, if…

In the event what happened was FDR’s anti-colonialist policy was replaced almost overnight by an aggressive pro-colonialist position toward both the French and British and their colonies on the part of the new Truman (Lansky) gang. The result would be the Indochina War against the French and the Indochina-American War. It also necessitated the overthrow of comprador regimes in Africa, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent by revolt, revolution and civil war.

Take Egypt to Begin With

Genies are hard to put back into bottles. Mossadeghwas the first of the Islamic leaders to use the radio and the mass resulting human mob turn-outs to shape a nation’s political policy. All of this had not been lost on young Army officers burning with nationalist passions around the Muslim world. Nowhere was this impact more intense than in Egypt and in the minds of the young Army officers chomping at the bit for their turn at the head of State and Government in their own country.

Egypt had been ruled for millennia by the same ilk and the British occupiers in Cairo were no different than their predecessors. It was inevitable that the young military patriots of Egypt would be inspired by the mass social movements changing the world, as the imperialist empires disintegrated around them. Inevitable they would find support in Stalin’s Socialist Camp which now stretched from Germany to the Bering Straits and from the Arctic to the China Seas.

Leading the uprising of military officers in Egypt had been General Mohammad Naguib. But the real organizational boss behind the scenes was a young ideological colonel named Gamel Abdul Nasser. After the coup which overthrew the King and brought the military Junta to power Nasser wrote a book entitled Philosophy of Revolution. I read it as soon as it was published and I recall the electrical effect it had on me, so I can easily imagine the dramatic effect Nasser must have had on his fellow Egyptians. Equally dramatic effects were reverberating throughout the entire Arab world as Nasser replaced the General and the Junta as the leading executive for Egypt, and in his own mind anyway for Arabia, demanding the complete withdrawal of the British and the French from the Middle East.

Voice of the Arabs

By 1954 Nasser had replaced Naguib who faded away like an Old General should. – And, in the place of the parasitical rulers foreign imperialism had placed on the Egyptian and other Arab thrones was an entirely new phenomenon. An Arab who could not be bought. Furthermore, an Arab with the ability to raise the mob as had Mossadegh. Nasser had himself been fired up by Mossadegh’s speeches and he recognized it was Mossadegh’s ability to turn out the Persian Street which had kept him in power as long as he had been. Nasser did exactly the same thing with his radio station and its 24 hour broadcasting to the Arab World (and anyone else who would listen.) It was called Voice of the Arabs and the invention of the transistor radio and its mass production in the mid-1950’s brought the entire Arab Street into the listenership. Nasser could overthrow regimes he deemed pro-British or pro-Imperialist or pro-Israeli and mobilize the masses in Egypt to support him against other Egyptian leaders anxious to replace him.

Elbowing the Competition at Suez

The British and French ruling capitalist families had one view of the Suez Canal. A French engineer had designed and led the project and British and French finance capital had led the investor group. The lifeblood of the post-1945 Europe was oil and it came at half the previous price (when it had to go around South Africa) now essential to the recovery of West European industry.

The Egyptians under Nasser were aggressively threatening to impose their rights over the Canal as it was the source of a great deal of money. The US had still another view of the Suez Canal.

The Special Gringo Deal with the Saud Family

The Americans were concerned that their extremely lucrative arrangements in Arabia could be derailed altogether if the Arab Street were to become enraged at all things Western not just British. The gringos needed the oil and especially under the arrangement with the Saud family that required them to use all US contractors and to spend all their money in the US and on US paper. This would allow them to save North American petroleum reserves (in Canada and Mexico as well as the US) until such time as they would need them. It offset the “Problem of foreign oil” which was essentially a monetary cash-flow problem with the specter of huge outflows of actual cash being offset by the agreement to spend it on US contracting. This Saudi agreement was the best of all possible worlds as it also kept US financial (dollar) reserves intact at home even though they were being spent abroad!

Egypt Acts

British occupation troops pulled out of Egyptian Canal Zone on June 13, 1956. One week later the US canceled its promised loan to build the Aswan High Dam. The Soviet Union stepped in with an offer to be the financier for Aswan, relieving the blackmail pressure from Nasser’s back, and on the 26^th of July Nasser seized the Canal declaring it Egyptian property, during a speech in Alexandria where he and the military cadets, who had sworn allegiance to Naguib and Pan-Arabism originally ten years earlier, brought their great romantic adventure to its logical conclusion.

During the speech Nasser gave the code word “de Lessups” several time (the name of the French engineer promoter who had built the Canal).  As if there had been a flick of a switch the Army sprang into action, doing what it had been dying to do ever since the 1953 Naguib coup. That was the signal and the entire Canal was made Egyptian by armed force in a few hours.

Ike says No!

The Brits and French went ahead with their own plan and regional ally (Israel) and sprung an attack on the Egyptians October 29, 1956. Only three months after Nasser had seized the Canal in nationalization, Egypt was at war with Britain, France and Israel.

Meanwhile the Red Army had been engaged in suppressing a CIA/US Army Intelligence conspiracy to overthrow the Government of Hungary. (I participated in the Hungary debriefing sessions at Ft. Holabird, Baltimore, in 1960, as a student US intelligence analyst).

In Moscow and Peking the European aggression against Egypt was seen as more “taking advantage” of the post-Stalin liberalization, New Class boss Nikita Khrushchev had set into motion. These new Soviet leaders saw the blackmailing of Egypt over the Aswan High Dam loan by the US Government as part of coordinated aggression the gringos had secretly encouraged while trying to deny their culpability to their allies in the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and elsewhere. The Soviets and the Chinese were right on all counts but the important thing emerging was that temporarily anyway, the imperialist rivalry between Europe and the US was being worked to the advantage of the international working class movement and its allied anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist national movements.

When Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower) found out what had happened (less than a week before the US Presidential election in 1956) he threw a fit and launched a campaign to force the Brits, French and Israeli’s to withdraw. Meanwhile the Canal had been sabotaged by Nasser with the sinking of many ships so the Canal itself had been withdrawn from the world economy. High costs and rationing were resulting in Europe and would continue even after the Americans and the Soviet Union had forced the withdrawal of European imperialist troops and Israeli’s to behind their frontiers.

Nasser emerged as the victorious hero the Arab world wanted. By the spring of 1957 the crisis was over with Harold Macmillan, Ike’s old friend from World War II, as Prime Minister it was unlikely anymore such independent efforts such as that shown over Suez would be on the agenda. Along the way Macmillan had cleared Kim Philby, in the House of Commons, of being the so-called Third Man in the Burgess-MacLean espionage case.

Testosterone was flowing throughout the military of the previously colonial world and after Nasser there would be no stopping it. For the next several decades military men would overthrow comprador regimes, expel colonial imperialist troops, and take command of the primitive economies of their now “Third World” countries.

Revolution in Iraq

1955 featured the Voice of the Arabs taking aim at the British comprador ruling family of Hashemites in Baghdad. Three years later, at the height of summer, Iraqi Army officers finally acted on Nasser’s demands that they overthrow the traitors and bring Iraq into the “Arab Revolution.” The July 1958 military revolt in Baghdad featured the liquidation of the Hashemite family and their government in rather gruesome ways. Nasser had placed his stamp on the future of compradors in Arabia! The emerging Army Officers Junta immediately informed the Iraq Petroleum Company (the holding entity of the foreign imperialists in Iraq) of changes in revenue sharing.

Syria joins the United Arab Republic

1958 featured Nasser at the zenith of his power as Syria joined with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.

Libya and Dr. Hammer: the Collapse of Capitalist Oil Pricing

Another Seed of Gringo Imperialism’s Eventual Destruction

Among the most important of the Nasser inspired military revolts was that of the Libyan army officers under the sincere dedicated nationalist leader Colonel Muammar Khadafi. – And stepping in to help was long time US Communist Armand Hammer.

You will recall that the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution resulted, in subsequent years, in the flight of tens of thousands of political refugees to Europe and North America. One of these had been Dr. Julius Hammer, Social Democrat of the Lenin variety (Julius Hammer attended the Joint Bolshevik-Menshevik Congress in London in 1907), who arrived in New York and established a medical practice and a pharmacy. Imprisoned eventually on trumped up abortion charges for anti-communist political reasons in New York, Dr. Hammer spent several years in New York State prison where his son Armand Hammer visited him weekly. See Hammer’s autobiography entitled Hammer.

Armand Hammer had become a millionaire in his own right by selling a home remedy (in alcohol) at the outbreak of the prohibition period when he had a virtual monopoly on this particular “medicine” which was sought really for its legal alcohol content. Armand was finishing medical school, visiting his father and running the family business when Lenin seized power in Russia (in the US November 7-9, 1917). Not long thereafter, as committed as his father to the theory of Bolshevism, Dr. Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow, with an entire US Army Field Hospital he purchased as a gift for the Red Army, and a plan to do business in Russia along the lines allowed by the Government.

To make this long story too short (Read Armand Hammer’s autobiography Hammer) let me skip ahead to say, at the age of 65 when most men are thinking about retirement, Armand had drilled on two leases he purchased in Signal Hill California. Signal Hill is a town surrounded on all sides by the city of Long Beach. It has a long distinguished US oil history and at one time around the turn of the 20^th century Signal Hill (1901) was the center of California oilfield production. Hammer struck it big there and got bit by the oil bug. So by the time he arrived in the Libyan capital of Tripoli he was President of Occidental Petroleum the largest major independent in the US.

Hammer made the deal of the century for himself and his oil company and set the standard for decades of foreign oil company cooperation with established regimes. It began with the concession Hammer grabbed for Occidental under Libyan King Idris.

As usual the always ignorant US CIA told its bosses what they wanted to hear “Libya is completely stable today and for the next five years or so and a smooth transition is then expected to occur.” In actuality everybody in Libya knew the Army was getting ready to move. So ready there were several coups planned by different Army officer groups for the same day! Of course, the gringo “intelligence” establishment managed to miss all of that. (As they had managed to miss the build-up to the Suez invasion.)

Beating the others to the punch on September 1, 1969, Khadafi seized the Government. Fulfilling High School boy vows (to follow Nasser and liberate their own country and join in the war of the Arabs against imperialism) these Army officers stepped up to the plate and brought the foreign domination of Libya to a close.

Dr. Hammer stepped lightly from the ship of Monarchy to the new ship of State under the Army officers led by Khadafi. The Revolution proceeded to expel the gringo and British military bases. Then it expelled the Italian population, originally settled in North Africa under the Fascist occupation of Mussolini. In the midst of all of this Hammer got what he wanted which was Libyan oil in large quantities and the Libyans got 55 percent of the take. The other companies were forced to accede to this new Agreement, and the world of producing countries vs. producing companies had taken on a new and ominous perspective, as far as the exploiters of the world were concerned.

On Feb 14, 1971, all the companies gave in at Tehran to the demand for 55% of the take to go to the producing countries. Over the intervening years the companies had lost more and more power to the producing countries and now Hammer had finished them off.

Hammer was welcomed in Moscow as a conquering hero for he had broken the imperialist stranglehold on the pricing of world oil. Something the imperialist bosses in Washington and Europe would never regain and this loss of control over capitalist pricing would, over the coming decades, lead them into devastating military adventures and eventual economic collapse! Lenin must have slept well that night with his favorite American back in the fold and successful for the cause.