Tag: Hitler

THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 3

Posted on by kathiemm
“September 11, 1973″ by Carlos Latuff; depicts the U.S.-backed attack on democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.”

by Stefan Schindler

Disturbing facts from American history, continued:

11 – The first 9/11 occurred on September 11th, 1973, when Nixon and Kissinger overthrew the elected government in Chile, the longest running democracy in South America, beginning’s America’s subsequent support of the 16-year Pinochet dictatorship and slaughter of liberal activists.

12 – The Carter administration launched a terror campaign against the newly elected social democratic government of Afghanistan in 1979, leading to the Russian counter-intervention in 1980, which led to Reagan’s eight-year creation, arming and financing of Al Queda to fight “the godless communists” occupying Afghan territory and preventing the installation of American pipelines for the transport of Iraqi oil.

13 – In the first five years of his administration, Ronald Reagan transformed America from the largest creditor nation in the world to the largest debtor nation in the world.

14 – Ronald Reagan conducted an eight-year terror campaign against the social democratic government of Nicaragua, which had finally overthrown 40 years of American supported dictatorship.

15 – The Bush-Cheney wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were an updated repeat of the lies that led to America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War to obliterate memory of U.S. devastation of Laos and Cambodia).

16 – The Bush-Cheney Administration’s continuation of Reagan’s attempt to unravel Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people, with its regulatory safeguards, led directly to the all too predictable economic meltdown of 2008: the largest stock market crash since 1929, from which millions of Americans, and many people around the globe, are still suffering.

17 – The single greatest factor leading to the outbreak of World War Two was the U.S. stock market crash of 1929.  That crash had ripple effects around the globe, including the implosion of Germany’s already impoverished economy.  In desperation, the German people elected a charismatic lunatic named Hitler.

18 – America’s neutrality during the so-called Spanish Civil War (actually a coup d’état) from1936 to1939 – the only place in Europe where ordinary citizens were actively fighting the rise of fascism – led to the overthrow of Spanish democracy by a cabal of Hitler-supported bankers, bishops and generals, and persuaded Hitler that he could continue Nazi expansion into other parts of Europe, including Czechoslovakia and Poland.

19 – American banks and corporations (including Ford and General Motors) helped Hitler build his war machine, and sanctioned Hitler’s persecution of German socialists (hoping that Hitler would invade Russia and put an end to the Soviet experiment in communism).

20 – Japan was begging to surrender in late 1945, asking only that their emperor, Hirohito, be left in place as the nation’s nominal leader.  Truman refused to accept Japanese surrender because of that single condition.  No American troop invasion of Japan was necessary to end the war.  Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily as a warning to the Soviets.  After Japan’s surrender, Hirohito was allowed to maintain his nominal political title.

21 – During World War Two, the American air force was ordered not to bomb Nazi war-making factories owned by Ford and General Motors.  After the war, the CEOs of Ford and General Motors were awarded millions of taxpayer dollars in compensation for “collateral damage,” instead of being tried and convicted for treason.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.

Then came Hitler (Quaker reflections, Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

A continuing series by guest author Jean Gerard

I was raised in the early 20th century by a conservative middle class family.  My father educated himself and became a teacher of geology and geography in a large high school in Pittsburgh.

Unemployed during Great Depression
Store vacancies & unemployment during Great Depression. Photo by Dorothea Lange, in public domain.

Dependent upon coal and steel, Pittsburgh suffered from strikes, pollution, and racial and class tensions among social groups– the very rich, middle class professionals, and many immigrant poor.

Children observed or experienced discrimination every day:  the Italian boy who couldn’t speak or read English; the Jewish girl with the violin and the heavy accent; the eight Catholic kids who moved in next door. “I don’t know what you see in those people!” my older sister used to say.

Thousands of “working stiffs” were slaving for next to nothing in the mines and mills, under a system that, in spite of temporary reforms here and there, would persist and eventually destroy the very idea of “liberty and justice for all” to which I swore allegiance every morning.

During the Great Depression, teachers were lucky to keep their jobs. Consequently, every Saturday my father bought large sacks of groceries and gave them away to sad-faced, lost men slouching on sidewalks.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt  came on the scene, my family was split by the politics of middle-class prejudice. I came to see how changes of the New Deal improved the lives of some of my friends even while they enraged others.

Then came Hitler, screeching over radio static from Germany. His ovens turned his country (and the land of my ancestors) into a living hell. By the mid-1930s he had almost made a Communist out of me – but not quite.

I sympathized, but didn’t join any political party because I was too confused and individualistic to join anything. It never crossed my mind that I had the same instinctive fear of consequences that had kept Hitler’s people voiceless–and now again has brought most of us Americans to a state of voluntary amnesia.

I was a political coward. I refused to take responsibility for fear of risking my safety.  I remained an observer with a guilty conscience.

 

Warning: Do not behave like our perpetrators

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie MM:  Today we welcome guest contributor John Hess, who has been an anti-war activist for 40 years, and worked for over 30 years in the construction business. He is currently a full-time faculty member in English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is a member of the executive committee for  the faculty-staff union.]

I found this video the other day and thought it well worth passing on. It is a fascinating comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel from Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

Meyer observes that Jews were “the pioneers of interhuman ethics” and that he “wants to wake the world” to speak out against the horrible treatment of the Palestinians by Israel.

One of the enduring strengths of Judaism is its strong moral tradition and it is in this tradition that Meyer urges Israelis “not to behave like our perpetrators” (the Nazis) toward the Palestinians and calls on the world to speak out against this behavior.

Watching the video led me to think about both the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine/Israel today.  It seems to me they are in some important ways linked, so I took a long look at a book I haven’t glanced in quite awhile, The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein.

The Holocaust, Rubenstein said, was “a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy” (p. 4).

Rubenstein provides a warning that it is well worth heeding today: “One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization” (p. 21).

In his view, “The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler” (p. 6).

What parallels do you see between the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine–or even other parts of the world?

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston