If the world treated WW2 the same way we treat the "War on Terrorism" and the "Conflict in the Middle East" this is what it would have been like...

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March 15/16, 1939: Nazis take Czechoslovakia. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge Czechoslovakia to be restrained in their response.)

May 22, 1939: Nazis sign 'Pact of Steel' with Italy. (Other nations declare that Italy and Germany signing pact to help each other take over the world "not helpful to the peace process.")

Aug 23, 1939: Nazis and Soviets sign Pact. (The world heralds signing of treaty as a sign of Hitler's good intentions. He wouldn't be signing a peace treaty if he wanted war would he?)

Sept 1, 1939: Nazis invade Poland. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

Sept 3, 1939: Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany. (World condemns these nations for declaring war. This may cause unrest in Europe!)

Oct, 1939: Nazis begin euthanasia on sick and disabled in Germany. (World mildly condemns this but declares that we must understand the actions of Germany in the context of the horribly unfair treaty of Versailles.)

April 9, 1940: Nazis invade Denmark and Norway. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

May 10, 1940: Nazis invade France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

June 14, 1940: Germans enter Paris. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

July 10, 1940: Battle of Britain begins. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge Britain to be restrained lest they further the "cycle of violence.")

Aug 23/24: First German air raids on Central London. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge Britain to be restrained lest they further the "cycle of violence.")

Aug 25/26: First British air raid on Berlin. (World outraged at British attacks! Civilians may have been killed by irresponsible British attacks! World votes 453-4 to condemn Britain!)

SEpt 13, 1940: Italians invade Egypt (Other nations give mild condemnation of Italian attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

Nov 20, 1940: Hungary joins the Axis Powers. (World excited! Hopes Hungary may now have the influence to help move the peace process forward. World publicly says they applaud the peace effort they are sure Hungary will soon begin!)

Nov 23, 1940: Romania joins the Axis Powers. (World excited! Hopes Romania may now have the influence to help move the peace process forward. World publicly says they applaud the peace effort they are sure Romania will soon begin!)

Dec 9/10: British begin a western desert offensive in North Africa against the Italians. (World outraged at British attacks! How will we ever have peace if Britain keeps attacking the other side?)

March 11, 1941: President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act. (World criticizes Americans for selling weaponry to combatants! Announces they should only give food, blankets, and tents if they're going to get involved at all.)

May 10/11, 1941: Heavy German bombing of London; British bomb Hamburg. (World is outraged by British attack on Hamburg! Civilians may of been injured! World condemns Britain in strongest terms and demands they stop bombing anywhere civilians might be!)

June 14, 1941: United States freezes German and Italian assets in America. (Americans accused of "hating all Germans and Italians". 32 lawsuits filed.)

June 22, 1941: Germany attacks Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa begins. (World upset that treaty broken. They urge president Roosevelt to personally sit down with Stalin and Hitler to negotiate new treaty.)

Sept 29, 1941: Nazis murder 33,771 Jews at Kiev (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi murders but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

Dec 7, 1941: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor (Other nations give mild condemnation of Japanese attack but urge United States to be restrained in their response.)

Dec 8, 1941: United States and Britain declare war on Japan. (Other nations outraged! Accuse United States of furthering "cycle of violence". World says that Roosevelt calling Dec 7, 1941 "a date which will live in infamy" is "simplistic" and "not helpful.")

Jan 20, 1942: SS Leader Heydrich holds the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." (World declares plan to kill all Jews is "not helpful". Urges Hitler to declare that exterminating all Jews is wrong in German.)

Aug 17, 1942: First all-American air attack in Europe. (World outraged at American aggression! Suggests putting Roosevelt up for war crimes trial!)

Oct 18, 1942: Hitler orders the execution of all captured British commandos. (World takes occasion to remind "Allies" that German prisoners should get extra Bratwurst and beer for "Oktoberfest".)

Jan 14-24, 1943: Casablanca conference between Churchill and Roosevelt. During the conference, Roosevelt announces the war can end only with an unconditional German surrender (World outraged! Says that Churchill and Roosevelt must be willing to negotiate with Hitler now while they're being attacked!)

May 13, 1943: German and Italian troops surrender in North Africa. (World demands that relief groups monitor the conditions for German and Italian troops to make sure they're not being "tortured.")

July 25/26, 1943: Mussolini arrested and the Italian Fascist government falls; Marshal Pietro Badoglio takes over and negotiates with Allies (World fears change in Italian leadership will cause "more instability in Europe.")

July 27/28, 1943: Allied air raid causes a firestorm in Hamburg. (World condemns "Allies" raid on Hamburg. Votes 454-2 to order all allied forces to withdraw to their own countries and begin negotiating for peace.)

Jan 6, 1944: Soviet troops advance into Poland. (World condemns Soviet aggression! Demands Soviets stop their "brutal oppression.")

March 18, 1944: British drop 3000 tons of bombs during an air raid on Hamburg, Germany. (World outraged! Citizens of Hamburg "under siege"! World suggests putting troops inbetween combatants in effort to insure a cease fire.)

June 6, 1944: D-Day landings. (World goes nuts! This outrageous aggression by the Allies must not stand!)

June 13, 1944: First German V-1 rocket attack on Britain. (Other nations give mild condemnation of Nazi attack but urge rest of the world to be restrained in their response.)

Sept 1-4, 1944: Verdun, Dieppe, Artois, Rouen, Abbeville, Antwerp and Brussels liberated by Allies. (World urges Allies to negotiate with Axis for peace! World has moment of silence for the German people who may of been harmed in attacks!)

Dec 17, 1944: Waffen SS murder 81 U.S. POWs at Malmedy. (World chides Allies that they had better not treat their prisoners like that!)

Dec 26, 1944: Patton relieves Bastogne. (World outraged! Patton is a "hawk". The fact that the Americans put a man like that in charge of their military shows "they're not serious about peace.")

Feb 13/14, 1945: Dresden is destroyed by a firestorm after Allied bombing raids. (World calls for all allied leaders to be put up for war crimes trial. World expresses "shock and dismay" at Allies "complete disregard" for civilians!)

March 6, 1945: Last German offensive of the war begins to defend oil fields in Hungary. (World comments "Who could blame them after all those allied attacks? Wouldn't you do the same thing in their place?"

April 1, 1945: U.S. troops encircle Germans in the Ruhr. (World demands US allow German troops a way out rather than attack.)

April 16, 1945: Soviet troops begin their final attack on Berlin; Americans enter Nuremberg. (World demands that Hitler not be overthrown! He is the elected leader of the German people!)

April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide. (World now very upset! Fears someone "worse than Hitler" may now take his place!)

May 7, 1945: Unconditional surrender of all German forces to Allies. (World upset and concerned about fate of German people. Sends relief groups in to make sure Germans not mistreated!)

June 5, 1945: Allies divide up Germany and Berlin and take over the government. (World outraged! Demands that the "occupation of Germany" end immediately)

Aug 6, 1945: First atomic bomb dropped, on Hiroshima, Japan. (World demands Truman be tried for war crimes. Protestors and peaceniks from across the world flock to Japan to act as human shields)

Aug 9, 1945: Second atomic bomb dropped, on Nagasaki, Japan. (World tells US that dropping atomic bombs will only "create more martyrs" and will encourage more Japanese than ever to turn against the Allies!)

Aug 14, 1945: Japanese agree to unconditional surrender. (World sincerely hopes the citizens on the Axis nations can forgive the Allies for their uncalled for aggression, imperialism, and oppression in this war.)


How today’s media would have covered previous wars and other crises


NAZIS ASK FOR 3-DAY HUMANITARIAN CEASEFIRE:
WORLD OPINION ATTACKS U.S. REFUSAL

Göbbels, German Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, yesterday called for a three-day humanitarian cease-fire from American and British bombings of German cities and a halt to the Allied offensive in order to move in food and medical supplies to non-combatants trapped on war zones.

“The innocent German civilians in dozens of cities, along with those who find themselves caught in the line of Allied advance, are having trouble finding fresh food, pork sausages and medical supplies,” Göbbels announced in a nationwide radio address. German newsreels in movie houses showed extensive film clips of the bodies of children and women being carried out from demolished buildings.

Nick Tobertson, Cuddly News Network war correspondent in Berlin, sent back a harrowing report of conditions among German civilians.

Hundreds of civilian men, women and children have been killed by what seems to be indiscriminate Allied bombing,” Tobertson reported. “Nazi officials took me on an exclusive tour of some of the worst bombed zones and I could see little evidence of any military targets.

German officials denied they placed military factories or anti-aircraft defenses in civilian zones. “Didn’t we scrupulously keep every agreement we signed in the 1930s?” asked Martin Borman, Hitler’s closest confidante. “Why would anyone think we would take advantage of a ceasefire to improve our military positions, especially in the East where millions of Soviet soldiers are advancing?”

Chris Natthews, commentator for Hyper Hysteric News Network, believes the ceasefire could help the Allies recuperate from what he called their recent “drubbing” by German forces.

“The Nazis caught the American Army flatfooted at the Battle of the Bulge,” Natthews screamed into the camera. “Most military observers call this the biggest blunder in American military history. President Roosevelt’s poll ratings are plummeting. We call in now retired Admiral Kimmel, who headed up U.S. forces in the Pacific until Pearl Harbor, to offer his views on this debacle.”

“Admiral Kimmel, is the war now stalemated in Europe, given the German rout of American forces in the Ardennes forces?” Natthews asked. “Should Washington and London now sue for peace, try to end the war as soon as possible before they lose more land.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad, Chris,” the admiral said. “I think—“

“You haven’t been seeing the same news reports from Germany that I have,” Natthews cut him off. “Hitler has been making speech after speech about new generations of miracle weapons that the Nazis will soon roll out to destroy Allied forces, and the German determination to never surrender is seen in all the newscasts of 12 year old boys and 60 year old men rushing to join the Werhmacht and kill Americans. Let me bring in now Charles Lindberg, the American air hero who long warned against hostilities with a Germany reinvigorated by Adolf Hitler.”

Yes, Chris, after Pearl Harbor, I thought I had a change of heart, but after seeing the unexpected German resistance in Europe and the stunning Japanese valor in the Pacific, I know we can never win this war. Can you imagine trying to invade the Japanese home islands after all the causalities we took invading those piles of rock and volcanic and in the Pacific. We ought to just give China and the Philippines to the Japanese and beg them for peace. We’d lose millions of men. We should extend the cease-fire offer to Japan, which should lead to peace talks that will allow us to withdraw our troops back to America.

“What do you think about the B-29 firebombing campaigns that Gen. Curtis Lemay is planning for Japan after he finishes with Europe?” Nathews asked.

“It would be completely immoral,” Lindbergh said.

We believe that the Americans and the British have taken a totally disproportionate reaction to Nazi attempts to expand their living space,” says Ifok Nanna, Secretary General of the League of Nations in Geneva. The League was dissolved when the Second World War began, but its bureaucrats refused to give up their offices, high salaries and other perks, such as first class train travel and 90 day vacations. “The German army hardly killed a single Frenchman, they surrendered so rapidly. The excesses in Poland and the Soviet Union may be only rumors. What is certain is that American and British bombers are blowing up huge sections of dozens of German cities, often with questionable military targets.

"The German Army has issued a valid plea for a three-day truce to enable the Nazi Government to rush supplies to trap civilians and to withdraw wounded women and children,” Nanna said. “I put all responsibility on civilian causalities on the Allies if they refuse this cease-fire.”

“There is no indication that the German army would use the troop to rush reinforcements to the battlefront, impossible now because of total Allied air superiority,” Nanna said.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS) also said that the cease-fire would allow the Germans to transfer more Jews to their state rest camps. Nazis point to spotless Jewish rest camp entrance with greeting, "Work Makes You Free." Göbbels points to happy camp residents to demonstrate what great shape they are not, not a single person overweight, unlike in lumpy America, "where every third person is as big as a hippo," Göbbels said.

“As everyone knows, the Führer doomed the Russian campaign by re-routing thousands of scarce rail cars to carry ever more Jews to the rest camps, rather than rushing reinforcements to the Eastern Front, in order to resettle them in comfort” Himmler said. “Thousands of spaces have unexpectedly opened up in these rest camps, and the Führer desires to transfer every possible Jew in Europe to these pleasant spas, no matter what. Allied bombing has made this transfer more inconvenient, so that we would take advantage of a ceasefire to move as many Jews as possible to their new homes.”

Barry King interviewed Himmler on his Cuddly News Network night time interview show and agreed that a ceasefire seemed the only humane alternative.

“It makes perfect sense to me,” King, wearing his trademark suspenders said. “The entire world is aghast of the thousands of children and women corpses taken out of the rubble.”

The prime ministers of both neutral countries Switzerland and Sweden joined the League of Nations in the cease-fire demands. The Japanese Government said their code of Bushido did not allow them to seek a similar cease-fire but they always considered the Germans a bit weak, like all Europeans, and therefore backed their demand.

“This slaughter has gone on long enough,” Oaf Palme, Swedish prime minister said. “The brutal American air war is devastating one magnificent city after another. Why can’t they leave we Europeans alone? Did the French object to the German takeover of their country? French soldiers did their best to keep the roads open for the German tanks and it was only those damn English, Anglo Saxons again, who actually tried to stop the Germans.”

Some Western media embedded with German forces have sent back harrowing pictures of dead German women and children, and in the new "media of feelings," added their voices to the calls for a permanent cease-fire and the imposition of a peace treaty along present borders.


  

 


A Return to Childhood
The new immaturity

by Victor Davis Hanson


Hollywood Heroes of World War ll

Today's "Hollywood bunch" are the most pitiful, hypocritical and idiotic excuse for human beings that has ever existed. They are actually living in their own world of fantasy. They want everyone to believe that all of the world's troubles today are caused by the "Great Monster," The United States of America. They claim that the other countries of the world have armed themselves because of the United States. If we would just lay down our arms, close down our military bases overseas and at home, then all the other nations of the world would follow suit. Then we could all live in an Utopian World of Peace. After all, they only arm themselves to defend their countries against the mean old United States of America. What an exasperating amount of stupidity, it belongs in the barn yard with the rest of the bull. They should certainly go to some other country and live. For this is what Saddam Hussein and most of the other Arab nations believe.

During World War ll, Hollywood had actors who were real men and patriotic to fight for their country. Here are just a few thumbnail sketches of the one hundred and thirtyfour directors, producers, and actors, who served in World War Two:

Clark Gable: In 1942 he joined the Army Air Force as a private. Soon he became an officer and obtained the rank of Major. He flew in B-17's (Flying Fortress) over Germany. His job was to make training films for aerial gunners. Hermann Göring, head of the Nazi Air Force, (the Luftwaffe), heard of this and offered a reward of five thousand dollars, ($5,000.00) to the German pilot who shot Clark Gable down. The lucky pilot would also get a promotion and a leave of absence. (No one ever collected this reward). Clark Gable went on to receive an Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war he was discharged by Captain Ronald Reagan.

Gene Autry: America's "Singing Cowboy," enlisted in 1942 as staff sergeant in the Army Air Force. Gene learned to fly on his own time. For a while he was stationed at the Army Air Force base near Chandler, Arizona. He was an instructor, teaching younger pilots how to fly. The next task he had was very dangerous, he flew a cargo plane in the China-Burma-India theater. Many of these planes were shot down, as they were unarmed. Luckily, Gene Autry's plane never was.

James Arness: Who is six feet seven inches in height, will always be Matt Dillon to millions of people. He played that role all the years "Gunsmoke" was popular. He joined the Army and was shot in the leg during the landings at Anzio, Italy. He received the purple heart medal.

Kirk Douglas: He enlisted in the United States Navy and served aboard a patrol warship. He was a communications officer. His ship was in an anti-submarine unit in the Pacific theater. A depth charge exploded very close to his ship, causing him to receive severe internal injuries. Kirk was hospitalized for five months and received the Purple Heart Medal.

Lee Marvin: He enlisted in the Marine corps when he was just seventeen years old. He was in twenty-one invasions of south Pacific islands. In the battle of Saipan, with 247 men in his company, only Lee and five others survived. He was wounded there and spent thirteen months on a hospital ship. At the same time that Lee Marvin was fighting in the Pacific theater, his father was fighting in Europe as an Army sergeant.

John Ford: Famous movie producer and director. Most of the big Western movies with John Wayne were filmed in Monument Valley, Arizona by him. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941, with the rank of commander. He became head of a Navy photographic unit. John filmed the departure of Doolittle's raiders to attack Tokyo in 1942. He also filmed the battle of Midway, and he was wounded while doing this.

Darryl F. Zanuck: Producer and director, he joined the Army in 1941, and was commissioned a Lieutenant Colonel. He started making training films but later took part n the invasion of North Africa.

Jimmy Stewart: He tried to enlist into the Army Air Force in 1941, but he was too skinny and had to gain at least ten pounds to qualify. For a while he was a bombardier instructor at Moffet Field, California. In 1943 Jimmy was sent to England, as part of the eighth airforce. He flew twenty five combat missions in a B-17 (Flying Fortress) named "Four Yanks and a Jerk." Jimmy Stewart received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the Croix de Guerre (French War Cross).

Wayne Morris: He was a navy fighter pilot in the Pacific war, and became Hollywood's first Ace. He shot down seven Japanese planes and sank two Japanese destroyers. Wayne flew fifty-seven combat missions and was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses. He died of a heart attack when only forty five.

Sterling Hayden: In 1941 he joined the COI (Coordinator of Information, a government agency set up by President Franklin Roosevelt.) This would become a secret spy network. Sterling was sent to England for commando and parachute training. But on his eleventh jump, he broke his ankle, tore the cartilage in his knee, and injured the base of his spine. (This would have ended the military career of most men). After Hayden recovered from his injuries, he returned to the United States. He became a test skipper, running PT boats for the Navy. This did not satisfy him, so he joined the Marines as John Hamilton, his real name. He was asked to join the OSS, Office of Strategic Service, which was the COI under another name. Sterling became commander of a supply base in Monopoli, Italy. He was in charge of four hundred guerrilla fighters, and twenty two boats. He made several trips behind German lines, supplying arms and equipment to Yugoslavian partisans.

Robert Altman: Producer and director. He became well known for the Army medical series that he filmed. Many raved about what a good picture it gave of the Army. While others thought it was a very lousy picture. Yes, it was M*A*S*H. Robert enlisted in the Army Air corps in 1943. He flew forty-six combat missions as a bomber pilot in Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.

Tim Holt: Cowboy actor; He flew as a bombardier on a B-29 (the super fortress) in the Pacific theater. Tim completed twenty two combat missions, many over Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded the Victory Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with three clusters, and the Asiatic Pacific Medal. The name of Tim's plane was the Reluctant Dragon.

Ira Hamilton Hayes: He enlisted at the age of seventeen as a paratrooper in the Marine corps. He fought on the island of Iwo Jima, in the south Pacific. This made him famous, for he was one of the five marines that helped raise the American flag. It was placed on top of Mt. Suribachi and was flashed around the world. It became one of the most famous photos of World War ll. Ira was made a national hero and sent back to the United States for war bond rallies. He acted in the war movie "The Sands of Iwo Jima," with John Wayne. Hayes also helped dedicate the Iwo Jima Monument in Washington DC. Most people do not know that Ira Hayes was a full blooded Arizona Pima Indian. He was not able to go back to the Indian Reservation and adjust to civilian life. Becoming an alcoholic, he died of exposure when he was only thirty-two years old.

Aristotle "Telly" Savalas: He enlisted in the Army way before his seventeenth birthday. He is best known as the star of the detective series Kojak. He received the Purple Heart Medal, for being critically wounded in combat action. Telly was crippled for over a year, and some doctors told him that he would never be able to walk again.

This is only eleven Hollywood movie stars, and three producers and directors who became real life heroes when America needed them. It sure is a shame that most of our Hollywood stars today do not have enough intelligence to know what a hero really is!!!

The United States of America is not perfect, because we, the people are not perfect. However, it is still the greatest place in the whole wide world to live in!

I would never have imagined that journalists, academics, actors, artists, and the intelligentsia in general would have so opposed the end of dictatorship and promotion of democracy abroad. And who would have thought that Vietnam would become the source for Democratic nostalgia, rather than the usual recrimination? Did anyone think the appointment of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, promises of $15 billion in grants to combat AIDS in Africa, and lectures to the politically powerful Arab world to cease the genocide of black Sudanese would earn George Bush slurs evoking the Taliban, the old Confederacy, and fascism? Have we become children who live in a world of bedtime stories, afraid to face the cruel truth around us?

POOR US — WE ARE ALL ALONE?

It is disturbing to see John Kerry insist that America has lost its friends and, through imbecilic diplomacy or worse, alienated those abroad. The world I see would beg to differ. Emigrants strive to reach American shores more often than all other destinations combined. Globalization is now synonymous with Americanization itself. The world's preference for American food, music, travel, popular culture, fashion, and entertainment all suggest dynamism in the United States found nowhere else.

One third of the planet — India and China — has evolved from being impoverished and bitter neutrals or outright enemies into capitalist powerhouses dependent on American free trade and outsourced jobs. If we used to argue in the 1940s about whether millions of dollars in U.S. grain aid really did any good in feeding the starving of China and India, we can all agree now that American liberality in letting consumer goods in and jobs out has done more for the world's hungry millions than a century of American gift-giving.

Without $12 billion a year in remittances from illegal aliens in the United States and American tourists south of the border, the economy of Mexico would be in ruins. For all his party's juvenile rhetoric, Vicente Fox realizes that America is about as liberal and humane to Mexicans who head north as his country is harsh and cruel to Latin Americans who cross its own borders from the south.

European elites, it is true, are angry at the United States. But that pique is more a result of projection and scapegoating rising from its own problems, not ours — as it struggles with demographic crises, unassimilated immigrants, impotence abroad, an embarrassing desire for free American protection despite concomitant resentment and envy, and a growing realization that while the world talks up the EU, when it has real problems, it goes to Washington.

In this regard, Greece is a metaphor for the entire ambivalence of the continent. It now worries about Arab terrorists in Athens, despite courting Middle East dictators for decades. It castigates the U.S. for bothering an Islamic Iraq, but Greeks lauded Milosevic in support of his Orthodox crusade against Albanian and Kosovar Muslims. A few years ago we were booed by Athenians for trying to save Muslims in the Balkans, and now we are even more vehemently trashed for allegedly killing them. Thousands publicly hissed at the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; yet American sailors openly patrol the Greek coastline while Special Forces not so openly help train Olympic security officers. Add it all up and there is one constant: Greece (like Europe) really does count on the U.S. as much as it counts on never having to say that publicly.

There are dozens of countries participating in the reconstruction of Iraq, perhaps more than were willing to get on board in Serbia to oust Milosevic. The Arab world's anger at the United States — not evidenced by a precipitous decline in immigration to Detroit or new alliances with France — arises out of hurt and shame. We choose to prefer a democratic Israel to its own autocratic tribalism. Yet Middle Easterners privately know that should they adopt democracy they would win equal treatment from Washington. And they also grasp that to do such a revolutionary Western thing, they would have to embrace religious tolerance, gender equality, free speech, and an end to the pathologies of the Arab Street. And so they are stuck with the nagging truth that the Middle East will have to become more like the West — rather than the West like traditional Arab society — for real friendship to emerge.

POOR US — WHY DO THEY HATE US

The best way to sum up this now popular leftist analysis of the rage of Islamic fascists and their sometime supporters in the Middle East would be simply to imagine a different America, in, say, January 1941.

So envision a Vice President Henry Wallace lecturing the American people on its failure to win the hearts and minds of European youth. He perhaps would say something like, "What have we Americans done wrong to lose millions of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Japanese, who turn their back on democracy and prefer fascism?"

Roosevelt then might expound further, "Look at the world! We don't have an ally anywhere but Britain. What have we done to earn the animus of most of Europe that has either joined Hitler or would prefer to be neutral? Why is all of Eastern Europe against us? Whether Communist or fascist, Russian or German, the common enemy is either the United States or England. All Stalin and Hitler can agree on is shared dislike of America. Why? Even Mexico and South America feel more affinity for Germany than for the U.S."

Then a congressional board of inquiry could issue a finding that America had failed to give proper aid to Europe during the depression. It could suggest further that we are isolationists and self-absorbed. More thoughtful senators, the intellectual precursors of a Patty Murray perhaps, could rail that whereas Hitler built autobahns, we lent out high-interest loans to those who were already struggling.

All such browbeating would have an element of truth in it, but, of course, in its totality remain an outright lie: Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don't.

YES, WE REALLY CAN HAVE IT BOTH WAYS

The best evidence of the new childishness is its persistence in self-contradiction. Thus, Howard Dean hints that the recently elevated alerts might be politically motivated terrorist hype — even as John Kerry insists that we haven't done enough to stop the fascists from planning our destruction.

Similarly, the Iraq war was at times necessary, completely uncalled for, poorly planned, nevertheless worthy of staying the course in, and more still — depending on the particular level of support voiced for the war in the polls of the week. The New York Times in April decries brutal American force in Fallujah, only by summer to scoff that our forbearance there had created a terrorist heaven.

The modern Left was created on the premise that Vietnam was both a strategic mistake and a moral catastrophe — and now has come full circle in praising men like John Kerry, Max Cleland, and Wesley Clark for their combat service. Are they heroes of a noble cause that to win deserved more support at home? Are they tragic fighters whose bravery was not properly appreciated? Or are they participants in what John Kerry once assured the American people was an illegal war in which soldiers routinely committed war atrocities? All or none?

THE WAR MADE IT WORSE FOR US?

This is a favorite canard of New York Times and Washington Post columnists who resent the inconvenience of security measures in their digs, and the attention such vigilance diverts from Mr. Kerry's message. This story I think runs something like this. After 9/11, instead of pursuing the culprits through the proper domain of law enforcement, Mr. Bush embarked on two wars. Thus, we are now plagued with a series of terror alerts in a manner that did not follow the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Then rightly we indicted the culprits, arrested them, put them on trial — and went back to our afternoon nap.

Put aside the idea of magnitude — the singularity of 3,000 dead, a city block leveled, and a trillion dollars in lost revenue — as well as the fact that the 1990s appeasement led to constant harvesting of American diplomats, soldiers, and tourists abroad.

Instead, focus on the sheer historical ignorance of such sentiments. The tardy decision to fight back — whether in Britain in 1939 or the United States in 1941 — always carries with it the acceptance of greater short-term bloodletting and chaos in hopes of long-term security. Churchill was applauded for ending Chamberlain's appeasement — and then nearly was sacked after Dunkirk, Singapore, and Tobruk defeats that all could have been avoided by submissively "dialoguing" with a Hitler or Tojo.

Pearl Harbor was not immediately followed by victory at Midway, but rather first the shame and violence of Wake Island and the fall of the Philippines. Certainly, there was more, not less, killing inherent in America's defiant decision on December 8, 1941.

So yes, Pakistan is beset by nearly daily assassination attempts and terror is ubiquitous now in Saudi Arabia. But this chaos is not because of George Bush, but rather because George Bush, unlike all previous presidents, at last pressured those autocratic governments to cease their bribery and tacit support of terrorism.

Fascists don't like it when erstwhile sponsors switch sides. In the same manner, once bin Laden & Co. learned that the U.S. was at last serious in eradicating their terrorist sanctuaries, they accelerated their killing, rightly convinced that there was a real war on now, in which there would soon be real winners and losers — and losing meant the end of all the progress that they achieved in the last two decades.

Why do we embrace these flawed concepts and exhibit such wild swings of mood and logic?

In a word, we have devolved into an infantile society in which our technological successes have wrongly suggested that we can alter the nature of man to our whims and pleasures — just like a child who expects instant gratification from his parents. In a culture where affluence and leisure are seen as birthrights, war, sacrifice, or even the mental fatigue about worrying over such things wear on us. So we construct, in a deductive and anti-empirical way, a play universe that better suits us.


In that regard, for the moment George Bush is a godsend. His drawl, Christianity, tough talk, ramrod straight strut — all that and more become the locus of our fears: French and Germans on the warpath? They must have been Bushwhacked, not angry that their subsidized utopia — from a short work week, looming pension catastrophe, and no national defense — is eroding.

Bombs going off in Manhattan or stuck in a tunnel while cops search every truck? Either way, Bush is the problem. Either he foolishly went into Iraq and let down our guard, or he is trying to scare us into believing that a nonexistent terrorist is under every bed. The television still blares about suicide bombers and repugnant thugs tormenting bound hostages? Surely Bush set them off. The proper response? Presto! Elect a less confrontational John Kerry, and thus cease a long, difficult war to defeat and to discredit all who would embrace such odious ideas.

Liberal civilizations often tire of eternal vigilance and in the midst of peacetime affluence work themselves into mass hysteria when challenged. Such is the picture we receive of the Athenian assembly around 340 B.C. when Demosthenes desperately warned that Philip was not a national liberator. Few thought Hannibal really would cross the Ebro. Churchill in the 1930s wasn't listened to very much — after the Somme, who wanted lectures about deterrence? Ronald Reagan's earlier prescience about the Soviet threat in the post-Vietnam era prompted Hollywood to turn out cheap TV movies warning of Reagan-inspired nuclear winters.

We too are reverting to our childhood and thus are in the same weird mood preferring fantasies and stories to reality. The Democrats know it. And so the unifying theme of their otherwise contradictory messages is that we can return to the infantile delusions of September 10, and not the crisis-filled adult world of post-September 11 that now confronts George W. Bush.



The Roots of Anti-Americanism
By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.


The contrast between George Bush's two-hour secret trip to occupied Baghdad in November 2003 and Adolf Hitler's visit to occupied Paris in June 1940 invites some interesting comparisons.

President Bush was in Baghdad for only two and a half hours (or two, depending on the report one reads). His presence there wasn't announced until after he had left. He never took so much as a step outside the US-occupied airport which is also the main US airfield in occupied Iraq.

Hitler's visit to France was likely not widely publicized in advance among the French people either, but he does seem to have enjoyed something of a tour of the French capital.

The issue is not to contrast the personal courage of Hitler and Bush, which is a complex and minor issue, but to contrast the two occupations.

During and since World War II we who live in the Allied countries have been given to understand that the French populace loathed the Germans and of course Hitler worst of all of them.

Yet somehow that supposedly unspeakable and unique and incomparable "barbarity" and "brutality" of the Germans elicited among the French nothing of the sort of massive popular armed resistance and mass visceral outrage that the US forces and their president have aroused among Iraqis.

Hitler could visit occupied Paris and see the sights. Bush had to sneak in and out of US-occupied Baghdad and dared not stay more than two or three hours, or venture outside the armed airport -- not even guarded and accompanied by the most powerfully equipped army on earth.

If the German occupation of France has been portrayed as almost an archetype of oppression and evil, how must we regard, and how will future generations regard, the US occupation of Iraq.


From an address to a joint session of the US Congress: President George W. Bush

Americans are asking ``Why do they hate us?'' They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. 

~ George W. Bush, 20 September, 2001

From Göbbels' New Year address to Germany

They hate our people because it is decent, brave, industrious, hardworking and intelligent. They hate our views, our social policies, and our accomplishments. They hate us as a Reich and as a community. They have forced us into a struggle for life and death. We will defend ourselves accordingly. All is clear between us and our enemies.

~Josef Göbbels 31 December 1939

The United States is one of the last remaining land empires. That it is made the butt of opprobrium and odium is hardly surprising, or unprecedented. Empires - Rome, the British, the Ottomans - were always targeted by the disgruntled, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed and by their self-appointed delegates, the intelligentsia.

Yet, even by historical standards, America seems to be provoking blanket repulsion.

The Pew Research Center published in December 2002 a report titled "What the World Thinks in 2002". "The World", was reduced by the pollsters to 44 countries and 38,000 interviewees. Two other surveys published last year - by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - largely supported Pew's findings.

The most startling and unambiguous revelation was the extent of anti-American groundswell everywhere: among America's NATO allies, in developing countries, Muslim nations and even in eastern Europe where Americans, only a decade ago, were lionized as much-adulated liberators.

Four years later, things have gotten even worse.

Between March and May 2006, Pew surveyed 16,710 people in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the United States.

Only 23% of Spaniards had a positive opinion of the USA, down from 41% the year before. A similar drop was evinced in India (from 71% to 56%), Russia (from 52% o 43%), Indonesia (from 38% to 30%), and Turkey (from 23% to 12%). In Britain, America' s putative ally, support was down by one third from 2002, to 50% or so. Declines were noted in France, Germany, and Jordan, somewhat offset by marginal rises in China and Pakistan.

Two thirds of Russians and overwhelming majorities in 13 out of 15 countries regarded the conduct of the USA in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace that Iran's nuclear ambitions. The distinction formerly made between the American people and the Bush administration is also eroding. Majorities in only 7 of 14 countries had favorable views of Americans.

"People around the world embrace things American and, at the same time, decry U.S. influence on their societies. Similarly, pluralities in most of the nations surveyed complain about American unilateralism."- expounded the year 2002 Pew report.

Yet, even this "embrace of things American" is ambiguous.

Violently "independent", inanely litigious and quarrelsome, solipsistically provincial, and fatuously ignorant - this nation of video clips and sound bites, the United States, is often perceived as trying to impose its narcissistic pseudo-culture upon a world exhausted by wars hot and cold and corrupted by vacuous materialism.

Recent accounting scandals, crumbling markets, political scams, technological setbacks, and rising social tensions have revealed how rotten and inherently contradictory the US edifice is and how concerned are Americans with appearances rather than substance.

To religious fundamentalists, America is the Great Satan, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a cesspool of immorality and spiritual decay. To many European liberals, the United states is a throwback to darker ages of religious zealotry, pernicious bigotry, virulent nationalism, and the capricious misrule of the mighty.

According to most recent surveys by Gallup, MORI, the Council for Secular Humanism, the US Census Bureau, and others - the vast majority of Americans are chauvinistic, moralizing, bible-thumping, cantankerous, and trigger-happy. About half of them believe that Satan exists - not as a metaphor, but physically.

America has a record defense spending per head, a vertiginous rate of incarceration, among the highest numbers of legal executions and gun-related deaths. It is still engaged in atavistic debates about abortion, the role of religion, and whether to teach the theory of evolution.

According to a series of special feature articles in The Economist, America is generally well-liked in Europe, but less so than before. It is utterly detested by the Moslem street, even in "progressive" Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Everyone - Europeans and Arabs, Asians and Africans - thinks that "the spread of American ideas and customs is a bad thing."

Admittedly, we typically devalue most that which we have formerly idealized and idolized.

To the liberal-minded, the United States of America reified the most noble, lofty, and worthy values, ideals, and causes. It was a dream in the throes of becoming, a vision of liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and progress. Its system, though far from flawless, was considered superior - both morally and functionally - to any ever conceived by Man.

Such unrealistic expectations inevitably and invariably lead to disenchantment, disillusionment, bitter disappointment, seething anger, and a sense of humiliation for having been thus deluded, or, rather, self-deceived. This backlash is further exacerbated by the haughty hectoring of the ubiquitous American missionaries of the "free-market-cum-democracy" church.

Americans everywhere aggressively preach the superior virtues of their homeland. Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of Life (1949-1961) warned against this propensity to feign omniscience and omnipotence: "Life (the magazine) must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all, or a Peeping Tom."

Thus, America's foreign policy - i.e., its presence and actions abroad - is, by far, its foremost vulnerability.

According to the Pew study, the image of the Unites States as a benign world power slipped dramatically in the space of two years in Slovakia (down 14 percent), in Poland (-7), in the Czech Republic (-6) and even in fervently pro-Western Bulgaria (-4 percent). It rose exponentially in Ukraine (up 10 percent) and, most astoundingly, in Russia (+24 percent) - but from a very low base.

The crux may be that the USA maintains one set of sanctimonious standards at home while egregiously and nonchalantly flouting them far and wide. Hence the fervid demonstrations against its military presence in places as disparate as South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.

Americans - officials, scholars, peacemakers, non-government organizations - maintain a colonial state of mind. Backward natives come cheap, their lives dispensable, their systems of governance and economies inherently inferior. The white man's burden must not be encumbered by the vagaries of primitive indigenous jurisprudence. Hence America's fierce resistance to and indefatigable obstruction of the International Criminal Court.

Opportunistic multilateralism notwithstanding, the USA still owes the poorer nations of the world close to $200 million - its arrears to the UN peacekeeping operations, usually asked to mop up after an American invasion or bombing. It not only refuses to subject its soldiers to the jurisdiction of the World Criminal Court - but its facilities to the inspectors of the Chemical Weapons Convention, its military to the sanctions of the (anti) land mines treaty and the provisions of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and its industry to the environmental constraints of the Kyoto Protocol, the rulings of the World Trade Organization, and the rigors of global intellectual property rights.

Despite its instinctual unilateralism, the United States is never averse to exploiting multilateral institutions to its ends. It is the only shareholder with a veto power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by now widely considered to have degenerated into a long arm of the American administration. The United Nations Security Council, raucous protestations aside, has rubber-stamped American martial exploits from Panama to Iraq.

It seems as though America uses - and thus, perforce, abuses - the international system for its own, ever changing, ends. International law is invoked by it when convenient - ignored when importune.

In short, America is a bully. It is a law unto itself and it legislates on the fly, twisting arms and breaking bones when faced with opposition and ignoring the very edicts it promulgates at its convenience. Its soldiers and peacekeepers, its bankers and businessmen, its traders and diplomats are its long arms, an embodiment of this potent and malignant mixture of supremacy and contempt.

But why is America being singled out?

In politics and even more so in geopolitics, double standards and bullying are common. Apartheid South Africa, colonial France, mainland China, post-1967 Israel - and virtually every other polity - were at one time or another characterized by both. But while these countries usually mistreated only their own subjects - the USA does so also exterritorialy.

Even as it never ceases to hector, preach, chastise, and instruct - it does not recoil from violating its own decrees and ignoring its own teachings. It is, therefore, not the USA's intrinsic nature, nor its self-perception, or social model that I find most reprehensible - but its actions, particularly its foreign policy.

America's manifest hypocrisy, its moral talk and often immoral walk, its persistent application of double standards, irks and grates. I firmly believe that it is better to face a forthright villain than a masquerading saint. It is easy to confront a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mao, vile and bloodied, irredeemably depraved, worthy only of annihilation. The subtleties of coping with the United States are far more demanding - and far less rewarding.

This self-proclaimed champion of human rights has aided and abetted countless murderous dictatorships. This alleged sponsor of free trade - is the most protectionist of rich nations. This ostensible beacon of charity - contributes less than 0.1% of its GDP to foreign aid (compared to Scandinavia's 0.6%, for instance). This upright proponent of international law (under whose aegis it bombed and invaded half a dozen countries this past decade alone) - is in avowed opposition to crucial pillars of the international order.

Naturally, America's enemies and critics are envious of its might and wealth. They would have probably acted the same as the United States, if they only could. But America's haughtiness and obtuse refusal to engage in soul searching and house cleaning do little to ameliorate this antagonism.

To the peoples of the poor world, America is both a colonial power and a mercantilist exploiter. To further its geopolitical and economic goals from Central Asia to the Middle East, it persists in buttressing regimes with scant regard for human rights, in cahoots with venal and sometimes homicidal indigenous politicians. And it drains the developing world of its brains, its labour, and its raw materials, giving little in return.

All powers are self-interested - but America is narcissistic. It is bent on exploiting and, having exploited, on discarding. It is a global Dr. Frankenstein, spawning mutated monsters in its wake. Its "drain and dump" policies consistently boomerang to haunt it.

Both Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to depose the latter and plans to invade Iraq for the second time to force the removal of the former.

The Kosovo Liberation Army, an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia two years ago. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA, on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed on him in his anti-Russian days.

Normally the outcomes of expedience, the Ugly American's alliances and allegiances shift kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.

This capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America's sincerity - and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and dangerous, "black and white", simplism.

In its heartland, America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do. And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly, sometimes forcefully.

Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials, popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the world.

It is too puerile, too abrasive, too arrogant - and it has a lot to learn. Its refusal to acknowledge its shortcomings, its confusion of brain with brawn (i.e., money or bombs), its legalistic-litigious character, its culture of instant gratification and one-dimensional over-simplification, its heartless lack of empathy, and bloated sense of entitlement - are detrimental to world peace and stability.

America is often called by others to intervene. Many initiate conflicts or prolong them with the express purpose of dragging America into the quagmire. It then is either castigated for not having responded to such calls - or reprimanded for having responded. It seems that it cannot win. Abstention and involvement alike garner it only ill-will.

But people call upon America to get involved because they know it rises to the challenge. America should make it unequivocally and unambiguously clear that - with the exception of the Americas - its sole interests rest in commerce. It should make it equally known that it will protect its citizens and defend its assets - if need be by force.

Indeed, America's - and the world's - best bet are a reversion to the Monroe and (technologically updated) Mahan doctrines. Wilson's Fourteen Points brought the USA nothing but two World Wars and a Cold War thereafter. It is time to disengage.

America the Narcissist

The majority of worldwide respondents to the last two global Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) regarded the United States as the greatest menace to world peace - far greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in "The Cultural Narcissist" and Theodore Millon in "Personality Disorders of Everyday Life" have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society.

This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual's early childhood.

The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.

The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.

The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", both political and cultural. .

Americans' religion is a manifestation of their "Chosen People Syndrome". They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.

American altruism is misanthropic and compulsive. They often give merely in order to control, manipulate, and sadistically humiliate the recipients.

Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).

Consequently, the United states always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.

Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, "no holds barred" ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness - and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.

.


Saturday, September 25, 2004
Liberals continue to conjure up Bush-Hitler conspiracy theories
 

How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis

Well the democrats have finally done it. They have managed to tie the Bush family to Hitler's rise to power. The only problem with their theory is that it is a complete fabrication.

Liberal websitesare very excited to claim that Prescott Bush, late grandfather of President G.W. Bush, was directly responsible for helping Hitler rise to power. They claim that real documents from the US National Archives prove once and for all that Prescott Bush was one of the financial architects of Nazism - Not true.

The report makes reference to a lawsuit by two holocaust survivors, that's right two, who are suing the Bush family for 40 billion dollars.

The real evidence of a Bush-Hitler connection is that Prescott worked for Brown Brothers Harriman, which at the time was a leading investment bank. Allegedly, a man named Fritz Thyssen, who once helped finance Hitler in the early 30's, but later had a falling out with him and left Nazi Germany for France in fear for his life, had affiliations with Brown Brothers Harriman. If this sounds like a compilation of baseless charges, it is because they are.

The fact that Thyssen, who owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany, may have had a bank account at Brown Brothers Harriman, which was the largest investment bank in the world during the 1930's, ties Prescott Bush who was an employee of the bank to the funding of Hitler's rise to power is beyond comprehension. It gets worse.

A lawsuit filed, by the two holocaust survivors, in 2001 states in a petition filed with the Hague: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The pro-Kerry lawyers representing their clients allege that the order to bomb Auschwitz was ignored by President Roosevelt (D) because of pressure brought by big American companies, including Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush was a director. Huh?

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said "If we have a positive ruling from the court (The Hague) it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."This can be great news for John Kerry.

Lissman charges that Prescott Bush, indirectly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz.

Democrats, who have lost every major election in the U.S. since President Clinton's term expired, have become increasingly out of touch with America's mainstream.

No wonder why they have no problem comparing a man of pure evil, Adolf Hitler, to a man (President Bush) that is trying to protect America from today's modern day Hitler.

I believe it was said best by Michael Savage, conservative talk radio host,"The Islamo-fascists we are fighting today are nothing more than Hitler in a headscarf."


George Bush family conspiracy theory

The Bush family conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory used to describe various negative theories alleging conspiracies or misdeeds involving or concerning members of the family of President George W. Bush, including the President's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, their brother Neil Bush, their father and ex-President George H. W. Bush, grandfather Prescott Bush, and great-grandfather George Herbert Walker. Some allege criminal conspiracies involving usually United States multinational corporations and vested interests, US government organizations, and various dictators. While some attach great importance to suggested links which connect individuals and companies, others dismiss some or all of the conspiracy theories as fantasy and claim that these connections are normal for business families and do not imply wrongdoing or negative intent.

Background

This conspiracy theory often refers to the alleged secret organization with one of the pejorative terms: Bush League, Bush Buddies, or Texas Taliban. The first is a pun on the baseball term "bush league"— minor league amateurs, or an allusion to George W. Bush's experience with the Texas Rangers baseball team. The others are alliterative.

A mixture of allegations have been made, trying to link the Bush family and their associates to various forms of intrigue or alleged wrongdoing. Many people, from a wide variety of viewpoints that range from pro-Bush, anti-Bush or neutral, consider the particular points cited by these conspiracy theorists to be paranoid and not linked to each other in a meaningful way. What many people believe or don't believe to be paranoid also depends on which specific conspiracy theory or on what specific allegations one is talking about. It should also be noted that many people are not familiar with some or all of these theories or with some or all of the allegations within them, and that therefore, they do not have an opinion as to whether these theories or allegations are paranoid or not.

Owing to the fact the Bush family has provided the last two Republican presidents, there may be a confusion of family conspiracy with what is actually normal political maneuvering by the Republican party. Additionally, members of the Bush family are politically and economically powerful, so it is natural that they have connections to other major political and business figures, some of whom have inevitably unsavory reputations.

A number of allegations have been made about different members of the Bush family at different times and so it is difficult to discuss these allegations sensibly as a whole. Listed below are assorted allegations and rebuttals, but any serious consideration of these allegations should be made on a strictly individual basis. These allegations range from ones widely regarded as specious and unsubstantiated to those which of been the subject of fierce public debate.

Allegations/conspiracy theories


The following are typical allegations made as part of or in support of the theory. These allegations are not considered proven, or even widely accepted

  • Prescott Bush supported the Nazis.
  • The Bush family supports crime and Satanism through the Skull and Bones Society.
  • While George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA, he may have been involved in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier. Bush remains silent on this issue, and the CIA refuses to release many of the internal documents which could shed some light on it.
  • Ayatollah Khomeini dealt with George Bush and/or his operatives to arrange the Iran-Contra deal and allegedly the October Surprise, on behalf of U.S. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.
  • While Vice President, George H.W. Bush was responsible for Saddam's acquisition of weapons and funding during the Iran-Iraq War.
  • Osama bin Laden, then a minor Mujahedeen leader in Afghanistan, is reputed to have been a CIA agent who made use of CIA resources and US-funds to bolster the morale of radical Islamists after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Further, the Bush family, through its ties to the bin Laden family and other connections, otherwise aided bin Laden's rise.
  • The Bushes are somehow responsible for Hinckley's assassination attempt against President Reagan, which would have made George H.W. Bush president.
  • There was an organized conspiracy between Jeb Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court, and ChoicePoint to rig the American presidential election in 2000.
  • The Bushes support the oil industry to enhance their own financial interests in the industry.
  • The September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack was planned or sanctioned by the Bush administration. (See 9/11 domestic conspiracy theory)
  • The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was planned by members of the Bush administration following the goals of PNAC, with the stated reasons (the threat of WMDs and terrorism in the wake of the September 11 attacks) being political cover.
  • Dick Cheney planned and executed the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the benefit of Halliburton.
  • Through legislation and actions which extend executive powers and reduce oversight as justified by the War on Terrorism, the Bush administration is working toward establishing a totalitarian state.

 Background


The following are the parts of known history which have led people to make further unproven claims.

 

  • Businesses associated with Prescott Bush, such as the Union Banking Corporation, were confiscated just prior to World War II under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
  • George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were members of the Skull and Bones secret society (Bush's membership in the Skull and Bones society was the subject of several Doonesbury cartoons).
  • George H.W. Bush was head of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976-77.
  • John Hinckley Jr, the "deranged drifter with the hots for Jodie Foster", also happened to be the son of one of George H.W. Bush's better supporters in his campaign against Ronald Reagan; the Hinckleys' Vanderbilt Energy was threatened with a $2-million fine the morning of the assassination attempt; the families are sufficiently close that Scott Hinckley and Neil Bush had a dinner appointment for the next day.[1]
  • George W. Bush has sealed the presidential records of both himself and his father.
  • Saddam Hussein, was provided with weapons and funding during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, in which George H.W. Bush was Vice President. In addition, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush was the Special Envoy to the Middle East in this period, appointed by President Ronald Reagan and met personally with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
  • Dick Cheney was G.H.W. Bush's Defense Secretary, and G.W. Bush's Vice-President. Cheney is the former President and CEO of Halliburton Company which has been given, by George W. Bush, an exclusive (and unbidded) contract in postwar Iraq. In addition, Halliburton's accounting firm was Arthur Andersen. This latter firm was conviced of obstruction of justice and, allegedly, committed fraud.
  • The Carlyle Group is an investment group which includes both the Bush family and bin Laden family (one of the richest in Saudi Arabia). Furthermore, George W. Bush and Salem bin Laden were coinvestors/business partners in Arbusto Energy.
  • The 2000 Presidential Election was won by George W. Bush in Florida, whose governor was his brother, Jeb Bush, after a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
  • The Project for the New American Century, which in 1990s advocated the invasion of Iraq for reasons of geopolitical strategy, included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle, all of whom subsquently held influential positions in the Bush administration.
  • The George W. Bush administration pushed for the USA PATRIOT Act and has used the new powers in a variety of cases.
  • The Bush administration does not accept the International Criminal Court's authority over American citizens, and members of the administration have questioned the usefulness of the United Nations.
  • George W. Bush, during the 2003 State of the Union Address, said that British intelligence had learned Iraq had been attempting to purchase uranium from Africa. That claim was based on information which the CIA said it could not verify, and CIA head George Tenet accepted responsibility for failing to remove the assertion from the speech in the fact-checking stage. An earlier document specifically documenting a supposed buy from Niger was known to be a forgery and was not referred to in any Bush speech.
  • Bush, as governor of Texas, presided over the execution of hundreds of condemned criminals, and joked about some of them prior to and after their executions.
  • George W. Bush twice claimed (, ) to have seen the first September 11 plane crash into the World Trade Center on live television, even though that crash was not in a public broadcast until much later.
  • Bush plans to have nuclear waste stored at the volcanic Yucca Mountain facility.
  • Bush has made the following statements:
    • "I told all four [congressional leaders] that there were going to be some times where we don't agree with each other. But that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." December 18, 2000.
    • Answering a repeated reporter question about the anti-Bush gwbush.com, "But how far should these guys go?", Bush replied "There ought to be limits to freedom. We're aware of the site, and this guy is just a garbage man, that's all he is. Of course I don't appreciate it. And you wouldn't, either." May 21, 1999.

 Response to allegations

 

Critics of the theory allege that its proponents mispresent events as part of the theory.

 

  • That G.H.W. Bush was vice-president during the Reagan Administration does not necessarily link Bush to Saddam's acquisition of weapons and funding during the Iran-Iraq War. Most vice-presidents have little role in the working of an administration and often have little practical influence over policy or decision-taking.
  • G.H.W. Bush's was head of the CIA from 1976 to 1977. Osama bin Laden's period as an alleged CIA agent occurred a decade later, when Bush was president. Presidents are, because of their workload, not involved in the hiring of CIA agents. Also considering that at any point CIA has thousands of agents acting worldwide, it seems unlikely that USA Presidents are personally associated with all of them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that bin Laden ever was an agent or an associate of or had any relationship at all with the CIA.
  • Many people work in a number of administrations. That Dick Cheney worked in the administrations of G.H.W. and G.W. Bush is neither unusual nor does it demonstrate a conspiracy. He also served in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
  • Many people internationally are associated with the Carlyle Group. As it is a large international investment group, it would be surprising if the Bush and bin Laden families were not in it or in some other group together. Former British Prime Minister John Major is also associated with it. The bin Ladens in fact have also disowned Osama bin Laden, who is an opponent of organisations such as the Carlyle Group, which he has accused of embodying international economic imperialism.
  • Many presidents have said "The job of the President would be easier, if I were a dictator" or something similar, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. In those cases the comment was made tongue-in-cheek. There is no evidence that Bush intended it in any other way. Similar arguments are applied to the "limits on freedom" statement.
  • Bill Clinton stated "When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." and "[we] can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans."
  • While proponents of the conspiracy link Bush family members to a range of groups, from Nazis to Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein to the Carlyle Group and the bin Laden, supporters of Bush argue that there is no connection between Bush, these people, and each other. They further note that although Bush may have had dealings with the bin Ladens, he didn't have such dealings with Osama bin Laden himself.
  • Many rich people and companies became involved with the Nazis due to pre-existing business relationships with Germany. Becoming disengaged from such relationships cannot happen overnight. Historians agree that Hitler's grasp for power did not rely on foreign trade, and that the Skull and Bones symbol used by the Totenkopf units of the Waffen-SS was designed by Karl Maria Wiligut, an advisor to Heinrich Himmler and Neopaganist.
  • Floridian electoral jiggery-pokery goes back at least three decades, and involves Democrats like Janet Reno; so it's hardly a Bush invention.

As a result, critics of the Bush family conspiracy theory see it as a string of unconnected claims which have at most pure circumstantial evidence but which contains no hard evidence of any longterm conspiracy.



31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush
by Edward Jayne
31 January 2006

1. Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.

2. Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler's case the Reichstag fire, in Bush's case the 9-11 catastrophe.

3. Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate and despite the opposition of most foreign nations.

4. Like Hitler, Bush has increased his popularity with conservative voters by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany's military build-up, Bush has used Al Qaeda and the so-called Axis of Evil to justify our current military build-up. Paradoxically none of the nations in this axis--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--have had anything to do with each other.

5. Like Hitler, Bush has promoted militarism in the midst of economic recession (or depression as it was called during the thirties). First he used war preparations to help subsidize defence industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) and presumably the rest ofthe economy on a trickle-down basis. Now he turns to the very same corporations to rebuild Iraq, again without competitive bidding and at extravagant profit levels.

6. Like Hitler, Bush displays great populist enthusiasm in his patriotic speeches, but primarily serves wealthy investors who subsidize his election campaigns and share with him their comfortable lifestyle. As he himself jokes, he treats these individuals at the pinnacle of our economy as his true political "ZZZbase."

7. Like Hitler, Bush envisages our nation's unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God. Just as Hitler did for Germany, he takes pride in his "providential" role in spreading his version of Americanism throughout the entire world.

8. Like Hitler, Bush promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation's hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the U.N. (or League of Nations).

9. Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he offers generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the cases of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City. The same goes for U.S. domestic programs. Once Bush was elected, many leaders of these programs learned to dread his making any kind of an appearance to praise their success, since this was almost inevitably followed by severe cuts in their budgets.

10. Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.

11. Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argued, for example, that they had taken every measure possible to avoid war, than an invasion of Iraq would diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat against the U.S., that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda, and that nothing whatsoever had been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. invasion plans. All of this was false. They also insisted that Iraq hid numerous weapons it did not possess since the mid-1990s, and they refused to acknowledge the absence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the early nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accused others of deception and evasiveness.

12. Like Hitler, Bush incessantly shifted his arguments to justify invading Iraq--from Iraq's WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of Iraqi democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for the war was challenged, Bush advanced to another, but only to shift back again at another time.

13. Like Hitler, Bush and his cohorts emphasize the ruthlessness of their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the bush team justified the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Hussein's crimes against humanity over the past twenty-five years. However, these crimes were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S. Our government supplied Hussein with illegal weapons (poison gas included), and there were sixty U.S. advisors in Iraq when these weapons were put to use (see NY Times, Aug. 18, 1992). U.S. aid to Iraq was actually doubled afterwards despite disclaimers from Washington that our nation opposed their use. President Reagan's special envoy Donald Rumsfeld personally informed Hussein of this one hundred percent increment during one of his two trips to Iraq at the time. He also told Hussein not to take U.S. disclaimers seriously.

14. Like Hitler, Bush takes pride in his status as a "War President," and his global ambition makes him perhaps the most dangerous president in our nation's history, a "rogue" chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal pre-emptive wars. He fully acknowledges his willingness to engage in wars of "choice" as well as wars of necessity. Sooner or later this choice will oblige universal conscription as well as a full-scale war economy.

15. Like Hitler, Bush continues to pursue war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. Additional to unprecedented low interest rates bestowed by the Federal Reserve, he has actually cut federal taxes twice by substantial amounts, especially for the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers, while conducting an expensive invasion and an even more expensive occupation of a hostile nation. As a result, President Clinton's $350 billion budget surplus has been reduced to a $450 billion deficit, comprising an unprecedented $800 billion decline in less than four years. At the same time the U.S. dollar has steadily dropped against currencies of both Europe and Japan.

16. Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. With the extra financing obliged by the defeat and occupation of Iraq, Bush now relies on a "defence" budget well in excess of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world. Moreover, the $416 billion defence package passed last week by Congress will probably need to be supplemented before the end of the year.

17. Like Hitler, Bush depends on an axis of collaborative allies, which he describes as a "coalition of the willing," in order to give the impression of a broad popular alliance. These allies include the U.K. as compared to Mussolini's Italy, and Spain and Bulgaria, as compared to, well, Spain and Bulgaria, both of which were aligned with Germany during the thirties and World War II. As a result of their cooperation, Prime Minister Blair's diplomatic reputation has been ruined in England, and a surprising election defeat has produced an unfriendly government in Spain. The Philippines have withdrawn their troops from Iraq to save the life of a hostage, and other defections can be expected in the near future.

18. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to go to war over the objections of the U.N. (League of Nations). His Iraq invasion was illegal and therefore a war crime as explained by Articles 41 and 42 of the U.N. Charter, which require two votes, not one, by the Security Council before any state takes such an action. First a vote is needed to explore all possibilities short of warfare (in Iraq's case through the use of U.N. inspectors), and once this has been shown to be fruitless, a second vote is needed to permit military action. U.S. and U.K. delegates at the Security Council prevented this second vote once it was plain they lacked a majority. This was because other nations on the Security Council were satisfied with the findings of U.N. inspectors that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. Minus this second vote, the invasion was illegal. Bush also showed in the process that he has no qualms about bribing, bullying, and insulting U.N. members, even tapping their telephone lines. This was done with undecided members of the Security Council as well as the U.N. Secretary General when the U.S.-U.K. resolution was debated preceding the invasion.

19. Like Hitler, Bush launches unilateral invasions on a supposedly pre-emptive basis. Just as Hitler convinced the German public to think of Poland as a threat to Germany in 1939 (for example in his Sept. 19 speech), Bush wants Americans to think of Iraq as having been a "potential" threat to our national security--indeed as one of the instigators of the 9-11 attack despite a complete lack of evidence to support this claim.

20. Like Hitler, Bush depends on a military strategy that features a "shock and awe" Blitzkrieg beginning with devastating air strikes, then an invasion led by heavy armored columns.

21. Like Hitler, Bush is willing to inflict high levels of bloodshed against enemy nations. Between 20,000 and (more probably) 37,000 are now estimated to have been killed, as much as a ro-1 kill ratio compared to the more than 900 Americans killed. In other words, for every U.S. fatality, probably as many as forty Iraqi have died.

22. Like Hitler, Bush is perfectly willing to sacrifice life as part of his official duty. This would be indicated by the unprecedented number of prisoners executed during his service as governor of Texas. Under no other governor in the history of the United States were so many killed.

23. Like Hitler, Bush began warfare on a single front (Al Qaeda quartered in Afghanistan), but then expanded it to a second front with Iraq, only to be confronted with North Korea and Iran as potential third and fourth fronts. Much the same thing happened to Hitler when he advanced German military operations from Spain to Poland and France, then was distracted by Yugoslavia before invading the USSR in 1941. Today, bush seems prevented by the excessive costs of the Iraqi debacle from going to war elsewhere if re-elected, but not through any lack of desire.

24. Like Hitler, Bush has no qualms about imposing "regime change" by installing Quisling-style client governments backed by a U.S. military occupation with both political and economic control entirely in the hands of Americans. It is no surprise that Iyad Alawi, Iraq's current temporary prime minister, was once affiliated with the CIA and has been reliably reported by the Australian press to have executed six hooded prisoners with a handgun to their heads just a day or two before his appointment a couple weeks ago.

25. Like Hitler, Bush curtails civil liberties in captive nations and depends on detention centers (i.e., concentration camps) such as a Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and any number of secret interrogation centers across the world. Prisoners at the camps go unidentified and have no legal rights as ordinarily guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. They have also been detained indefinitely (for 2 ˝ years already at Guantanamo Bay), though there is mounting evidence that many are innocent of what they have been charged--some, for example, having been randomly seized by Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan for an automatic bounty from U.S. commanders. Moreover, many Iraqi prisoners have been tortured, in many instances just short of death. Recent U.S. documents disclose that as many twenty have died while being tortured, and twenty others have died under unusual circumstances yet to be determined.

26. Like Hitler, Bush uses the threat of enemies abroad to stir the fearful allegiance of the U.S. public. For example, he features public announcements of possible terrorist attacks in order to override embarrassing news coverage or to crowd from headlines positive coverage of Democratic Party activities. He also uses the threat of terrorism to justify extraordinary domestic powers granted by the Patriot Act. Even the books we check out of public libraries can be kept on record by federal agents.

27. Like Hitler, Bush depends on a propaganda machine to guarantee sympathetic news management. In Hitler's case news coverage was totally dominated by Göbbels; in Bush's case reporters have been almost totally "imbedded" by both military spokesmen and wealthy media owners sympathetic with Bush. The most obvious case is the Fox news channel, owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, recent polls indicate that the majority of Fox viewers still think Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attack.

28. Like Hitler, Bush increasingly reduces the circle of aides he feels he can trust as his policies keep boomeranging at his own expense. Just as Hitler ended up isolated in his headquarters, with few individuals granted access, Bush is now said to be limiting access primarily to Attorney General Ashcroft (who also talks with God on a regular basis) as well as Karl Rove, the Vice President, Karen Hughes, and a few others. Both Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld are now said to be out of the loop.

29. Like Hitler, Bush has become obsessed with his vision of conflict between good (U.S. patriotism) and evil (anti-Americanism. Many in contact with the White House are said to be worried that he is beginning to lose touch with reality--perhaps resulting from the use of medication that seriously distorts his judgment. Possibly symptomatic of this concern is the increasing number of disaffected government officials who leak embarrassing documents.

30. Like Hitler, Bush takes pleasure in the mythology of frontier justice. As a youth Hitler read and memorized the western novels of Karl May, and Bush retains into his maturity his fascination with simplistic cowboy values. He also exaggerates a cowboy twang despite his C-average elitist education at Andover, Yale, and Harvard.

31. Like Hitler, Bush misconstrues Darwinism, in Hitler's case by treating the Aryan race as being superior on an evolutionary basis, in Bush's case by rejecting science for fundamentalist creationism.