Why the U.S. Hired Nazis but Hated the USSR

It’s one of the strangest contradictions in American history: right after fighting a war against Nazi Germany, the United States turned around and gave hundreds of Nazis safe passage, jobs, and paychecks. At the same time, it launched a global crusade against the Soviet Union, its former ally in the war. So why were ex-Nazis welcomed into the U.S. while Communists were treated like the ultimate enemy?

After World War II, the U.S. quietly recruited more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians through a program called Operation Paperclip. These weren’t just neutral “lab coat” types. Many had been members of the Nazi Party or had worked directly for Hitler’s war machine.

Wernher von Braun, who built V-2 rockets with slave labor, later became the father of the U.S. space program. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine,” had ties to medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Why hire them? Because knowledge was power. The U.S. wanted their rocket science, their chemistry, their military technology, and just as importantly, it didn’t want those brains falling into Soviet hands.

While the U.S. was willing to rehabilitate Nazis, it drew a hard line against Communists.

The U.S. was built on capitalism; the USSR was Communist. American leaders saw Communism as a direct threat to private property and global markets. Geopolitics: After the war, the USSR controlled Eastern Europe and projected influence worldwide. The U.S. wanted global dominance and couldn’t tolerate a rival system. Once the Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the competition turned existential. Anti-Communism fueled McCarthyism and justified military budgets, CIA coups, and repression of leftists at home.

In short, fighting Communism was about preserving U.S. power, not morality.

This is the big contradiction: The U.S. claimed it was defending freedom and democracy, but its actions told a different story. Nazis were a defeated enemy who could be repurposed. Communists were a living enemy offering an alternative vision of the world. So America struck a deal with its conscience: use the Nazis, fight the Soviets, and sell the public a story about good versus evil.

This history cuts through the myth that U.S. foreign policy is about values. The real driver is power. The U.S. was never “pro-freedom vs. anti-fascism.” It was always pro-Capitalism vs. anti-Communism, and if that meant hiring Nazis to help win the Cold War, so be it.

The Real Terrorists Have Offices

Let’s get one thing straight: the United States isn’t a benevolent empire. It never has been. It didn’t “spread democracy” to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. It didn’t “liberate” anyone when it installed dictators across Latin America or propped up apartheid in South Africa. What it did do–and still does–is colonize, exploit, and annihilate in the name of profit.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s currently happening. It’s the drone strikes that don’t make the news. It’s the “aid” packages that comes with strings attached and private contractors waiting in the wings. It’s military bases dotting the globe like pimples of power on every continent but Antarctica.

I’m anti-imperialist because I don’t believe any nation has the moral authority to dominate another. Especially not through force, especially not under the smokescreen of “freedom.” American imperialism wears many disguises: NGOs, trade agreements, coups, color revolutions, Hollywood, but underneath, it’s always the same face: power backed by violence.

I’m anti-colonial because the world is still bleeding from wounds inflicted by white supremacy and extraction-based economies. Colonization didn’t end with flags being lowered. It evolved into debt traps, resource plunder, and forced dependency. Look at how the Global South is treated when it tries to resist. Look at how indigenous people in the so-called “developed world” are still pushed off their land for pipelines and lithium mines.

And I’m absolutely anti-military industrial complex because we spend trillions every year not on health, not on housing, not on education, but on weapons, surveillance, and endless wars. The Pentagon is the world’s biggest polluter. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, these are the real welfare queens, sucking on our tax dollars to build machines that blow up brown children in countries most Americans can’t find on a globe or a map.

And we’re told to be proud of this.

We’re told this is “defense.” That’s Orwellian doublespeak. You don’t “defend freedom” with cluster bombs and occupation. You defend it by dismantling the systems that profit from bloodshed.

To be anti-imperialist today is to be a threat to bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans alike bow to the altar of militarism. They clap in unison for war budgets, while telling us there’s no money for universal healthcare. The only thing they agree on is that endless war is good business.

But some of us aren’t buying it anymore.

We’re organizing. We’re protesting. We’re resisting not just war, but the machinery that makes war possible. That means opposing U.S. hegemony, standing in solidarity with liberation movements worldwide, and rejecting the normalization of violence as policy.

The empire has no clothes. And it’s time more of us said so … loudly

The U.S. War Machine

Let’s stop pretending the U.S. is a reluctant world police officer, dragged into conflict by duty or democracy. The truth is uglier: The U.S. war machine exists to prop up imperial interests, feed the military-industrial complex, and maintain global dominance. It’s not about freedom and it never was.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing … they’re not building weapons for defense. They’re building profit pipelines, and their stock value depends on war. It’s no coincidence that conflicts abroad send defense stocks soaring. War is an investment, and the return is drenched in blood.

We’ve normalized endless war. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, some Americans couldn’t even locate these countries on a map, but their tax dollars funded drone strikes, invasions, coups, and occupation. These aren’t defensive wars, they’re acts of aggression dressed up in patriotic drag (which is much better and more American than drag queens.) The U.S. war economy requires perpetual enemies. If they don’t exist, we invent them.

U.S. imperialism isn’t just about boots on the ground. It’s about toppling governments that won’t play ball with Western capital. Iran in 1953. Chile in 1973. Haiti, Guatemala, the Congo. The list goes on. When diplomacy doesn’t serve U.S. interests, regime change becomes the foreign policy of choice. Empire with a smile.

The justification for U.S. imperialism is still the same colonial lie: “We’re bringing civilization.” Only now it’s rebranded as democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. But we’re not spreading democracy, we’re spreading McDonald’s, oil pipelines, military bases, and sweatshops. And if a country resists? Sanctions, bombs, and coups.

While the Pentagon devours over $800 billion a year, Americans go bankrupt from medical bills, ration insulin, and drown in student debt. Empire is expensive. It always comes home. It militarizes police, surveils dissent, and turns the nation into a fortress built on fear. Meanwhile, infrastructure crumbles and the planet burns. And we want to bring more children into this wasteland so they can keep feeding the war machine when they turn 18, but they come back with PTSD and have to wait until they’re 21 to have a drinking problem because of it.

The war machine doesn’t protect us. It protects capital. Real security comes from housing, healthcare, education, and dignity. Not aircraft carriers and drone fleets. It’s time we stop worshiping the military and start dismantling it. That means defunding the Pentagon, ending the imperialist wars, and refusing to let our lives serve empire.