8.16.2003
Learn from History, Please...
(Will we ever learn?)
This just in: Conservatism often is symptomatic of a psychological syndrome. It can involve fear, aggression, uncertainty avoidance, intolerance of ambiguity, dogmatic dislike of equality, irrational nostalgia and need for "cognitive closure," all aspects of the authoritarian personality.
George Will
Okee Dokee- If you have been coming around here for any length of time you must be thinking "Hell has frozen over and Mr Bush is a hockey referee" - me quoting George Will, a person make no bones about it, I despise. And not only because of the things he said about Jerry Garcia at his early death; I find Will one of those windbags that is comfortable skating the truth to make his point, truths that are revealed as crappolla to a better informed reader. A liar. Now that quote above, there I see truth. Obvious as the nose on ones face. But as he refutes what we know to be true, in the body of his essay he resorts to some typical conservative "talking head" shennanigans. Check this Will quote out with me:
It often involves a hash of unhistorical judgments, including the supposedly scientific, value-free judgment that conservatives are authoritarians, and that fascists -- e.g., the socialist Mussolini and Hitler, the National Socialist who wanted to conserve nothing -- were conservatives.
Here is a quote from journalist George Seldes to start us on our journey of discovery.
To know what Fascism really is and why we must fight it and destroy it here in America, we must first of all know what it is we are fighting, what the Fascist regimes really are and do, who puts up the money and backs Fascism in every country (including the United States at this very moment), and who owns the nations under such regimes, and why the natives of all Fascist countries must be driven into harder work, less money, reduced standard of living, poverty and desperation so that the men and corporations who found, subsidize and own Fascism can grow unbelievably rich.
Mussolini began as a socialist newspaper writer it was true.
Italy
Before World War I Mussolini was a socialist. A brilliant organizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist Party's official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Indeed, when the Italian upper class tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he did not hesitate to switch sides.
By the end of World War I, Mussolini, the socialist, who had organized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini, the fascist, who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he recieved from wealthy interests, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and conservative dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor. The fascist Blackshirts spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives.
I'll include this quote from the same Michael Parenti link because it is very timely.
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamentary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today.
It goes on to say:To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.(2)
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"--really a coup d'etat--took place.
To be Fair and Balanced, was Mussolini a Socialist or an authoritarian Conservative? You decide.
To know what Fascism really is and why we must fight it and destroy it here in America, we must first of all know what it is we are fighting, what the Fascist regimes really are and do, who puts up the money and backs Fascism in every country (including the United States at this very moment), and who owns the nations under such regimes, and why the natives of all Fascist countries must be driven into harder work, less money, reduced standard of living, poverty and desperation so that the men and corporations who found, subsidize and own Fascism can grow unbelievably rich.
Will also claims Hitler was a Socialist, not an authoritarian Conservative. What does a reading of history show us?
Germany
From his New york Times obituary let us see just what sort of Socialist he was.
His strategy was based on a simple principle: to obtain the support of powerful and influential elements in the army, industry and finance and to buttress that with support among the masses. He addressed himself first to the middle classes, ruined by inflation, and managed to obtain some assistance from elements among the workers disappointed in the revolution.
To the middle classes he promised relief from what he called the tyranny of big business, particularly the department stores, with which small tradesmen found it difficult to compete. He promised them that when in power he would dissolve the department stores and abolish all interest. To the workers he promised dissolution of the trusts. Neither of these promises was kept.
Further on:
Stubbornly, persistently, Hitler toiled at the task of building his movement. Believing the mission of national and social regeneration was to be realized by what he called a vigorous minority, a desperate elite, he gathered around him a group of intellectuals, officers, former officers, penurious students and ambitious youths without prospects in the Germany of that time.
All these were in the main men of humble origin who had gone through the war and found themselves socially shipwrecked when it was over. Like Hitler, they were ready for anything. They had nothing to lose and felt they had everything to gain if only they could grasp the instruments of power. Like Hitler, they were impelled in their thoughts and actions by a superiority complex, the satisfaction of which became the propelling ambition of their being. Like Hitler, they identified the regeneration of Germany with the realization of their dream.
Further on:
The same methods that Hitler subsequently used against other nations--intimidation, violent and abusive propaganda, coercion and terror--were applied by the Nazis to their political opponents in Germany. With increased support from the army and industrialists, a gigantic propaganda machine was set up, which, backed by millions of throats, blared wild accusations in an unending stream against the Government and leaders of other parties.
Men like Gustav Stresemann, to say nothing of Socialists and Democrats, were denounced as traitors and held up to public ignominy. Their lives were in constant danger. An atmosphere of disorder was created with the intent of feeding popular demand for a "strong hand." All this was staged with tremendous dramatic effect by the able propaganda organization directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
If Socialists were denounced as traitors I'm guessing you'd agree with me that ol' Adolf wasn't of a progressive persuasion.
There were mass arrests of Socialists, Communists, liberals, Catholics and others, many of whom were taken to concentration camps, where they were severely beaten and maltreated in brutal fashion. Some of the leading statesmen and labor chieftains of Germany were among the prisoners. Many were murdered by prison guards and Storm Troopers.
At the same time a wave of anti-Semitic outrages spread all over the country. Decrees depriving Jews of civil rights, of property and the right to work in various professions were issued. These found expression later in even severer form in the Nuremberg laws.
Socialists and Democrats as traitors... Hmmm... Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it, eh?
Now if a brain damaged regular Joe from a small town in New England can document Mr Will's duplicity on these matters, how is it that George Will can write this poop with a straight face? It is in the Washington Post for crying out loud. Doesn't the Post employ fact checkers? Or can this quote from Goebbels apply to what seems to me to be a willfull case of misrepresentation. ( linked from the same Times obituary cited above)
As Goebbels, who was to become Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, explained it in later years, "Propaganda should not be decent--it should be effective"
Hitler too was financed by industry.
The true story of Hitler-Germany is the real clue to the situation everywhere. In 1923, after his monkeyshines in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler received his first big money from Fritz Thyssen. January 30, 1933, Hitler came into power after a deal with Hindenburg and the big Prussian landlords (Junkers). Since then, and in all of vast occupied Europe, Hitler has been paying off the men who invested in Fascism as a purely money-making enterprise. A personal dispute put Thyssen out, but his brother and the thousand biggest industrialists and bankers of Germany have as a result of financing Hitler become millionaires; the I. G. Farbenindustrie and other cartel organizations have become billionaires.
Big money entrenched itself completely after the departure of Fritz Thyssen, with his rather quaint ideas of placing limits on corruption in business, with his repugnance to the murder of Jews as a national policy, and other rather old-fashioned ethical concepts of monopoly and exploitation which he inherited from his father and which did not encompass robbery and bloodshed as means of commercial aggression. The cartels moved forward with the troops.
There were, of course, exposés of Hitler as a tool of Germany's Big Money, written before he became dictator, but inasmuch as publication occurred in small non-commercial weeklies which few people read, or in the radical press, which is always accused of misrepresentation (by the commercial press which is always lying) the fact remains that few people knew what really was going on. This conspiracy of silence became even more intense when the big American and other banking houses floated their great loans for Hitler—and other fascist dictators in many lands.
Fritz Thyssen was a major funder of Hitlers rise to power.
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:
50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives.
The Bush mentioned in the above quote is the present Mr Bush in the White House's Grandfather, Prescott Bush. Other folks who were supporters of Naziism include Henry Ford , a man we can safely call a Conservative
Auto baron Henry Ford established the $10.3 billion Ford Foundation in 1936 as an "initially conservative" organization, according to Scanlon. But the foundation has gradually shifted to the left over the past 50 years, he said.
Here is a rendition of Ford's friend, Charles Lindbergs' attitude toward Nazi Germany rendered by Dr. Suess, Theodor Geisel:
I'm guessing Lindberg was a Conservative. Fair and balanced, you decide.
Ford wasn't alone in working with the Nazi War machine. GM was more interested in making money than standing by its' country.
When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.)
Further on
The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
The granting of such awards reflected the vital place that the U.S. automakers had in Germany's increasingly militarized economy. In 1935, GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named "Blitz" truck, which would later be used by the German army for its blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.
The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as "German" as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.
Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."
There was big US money involved in Nazi Germany, US business executives involved up to their necks.
And it is important to consider the size of American investments in Nazi Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted to an estimated total of $475 million. Standard Oil of New Jersey had $120 million invested there; General Motors had $35 million; 111 had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5 million. Though it would have been more patriotic to have allowed Nazi Germany to confiscate these companies for the duration-to nationalize them or to absorb them into Hermann Goring's industrial empire-it was clearly more practical to insure them protection from seizure by allowing them to remain in special holding companies, the money accumulating until war's end. It is interesting that whereas there is no evidence of any serious attempt by Roosevelt to impeach the guilty in the United States, there is evidence that Hitler strove to punish certain German Fraternity associates on the grounds of treason to the Nazi state. Indeed, in the case of ITT, perhaps the most flagrant of the corporations in its outright dealings with the enemy, Hitler and his postmaster general, the venerable Wilhelm Ohnesorge, strove to impound the German end of the business. But even they were powerless in such a situation: the Gestapo leader of counterintelligence, Walter Schellenberg, was a prominent director and shareholder of ITT by arrangement with New York-and even Hitler dared not cross the Gestapo.
George Will be damned, these individuals and corporations were not Socialist. They were conservative, just as multinational corporations are now.
On May 19, a federal judge, John Sprizzo, of US District Court, Southern District of New York, a Reagan appointee, will for the first time make substantive rulings on the initial lawsuit (combined with a similar suit filed by Connecticut lawyers). On May 28, a federal judicial panel is expected to decide whether all the lawsuits should be consolidated.
The approximately thirty US and European defendants--some are in both lawsuits--include banks (e.g., Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS AG, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank), oil companies (Shell and ExxonMobil), vehicle manufacturers (Ford, DaimlerChrysler, GM) and technology companies (IBM and Unisys). The complaints claim that the banks provided the funding that kept the apartheid government in power; that without oil, the police and military could not have functioned and the economy would have collapsed; that vehicle manufacturers supplied military vehicles and that technology companies supplied the resources for the national identity system. Companies were targeted not simply for doing business with South Africa but for allegedly supporting the apartheid system and profiting from crimes against humanity.
As you see, these multinationals show that they put making money over furthering human dignity- same as it ever was, they supported South African Apartheid just as they supported Hitler's Naziism. If you read the links offered throughout this entry you'll note that even some of the same players are involved.
Do a search with he terms IBM+Nazi, see for yourself.
Will we learn?
Alright, I'm getting carried away with the industry,conservatism/authoritarianism stuff, interesting but off topic. But we see a collusion of industry and policymakers right now, currently- and like Santana said, "Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it", quoted loosely- and look what is going on. Mr Bush and his obscene level of fundraising, and he is unopposed. Whitehouse for sale will let you learn what is going on in that arena. The lies that got us into Iraq are straight out of Goebbels and Hitlers playbook. Bushs' language of fear and the way the media "pumps it up"- duct tape anyone? "You're either with us or against us", no ambiguity, no room for thought by the individual- but corporations like Halliburton, like Hewlett Packard can trade with the enemy a`la WWII Ford and GM. The dogmatic dislike for equality is exposed in the tax cuts and corporate welfare so reminescent of Mussollini. Remember the Willie Horton ads? How many conservative politicians using rascist language do you remember from this year alone?
Mr Will, you are an idiot. But thank you for that first honest paragraph.
And for this one:
Liberals, you see, embrace liberalism for an obvious and uncomplicated reason -- liberalism is self-evidently true. But conservatives embrace conservatism for reasons that must be excavated from their inner turmoils, many of them pitiable or disreputable.
You could have listed greed, fear, ignorance, feelings of inadequacy... But two honest statements in a piece by you is probably a record. Way to go. Jerk.
Read the study Will speaks of in full (.pdf format) "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition".
Orcinus' work Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis is essential reading. A 5 dollar contribution is peanuts for the perspective he shares.
To learn about the Bush/Nazi connection visit this Linkfest: Were Bush's great-grandfather and grandfather Nazis? there is a wealth of information on this topic to google up too. Read and share!
Bush is no Nazi flash presentation from Take Back the Media is still timely, sadly enough.
Thanks to Dimn at Byte Back for the inspiration to vent my ticked-ness fully at Conservative narrowness and lies of convenience and Natasha at Pacific Views for the initial Will quote and for turning me on to BusyBusy Busy
Back on in a week or so...
8/16/2003
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