How Hitler Gamed Capitalists Into Assisting With The Holocaust

Many may not realize or appreciate it, but history is a fragile subject- unlike the hard objectivity of physics where I can define a wavelength of light precisely by its spectral line. Or determine a star's surface temperature from its emission lines.

  In the case of history, we who have studied it at length (often as intensely as we've mastered physics) know we are always faced with revisionists who would change it to their own beliefs and liking - never mind they are manufacturing fantasies. The sad and inescapable fact? At the same time the first historians appeared so did the first history revisionists who had little or no tolerance for facts.

This  revisionism can cover such diverse arenas as the history of Nazi Germany - including Hitler's political background, ideology and associations as well as the assassination of John F. Kennedy - done by the national security state. We've already seen such bollocks from the likes of Larry Schweikart, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/08/48-liberal-lies-how-about-50-tea-party.html

As well as the efforts of the Right to revise AP American history to render it more palatable and positive, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/09/bravo-to-protesting-students-teachers.html

In this post I want to show how and why Hitler gamed German capitalists and the Right to assist him in his abominable aim to build the Third Reich and also to slaughter over 6 million Jews.  We already know there are revisionists out there - not only to do with the origin of the Holocaust, but also Hitler's own political associations. We can especially see in the last case how history has been twisted and defiled to make the totally gullible believe it was "the Left" behind the Nazi experiment (because the Nazi Party was cynically termed the "National Socialists" - ensuring the future lazy -minded would take it literally), when historical facts point to the fascist Right. And this is where we pick it up.

Historian Ian Kershaw in his masterpiece ‘Hitler Nemesis’, observed,  (p. xxxiii):

“Leaders of big business, though often harboring private concerns about current difficulties and looming future problems for the economy, for their part were grateful to Hitler for the destruction of the left-wing parties and trade unions. They were again ‘masters in the house’ in their dealings with their work force”

He added (ibid.):

“The oppositional forces on the Left, such as the Communists and Socialists were crushed, cowed and powerless”

This was in reference to Hitler dispatching his S.A. thugs in the early 1930s (and later S.S. after "the night of the long knives" in 1934)  to beat and kill Socialists (the REAL ones, not the fake named "National Socialists") as well as communists and labor leaders.  Big German business, much like its current American counterpart  - preferred not to be driven to pay high wages or benefits because unions made them. They wanted instead leverage or political muscle to use against the unions (and socialists which supported them) and Hitler provided it in spades.

This vicious and predatory campaign against socialists and unions was in addition to his reign of terror against Jews which saw them first labeled using yellow stars (sewn on to their clothing) with the word 'Jude', then deprived of their businesses (having them seized), then their homes - as they were dispatched to the concentration camps. (Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, etc.). The monies collected from this appropriation then ended up in Swiss banks.

Kershaw also documents how the pre-Reich Weimar Republic constituted a weak democracy which had little or no control over the most radical Rightists, especially Hitler’s gang (actually, originally Ernst Röhm's) NSDAP party. They would regularly - as Kershaw writes- : beat Marxists, socialists, and any leftists on the streets while holding up signs that read: “Tot dem Marxem!” (Death to Marxists!)

Kind of a damned funny way to show kinship with REAL Left Socialists!  Now, if these "geniuses" who insist Hitler "wasn't of the Right" are correct, then WHY beat up on Marxists, Socialists and Commies of the LEFT? Huh? Can these illustrious nabobs answer that? Of course not, because the facts of history contradict their absurd reconstructions.

Unlike too many Americans who've never set foot in Germany, I've been there four times and been able to actually discuss that nation's history with those who lived it - including three former Werhmacht soldiers (Dieter, Werner and Hans)  in 1985, as well as a former Hitler Youth (Kurt., below) who for over 30 years had amassed an archival collection of films on the Third Reich. (Kurt's mother had been threatened with rape when he was 12, unless he joined. He was found by Russian soldiers near Berlin one month later, and sent back home.) Kurt's films from his archives also showed the Reichstag fire, scenes from Kristallnacht and the S.S. thugs stomping pitilessly on trade unionists and real socialists - not the faux Nazi bunch who merely called themselves by the name.

Kurt - former Hitler Youth - showing archival  film of 1938 Nazi (S.S.) terror tactics - seen on my first visit to Germany (Frankfurt-am-Main) in  1978.

Watching Kurt's archival films in July of 1978 included early 1930s footage of hundreds of gangster S.A. (enlisted by Hitler) swooping in on a crowd of union workers really brought home to me what later books I read merely referenced in the abstract. It was also fairly sickening with some of the films showing Socialists and Marxists  beaten  half to death by the Nazi thugs.

THIS was HISTORY, ACTUALLY DOCUMENTED! If the American Right doesn't wish to be associated with this or rejects it as reflecting on their own ideology, I fully understand. But to try to revise history because they abhor the Rightist link to racism and Nazis is both pigheaded, and disingenuous. Take ownership, then move on!

THIS is also why the German capitalists, such as Krupp, Volkswagen, I.G. Farben (infamous for later manufacturing the Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers) etc. threw their lot behind Hitler and provided the political ballast, without which he could never have become 'Der Fuehrer'.  They even helped design the gas chambers for maximum efficiency. Other capitalist businesses made use of the hair shaved off of Jews headed for the gas chambers, at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen etc. - to manufacture carpets. In addition, they used Jews enslaved at the camps as slave labor for their munitions factories etc. Thus, the bodies shown below at Mauthausen concentration camp - taken by liberating Russian troops in May, 1945, had already been shorn ouf the hair and relieved of all gold fillings.


As Dieter, a  former Wehrmacht soldier put it, when I met him and two other former Wehrmacht in May, 1985:

"It was disgusting how far the big businessmen went to support Hitler! Had it not been for them I doubt he'd ever have been Chancellor or even gotten 15% of the vote in the 1932 elections.

Hans, another former Wehrmacht soldier (who had pinned American troops down in the Teuotoburger in  March, 1945 but didn't press the advantage) was more colorful:

"The Big Businessmen just kissed Hitler's ass! They wanted him in power more than a drunken sailor wanted a whore in shore leave!"

Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, saw a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany in November 1938.The attacks were carried out by Sturmabteilung  in concert with S.S. forces and non-Jewish civilians and were ignored. In all,  91 Jews were killed and around 30,000 were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.

In most of Hitler's writings he asserts "Marxists are Jews"  (thereby explaining his hatred of real socialists) based on the fact Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital, was a Jew.   In one of his worst tirades, a radio speech on October 15, 1933 (quoted from Konrad Heiden's book, 'The Fuhrer') Hitler bellowed:

"These ruinous and inferior characters have succeeded in arousing a world psychosis!"

This was  also tied to those he perceived as "Jews" in the American press, working in league with communists and Socialists in Europe to spread rumors about Hitler and demonize him. What happened is that the Jews - like ALL Socialists, Communists, and Marxists- were dispossessed of their worldly goods and bank accounts. By 1936 virtually no German Jew (just as no German Socialist, or Marxist) could own a business, or even own a personal bank account. Once this happened most Jews realized their only hope of saving themselves was to try to leave Germany.

All Jewish gun ownership effectively ended on Nov. 11, 1938, when a new law was declared, prohibiting Jews from owning weapons of any kind, including swords, which many Jewish army veterans had kept as mementos from World War I.  Despite numbskull Ben Carson's claims, however, even if the remaining Jews had weapons -guns they'd not have been able to defend themselves against the Nazis. (Also, it is lame to try to tie deprivation of guns to exclusively to "Nazi" governance, when the key and critical distinction was the terrorizing of (real) socialists, trade unions, Jews and communists-  and the establishment of concentration camps for them.)

The failure of Jews to mount an effective defense against the Waffen-SS in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 provides a good example of what happened when ordinary citizens with small arms went up against a well-equipped force. The uprising in the ghetto possesses enduring symbolic significance, as an instance of Jews’ determination to resist their oppression. But the uprising saved few Jewish lives and had little to no impact on the course of either World War II or the Holocaust.

Most estimates put German industry profits at more than $1 billion thanks to the holocaust and its ancillary slavery, more over it wasn't just German capitalists who profited.  Major US corporations also had operations in Nazi Germany included Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), IBM, ITT, Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, Alcoa (Aluminum Corporation of America) and Dow Chemical.

As noted by author Henry C. Sutton in his 'Wall Street  and the Rise of Hitler', American law firms, investment companies and banks were also eager to share in the profits to be made in a country where the working class was terrorized. The other capitalist connections included the Chase Manhattan Bank, J. P. Morgan as well as Dillon, Read and Company, and the Union Bank of New York, owned by Brown Brothers & Harriman (together with German capitalists.)  It has been estimated that as of 7 December 1941, capital invested in Nazi Germany by US corporations amounted to approximately USD 475 million, which is about USD 6.7 billion in today’s money. Sadly, most of the American media, and American historians in general don't even want to 'go there', though Kurt showed me several films of bigshot American capitalists, including Henry Ford, praising Hitler and contributing to his war machine.

But the perverse relations of U.S. capitalists to Nazis didn't end there.

 Let us also recall the tie -in of U.S. intelligence to U.S. banking operations (as revealed in Donald Gibson's book, 'Battling Wall Street - The Kennedy Presidency'.  As he observes (p. 72):

"by the early 1960s the Council of Foreign Relations, Morgan and Rockefeller interests and the intelligence community were so extensively inbred as to be virtually a single entity."

Gibson also notes (ibid.) that William Donovan, the original OSS head had long links to Morgan financial and banking interests. Indeed, Donovan "began his intelligence career working as a private operator for J.P. Morgan, Jr."

And one of the most critical findings is (ibid.):

"The global interests of the Morgan and Rockefeller groups (which also had oil interests, e.g. in Standard Oil) led to a natural involvement in the formation and development of the Central Intelligence Agency".

Given all this, it was not a stretch that the banking- underpinned intelligence establishment would soon wish to find a place for ex-Nazi intelligence agents in its structures. As noted by investigative author Christopher Simpson in his book ' 'Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy' for which readers can obtain an excerpted segment here: Ratlines-Blowback   the selection of former Nazis for intelligence use (especially via "Operation Sunrise" among others) wasn't coincidental. We already know that the Nazis had as one of their priorities the disposal of socialists and communists. This appealed to Donovan and the O.S.S. as it later did to CIA chief Allen Dulles because both believed Russia and communism (and by extension, socialism) was the biggest threat to American interests going forward - so engineered the recruitment of Nazi thugs to serve in spy capacities.

Much of this is documented in Simpson's book but even more can be found in Russ Baker's 'Family of Secrets' including the ties of Prescott Bush - George W's grand father- to the Nazi war machine. Readers can also find more information on the Nazi- CIA ties here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

Excerpt:

In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.


Capitalists, as a matter of historical fact, had much to do with not only greasing Hitler's war machine but also seeing that the Holocaust was expeditiously carried out and maximal use made of the human resources, including hair, teeth, bones etc, extracted from Jewish bodies before being gassed and cremated.

Don't let any Right winger try to tell you otherwise, or that the Nazis were "socialists" (just by virtue of the name "National Socialist Party") or "leftists".  If they assert any such nonsense you know immediately they are history revisionists - and you need to examine their agenda!

Another Reckless "Free Speech" Episode: GOOPr Compares Obama to Hitler For Not Going to Paris

Where does it end? The crass stupidity and ignorance afoot in this country like a mutant  swine flu virus run amuck. How many brains are already infected we don't know, but on the conservo side it looks like most of them - from the evidence: denying global warming imps, to the subset seeking to make it 100 times worse with the Keystone XL pipeline, to the degenerates who removed a key banking regulation that could bring on another financial crisis. And now, some mutant asshole comparing Obama to Hitler, for god's sakes!

Republican Congressman Randy Weber (R-TX) on Tuesday  took the debate to reprehensibly  offensive levels when he tweeted that "Even Adolph [sic] Hitler thought it more important than Obama to get to Paris. (For all the wrong reasons.) Obama couldn't do it for right reasons."

 

 

Are you kidding me? Turning Obama into Hitler (who had his storm troops INVADE Paris)  because he didn't join the security nightmare mob scene in Paris to selectively mourn the Charlie Hebdo satirists who consistently poked the hornet's nest because they could?  (And let's bear in mind even Pope Francis declared that while using violence in the name of religion is wrong, so is insulting others' religions.)  Aren't people thinking? Haven't they seen the news of problems in the Secret Service - with four major security breaches - and the overhaul just yesterday by Assistant Director Joseph Clancy in replacing four high officials? Imagine the nightmare scene had Obama stood with freakin'  millions in gay Paree with these security vulnerabilities. See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/60420/the-lash-and-the-sword-hebdo-hypocrisy-and-the-mob-mind

 

 

Let's get this clear:  whatever your take is on the Charlie Hebdo incident and attack, the jaw-dropping insult from a sitting member of Congress was unconscionable. Further, it can only really be understood when you realize that the conservative media in America have been wallowing in that kind of mindless garbage for most of Obama's time in office. (UPDATED: Weber has since apologized as he should)

 

 

Freely engaging in the kind of rhetorical bomb-throwing that had previously been seen and heard on the far fringes of American politics, mainstream conservative commentators have embraced the Obama-is-just-like-Hitler narrative and have proudly paraded it around for years, either oblivious to, or unconcerned with, the offensive implications. In previous blog posts I have noted many outbursts of this Hitler - malarkey, including some clueless folks posting repugnant images such as:

 

 

 

As Media Matters noted last year:

Wallowing in self-pity and convinced of the dark forces moving against them, conservatives launch attack after attack, insisting they're fighting forces at home akin to Hitler's Nazi storm troops. They complain louder and louder that America has become like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler when 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

This country's  perception of "free speech" has now been so badly fucked that something as innocuous as a debate over Obama's scheduling is met with a Republican Hitler-based denunciation.  This is a mark of insanity and intemperance - which would be bad enough among the bigot punditry like Limbaugh and Hannity - but is inexcusable coming from a lawmaker. (In Germany such comparisons would earn the guy 3 years at hard labor)

 

 

But sad to say,  this kind of rhetorical bomb throwing  has been a mark of conservative shame throughout the president's tenure.  Let's also recall that Fox News chief Roger Ailes accused the management of National Public Radio of having "a kind of Nazi attitude" when it fired commentator Juan Williams. Then we beheld how the former Fox host Glenn Beck immersed himself in odious Hitler rhetoric during Obama's first years in office, while the then-burgeoning Tea Party movement did the same, and so did Rush Limbaugh. The latter pig obsessed over Obama-Nazi comparisons in 2009:

 

 

"Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate." Limbaugh thought it was "fabulous and fantastic and hilarious that a women shows up at a Barney Frank town hall meeting with an Obama-as-Hitler poster and the Nazi stuff."
 

Note that none of these assholes have likely ever been to Germany or actually spoken to real Germans that fought in WWII - including in the Wehrmacht under Hitler - as I have. So they don't have a damned clue what  they are yapping about, other than from comic books. See e.g.
 

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/07/want-to-know-about-nazi-germanys-real.html

 

 

Then, last year, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins submitted a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor hyping an alleged "progressive war on the American one percent" and compared it to Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish riots. (WSJeditors, a Fox analyst, and Michelle Malkin all defended Perkins from the criticism he received following the distasteful

 

And I've already bashed this fool elitist for that outburst, e.g

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/tom-perkins-another-whiny-rich-asshole.html

Then there was cornpone moron Mike Huckabee who  likened abortion to the methodical extermination of the Jewish population in Germany under Hitler. This jerk not even conscious that one mandate under the Reich laws of Hitler was forced abortions, mainly of Jewish women and forced births demanded of "Aryan" women - or dispatch to the camps.

 

 

More recently, the latter day Fox News contributing numbskull Dr. Ben Carson claimed America is "very much like Nazi Germany" in that it has a government "using its tools to intimidate the population."  Clearly this jerkoff who calls himself a doctor has no clue - not one - of the level of intimidation in Nazi Germany in the late 30s, early 40s, when neighbor regularly spied on neighbor and people's doors were broken down in the middle of the night by Gestapo agents - taken to hidden locations - and forced to endure rectal rehydration, genital mutilation and whipping until they expired. Those that didn't were dispatched to Nazi concentration camps. Don't take my word! DO your own research, including getting hold of the book, 'The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During The Second World War', by Martin Gilbert.

 

 

Carson, who was actually expected to mount a presidential campaign, recently defended his ignorant comments:

 

 

"I know you're not supposed to say 'Nazi Germany.' But I don't care about political correctness," suggesting additional Hitler rhetoric could be a cornerstone of Carson's upcoming campaign.

 

 

But it isn't a case of "political correctness" as this imbecile claims, but of getting historical facts correct. Sadly, assholes like Carson, Beck, Huckabee,  Limbaugh and others get away with their BS because for too many 'Muricans the 2nd World War is like ancient history - and most haven't read one single serious monograph on the Nazis, the Third Reich, Hitler himself -  far less actually gone to Germany and spoken to the people who lived at the time.

 

 

For years, the Anti-Defamation League(ADL) has been grappling with the mainstreaming of Hitler rhetoric especially in the punditry and the political class (namely American conservatives)  - which ought to know better.

 

 

Last year the ADL again tried to raise a red flag, declaring, "The six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Hitler deserve better. Their deaths should not be used for political points or sloganeering. This type of comparison diminishes and trivializes the Holocaust."

 

 

But do these toads care? Hell no! They will continue to spout their ignorance and rhetorical bombs against Obama so long as they know their main audience is woefully ignorant of the facts of history. This is why they can exploit it!

 

 

See the Pope's take on the limits to free expression here:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/19f31342-9cb6-11e4-a730-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3OuY6oOIM



See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/shamus-cooke/60462/the-spectacular-media-failure-on-charlie-hebdo

Is Darwinian Evolution Responsible for Racism?

In a recent article on salon.com the author actually wrote:

 

“Modern racism had several different intellectual sources, and only with difficulty could one say which of these was most important. I will focus here on the “scientific” strand of racism, which drew its inspiration from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. Several factors dictate this emphasis on Darwinian racism. First, Darwinist racism explicitly motivated Hitler and many other leading perpetrators of the Holocaust. Second, Darwin inspired the researchers, most notably in biology and anthropology, who gave racism its aura of scientific certainty.  Third, Darwinian thought may well have been more popular in Germany  than anywhere  else during these years, in part because Germany was the world’s leading center of biological research before World War I ..."

 

But can the claim really be made that Darwinian evolution by natural selection provided an “intellectual source” for modern racism? In fact I think not. No more than Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (leading to the equation E = mc² in one paper) could be said to be the “intellectual source” for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My point is that Einstein was no more responsible for the atomic bomb than Darwin was responsible for modern racism. Scientists engaged in one manner or other of pure research cannot be held accountable for what others do to pervert or apply  their work, including how they distort and corrupt it – in the case of formulating doctrines of racial superiority.  It doesn’t matter here how or if Darwinian evolution “motivated Hitler” or anyone else. The brute fact of the matter is that Darwin’s evolution by natural selection was never intended to be extrapolated beyond the biological domain to the social one.

 

I also dispute (having taught Darwinian evolution while in Peace Corps) it is the “easiest to explain”. In fact not! The subtle basis for natural selection and how it manifests over vast eons is in fact extremely difficult to explain. One must use countless examples, integrate genetics where necessary and then rain dozens of diagrams down on students and hope that they have some grasp of the principles at the end of the day, or week. More often then not, they don’t.

On the other hand, perversions of Darwinian evolution – say to the realm of Social Darwinism, are easier to explain because they simplify the complex biological context to a simple sociological one.   The latter was concocted by British philosopher Herbert Spencer who actually coined the term “survival of the fittest” – it was never used by Darwin himself.

Spencer, without a scintilla of hard evidence, simply extrapolated Darwinian evolution to the human realm and claimed that humans consisted of assorted classes and sub-classes with the latter being the “unfit” whom natural selection bypassed. They were ill-adapted to their world and hence became dopers, bums and the chronic unemployed. They were useless because “natural selection” (from inferior genes in their families) left them without viable skills.

 

On account of this totally wrong-headed twist on evolution and natural selection Spencer was able to state in one of his tracts:

 

“If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die."

 

Right! So if natural selection as Spencer conceived it left the forlorn “less fit”  humans unable to live, then they ought to perish. What he meant is that they ought to be left with no government support at all, hence to sink or swim of their own accord. If they sank, too bad – to Spencer it meant we were rid of more of the unfit so the fittest could propagate. It doesn’t take a genius to grasp that a foul fanatic like Hitler would latch onto this like a fly onto dog shit.

 

It also doesn’t take a genius to grasp that any racist would latch onto it as well, for the same reasons, and exploit it to justify slavery, deny African-Americans equal educations, or keep them in low wage, menial jobs.

 

While acknowledging the existence of Social Darwinism as a separate and distorted strain, the salon.com author nonetheless harped on the wrong  aspects with the wrong emphasis. He claimed that “the most important idea may have been struggle- ’the notion that all relations between individuals and between nations were defined by a merciless battle for survival’ and then concluded:

 

“Struggle followed inevitably from the laws of nature as discovered by Darwin, and therefore had no moral significance.  The Christian injunctions to “love your neighbor” and “love your enemies”  had no place in the animal  kingdom;  neither should they control the behavior  of human beings, who were not made  in the image of God,  but rather counted  as nothing more than an especially clever type of animal.”

 

But again, Darwin never applied the concept of “struggle”,  whereby a “most fit”  specimen “survived” to human evolution.  It was Spencer who did this.   Hence it was Spencer’s assumptions about struggle that justified (to him)  the argument that extreme social inequality was natural and permanent. The poor were poor because they were less fit than the rich.  (Spencer did allow charity to help the poor who couldn’t survive without it, but he rejected all government assistance)

More unsettling is how Spencer’s meme spread even to the Christian evangelicals in the person of Rev. Josiah Strong.  Like Spencer, Rev. Strong pooh-poohed services for the poor and disabled as encouraging a fundamental weakness in society which induced corruption, sloth and all the other vices. People needed to be put through a "caldron" and - if they survived- they'd find God, spiritual life and work for their own wealth instead of bleeding it off the state. We hear similar balderdash today from the Right wing nuts who get on their pedestals (like Cliven Bundy) and actually assert welfare is making slaves of people, or that people who accept government help as less godly folk.

The capper was tying the amassing of great wealth to Christian virtue. Thus, one's wealth immediately became a barometer for one's morality or spirituality. The Rev. Strong had accomplished what might have been deemed impossible in Jefferson's era: tying political motives, agendas to evangelical religious concepts.

Once that "dog" was let out, it began to increasingly infect more and more political venues- permeating them with its enticing belief system of the "exceptional America". For example, Sen. Albert T. Beveridge before the Senate in 1899, in his own words:

"God has not been preparing the English -speaking and Teutonic peoples for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns..He has made us adepts that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples "


Note the choice of words above: the "English" and "Teutonic peoples" - the latter a direct reference to Germans. Note also the words - GOD making them the "Master Organizers of the World". And further - "to administer government among savages and senile peoples". In other words, the blueprint was already being laid for mass genocide, ethnic cleansing and even the Holocaust. (Which idea Hitler, in his Mein Kampf, actually attributed to the American Eugenics movement in the 1920s, and the report of a California black man (in one of the German newspapers Hitler was allowed to read while in prison in the 1920s) killed in a gas chamber at San Quentin).

 

Sen. Beveridge’s barf spread through the culture like chemicals from a toxic dump as writers of popularized science ( and  many  biologists and anthropologists),  carefully  ranked  races and  nationalities from lowest  to  highest in value, whites always at the top, and among white people in numerous gradations. American elites generally agreed that among people of European descent, those who had emigrated to the United States from Northern and Western Europe— English, Germans, Scandinavians, and others—were born  with the highest intelligence, the strongest  work ethic, and the best of other moral qualities. In contrast, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe—Poles, Greeks,  Italians, Russian  Jews, and  so on—were said to be "markedly inferior", and  indeed  a potential threat  to the country’s “racial health.”

 

Alarmed by Beveridge’s  imagined  threat,  the U.S. Congress enacted an immigration law in 1924 that closed America’s borders to all but a limited number of immigrants from the “wrong” parts of Europe. Earlier laws had almost completely eliminated immigration from China and Japan, whose people, not even being white, were wholly unwanted.

 

The fallout from Spencer’s Social Darwinism remains with us today manifest for example, as:

-        supporting  a bias  toward violence  between nations,  and a glorification  of warfare. (“Superior” peoples had every right  to conquer, exploit, and even exterminate “inferior” ones. )

 

-        In international relations, might made right: by winning a war, the victor showed that he deserved his victory, because his people were more fit to survive than were the losers.

-        Limiting government support or donation to the less developed nations – “let them sink or swim”

 

-        Cut out food stamps, welfare for “unfit” Americans or put them to work in prison labor

 If you seriously want to blame racism and Hitler’s genocide on someone, or some idea, don’t blame Charles Darwin’s evolution by natural selection. Blame its perversion compliments of Herbert Spencer and the “good” Christian, Rev. Josiah Strong.

You can also blame the perverted economic principles of libertarianism in large measure on indiscriminately adopting much of Spencer's Social Darwinism. Heck, Ayn Rand's 'Virtue of Selfishness' itself  could easily have been penned by Herbert Spencer!

 

Can We Prevent Another Holocaust From Happening?

                                                                                          


Photo taken outside the Mauthausen Concentration Camp by Russian soldiers in May, 1945.

"Evil takes place when human bonds are broken, when concrete relationships crumble for the sake of abstract identifications. When we divide the world into sheep and goats, into good and evil, the 'sheep' - the self-proclaimed good- have a tendency to subject the goats to the worst imaginable treatment. In doing so, the sheep's group identity is made stronger, something that forms the basis of new and better identification of 'goats'."  - Lars Sevendsen, 'A Philosophy of Evil'


Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, it behooves all of us to consider what if anything can be done to prevent an abomination like the Holocaust from ever occurring again. Lars Svendsen's book is a good place to start, because it shows the potential for idealistic evil occurs within us all. Idealistic evil is that form which emerges when people stop thinking of others as human like themselves and instead put them into abstract brackets. The Nazis did it when they relegated the Jews in Europe to pests, e.g. rats, even making films to depict them that way. The Hutus in Rwanda did it to the Tutsis - of which they slaughtered over 800,000 -- by comparing them to "cockroaches." Despite the fact no outside observer could ever find the slightest difference between members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribe, the 'sheep' in this case (the Hutus),  did bracket their opposition as predatory 'takers' and traitors. Unleashing a genocide was merely the next step.

In his trenchant book, Svendsen examines  the doings of Rudolph  Höss  (commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp), Adolf Eichmann and Lt. William Calley - comparing why they did the horrific things they did and noting in each case the common denominator was a failure to be conscious of their deeds or their significance- hence to take any responsibility for them.

For example, Höss, an SS-Obersturmbannführer,  in his autobiography - said he was not to blame and he was merely "following orders". Besides, he insisted, he did not actually herd the Jews into the gas chambers or throw in the Zyklon B gas crystals. He had effectively detached himself from the evil he spawned. Adolf Eichmann in his trial, after being captured by Israeli agents, made similar claims and offered that he was merely a mid-level bureaucrat  - again just following orders- assembling names of Jews into documents for transport. How could he be to blame?

Ditto with Lt. William Calley, who while he didn't participate in a holocaust on the scale of the extermination of the Jews, did participate in a mindless massacre of innocents. As Svendsen observes (p. 177):

"Take another famous example,  namely the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968. Lieutenant William L. Calley was commanding officer, and therefore was principally responsible for the massacre which lasted around an hour and a half.  In that time, 507 innocent people were murdered- among them 173 children and 76 infants. Calley alone killed 102 people. The official report read: '128 enemy resisters killed in battle'. For one thing it wasn't 128 killed but 507. For another they weren't 'killed in battle' but slaughtered while helpless. They weren't  'enemy resisters' in the sense of soldiers but ordinary civilians."

 The scene at My Lai, Vietnam after William L. Calley and his troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians.

As Svendsen goes on to note (ibid.):

"In his own mind, Calley was simply following orders and doing what was expected of a good soldier. He couldn't believe his ears when he was accused of mass murder."


In other words, Calley was exactly like Adolf Eichmann in the sense that his "orders" trumped any charge he could have done anything wrong. Thoughts of what he was doing when he ordered the massacre of unarmed villagers went out the window as they did with Eichmann as he assembled 1,000 or 1 million more names for his transports to the gas chambers. Or  Rudolph Höss when he ordered his S.S. commandos to herd 1,000 more Jews into the gas chambers at Birkenau ("Auschwitz 2" the actual  death camp) . As in the case of Eichmann and Calley, Höss' orders from the 3rd Reich High Command trumped any need for him to really THINK of what the hell he was doing.  In each case, whether for Eichmann, Calley or Höss, conscious thought was the first casualty as the killers or killing masterminds were turned into automatons.

Svendsen's point is that none of these evils would have occurred, firstly, had the Jews not been reduced to vermin, and the Vietnamese not been reduced to "gooks". Because each group had been abstractly de-humanized they became 'goats' and hence fodder for extermination, whether in the mass form of the Nazi gas chambers, or in Calley's form of troops slaughtering an imaginary enemy (but real innocents) with their M16s.  As Svendsen noted, "they have said it was wrong to kill but they were in a war."

So war made it all right not to think about what you were doing, whether pulling a gas chamber lever or emptying your clip into a 6 month old  "enemy" infant.

The saddest element, as Svendsen adds, was the respective populations of the nations themselves were largely ignorant or in denial of the heinous deeds. The "good Germans" protested that THEY weren't the ones that committed the crimes, and they didn't know where the death camps were. Also, how could you expect them to help hide the Jews when the Gestapo had its eyes and ears all over?

In the case of Calley's supporters, Svendsen writes (p. 179):

"When Calley was condemned, the White House received 100,000 letters in one day alone, supporting William Calley.  'The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant William Calley'  sold a million copies in a week.  TIME conducted an extensive survey in 1970 where two thirds of Americans said they were not emotionally moved by the massacre, while eighty percent said it was wrong to indict him."


This itself is enough to make a sentient person vomit, including the fact not one of Calley's men saw that they'd done anything amiss. Again, "just following my orders". That one's own countrymen could be so desensitized to the evil committed (and in their country's name) as to be emotionally unaffected and to go so far as to support the perpetrator boggles the mind! But of course if those bodies were merely regarded as "gooks' you could understand why so many in the polls wouldn't give a damn. Hell, it wasn't THEIR kids or wives - say slaughtered by the Chinese. Besides they'd been brainwashed to believe ALL the "gooks" were the enemy (Viet Cong.) 

Svendsen's clear point is that so long as other people, other groups, mean nothing to us - in terms of putting them in abstract categories to hate - we will give no thought to their elimination. When we become unthinking supporters of idealistic evil, we become just as bad as those who perpetrated the evil, whether Rudolph Höss as he had 1.8 million gassed at Auschwitz, or Lt William Calley, as his band of warriors slaughtered 507 innocents at My Lai. 

So long as specious popular support remains for these types of criminal mass murderers and their actions the potential for future holocausts exists.  It means, or implies, a blind spot to moral failure and evil exists within us all which can be charged at any time, say if the right fanatic gets into power and manages to pull the right cords. What Svendsen argues for - and I do as well - is that we must move beyond the nature of being mere puppets or automatons to become conscious of our acts and with whom we align. We also have to applaud those (like Snowden) who refused to follow orders, given that it is exactly the "order"  template that has repeatedly spawned the worst atrocities in the past 75 years-  whether on the small scale (My Lai) or the large (Auschwitz).

A sad commentary on just how little we have really evolved.

Holocaust Deniers - Need to Be Force-Read 'Doctors From Hell'

Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll, this past Sunday, extolled the efforts of his aunt,   Vivien Spitz,  to get the word out about the horrific Nazi medical experiments, as she documented in her book, Doctors from Hell. He noted she especially was energized in 1987, after reading in The Denver Post of a German Language Arts teacher who actually referred to the Holocaust as the "Holo-hoax'.  In addressing her Denver suburb high school class the teacher was actually quoted as saying: "Some say holocaust, some say holo-hoax".

Right! But I say that those who declare  "holo hoax" are ignorant fools (revealing themselves as such), who merit no input into any serious historical discussions. Their opinions aren't worth even an ounce of doggie lickspittle. That includes those like the character Robert Sungenis, responsible for the pseudo-science travesty 'The Principle' (previous blog post), which proposes the Sun revolves around the Earth. Well, anyone who disputes the Holocaust has already lost all credibility in any other venue, including scientific. 

Anyway, as Carroll notes, seeing this baloney - and coming from the mouth of a teacher (who ought to know better) spurred Vivien Spitz to not only go on an educational circuit to show teachers and students what happened, but to write a book about her experience at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.  An expert at manual and machine shorthand, Ms. Spitz was recruited by the War Department in 1946, to provide a record of the trial of the Nazi war criminals. These transcripts would later be put to use providing presentations to groups across the country: schools, churches, veterans organizations, bar associations and civic organizations. Ms. Spitz felt, after her 1987 wake-up call people could not be allowed to forget what happened, lest it happen again.

The book, meticulous in its detail, is not for the squeamish - but then neither are the actual autopsy photos and records of the Kennedy assassination. Historical validity and nicey-nice often don't go together, and those who want their history neat and tidy are usually the ones left out in the cold as to actual history. They are the ones who continue to be gamed and spinned by those who would alter it for their own agendas.

I was already familiar with a lot of the infamous Nazi medical experiments thanks to video documentaries such as detailed in "The Holocaust Testaments".  These narrow in on each major concentration camp- from Auschwitz, to Birkenau, to Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, to show what was done to hapless men, women and children.

In the Auschwitz record, for example, one beholds a 12 year old boy who's  been infected with Leprosy and the results after just 6 weeks. In another segment, one watches with heart break as the bandages are removed from a 10 year old girl's foot, showing blackened flesh - after she had been forced to stand ten hours in freezing temperatures. In yet another segment, a 9 year old boy is unable to exercise or move either of his arms - they had been amputated and replaced with the arms of a 9 month old infant.

As Carroll observes:

"The bone, muscle and nerve regeneration experiments - and incredibly, bone transplantation- were among the most savage, sadistic and inhumane."

 He also refers to others including: infecting prisoners with typhus, lathering prisoners' arms with a phosphorus mixture and igniting it, immersing prisoners - including children - in ice water, to see how long they could survive, and forcing them to drink sea water for days on end to see how long they could live off it before their kidneys were destroyed.

Other experiments, summarized in Ms. Spitz' book (pp. 44-46) included:

- High altitude experiments, carried out in a low pressure chamber in which the victims were suddenly exposed to extremely low atmospheric pressures such as would be experienced at Everest, for example, and even higher (up to 68,000 ft.) with the subjects then dying in horrible agony.

- Mustard gas experiments, with wounds directly inflicted on the exposed flesh of men, women and children using a mustard agent, and then the doctors documenting how long each took to die in agony.

- Sulfanilimide experiments: to determine the efficacy of drugs, exposing victims to a range of diseases: tetanus, streptococcus, and gas gangrene - with wood shaving and ground glass later forced into the wounds.

- Nerve regeneration experiments, in which living nerves were actually removed from victims causing intense agony and debility, and often agonizing death.

- Sterilization experiments, with victims subjected to sterilization by x-rays, various surgeries or drugs, causing great mental and physical anguish.

- Poison experiments: Poisons, including strychnine and arsenic, were secretly administered to experimental subjects in their foods leading to death - after which autopsies were performed.

- De-fleshing and skeleton collection: to create skeletons for display by the Nazi doctors over 1200 Jewish men, women and children were selected, killed and de-fleshed for skeleton preparation - with the specimens sent to the Reich University.

Meanwhile, in the Holocaust Testaments (Auschwitz) one also found:

- Removal of skin for chairs, and art 'canvas':   In this case the selected bodies of certain gassed victims had their skin later removed and used to form the fabric for chairs - generally by the particular concentration camp Kommandant - and also for "art" canvas, with the art often pornographic.

- Bodies of fetuses (expelled by their mothers in the gas chambers) designated for autopsies.

Yes, one beholds a true 'House of Horror's created by these Nazi doctors.  All documented, and in meticulous detail. So much that no rational person can counter its truth by confecting any kind of fulsome rejoinder or nonsense,   that it "never happened" or that  it's all a "holo -hoax".

Vivien Spitz wrote:

"I would spend the rest of my life trying to recover from what I had heard and written.. From that point on I would no longer tolerate any bigotry.

Meanwhile, the best prescription for Holocaust deniers like Robert Sungenis would be to have 'Doctors from Hell'  force -read to them while they're tied down. Then, afterwards, show them the Holocaust Testaments on an endless loop with eyelids taped open - like Alex in "Clockwork Orange".

Horrific torture? Too terrible for these fuckers? Hardly!  This conditioning is nowhere near the level of what the Nazi doctors from Hell inflicted on their innocent victims.  And look at it this way, at least the deniers aren't being imprisoned for ten years as they would be in Austria or Germany!

Another Mockumentary: Holocaust Denial Blends With Creationist Codswallop

The news on salon.com that physicist Lawrence Krausse and former Star Trek actress Kate Mulgrew were integrated into an asinine  pseudo-science documentary, entitled ‘The Principle’ (what I call a mockumentary)  caught many people by surprise. Surprise that idiots are still peddling this geocentric bunkum – that the Sun revolves around the Earth and not vice versa, and also that a prominent Holocaust denier named Robert Sungenis was behind it.

 

Anyway , it has been reported to be narrated by “Star Trek” alum Kate Mulgrew. Now the actress, who played “Star Trek’s” Capt. Kathryn Janeway, has come out publicly on her Facebook  page to distance herself from the film. Ms. Mulgrew’s FB post stated:

 

“I understand there has been some controversy about my participation in a documentary called THE PRINCIPLE. Let me assure everyone that I completely agree with the eminent physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was himself misrepresented in the film, and who has written a succinct rebuttal in SLATE. I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism.

 

More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused. Kate Mulgrew”

Her reference to Prof. Lawrence Krausse refers to the fact he also had somehow  been snagged into a pseudo-appearance on this travesty, along with several other scientists to appear in the trailer. Since being alerted of this perfidy Prof. Krauss wrote a response piece in Slate in which he lambasted geocentrism and stated that he did not know how the clips of him were obtained.  He wrote:

“Even after being inured to such things, I was surprised to learn of the premise of the film, until I learned that its producer also apparently questions the Holocaust. It is tempting to say that both claims are obscene nonsense, but I believe that does a disservice to the word nonsense.”

 

‘The Principle’ follows along  the typical moronic lines of approach displayed in piffle such as the work of Young Sun- Young Earth aficionado, Jason Lisle.  That is, ignore all the scientifically discounting  evidence in favor of ancient tracts – scribbled by semi-literate peasants and sheep herders.

Both the ‘Young Sun- Young Earth’ and geocentric perspectives are those of firm pseudo-scientific knuckle draggers in the creationist mold. Both are made up nonsense extracted from Genesis. However,  the geocentric bilge probably beats the former by a hair in terms of having the most bull pockey.  The reason is that anyone who’s been exposed to the most basic Newtonian mechanics (usually taken in high school physics – at least it used to be) would know that the primary and more massive object always  attracts the less massive with a greater force of attraction, according to Newton's law of gravitation.

 The force of attraction of a  large mass M for a less massive orbiting object, m , is equal to the centripetal force:

 
GMm/R² = m v²/R

Here m is the mass of the planet and R its distance, while M is the mass of the Sun.

 

Now the Earth’s mass is 6 x 10 ²⁴ kg and Sun’s mass M = 2 x 10 ³⁰ kg.

 The centripetal acceleration with which the Earth ‘falls’ toward the Sun’s center is then found by solving for a = v²/R  or:

a =   GM/R² =  

  (6.7 x 10 ^-11 Nm²/ kg ²) (2 x 10 ³⁰ kg )/  (1.5 x  10 ¹¹ m) ²  =

 

5.9 x  10 ^{- 3} ms^{- 2} 

Thus the unbalanced attractive force is on the side of the vastly more massive (by 330,000 times) Sun. Hence, like a massive (200 lb.) human swinging a much lighter child (50 lb.) around at the end of a rope, the Sun exerts the dominant central force. 

 Sungenis’ bunkum, then,  makes about as much sense as claiming that a fifty pound child can swing  a 200 pound adult around at the end of a rope and dictate the adult’s  circular motion. It is total irredeemable idiocy that only confirmed  idiots  and semi-educated fools could believe.

 It is unclear how much Ms. Mulgrew knew before she signed up, but it is possible she could have been told any old lies or story to get her onboard, including that it would be a “scientifically educational presentation like ‘Cosmos’” These sort of degenerates – like Holocaust deniers- will say anything to push their  crap onto the unsuspecting or enlist their support. As for Prof. Krauss and the other scientists, we know the copy and paste motif exists in video as well as in still images, so that Sungenis could have grabbed pieces of other presentations from anywhere (say PBS series) then spliced them into his grab bag of bollocks.

 

The cautionary tale in all of this is that we need people - especially celebrities and scientists-  to be wary and suspicious before they accept a role for any claimed "scientific" documentary. The knuckle draggers will stop at nothing to push their lies or recruit whoever they can to help push them.