Playing The Nazi Card
08 September 2006 8:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Playing The Nazi Card
guest post by Ed Encho
\”See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.\”
- George W. Bush
“How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”
- Adolph Hitler
In an incredible escalation of rhetoric the Bush administration this week begun to invoke the specter of Nazism in seeking to seize and shape the dialogue in the run up to the potentially catastrophic November elections. In the past week Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in which he said that war critics suffered from “moral and intellectual confusion” and likened them to Nazi appeasers. In advancing the new Karl Rove talking points George W. Bush then hit the circuit to give a series of speeches that in addition to invoking Osama Bin Laden and 9/11 early and often as familiar bogeymen to keep America firmly rooted in the free-floating dread that has gripped the populace for the past five years and using similar flawed comparisons to some of history’s most villainous regimes. Bush launched his fall tour of fear and lies with a speech in front of veterans at the American Legion convention with the following:
“As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before,” he said. “They’re successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century, and history shows what the outcome will be.”
Now that the dreaded Nazi card is out and flying around I find it entirely appropriate to set the record straight over many misconceptions that may be held about the version of revisionist history that the administration and their army of seasoned propagandists are out there selling and that which is more accurate.
Let’s start with the Nazi thing itself; Bush of all people should be intimately familiar with this because it was his grandfather, Prescott Bush who personally profited from his work and association with the Union Banking Corporation which was a conduit for businesses that financed the rise of the murderous regime of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party. So egregious was their assistance and complicity in building the war machine of the Third Reich that UBC was shut down and had their assets seized by the government under the Trading With the Enemies Act . No wonder that the Bush family and the extremist right-wing fascists who control the Republican one-party government has so much hatred towards President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A government that the Bushes have been major players in and have had at least one member in control or in a position to influence the Oval Office for seventeen of the last twenty five years.
This is fascinating stuff that unfortunately due to the nature of our pathetic national media is little known and normally would earn one the stigma of being affixed with the dreaded ‘tin foil hat’ but it is all out there for those seeking to know the truth about the true history of this most despicable and treacherous of American families that are the Bushes. Grandpa Bush and his company served as agents for Fritz Thyssen the German industrialist known as “Hitler’s Angel” who was indispensable in providing the financial backing and carried clout that would create what was then the strongest military machine in the world as well as the most bellicose. While the Bush-Nazi links received no attention domestically in our neutered, corporatist media here is an article from the London Guardian “How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power” and another piece by investigative journalist John Buchanan entitled \”Bush Nazi Link Confirmed\” that was published in the New Hampshire Gazette. The Nazi skeleton is but one of a great number in the Bush family closets and potentially the most damning of all, especially in the face of the strident language used by the current Bush regime in seeking to marginalize dissenters and tar them as ideological sympathizers with those who were appeasers and facilitators of the most vile despotic regime of the last century.
And now that the Nazi card has been played by the Bushists maybe it is finally time to begin to bring up that which is most obvious in that it is the current leadership of this country that has far more in common with the Nazis than most would be able to accept. See if any of this sounds familiar:
The nation’s leader seized extraordinary powers after a ‘terrorist’ attack; a leader who holds a cult-like sway over a large percentage of the population and was not elected by a majority when he came to power; leader belonged to a secret society (Thule / Skull and Bones); a special act was passed enabling the leader to subvert the constitution during a prolonged state of emergency; a vaguely defined enemy; surveillance and searches without warrants; the use of religion as justification (Gott Mit Uns) and the propagation of a belief that God had chosen the leader and the people for a special purpose; control of the press; ever present propaganda; the use of the term “Homeland” (Heimat) to describe the country; us versus them (“with us or against us”) mentality; the persecution of homosexuals and other minorities deemed inferior; organized crackdowns on liberals and intellectuals; the changing of the definitions of science and history to suit the agenda of the regime; the consolidation of power through corporate alliances; construction of detention facilities for vague ‘new programs’; centralized security apparatus; labeling of critics and dissenters as traitors and using ethnic divisiveness to identify enemies of the state.
All that is missing now are the organized pogroms but with the shrill voices of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage and the rest of their ilk those could be coming very, very soon. Especially if the polls continue to show a possible loss of Republican iron-fisted, authoritarian rule in the congress because the one thing that the Bush administration and their neocon allies absolutely cannot risk under any circumstances whatsoever is a newly empowered legislative party with an ax to grind and subpoena power. It is imperative that Americans not swallow the administration’s new Nazi rhetoric and to remain vigilant in order to prevent late legislative chicanery like Bush’s new push for increased powers to use the NSA for spying and the circumvention of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s recent ruling that found the administration in violation of the law as well as any attempt to use the one –party fascist Republican Congress to pass laws rendering Hamdan v. Rumsfeld irrelevant and restore dictatorial powers to Bush and Cheney.
Also of the utmost importance is to view all propaganda regarding ‘terrorists’ and those who seek to appease them (Rovian translation: Democrats) with extreme skepticism as the onslaught of lies is now increasing in intensity with Disney/ABC’s Clinton bashing opus of deceit “The Path to 9/11″, the fraudulent documentary that will exploitatively air on the fifth anniversary of the attacks as well as Bush’s scheduled Monday prime time stemwinder that will once again politicize and distort 9/11 as the Republican rogue government goes to the hole once again with the most effective play in the book.
The ultimate horror would be another terrorist attack in the run up to the elections which would allow for Bush and Cheney to implement every provision of the PATRIOT Act that would effectively end America as we know it for the rest of our lives. Alarmist? I hardly think so given the loathsome actions of this administration and the Republican establishment whose actions have been…well…Naziesque since September 11, 2001. As George Santayana once said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and has there ever been a country whose lack of knowledge of the past and the millions who wear their willful ignorance as if it were a badge of honor quite like America in 2006?
Here is a very brief history lesson:
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, his Nazi party was a minority in the legislative body not possessing the two thirds vote that it would take to activate the ‘enabling act’ which would allow for the leader to pass laws in a time of war or national emergency without the approval of parliament. Hitler wanted to assume total control in order to declare war on the terrorists and the enemies within who were seeking to destroy the German way of life.
On February 27, 1933 the building in which the German parliament met was set ablaze under s mysterious circumstances and a man who was a known Communist was found naked and cowering behind the building, taken into custody and eventually executed after a trumped up trial in which the Nazi demagogues railed against the ‘terrorist’ threat. The party and their leader then used rhetoric, fear and propaganda in order to convince the majority of the populace that they were the only ones capable of shielding them from harm; there was only one catch, they had to forfeit their rights and place their trust the party in order to be safe. This event is commonly known as the Reichstag Fire.
Immediately thereafter, Hitler, Goebbels,Goering and the rest of the extreme right-wing Nazi party used fear mongering to declare a state of emergency which led to the activation of the enabling act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers by allowing the leader to reign unequivocally without the vital check of the oversight of the legislature in the Reichstag…including the powers to conduct secret surveillance against Germans under the guise of protecting them from the ‘terrorists’ Once the normal democratic processes had been subverted opponents were quickly silenced (either out of fear, execution or having their tickets stamped to the one of the many concentration camps springing up throughout the land) and the legislature and courts were rendered irrelevant to the whims of the leader and the Kool Aid drinking sycophants who were held enthralled by the cult of personality while the remainder of the population was terrorized into compliance and capitulation by the leader’s unchecked powers and his willingness to use police state tactics to eradicate all opposition.
And the rest as they say is history.
