A recent PBS documentary of the Auschwitz labour/death camp provides another unique opportunity to see a masterfully-executed PR Limited Hangout in-action, a mass-media bit of slick historical revisionism that 'cleverly' excises all mention of the more than 100 American corporations that benefitted from trading with and doing business with Nazi Germany during the 2nd World War -- and who were never held accountable for their treason and betrayal. It's hardly a surprise to find that Nazi ideas and ideology have been insiduously infecting American politics and economy through the merging of State and Corporate interests ala Fascism -- esp. given the CIA's historical ties to Nazi War Criminals, the CIA's establishment of intimate ties to Defense Contractors and cut-out front-businesses run by ex-Military personnel and retired spooks to do 'sensitive' Security, espionage, black-ops and intelligence work requiring plausable deniability or exemption from Congressional oversight (ie, Dyncorp, Air America).<br><br>Hardly surprising then too that the modern 'corporate' model reflects the same kind of conscienceless war-profiteering such businesses as IBM, AT&T, Ford, General Motors, and General Electric 'enjoyed' on both sides of the Axis/Allied divide. Ford made most of the medium-to-light duty trucks that was the backbone of the Nazi Army Transport system, while IBM provided information systems that improved the efficiency of 'managing' Germany's slave labourers.<br><br>The 'legacy' of such close cooperation can be seen in the US's adoption of ruthless, brutal policies during the Cold War, grossly distorting the true nature of an actual Communist threat in order to consolidate ever-greater economic power and international influence while militarizing Foreign Policy and provoking a wasteful Defense Industry and disasterous arms race, legitimizing ruinous, destructive wars and foreign interventions, neocolonial conquests and strategy of tension via false-flag terrorism -- Latin American Death Squads, alignment with Mafia and Organized Crime, arms and drug-smuggling to fund black-ops and a secret shadow government, directing Military Coups and sabotaging legitimate self-rule democracies, training legions of pro-US torturers and saddling nations with crippling debt to keep them poor and vulnerable to US control -- The whole sad, sorry-ass history of abuses and crimes and specious end-justifies-means bullshit that Corporate America and a corrupt plutocracy evaded all accountablity for, but absurdly, reacted with collective hysterical outrage when Ward Churchill accused the technocratic corps of modelling Adolf Eichmann.<br><br>The 'lesson' being?: How about -- If the shoe fits ... Then use 'em to kick your illegal-immigrant servant in the ass on his way to the store to buy you a pack of Camels (made by 11-year-old barefoot illiterate Turkish children working 6/14 hour days earning $3.00 US per week ...<br><br>Aieieiei;<br>Starman<br><!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :smokin --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smokin.gif ALT=":smokin"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br>***<br>Robert Lederman<br>CIA to Detail Cold War Ties to Former Nazis<br>Mon Feb 7, 2005 19:57<br>64.140.158.85<br> <br><br>Subject:<br>Update on CIA-Nazi file release and comments on PBS series Auschwitz<br>From: "Robert Lederman"
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net <br>Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 09:30:36 -0500<br><br>LA Times 2 7 05<br>CIA to Detail Cold War Ties to Former Nazis<br><br>WASHINGTON - The CIA (news - web sites), under pressure from Congress, has agreed in principle to release new documents detailing its ties to former<br>Nazis who aided U.S. Cold War espionage against the Soviet Union, officials said Sunday.<br><br>Facing demands for public testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites), CIA officials have conceded that records on former Nazis who have not been accused of war crimes, including members of the German SS, should be subject to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, the officials said.<br><br>"This means the information we thought would come out when we wrote the law will now come out," said Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ohio), who co-wrote the disclosure legislation.<br><br>The CIA, which had no immediate comment, has released about 1.25 million pages of documents about Nazi war criminals in compliance with the disclosure act, which requires government agencies to divulge records of war<br>criminals to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.<br><br>The CIA had refused to disclose documents on former Nazis who had not been targeted as war criminals. Members of the working group and U.S. lawmakers<br>contend the law applies to any individual who belonged to an organization guilty of war crimes.<br><br>The records at issue include hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, including material on CIA dealings with former members of the Nazi party and the German SS, who joined the allied Cold War effort against the Soviet Union in Europe, congressional officials said.<br><br>The CIA's position changed last week after DeWine, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded that CIA Director Porter J. Goss appear before the panel to provide a public explanation of his agency's refusal to<br>disclose the records.<br><br>DeWine is expected to seek a two-year extension for the working group, which had been scheduled to dissolve at the end of March. <br>--------------------------------------------------<br>RL comments<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/">www.pbs.org/auschwitz/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Having just watched PBS' Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State I feel compelled to comment. It was a beautifully and sensitively made documentary, but did it cover<br>up more than it uncovered? <br><br>The premise of the series is that by educating the public about what Auschwitz was really about that future acts of genocide could be avoided. But how can the public understand what Auschwitz was really about with no <br>reference to:<br>1. Eugenics as a whole or the fact that eugenics (forcible population control by government)<br>began in the US and was far more advanced in the US than in Germany until the mid 1930's. Why omit the fact that eugenics-based ideas are behind many of the<br>policies of the Bush administration and were the essense of the Giuliani administration or that IG<br>Farben was broken up into pharmaceutical and chemical companies (many with direct Bush family connections) that are still poisoning millions of people worldwide with their products? The series extensively describes Dr. Mengeles' experiments as if they were the work of an isolated madman rather than what he was...a eugenics scientist funded by the Rockefellers.<br><br>2. The corporate ownership of Auschwitz. IG Farben is mentioned two or three times during the series as is the issue of the Auschwitz camp complex being a factory/industrial/slave labor complex. Yet, there is not a single mention of the fact that Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a half-owner; that the Dulles brothers were the IG Farben lawyers; that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman considered trying the Rockefellers as traitors,<br>that Prescott Bush and other Wall St bankers were the financiers of it or that the Bush family fortune<br>derived from funding Hitler and the Nazis.<br><br>The film also emphasizes how Auschwitz guards and average Germans profitted from looting the wealth of European Jews, yet makes no mention of the banks, insurance companies and corporations - many of them Fortune 500 companies today - which were the far bigger looters.<br><br>If one were to sue a car manufacturer for a defect would one place the ultimate liability on the factory workers who assembled the car or on the corporate owners who decided on a cost-risk based analysis to not correct safety defects? If one hires a hitman to commit a murder, is not the one doing the hiring as guilty as the<br>one actually committing the murder?<br><br>3. The series makes quite a point about thousands of SS members who participated in the Holocaust escaping punishment yet never once alludes to the fact that the US government imported thousands of these same SS officials to the US or that we are living in a police state modeled on their ideas.<br><br>Perhaps the reason PBS had to omit these things was that its top corporate patrons are the very corporate identities who brought us the Nazi Holocaust like Chase Bank, Standard Oil/Exxon, the Rockefeller Foundation etc.<br><br>Somebody spent millions to make a sanitized series on Auschwitz which will become the standard educational means of informing (misinforming) future Americans about this event yet completely omits mention of some of the most cupable parties. Can that have been an accident? (see LA Times article below) <br><br>The single best thing in the documentary is in the last few minutes when a former Auschwitz SS guard who feels he did nothing wrong nevertheless tells the world that Holocaust denial is a lie; that Auschwitz was really a death camp where millions were murdered. The<br>series is worthwhile for that one moment alone.<br><br>The real lesson of Auschwitz is that it was a model of corporate ideology that is increasingly being applied on a worldwide scale. Lower wages, cut health benefits,<br>poison the food supply, make water something people have to buy, decrease democracy while pretending to increase it, imprison minorities, use ID as a means to control population...in a sense we are living in a giant corporate Auschwitz.<br><br>The Bush administration is IG Farben 2005.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>