New Nazis

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For Bart

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(1) The Manufacture of Evil

George Bush introduced the notion of ‘evil’ into world politics of the 21^st century world. Being the simpleton that he is, he merely accuses opponents of imperialism and US international criminal behavior as being the incurable bad boys, while Bush & Co wholeheartedly embody the good guys. Evil is on everyone's mind and confuses many millions, including the American president himself. What did he expect to achieve by reintroducing a medieval concept, which has never made sense to anyone?

In 1886 Nietzsche published a famous essay on this question. He noted that humanity had experimented for so many centuries with morality and ethics and had continuously defined or refined ideas about good and evil. He considered these concepts as completely worn out. Distinguishing the good from evil was no longer possible with the naked eye. Listening to the utterances of Bush junior, who nowadays applies the concept of evil left and right leads one to a fateful rendezvous with numerous unanswerable questions. While mankind expects strong and unquestioned leadership from the top-gun of the only superpower, all we are getting from Washington is incoherent babble from an obviously deeply confused and shockingly incompetent man. Bush has no clue as to the core of the problems he is faced with, and consequently makes an irreparable mess of everything.

Instead of quietly continuing to run the governor's office in Austin, George was thrust into a position, which he was blissfully unfamiliar with and unprepared for. His power hungry Dad, and associates within the Texas oilindustry, thrust the most important political-military leadership in the world onto the shoulders of his eldest son. To achieve his goal, Dad and his accomplices had to steal the election in what has been labelled the biggest electoral scandal in US history. In 2002, the entire world is drifting rudderless on an ocean of uncertainty and indecisiveness waiting for Godot, hoping that perhaps some day ‘the great leader of the western world’ will finally catch up with what really is going on. In the mean time, people are dying and suffering everywhere, especially in the Middle-East.

In Plato's philosophy the essence of all reality was supposed to be ‘good’. ‘Evil’ was merely the faulty reflection of reality found in the world of particulars. Poor George is so totally ignorant of particulars, that he will never be able to form sound judgements on anything, let alone on the basis of realities in places beyond Crawford, Texas. After brooding for weeks as what to say June 24, 2002, the president finally coughed up his grand design for peace in the Near-East. Being an expert on election fraud, he strongly advised Palestinians to hold a free election and be sure to vote Yasser Arafat out of office. It would seem that nobody at the White House was brave enough to tell the boss, that he was overstepping all boun-

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daries of democratic principles and diplomatic courtesies by uttering such nonsense.

The western way of life lays claim to our consciousness. ‘It operates a system which advertises its own bulging cornucopia of products and processes. However, within the industrial system evil has become systemized,’ wrote Canadian political scientist Lionel Tiger in The Manufacture of Evil (Harper & Row, New York, 1987). In professor Tiger's view, ‘The production of evil has become technologized, internationalized, multinationalized, and especially in times of war and high zealotry, officially rhapsodized.’ Bush - and Tiger - still use ‘evil’ in prae-Nietzchean terms. The US president calls everything he does not understand, or lacks the information to understand, ‘evil’, because that is the easiest way out.

When the disaster of September 11, 2001 occurred, Bush announced to the world, as an incontestable fact, that Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda were responsible for the massacre of Americans on that day. The president did not offer a thread of evidence to support his accusation. He needed a guilty party fast and used names handed to him by his intelligence services. Muslims claim their acts of defiance. No-one ever claimed 09-11. Neither Bush, nor the far majority of his worldwide audience, seemed to need any hard evidence, that would stand up in the courts. The western world in particular blindly bought the Bush version of the September 11 events without taking a second look at unanswered questions or even doubting the integrity of the president's wild guess.

This is the more surprising, since even a cursory knowledge of American twentieth century history should have taught western audiences that literally every US president, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, has been sadly catalogued in retrospect as being a habitual liar or an embarrassing crook. I am not saying it is any better elsewhere. But the US public in particular is incredibly slow to learn that they have elected the one bastard after the other to the White House.

Bush immediately acted on what he was being told. He reacted with Pavlovian precision as all his predecessors did before him: launch another war. He attacked Afghanistan to wipe out the Taliban and catch the prime suspect Osama bin Laden and bring him to American Justice. Perhaps Bush realized later, that the Saudi rebel, as he himself emphatically stressed, indeed was not guilty of 09-11 as charged. He does avoid talking about the man lately, while he initially swore he would bring him to book at his earliest convenience. Following 09-11 Bush' popularity rose from a wavering 30 percent in August 2001 to more than 90 percent. Hitler's popularity with the German people rose to an all time high after he annexed Austria on March 12, 1938. True, Washington did not declare Afghanistan part of the United States, but the US did install a US puppet regime. Whatever happens in Kabul is, for the fore-seeable future, being decided in Washington while the US military occupation continues.

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The manufacture of evil takes place at all levels of society whether a nation is run by a fascist dictator or by an elected president in a so called free democratic society. The greater the prosperity the more sharks are on the loose to grab a piece of the pie. Those who lay behind do whatever it takes to get their share in the rising fleshpots of Egypt. When Germany went down as a result of World War I, the last emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland. It did not take long for Adolf Hitler to mount the throne in a free election. Germans wanted law and order, and German glory restored. At the time Winston Churchill cheered Hitler's achievements in putting Germany back at its feet. The Nazi leader surrounded himself with likeminded characters: Hermann Goering (Air Force), Franz Joseph Goebbels (propaganda), Heinrich Himmler (national security) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Affairs). The military-industrial complex was quickly revived in close cooperation with the corporate empire IG Farben, which in turn was linked to Kuhlmann (France), ICI (Great Britain), Montecatini (Italy), AV (Czechoslovakia), Boruta (Poland), Mitsui (Japan), Standard Oil (New Jersey) and Du Pont and Dow Chemical in the US. Through IG Farben and Alfred Krupp the German war machine was resurrected and would soon be unleashed to conquer France, Italy and most of Europe, with the notable exception of Great Britain. The groundwork for the ultimate Nazi defeat was laid at Stalingrad (February 2, 1943).

Hitler dreamt of becoming an EU-Cop for a united Europe under the banner of National Socialism. Much like Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the junior Bush have been drifting towards a Global Cop system under the aegis of capitalism and the free market system. This paradise should be protected by an impenetrable shield in the sky to fight off rogue states which might try to attack. Hitler and Goebbels were quite successful in disseminating ideas and information with the design of inducing or intensifying attitudes and actions favorable to the purposes of National Socialism. They had to use radio and propaganda films or news reels in cinemas to reach the public. Bush, Sharon, Saddam or Arafat have a much easier go at it in pleading their case than the Nazis had in the 30's and 40's. They have TV, internet, CNN and all the rest.

Even Osama bin Laden reaches hundreds of millions when someone with a portable video camera would be brave enough to direct his donkey up an Asian mountain top and records what he has to say. The Qatar station Al Jazeera will then broadcast the text to millions of livingrooms around the world. Television adds a dimension to the tool of propaganda, which Hitler and Mussolini had to do without. People no longer form their opinions solely on the basis of what they hear. Since the 50's performances by those in the news can be seen and followed via TV screens.

Mark Miller, professor of Media Ecology at New York

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University put it this way: ‘Television has clearly shown the truth about George Bush Jr. His body language bellows his uninterest, his distraction, his uneasiness, his callousness: and he tends to blurt out all or part of what he is really thinking, even as he is trying to lie about it, when it becomes a linguistic struggle that intensifiers his incoherence. Meanwhile, his handlers and the mainstream media all keep on trying to play the revelations down, forever countering the obvious with lots of upbeat spin and tactful silence. Thus TV keeps on sending us an eerie double message, by showing us one thing and telling us another. Those who want to buy the pitch prefer the latter, naturally, while who just can't buy it feel as if they must be going crazy, what with all those smooth and authoritative voices claiming that this man should be our president when we can see, and have seen all along, that that simply is not the case.’ (The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations of a national Disorder, W.W. Norton, New York, 2001).

Professor Miller referred to the illegal machinations by the Bush clique and the Republicans to bring George junior into the White House to do the bidding of the Houston oil lobby in international affairs. ‘Our experience of this transparent coup has been disorienting from the start,’ he wrote. ‘Hardly had he assumed the presidency or Bush was immediately hailed for his charm, his democratic ease, his rare ability to be all things to all Americans.’ And, again, we touch on another aspect of the manufacture of evil, the way the management of a free press deals with information.