Although civil libertarian Whitehead is very concerned with the growing police state in the US, he doesn't really understand it. He exposes the similarity of the FBI to abhorrent police agencies in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but only offers vague ideas about why they exist.
Indeed, a far cry from the glamorized G-men depicted in Hollywood film noirs and spy thrillers, the government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused.
...as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s no coincidence that the similarities between the American police state and past totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany grow more pronounced with each passing day. This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power.He goes on to describe the great affinity between Nazi spies and our own secret services:
As Gellately noted, “[A]fter five years of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Nazi police had won the FBI’s seal of approval.”
Indeed, so impressed was the FBI with the Nazi order that, as the New York Times recently revealed, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen, brought them to America, hired them on as spies and informants, and then carried out a massive cover-up campaign to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown.So, his explanation begs the question: why did the FBI and other US secret services actively recruit so many Nazi spies, and not Soviet spies, for their secret services?
Obviously the reason for this was that these secret Nazi agents also served their capitalist counterparts, and the latter had fundamental differences of ideology with the Soviet ruling class. Such agencies as the FBI and their Nazi counterparts both had a common commitment to capitalist rule. Hence they were natural allies.
If you understand this, then you will understand that WWII was really a war against a system that did not allow major concentrations of private property in the hands of a few--the Soviet Union. (Of course, the latter had its own bureaucratic ruling class and their associated class interests.) The war got sidetracked for a while by Hitler and associates, who drunk with power on their early easy victories over class-conflicted capitalist nations in nearby Europe, decided they could make short work of Britain with bombing air-raids.
This threatened the Anglo-American Empire's capitalist class's dominance of the world, and could not be tolerated by the Anglo-American ruling classes. Thus, after the much celebrated but brief (3 months and 3 weeks) Battle of Britain they welcomed the subsequent movement of Nazi armies against the Soviet Union. Have you noticed in your readings of WWII history that the Allies only got serious about defeating Germany after the decisive defeat of the Nazi army at the Battle of Stalingrad? The Anglo-American Empire, soon to become the US-led Empire, then finished off the already defeated Germany, but immediately afterwards began waging a long Cold War against the Soviet Union. Notice that this quest for dominance did not end with the collapse of the Soviet system.
Capitalist gangs always compete for dominance much like street gangs. However, they are different than street gangs in that they don't engage in wars themselves--they have property-less, ordinary people do that for them. Meanwhile, they profit hugely from wars as the military-industrial complex is now doing by furnishing weapons to Iraqis, fascists in Ukraine, terrorists (ISIS) in Syria, Iraq, and Eurasia, and directly engaging in bombing campaigns supposedly against ISIS.