Pacing: None Dare...pp. 62-64

 Books like this aren't meant to be read slowly. They really aren't meant to be read, they're meant to be skimmed. There are a few reasons for this, primarily being that the authors know they aren't factual they appeal emotionally. If you take your time to read through the book you become emotionally detached and the book betrays itself. It's repetitive and bland. By chapter 2, we get the point, but emotionally we're bound to its claims because the writing angers up the blood. In the modern age, the reason that the book isn't meant to be read slow is that fact-checking is so easy now. If I stop at each paragraph, I can easily find how many false claims are being made. This is not why this type of book was written. 

We begin chapter 6 "Rockefeller and the Reds" with a heavy head because even though I was never going to jump in to these claims, it was fun to run through all of them...until I took a week off, and now I'm so emotionally detached that it's difficult to get started on the chapter. The first sigh I exhale is when I realize that this chapter is going to be devoted to the Rockefeller family's links to COMMUNISM. Ok, but, haven't we been doing that for the entire book? As I said above, repetitive and bland, but let's go forward.

The second sentence in the chapter, "The Rockefeller clan reportedly has worked with the Rothschilds and their agents since the 188O's when the original John D. arranged to get a rebate on every barrel of oil he and his competitors shipped over Kuhn, Loeb & Co.-controlled Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads."

I don't care whether this claim is true or not, what bothers me is the word "reportedly." I will say this to my students, if it's "reported" then you have to tell me who is reporting it. My edition does not have a work cited page, the one I started with did so I'll have to double-check. However, the general problem with conspiracy literature is that things are "reported" or "suspected" but we are never told who is doing it. I can ask my conspiracy theory friends about if they've heard of it, and if they have--I can truthfully say, "I've heard it reported that..." This is the "many people are saying" gambit of the American right-wing currently. It doesn't matter if it's true, or if anyone is actually saying it, it matters that it sounds like people are saying it. 

Did Kuhn, Loeb & Co. control railroads that shipped Rockefeller Oil? Probably not. Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. probably invested in a railroad company, but given Allen's poor understanding of how economics works, he definitely thinks that this means control. Not that it matters if they did. What matters is that the two parties may have once worked together, because his thesis is that they currently work together and that's evil. 

I have been complaining about Allen's lack of citations, so it's pretty funny when he swings into completely the opposite direction by over-citing. This is the conspiracy theorist tactic of name-dropping sources knowing that we don't have the time or the willpower to check every single one of them. We've discussed some of Allen's sources before and they fall into two categories: just like him or serious academics/journalists that he's pulled out of context. Allen is going for the former with Antony Sutton talking about Russia post-revolution. 

The next three pages are spent proving that economic trade was being conducted by US companies and the fledgling Soviet government. Yes, this happened, because the US wanted to trade with the Russian nation no matter who was in charge. This isn't a conspiracy, this isn't anything but private businesses engaged in trade with a nation. A nation that, we must remember, was not an enemy. This only looks bad when being written from the perspective of the cold war. It's three pages of providing proof that trade was conducted by American businesses with the Soviet Union. Fun. 

The larger claim is that without this trade the USSR would have collapsed. That's a claim that would need larger evidence. Historical hypotheticals usually boil down to this kind of oversimplification. Would the French Revolution have happened if there hadn't been a famine? That kind of question presupposed that there was only a single reason for the French Revolution. Similarly, the USSR's early trade wasn't just with the US but even if it were, Allen's claim presupposes that this was the only source of trade in the world. We should remember that the US wasn't the economic power that it would become post WWII. However Allen has his proof in Sutton's work, 

"Professor Sutton proves conclusively in his three volume history of Soviet technological development that the Soviet Union was almost literally manufactured by the U.S.A. Sutton quotes a report by Averell Harriman to the State Department in June, 1944 as stating: 

"Stalin paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprise in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance." (Sutton, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 3.)"

First, note the brag that it's a three-volume work...and Allen has definitely read all three volumes. He just did it in Canada so wouldn't have seen him reading. 

Secondly, most importantly, the report by Harriman does not say that at all. It merely said that Stalin was grateful to the US for its assistance. Stalin does not say that the US built the USSR. Countries in Europe had begun to trade with the Russians and the US needed to compete with them. Further, as the Revolution was ebbing, it was the belief of President Wilson that the command economy would give way to a freer economic system. Henry Ford believed that trade was the best path to avoid war. It needs to be said as well, that the trade and economic benefit to the new USSR prevented mass starvation. 

Allen either doesn't understand this or it goes against his desire for war. In either case, his understanding of history is about where we left it. It's hard for me to even guess whether this ignorance is willful or not.