Buchenwald, D-Day, Communists,
Hitler's Backers, Capitalism And Media
By Jay Janson
12 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org
World War II, the Holocaust petrifying and incomprehensible extermination of six million Jewish Europeans and the non-Jewish victims of the death camps, which, while never denied, are certainly less often mentioned - all three of these connected events should be studied in the context of the many eminent American and European industrialists and bankers who made fortunes backing German rearmament under Hitler.
Descendants of important investors in Nazi Germany are among America’s wealthiest and most powerful political figures, for example the son and grandchildren of Prescott Bush, who had his company's assets seized in 1942 by President Roosevelt under the Trading with the Enemy Act. More than sixty years later, in Germany, two former slave labourers at Auschwitz filed a civil action for damages against the Bush family. [The Guardian, Saturday 25 September 2004]
From a strictly business point of view, the initial, long-term, and deep investments of prestigious captains of American industry and finance in Nazi Germany made sense for the huge profits that these investment ties made before, during and after the Second World War Hitler that brought about.
Secondly, America’s power elite saw building up Fascist Germany into a strong and successful nation as a bulwark against communism. The hope of the capitalist West, which originally refused Soviet proposals for a united front to oppose the German threat, was that Hitler would expand Eastward against Russia.
This year’s anniversary of D-Day saw President Obama honor the brave men who gave their lives fighting a super powerful rearmed Germany that could not have been built without the efficient enterprise of the capitalist world.
The day before, Obama spoke at Buchenwald, commemorating those that perished in the Buchenwald concentration camp, another result of the West having cooperatively helped rearm Nazi Germany to be superior to any other nation in military power and conquering ability.
Even some notable support for Hitler’s early on scapegoating of Germany’s Jewish citizens came from various American tycoons. Henry Ford, a backer of the very beginning of Hitler’s political party, published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem in 1920 - in 1924, volume 4, Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States.
Millions of copies were ordered and distributed by the Nazis and became required reading for the Nazi Youth, translated into German as Der internationale Jude, Henry Ford, Hammer Verlag/Leipszig.
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial Baldur von Schirach mentioned The International Jew made a deep impression on him and his friends in their youth and influenced them in becoming anti-semitic and said, “ we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.” [Wikipedia]
President Obama's noted categories of murderous intolerance at Buchenwald, “racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism”, with an obvious and probably deliberate passing over mention of ‘communism.’ Communists, if one takes the deaths of both communist political prisoners and Soviet soldiers together, would probably easily represent the greatest number of inmates murdered at Buchenwald under a single category.
One supposes that a U.S. president, who believes in capitalism, would not wish to give attention to the Communist dead, though they were America’s allies and bore the brunt of Hitler’s military power.
CNN detailed part of the breakdown of inmates murdered at Buchenwald as part of the coverage of Obama address there.
“Total deaths = 56,000
Jewish deaths = 11,000”
to complete:
Soviet soldiers deaths = 8,000
Communists, Poles, Gypsies, Cripples, Homosexuals, etc. 37,000
In any case, more often than not, it is Jewish deaths that are most remembered, which is very understandable, given the pre-war prejudice that Jews suffered throughout America and Europe that made their citizens feel horribly ashamed when the ghastly reality of death camps came to be graphically witnessed in 1945.
In 1947, trying to make up for their belatedly realized complicity in Hitler’s demonic and horrific brutal persecution, torture and mass murder of European Jews, the world powers in contrition, awarded the survivors, lands in the colonial occupied Middle East holy to their religion.
With the great majority of Palestinian Arabs in understandable resentful resistance, the Western powers including the Soviet Union, did not make it easy for the great numbers of European Jews flowing into where they would come to carve out a separate Jewish state eventually be given the largest part of the Palestine, and then coming to militarily occupy and slowly settle into that which was left.
And it was to be ultimately a painful imprisoning and life-costing destiny that European powers and America saddled upon the 68% non-Jewish inhabitants of British occupied Palestine.
Still over the years Western media has promoted the idea that the Holocaust was, and is, a reason to give a carte blanche ignoring of the terrorism that was deemed necessary by the Zionist leadership to be able to establish the Jewish state of Israel, and later downplayed the importance of the suffering of the Arab refugees.
The few Nazi minded mentally ill individuals who attempt to deny the Holocaust are being highlighted in the news and often referred to by President Obama for obvious purposes, being that the media has managed to falsely include the President of Iran in this tiny demented group of freaks. Pretty easy to do, since either out of misinformation or in blind stupidly, someone, perhaps Ahmadinejad himself, invited and allowed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and a couple of other weirdo Holocaust deniers to speak at his arranged Conference on the Holocaust in Tehran in 2006. It is doubtful that normal people who still shutter when remembering images of the Holocaust will ever forgive this president of Iran for giving a platform for such opprobrious persons not withstanding that on the same platform a large multinational group of orthodox Jewish rabbis spoke in agreement with Ahmadinejad regarding the Holocaust being constantly used as an excuse for the
violence that occurred in the founding, and occurs in the expanding of the state of Israel.
In any case, one witnesses today, just as Ahmadinejad said at a UN conference in South Africa, that Western media will not report Israeli bombing of Gaza as crimes against humanity and one senses that this is out of respect that European Jews suffered, as Obama himself has stated, centuries of persecution culminating in that Holocaust more than a half century ago.
It is hopeless to try to ask the pro-Israel and pro-war conglomerate owned media to stop twisting Ahmadinejad 's words when he quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, that as the Soviet Union has been removed from the map, so will it happen with the state of Israel. The Soviet Union dissolved itself by and large peacefully, and Ahmadinejad has never made a threat of physical violence against Israel, merely calling for all Palestine elections rightly or wrongly, to lead to a one state solution for all. On the other hand, 51% of Israelis have been polled to now favor bombing Iran, fearful of that nation's intentions.
And when the President of Iran has seen to observe that the murder of Jews in Europe has been used as the reason for them to have been given land in the British colonial protectorate of Palestine instead of their having been given land for a European Jewish homeland in Germany - as Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed, Western media has vilified the Iranian president as a dangerous madman.
In Cairo, Obama acknowledged that the U.S. was involved in overthrowing a democratic government in Iran. All the world knows that the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein invasion and eight years of war on Iran costing a million lives. Yet media teaches that Iran remains the dangerous bad guy government though it has never attacked other countries the way the U.S. has.
One can always count on conglomerate owned media responding to a need for pro-war propaganda and it can be trusted to enrage or frighten the public through necessary distortions, mistranslations and words taken out of context.
One remembers Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, having remarked at an embassy dinner, "History is on our side. We will out live you [capitalists]. We will dig you in." and the networks and capitalist print media scaring the public with the menacing translation 'We will bury you'' and transposing the words to a different moment of shoe banging during a speech in the UN General Assembly by the delegate of the U.S. backed Philippine Marcos dictatorship.
Our world will never be safe from its children being slaughtered in wars 'justified' by insidiously criminal pro-war media personnel, as long as the public is asleep to its own violent undoing by the very corporations who conspire to misuse the broadcast frequencies owned by the public but leased without oversight by the citizens’ own elected Congressmen acting in collusion for campaign contribution payoffs.
America’s commercial media presents Muslim hostility to Zionism as being virulently hateful of Jews while burying deep the memory of the extreme anti-semitism experienced all around yours truly growing up in the United States before and during World War Two.
SUGGESTION:
Take action - contact your local newspaper and congress people:
Demand that the criminal misuse of the public’s airwaves be investigated by a independent prosecutor.
