Annie Jacobsen and her new book “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base” have been popular with NPR, the New York Times, the Daily Show and Democracy Now. Her book is a rehash of what goes on at the U.S. military testing base in the Nevada desert. However, what is grabbing headlines are the allegations made in the book’s final section.
Jacobsen alleges that the “Roswell Incident” –– in which a UFO supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 –– was actually a failed Soviet propaganda campaign. She claims that the UFO in question was a Soviet spy plane designed by the Nazi Horten brothers and flown by 12-year-olds who had been genetically/surgically altered to look like aliens by the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele. The plane was crashed in the U.S. in order to cause a War of the Worlds panic (reference to H.G. Well’s novel that details the conflict between invading Martians and humans) that would serve as a cover for a Soviet invasion. The grand mastermind of this plan was, “naturally,” Joseph Stalin.
This theory is yet another method to equate two diametrically opposing forces: the Nazis and Soviets. Nazism is a variety of fascism (a form of capitalism in crisis) at its most brutal combining vicious racism with sexism and nationalism. While Nazism is inherently anti-working-class, the Soviets were fighting for a workers’ state. The Soviets vehemently fought the Nazis. Yet the U.S. continues to keep the workers in the dark through outright anti-communist lies.
Jacobsen’s anti-communist nonsense was spewed forth by a single anonymous source (most likely her over-active imagination) without any concern for facts or evidence. The media, owned by the ruling class, has been praising the book’s unscientific allegations. But facts are stubborn things, and they belie Jacobsen’s tale.
Immediate problems arose in Jacobsen’s story. Nazi Mengele did not disappear after the abandoning of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945, but rather fled the Soviet Red Army, an odd behavior for a supposed ally. He worked in concentration camps, including Gross Rosen, before taking a job as a medic for the Wehrmacht (armed forces of Nazi Germany).
After the Soviet Union crushed Mengele’s beloved Nazi regime, he continued fleeing west to Argentina on a CIA pipeline eventually ending up in Brazil. At no time was he ever in the Soviet Union, a country which would of course have executed Mengele if it got hold of him. Likewise, the Horten brothers fled west in the face of advancing communists. One brother wound up in Argentina, while the other took a job in the newly U.S.-imperialist-reconstituted West German Luftwaffe (air force).
Of course, these factual problems only add to the ridiculous rational problems in Jacobsen’s fairy tale. For instance, how did an un-aerodynamic flying saucer aircraft, which neither Nazis nor U.S. engineers could fly, make the 6,000-mile journey from the Soviet Union to New Mexico? An aircraft so small that it had to be flown by 12-year-olds couldn’t have held enough fuel for the trip, either.
If this was all a propaganda stunt to terrorize people in the U.S., why was the aircraft crashed in the desert of a barren, low-populated state? Why not LA or Times Square? If this master plan was a stunt to trigger World Was III, where was the war? Where is the evidence of Soviet forces on the brink of invasion? And why did the anti-communist U.S. conceal these horribly abused children from the world media? U.S. fabricated a myriad of stories (and clearly still do so) about the Soviet Union, yet they let this golden opportunity slip? If these were indeed 12-year-olds, how was Mengele working on them in 1935 in the USSR when he was known to be in Nazi Germany at that time? Apparently, Jacobsen’s math is as bad as her journalism.)
These inconsistencies are due to Jacobsen’s poorly constructed, poorly reasoned, anti-communist lies. It stands as proof that the U.S. media will promote any lie that defames the first workers’ state. The capitalist class will go to any lengths to defame and erase the memory of the Soviet Union because it stands as proof that workers can take state power from the capitalist class, resist continuous capitalist invasions, and build a better world in the process. Every time that they fabricate another ludicrous lie about the Soviet Union, they hope to obliterate the memory of real, working communism further out of workers’ minds.
By organizing workers into the PLP, we keep the memory and dream of communism alive for the working class. We build for the day when we can destroy the capitalist state and use communist state power to smash the capitalists once and for all.