Assessment of BLOWBACK | The debunker debunked

In the denouement of WWII, the Western Allies and Soviet Union raced to capture top scientists and engineers and other key figures who had worked for or served in the Third Reich. That race and its aftermath should be enough to fill a book without resorting to sensationalism and baseless charges.

In seeking the roots of Simpson's outlandish and unattributed contentions such as "some of the Vanagis’[sic.] leaders had served as the Nazis’ most enthusiastic executioners", one inevitably arrives at Simpson's systemic bias:

“the myth that the Baltic Waffen-SS legions were simply anti-Communist patriots”

Simpson would not be the first to equate Hitler's elite SS and the Latvian Waffen-SS. But as a celebrated "internationally known expert" in propaganda, he would know that essential to its success is enlisting the unwitting to repeat lies until they take root as truths in the common consciousness.

That Soviet-originated KGB-authored fabrications manifested themselves as accusations via multiple channels:

  • "the U.S. government itself,"
  • "U.S. authorities,"
  • "U.S. investigators,"
  • "CBS-TV 60 Minutes,
  • and other media"

does not impart truth through repetition. Yet repetition is the very technique Simpson uses to purportedly debunk the "myth" of anti-Soviet Latvian heroism and sacrifice, and to smear the

  • Latvian Legion (Latvian Waffen-SS),
  • post-WWII Daugavas Vanagi veterans' organization,
  • post-WWII Latvian émigré community,
  • and their collective and often overlapping leadership

as harboring Nazi war criminals. Blowback exhibits none of the rigorous fact-checking one expects in the unmasking of a conspiracy.

The discredited KGB fabrications1 Simpson includes in his "selected bibliography" set the tone for his baseless anti-Latvian conspiratorial fulminations.
One starFor the factual portion of Blowback. That the CIA reached out to émigrés to gather information from inside the USSR and provided funding for anti-Soviet Baltic and Eastern European émigré organizations is informative. That the members of those organizations were all fascists and Nazis whom the CIA and other U.S. agencies knowingly recruited is little more than propaganda, and as investigated here, an outright lie concerning Latvians.

1Paulis Ducmanis, the author of Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They?, and Imants Lešinskis, the KGB operative who delivered it into the hands of Nazi hunters, both subsequently confirmed it was a concoction of lies, part of an extensive, organized information war against émigré leadership.
Updated: September, 2023
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