Prescott Bush/Nazi link today: "The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement" by Robert Parry

[Bozita]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush , can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.


http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=26004

First Published 2008-05-20, Last Updated 2008-05-20 11:46:19
The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement


The evidence from dusty archives suggests that the Bush family went way beyond appeasement of Adolf Hitler to aiding and abetting the Nazis, says Robert Parry.


The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naïve saying “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,” then what should be said about Bush’s grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the US government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”

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[GrpCaptMandrake]

1. Day late and a dollar short

but even on the way out, maybe this is the break we've needed to get the general public to note that the Bush Crime Family is a gang of Nazi-collaborating thugs. Maybe now that Dear Leader is the one to have brought it up, it'll be "fair game" to make him eat it.

Heck, Larissa Alexandrovna's piece even got an airing on "The View." Now if Simon would only mention it on "American Idol," the American people might actually pay attention.

[Indiana_Dem]

2. I wrote up a LTTE in my local paper about this in 2003 or so.

I got threatening phone calls, 2 rebuttals int he paper saying I was just spreading propaganda and it was not true. I was quoting what John Loftus had researched. John Loftus was with the Department of Justice who was studying the history of the Jews for some museum he was making in the U.S. or something. I forget the details as it has been so long ago--I felt I should just forget trying to tell people about it because they'd just brush me off as some nutcase. But the facts are there.

[GrpCaptMandrake]

3. It's in the National Archives

The first article about it originated as an online article in the New Hampshire Gazette.

[Indiana_Dem]

5. Yes, that's it! That's from what source I was writing about it along with Loftus' comments. nt

[blm]

7. Still needs to stay out there. It ALL does. If not us...who?

.

[Bozita]

4. Just found Chris Floyd's Sunday piece. It's MUST READ stuff!

http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1513/135/

-snip-

III.
But the progressive hissy fit over Bush's speech has provided a massive distraction from the real scandal of his appearance before the Knesset, and his reference to Nazi Germany: the fact that this mass-murdering wager of aggressive war would not have been standing before the Knesset at all – if not for his own family’s extensive, and profitable, role in the rise of the Nazi war machine. A role which continued not only after “Nazi tanks crossed into Poland” (where Bush family investments helped finance the concentration camp at Auschwitz) but even after Nazi forces were killing American troops in North Africa.

As Toby Rogers noted in his landmark 2002 piece for Clamor magazine, “Heir to the Holocaust,” which pulled together the vast amount of documentary evidence of the Bush-Walker clan’s intimate and instrumental connection to the Nazis:

According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.

Throughout the Bush family's decades of public life, the American press has gone out of its way to overlook one historical fact – that through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), Prescott Bush, and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, along with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II.

Rogers’ article – and other pieces such as the stories published in 2003 by John Buchanan in the New Hampshire Gazette -- provide the devastating details of this sorry history, including the seizure of some of the Bush family’s Nazi assets under the Trading With the Enemy Act in 1942 – and their subsequent pulling of elitist strings to keep these genuinely treasonous dealings out of the public eye….and even profit from them after the war, when the family and its partners were allowed to liquidate their share of the seized foreign assets:

Prescott Bush received $1.5 million for his share in UBC. That money enabled Bush to help his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to set up his first royalty firm, Overby Development Company, that same year. It was also helpful when Prescott Bush left the business world to enter the public arena in 1952 with a successful senatorial campaign in Connecticut. On October 8th, 1972, Prescott Bush died of cancer and his will was enacted soon after.

In 1980, when George H.W. Bush was elected vice president, he placed his father's family inherence in a blind trust. The trust was managed by his old friend and quail hunting partner, William "Stamps" Farish III. Bush's choice of Farish to manage the family wealth is quite revealing in that it demonstrates that the former president might know exactly where some of his inheritance originated. Farish's grandfather, William Farish Jr., on March 25th, 1942, pleaded "no contest" to conspiring with Nazi Germany while president of Standard Oil in New Jersey. He was described by Senator Harry Truman in public of approaching "treason" for profiting off the Nazi war machine. Standard Oil, invested millions in IG Farben, who opened a gasoline factory within Auschwitz in 1940.

Farish had signed a deal with the Nazis on secret patents for synthesizing rubber. Hitler couldn't have gone to war without it. Even after America entered the war, Farish stood by his Nazi partners and refused to share these precious trade secrets with the U.S. government, despite the American military's dire need for rubber.

None of this means that Bush’s grandfather was a Nazi. This is simply the way the American elite have always functioned. Ideology, morality, patriotism, law – all must give way to the relentless and ruthless pursuit of wealth, and the power and privilege and dominance wealth brings. Prescott Bush traded with the Nazis, even when they were killing Americans, because there was money in it. For the same reason, his son, Prescott Jr., has long been a leading figure in trading with the repressive communist regime in China (as have Dubya's brother Neil -- and Don Rumsfeld too, for that matter.). For the same reason, Prescott Senior's other son, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his son, George Walker Bush, have long had extensive and intimate business ties with the violent religious extremists in Saudi Arabia, and with a number of other tyrants throughout the Middle East and around the world.

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more, lots more...

[AdHocSolver]

9. Many major American corporations profited by aiding the Nazis.

In "IBM and the Holocaust", Edwin Black documents how IBM supplied data processing equipment (card sorters) to set up and operate the concentration camps. GM built trucks for the German military. There were numerous other corporations that happily profited aiding our "enemy".

I take issue with your statement: "None of this means that Bush’s grandfather was a Nazi."

Maybe he wasn't a card carrying member of the party, but he was intimately involved with the rise of the Nazis to power. You can call it Nazism, fascism, state corporatism, corporate statism. The practices and goals are the same. Set up slave labor camps and work the people in them to death. This maximizes profit since the corporation is not wasting food or medical care on the inmates. Invading Europe was the Nazi's technique for ensuring an endless supply of labor to Germany. At the same time, this practice ensured the elimination of potential enemies to the regime.

The war in Iraq is designed to eliminate "unnecessary" people to support in the military. The offshoring of jobs to "third" world countries, at successively lower wages, ensures an endless supply of cheap labor.

You think that this description exxagerates the issue? Get your head out of the clouds and stop analyzing what is happening from "your" perspective of fairness or commonsense. Look at what they actually DO and analyze how they profit by it.

[Bozita]

10. Good post, but ...

... those are the words of Chris Floyd.

[Bozita]

6. evening kick

[Melynn]

8. Still more kick

More kick.

[Fire Walk With Me]

11. So dubya has two degrees of separation from Hitler, and his daddy, one.

And by separation, I mean aiding and abetting.