The Daily News
1 The scandal surrounding the arrest of KGO talk show host Bernie Ward reminds me of this book I read years ago.
2 It was entitled They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, and authored by one Milton Mayer.
3 It’s a fascinating account of how the Nazis came to power, and it is filled with stories of normal people going about their business suddenly watching as things slowly changed, so slowly in fact that even intelligent people, while sensing something wrong, remained silent.. No point in being labeled an alarmist. Normal people don’t do that. And so it was allowed to grow. It was, in our illustrious 21st-century vernacular, “enabled”.
4 Students used to ask me, “Mr. H, aren’t you afraid that the government will come and arrest you for telling us the truth about our history?” The reference was to my JFK assassination unit, which investigated not only the murder and subsequent cover-up of the assassination but also the tracing of its Nazi roots, and of the clear involvement of the Bush family dating back to the 40′s.
5 It took years balancing facts, trusting sources, and trying to avoid a “liberal” vs. “conservative” issue. To me it was clearly evident that it had little to do with any of that. The story of our march toward our present state was long and at times frightening, but the story eventually began to tell itself. All it required was putting together very telling evidence beginning with Prescott Bush and his associations with the likes of Allen and John Foster Dulles, and of Zapata oil, and of Texas oil tycoons who seized power and have managed to maintain that power to this day.
6 My answer to those students was quite simple: I could report all of that because who is going to listen to a two-bit drama teacher at small San Jose high school? Who cares what some blowhard teacher has to say?
7 I was and remain no threat. But the troublesome thing about the rise of Nazism in Germany was that it was so gradual. The erosion of civil liberties and rights took time, and happened little by little, so gradually in fact that by the time people who knew better realized it was time to speak out, it was already too late. I have added an excerpt from They Thought They Were Free as an addendum to today’s DN.
8 Bernie Ward is by all rights nothing more than a “two-bit” talk show blowhard, just as I am a two-bit teacher/blowhard. At least he could be put into that safe label.
9 Ward was WAY on top of the Bush administration’s agenda, which is based on a scary document called Project for the New American Century, almost a blueprint outlining our mission to become the most superior nation on the planet, the world’s police, if you will.
10 Keep in mind that our beloved President’s father once declared a New World Order in America, a clarion “shout-out” of a term Hitler used.
11 Ward was investigating a lot of corruption not only nationally, but locally with some scathing indictments of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco.
12 The feds arrested him last week on trumped up child porn charges, even though they seized his computer two years ago and found absolutely nothing remotely pornographic on it.
13 Well! Once THAT finger is pointed at the guy, he is tried and convicted instantly. Ward’s defense that he was researching material for a book he was writing about hypocrisy in America just doesn’t sound right, even though the only time in his career he ever visited a sight was during his research at that exact period of time.
14 As a person who writes a daily “blog” (The DN a mere “blog”? Insulting! The DN was around six years before the word “blog” even existed!) I have on several occasions let my political beliefs sail freely.
15 I’ve pissed people off, but in my defense, my beliefs are the result of painstaking research that took years to sift through and balance. I always looked at both sides of issues, researched carefully, and still discovered unbelievable things.
16 In my classrooms, I brought in resources, showing students how to find facts rather than accepting everything they read as truth. The Kennedy assassination is the pantheon government cover-up, and the roots of much of what is happening now began there, at least for me. Clearly the true roots of where we are now began years before, and the name Bush is the common denominator in all of it.
17 Read about Prescott Bush, and about Allen Dulles and their ties to the Nazi regime. It’s downright frightening. And I don’t mean reading the sensationlist yellowed versions. There are perfecty well-researched documents in the mainstream press.
18 Even a semi-intelligent person could spend a few thoughtful hours looking over legitimate documents, which are now readily available on the Internet. Remember, these people were all connected to the CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Eisenhower knew of this and warned all of us before he left office.
19 According to a book called American Spy by E. Howard Hunt, a fellow who was implicated as a major player in the JFK assassination, the CIA routinely infiltrated, controlled and continues to control news, films, books, educational institutions, and on and on.
20 And I’ve always felt Hunt probably knew a great deal about the JFK stuff, although he plausibly denied it to his death last year. But HE was a voice from the conservative side, and his book was riveting, although I’m sure much of what he said was probably lies, since that’s basically what he did for a living. In researching this DN I ran across a deathbed confession by Hunt admitting that he was a “benchwarmer” in the assassination, which the government insists to this day was the work of one guy. Hunt also implicated Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Baines Johnson as possibly a key player and perpetrator of that murder. This link also includes a picture of what appears to be a young George Bush standing with hands in pockets in front of the Texas School Book Depository just before JFK was shot on the same street. Here’s the link. Hunt’s taped confession is on it:
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/april2007/300407deathbedconfession.htm
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this picture, which was on a link I found for this DN. The hairline, chin and stance are pure George Herbert Walker Bush. I would need more than this ordinarily. This picture will be put in a “food for thought and grounds for further research” category. VERY interesting picture though.
21 The recent arrest of Bernie Ward signaled a totally new twist on all of this. The Patriot Act has clearly made it easier to round up political enemies and imprison them, and then to destroy their reputations on tepid allegations of misconduct. Bernie Ward was arrested, tried and found guilty on the very implications of the odious allegations against him. Even if he wins in court, his credibility and reputation have been forever tarnished in the public arena.
Calling someone a witch is easy; denying the allegation almost impossible unless one is willing to countersue. And in Ward’s case, he admits that he DID trade this stuff and enter chat rooms as research for his story. Technically he is guilty. But after they seized his computer in 2005 and found absolutely no evidence of anything remotely prurient, it’s tough to believe this is anything less than a set-up, and a good way to muzzle someone who is quite close to the truth about what is really going on in a country that prides itself on freedom.
22 Ward is not a two-bit talk show host. He’s a remarkable voice, a loving father, and a charitable human being.
23 What an easy way to lock a voice like his up. Anybody who writes or is publicly critical of this regime had better get a helmet.
24 If they get my computer, they’ll see pictures of Alfred E. Neuman, kites, people, dogs, umbrellas, art, and everything ever researched for the DN.
25 And the DN is just a lark for people who loved the YB Theatre, and the Drama Workshop, as well as my awesome Class of ’05, whom I still miss.
26 Some threat, huh?
27 I guess the bottom line is that if someone like Bernie Ward is suddenly gonna be disappeared clearly for his political research, then anyone can.
28 It’s a very scary day for America. KGO answered with some lady talking about “What Christmas Means to Us” yesterday morning where normally Ward’s Godtalk show was. She blew it off with a blanketed apology from KGO. Ward’s opening music played. It was a lovely version of Amazing Grace.
29 I would have loved it if they had the integrity to defend Ward and to editorialize the clear political agenda that has put a good man behind bars.
30 They should have read the following excerpt from They Thought They Were Free.
31 No apologies. It’s here for you, if you’re brave enough to take a gander. It’s a report on why normal people allowed the Nazi flag to fly over it’s fatherland.
32 It’s riveting.
33 I’ll bow out now.
34 See ya tomorrow.
35 Peace.
~H~
http://www.xanga.com/bharrington
An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
But Then It Was Too Late
“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”
“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”
“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
“Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
“You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.”
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
“I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.”
“And the judge?”
“Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.”
I said nothing.
“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.”
