New Nazis

(2) The Manufacture of Hatred

Pioneer in programming Nazi propaganda was Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945). In 1928 he was freely elected to the German parliament. With the Nazis entering the political arena, he became instrumental in bringing Hitler to power. He was highly effective in spreading the virus of hatred for Jews and other non-Aryan groups like Slavs and Russians. Propaganda is usually accompanied by distortions of facts in order to conform to the ideology of the disseminator who creates his own imagined or desired reality. Appeals to passion, nationalistic fervour and above all, to traditional prejudices will inflame peoples and nations beyond common sense and any reason.

No doubt, Goebbels was an intentional propagandist of hatred. After World War II Washington followed a similar Nazi-type offensive to manipulate people's minds and mobilizing worldwide hostility against the USSR. Any lies and distortions were acceptable as long as ‘the enemy’ could be destroyed. Communists did exactly the same with us. In the 70's I visited a school in Irkutsk, Siberia, where Soviet children were reassured that Marxism would win over capitalism. Our western schools taught kids, that a free market economy and maximum freedom

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for the individual would bring the Valhalla on earth for everybody. Democracy was good; communism was evil and had to be stamped out by whatever means necessary. This irrationality on both sides brought us all the Cold War.

Goebbels developed the Nazi propaganda technique of ‘a war of nerves.’ Each time, prior to Hitler making another aggressive move on the European chessboard, the German press and radio invented all kinds of accusations against the chosen target. Incidents were manufactured intentionally and then exploited to justify a German military intervention. The Goebbels design proved to be very effective in dividing people in other nations, weakening their resolve to resist the forthcoming aggression, and causing the allies of Nazi victim nations to hesitate as well.

Following World War II, Washington, the Pentagon and the CIA used the same Nazi propaganda techniques to manufacture global hatred for communists. Step by step over a number of decades, the US war machine drifted towards becoming the only super power in the world by the turn of the century. Hitler's divide and rule policy, that led to his virtual control over Europe in the early 40's has been followed by Washington's global divide and rule policy that now threatens to bring all of mankind under near total US supervision and control. The US juggernaut cannot be stopped. ‘All roads lead to America, the new Rome,’ observed Martin Ivens in the London Times (June 30, 2002). ‘At Versailles in 1919, the balance of power between the United States and the British Empire was more equal. Today American military and economic power dwarfs that of its European and Asian allies,’ Ivens wrote. This undoubted accomplishment is a fact in 2002. But will a Pax Americana still prevail in 2052?

More painful comparisons must be drawn with Nazi Germany when observing US audiences generally accepting anything that comes directly from the Oval Office as the gospel truth. Over ninety nine per cent of all Americans immediately took Bush at his word, that Osama bin Laden was guilty and thus a mass murderer. Two weeks after the twin towers collapsed I visited Manhattan. The mere suggestion to friends and strangers alike, that may be some day, when more becomes known about what really happened on September 11^th, it could become known that Osama bin Laden, and perhaps even Al Queda, had after all nothing to do with that disaster, would persistently meet with frantic and outraged reactions.

Bush offered Americans a well constructed story, which indeed possessed a kind of reasonable narrative truth. His arguments and information seemed plausible both in logic and content. But too often narrative truth is confused with historical truth. A narrative account of a disaster can sound entirely reasonable while in reality it is A to Z misleading, since it often contains only part of the truth or none at all. In Freud's concept of narrative truth, Bush' report about what supposedly happened on September 11th, lacks ‘the kernel of historical truth’.

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Psychiatrist, Donald P. Spence of the Rutgers Medical School wrote: ‘Narrative truth is what we have in mind when we say that such and such is a good story, that a given explanation carries conviction, that one solution to a mystery must be true.’ (Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, W.W. Norton, New York, 1982). Almost all Americans instantly accepted Bush' narrative truth as the historical truth. From his hideout in the Tora Bora Mountains in Afghanistan the Saudi millionaire rebel mobilized, according to Bush at least, four US airliners to cause death, havoc and destruction in the US. Professor Spence postulated years ago, that ‘once a given construction has acquired narrative truth, it becomes just as real as any other kind of truth.’ He added that in psychoanalytic treatment, basic attention is being paid to narrative reality, because it has no relation to the facts and historic reality.

Ninety percent of the Germans supported Hitler and the narrative truth of the Nazis. The Soviets accepted Lenin's narrative truth which after seventy years was overtaken by inescapable historic realities. The USSR simply collapsed under the weight of its daydreams and narrative truths. Now, we see America goose-stepping towards unparalleled power in line with Bush's storytelling. But some day in the future the chickens will come home to roost, when historical truth catches up with popular fairy tales of the past.

All of America bought lock, stock and barrel the Bush version of September 11. From that day onwards, all Americans ‘knew’ what had happened. Tell Americans in 2002 that perhaps there is more to this tragic day in US history than the president has told them, and they go instantly ballistic. I was reminded of some devout Nazis who half a century later still stand by the Fuehrer and still considered it out of the question that the Third Reich ever installed gas chambers in concentration camps. There are still Americans today, who are absolutely convinced Oswald alone killed JFK. Whether they watched the Zapruder film of the assassination or not, they are simply incapable of accepting the historical truth that Dallas was a conspiracy. Abraham Zapruder filmed by mere coincidence the motorcade of the president when the shots at the Kennedy's were fired. The celluloid clearly showed that the president was hit by bullets from both the back and the front. Yet, many millions of Americans continue to live with the narrative truth that there was no conspiracy in Dallas, because they are apparently unable to accept the historical truth.

Brainwashing implies the use of physical or psychological duress. This is not what the White House, the CIA, NATO, CNN or western media organizations are engaged in. Neither did the Nazis. Subtler strategies were and are designed to render leadership the widest possible support. To manufacture hatred one replaces simple truths by vital lies. Goebbels polluted German minds by deliberately planting false and fantastic stories. The far majority

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of Germans fell for this Nazi crap, just as the far majority of Americans seems to blindly buy the rubbish that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell are unloading on the American public.

Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana (1863-1952) termed German philosophy ‘a work of genius’ (The German Mind, Thomas Crowell, New York, 1968). It is universally recognized, that Germans (Bach, Beethoven, Luther, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) rank among the foremost civilized and erudite peoples in the human saga. Yet, in spite of their rich heritage they collectively fell, during a vital stage in their history, for the harangues of a fascist dictator. There is no guarantee, that some day, another nation, or another highly civilized society would not buy the narrative gobbledygook of some other lying or hate mongering generalissimo or Führer.

The Nazis achieved true miracles in drumming up massive support through their printed press outlets and ramshackle radio broadcasts. Today's occupants of the White House easily command entrance to electronic highways, communication satellites and cable-networks. Their narrative truth is directly beamed into the living quarters of hundreds of millions of people around the world. To win support from an electorate has become considerably easier than it must have been in Hitler's day. But television screens also carry a clear disadvantage for unstable or psychopathic personalities seeking favor with the masses. Would Germans have blindly followed Hitler to their doom if they had been able to watch him closely and see him live delivering his thundering speeches against the rest of the outside world?

The other successful technique invented and refined by Goebbels was the launching of ‘a war of nerves’ in advance of declaring war. In 1938, for instance, Hitler was preparing his next aggressive move on the European chessboard. Goebbels prepared the ground for Hitler's move into Czechoslovakia. He distributed false reports about the mistreatment of German minorities in the neighboring country. His propaganda apparatus manufactured a number of violent incidents as proof that Berlin had to come to the aid of its terrorized citizens. There was no terror in Czechoslovakia against Germans. But Hitler created an alibi to justify military intervention.

It is a tactic Washington has been using since 1945 over and over again in dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The White House and US intelligence services have for half a century copied Nazi tactics directly from the lexicon of Hitler en Goebbels. The US has applied state terrorism in Asia, Africa and Latin America for decades. Apart from applying wars of nerves everywhere by sending warships and B-52's to frighten far away lands into submission, covert military actions, secret invasions, political assassinations or coups d'etats against heads of state or people Washington did not like, have become

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US standard practices. Like most recently the wars on the Balkan's were clearly provoked and organized through covert operations by the Americans. The Albanian UCK rebel army was equipped, paid for and secretly led by US agents when it went into Kosovo to destabilize Yugoslavia further with the ultimate goal of unseating the last communist leader in southern Europe. Slobodan Milosevic was simply ‘sold’ by traitors for millions of dollars to the Hague Tribunal for War Criminals. The real war criminals who lighted the fuse in the Balkan's go free in Washington. The behavior by Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. in southern Europe alone would have certainly brought applause from Hitler and Mussolini.

What options do people have after being invaded, intimidated and terrorized by a foreign power and are occupied against their will? Holland surrendered in 1940 after five days of war following the destruction of the center of Rotterdam by Goering's Luftwaffe. Reaching the age of 18 in 1943, I joined the Dutch underground. We had no choice but to resort to guerrilla warfare against the Nazi Wehrmacht. Hitler labeled us terrorists. Likewise Bush, Blair and Sharon and a number of western leaders and media organisations continue to misname Palestinian underground forces terrorists. We knew, that we were fighting the Nazis, as genuine freedom fighters. So are the Palestinians, who have battled these new Nazis for half a century. Americans, who have not been invaded or terrorized on their own soil for two centuries, seem in a quandary about the question who is a freedom fighter and who a terrorist. They have forgotten their own past, when they threw out the British and signed a peace deal in 1783 in Paris.