The Western establishment, says Historian Jacques Pauwels, was never anti-fascist.

Historian Jacques Pauwels applies a critical, revisionist lens to the two great World Wars, offering readers a fresh interpretation that challenges mainstream thinking. As Pauwels sees it, war offered benefits to everyone, across class and national borders. For European statesmen, a large-scale war could give their countries new colonial territories, important to growing capitalist economies. For the wealthy and ruling classes, war served as an antidote to social revolution, encouraging workers to exchange socialism’s focus on international solidarity for nationalism’s intense militarism. And for the working classes themselves, war provided an outlet for years of systemic militarization -- quite simply, they were hardwired to pick up arms, and to do so eagerly. To Pauwels, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 -- traditionally upheld by historians as the spark that lit the powder keg -- was not a sufficient cause for war but rather a pretext seized upon by European powers to unleash the kind of war they had desired. But what Europe’s elite did not expect or predict was some of the war’s outcomes: social revolution and Communist Party rule in Russia, plus a wave of political and social democratic reforms in Western Europe that would have far-reaching consequences. Eventually, the profound social dislocation caused by the First World War and the ravages of an unresolved capitalism (triggering the Great Depression and a multitude of other ills) would create the next big crisis for the capitalist elites opening the road for their recourse to fascism. Another important aspect of Pauwels analysis is his reminder that, contrary to propaganda, “fascism“ was not the enemy of the “capitalist democracies“, it certainly was not to the Western elites, many of which openly supported and collaborated with the fascist movement. The enemy of the allies—chiefly Britain, France, and the US—was the German Reich, which represented a competing politico-industrial power liable to challenge the established spheres of Western imperialism. The proof of the puddling is that right after the war the “capitalist democracies“ had no trouble opening their arms to thousands of prominent Nazis, handpicked to run the new “Western Germany“ (where “denazification“ was a farce); in fact Gehlen and his cohorts, a prominent Nazi intelligence officer with an extensive network of Nazi spies, not only became a CIA spymaster, but was put in charge of Western Germany’s own security bureau. This is admitted by Wikipedia itself: “Gehlen was instrumental in the negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service on the basis of Gehlen Organization from the early 1950s. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Republic of Germany’s official foreign intelligence service, and Gehlen served as its first president until his retirement in 1968.“ Meanwhile the new German army received numerous recycled Nazi generals, many joining NATO over Soviet objections. Via Werner von Braun and his associates, the Americans also had no trouble importing a hefty chunk of the German missile research community to work on US rockets, at the time openly designed to “contain“ the Soviet Union.