The 60 Minutes interview last Sunday with Dick Cheney and his babbling sidekick, George, confirmed what many Americans have already suspected: that our political system has been usurped by a malevolent duarchy. As if to underscore that fact, Dick Cheney, speaking for Bush while demeaning our electoral process as a “poll,” insisted, “this president does not make decisions based on public opinion.” He further asserted his contempt for American traditions by dismissing our elected representatives, referring to the anti-surge resolution being considered by Congress as a meaningless verbal exercise and declaring that Bush has the sole authority to send troops to Iraq regardless of their opinion. Such arrogance in the face of abysmal support can only be seen as a eulogy to representative government and a declaration of accession by the Executive Branch―a chilling consideration by anyone’s measure.
Yet, as historians may well recall as they mull our descent into tyranny, the roots of our constitutional crisis can be traced to the days of Adolph Hitler when a powerful elite in America financed a political vision far different from the one we learned in school. That elite included such notables as George Herbert Walker (W’s great grandfather) and his son-in-law, Prescott S. Bush (W’s grandfather), and it included such Nazi collaborators as W. Averill Harriman, the presidential advisor who paved our way into Vietnam, and John Foster Dulles, the former Secretary of State who ratcheted the Cold War after sneaking his Nazi riches out of Berlin. And when the war was over, and our servicemen returned to forget the horrors they’d witnessed overseas, many of these same players were instrumental in driving their Nazi vision into the American political mainstream, using fear and the fortunes they’d amassed to uproot our populist traditions.
None of this is new, of course. It’s all well documented, almost hackneyed, and could well have been accessed by that segment of the public who found it easier to get their news from FOX Television in the last two elections. Nevertheless, in light of our waning constitutional grip, we think it fitting to reopen the issue of the Bush family’s complicity in international fascism, if only to reconcile our collective naiveté. So, let’s review.
In 1918, following the U.S. entry into the first World War, Samuel Prescott Bush (W’s grandfather) was given a sinecure on the US War Industries Board as Director of the Facilities Division under Bernard Baruch (advisor to Woodrow Wilson), and Clarence Dillon, a Wall Street private banker. Bush’s principal mission was to direct arms sales to Remington Arms, owned by Percy Rockefeller (John D Rockefeller’s brother) and run by his man, Samuel Pryor.
The following year, George Herbert “Bert” Walker (W’s great-grandfather), a mid-west power broker renowned for his international contacts, formed a private bank with Averill and “Bunny” Harriman, and Percy Rockefeller. That bank was called W.A. Harriman & Co.
Meanwhile, a young Prescott Bush was back from the war and going nowhere―that is, until he met Bert Walker’s daughter. Their union rocketed Prescott from a minor executive at a railroad equipment supply house to vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co., the largest private bank in the world.
Small wonder the Bushes embrace the sanctity of marriage.
In 1920, Walker and Harriman somehow gained control of the German shipping line, Hamburg-Amerika―whose assets had been confiscated by the U.S. after WWI― through a William Cuno (who later became a heavy contributor to the Nazi Party) and Max Warburg of the line’s banking firm, M.M.Warburg. Also involved in the deal (not surprisingly) was Rockefeller’s representative, Samuel Pryor. The shipping line was deceptively renamed the American Ship & Commerce Corp. and Pryor was placed on its board of directors. Harriman and Walker now controlled half of the largest shipping line in the world and dominated the other half through the auspices of the Anglo-American occupation of Germany. Their next step was to foment hostilities.
In 1922, Harriman established a branch of the W.A. Harriman Bank in Berlin under Walker’s presidency. It was at that time he met the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who began donating heavily to the Nazis. According to government records, Thyssen and Harriman agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York, the Union Banking Corp (UBC), that would link Thyssen’s bank in the Netherlands and provide funds for Hitler’s insurgency. Thus, the UBC, as aptly described in Tarpley and Chaitkin’s book, “George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography” (read it here: http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm ) became Hitler’s de facto bank in New York.
Soon afterwards, funds began pouring back and forth between New York and Thyssen’s bank in Holland and into the coffers of Hitler’s militia. The war profiteers, anxious to usher more profitable times, were up to their necks in intrigue.
It’s instructive to note that Fritz Thyssen was no run-of-the-mill industrialist. He was the single most important financier for Adolph Hitler (as confessed in his book, “I Paid Hitler”). And it’s no stretch to say that without Thyssen’s money, Hitler might never have come to power. And of course, without Hitler, there might never have been a Second World War.
Not good for the arms business.
In 1926, as mentioned above, Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman. That same year, he, Harriman, and Dillon established the German Steel Trust (GST) with Thyssen and Thyssen’s partner, Friederich Flick. The GST later provided the Third Reich with much of its explosives, steel plate, wire, pig iron, pipes, and tubing (materials that would later be used for such projects as the Atlantic Wall and the 155mm cannons that rained death on our servicemen on the beaches at Normandy). The GST was directly linked to George Bush’s grandfather’s bank in New York and was presided over by Albert Voegler, another German industrialist who paved the way for Hitler’s ascent (and, incidentally, Voegler also held a directorship on the Hamburg-Amerika Line).
Funny how it all links together, eh?
Thus, Bush, Walker, and Harriman were now in direct partnership with Flick’s zinc, steel, and coal conglomerate in Germany and Poland. Together they owned a third of his sprawling empire and renamed it the Consolidated Silesian Holding Co.
Between 1930 and ‘31, as admitted at Nuremburg, Thyssen arranged with Rudolph Hess for the transfer of 250,000 to 300,000 marks to the Nazi Party through his bank in Holland. During that period, W.A. Harriman merged with the Anglo-American investment house, Brown Brothers, to create Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott and two Harriman brothers were made senior partners along with Thatcher Brown and Montagu Norman, the notorious Nazi sympathizer. Brown ran the London office while Prescott ran the New York office. Montagu Norman, who often stayed with Prescott when he came to New York, was not only an ex-Brown partner, but his grandfather had led the company during the American Civil War at a time when they were shipping three quarters of the slave cotton to British mills.
Clearly the group had a lot in common.
By 1932, Hitler’s SA and SS troops numbered nearly 400,000 and questions began to surface as to how this madman could have obtained financing. Yet, even as the German government battled his brown shirts in the streets, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was funding propaganda to thwart their efforts.
In 1933, the efforts of the Nazi financiers paid off and Hitler came to power. That year, Prescott sent Max Warburg to represent the American Ship & Commerce Line on the Hamburg-Amerika’s board of directors. Prescott and Max were old buddies and Warburg was a close friend of Montagu Norman. He was also an executive at Hitler’s Reichsbank. His brothers had run the Kuhn Loeb investment bank that brokered Harriman’s buyout of the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad back in 1890 when Sam Bush was still head of the Buckeye Steel Casings Co. And he was also a close advisor to Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht and John Foster Dulles (the man for whom Dulles Airport is named), worked closely to arrange an agreement whereby all trade between the United States and Hitler’s Germany would be funneled through the Harriman International Co. under Oliver Harriman.
It’s nice work if you can get it.
The Dulles’ family ties to Nazi Germany are almost too numerous to list. Two Dulles brothers, partners at the law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, acted for I.G. Farben, the company that developed Tabun, the nerve gas used by the Nazis. They assisted SKF, a company that supplied 60% of the bearings used by the Third Reich. They acted for the Shroeder Bank which offered Hitler financing before he assumed power on condition he break the trade unions. Allen Dulles, who became the first director of the CIA and sat on the whitewashing Warren Commission, set up business deals between the Nazis and Bush-Harriman-Rockefeller, and sat on the boards of both Standard Oil (Rockefeller) and I.G. Farben. He also set up the notorious BND, Germany’s intelligence-gathering apparatus after the war, with spymaster Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s intelligence chief on the Eastern Front. It was Dulles who recruited Nazi butchers like Gehlen for what soon would become the CIA.
Is it any wonder we’re in the mess we are today?
In 1933, a North German company, Lloyd Co., merged with the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The American Ship & Commerce Co., who owned the Hamburg-Amerika Line, installed a long-time Harriman executive, Christian Beck, to head North American operations while Emil Helfferich, a high-ranking Nazi, presided over the newly-merged company, Hapag-Lloyd. All shipping was accompanied by Nazi guards. The following year, Samuel Pryor—still at Remington where Rockefeller put him―entered into a cartel arrangement with I.G. Farben. Thanks to his efforts, Nazi troops by then were all well armed with American guns.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Trading With The Enemy Act was enacted and Hapag-Lloyd’s property was confiscated by the government. The stock shares of Union Banking Corp were also seized, and the list of shareholders read like a Who’s Who of Nazi financiers: Prescott S. Bush (director and largest shareholder), “Bunny” Harriman, Cornelis Lievense (president, responsible for all New York banking finances for the Nazis), H.J. Kouwenhoven (director who helped establish UBC as a conduit to Fritz Thyssen, managed the Netherlands office during the Nazi occupation, and served as the director of the German Steel Trust) and two other associates of Bush. Other UBC companies were also seized, including the Seamless Steel Equipment Co. (long managed by Prescott Bush and father-in-law Bert Walker), the Holland-American Trading Corp. as well as Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corp.
Okay, okay, wait a minute. Maybe George Bush’s ancestors were involved with the Nazis. But does that make him a Nazi sympathizer?
Not necessarily. It’s a question of, well…family values. The Bush family has consistently demonstrated a contempt for human liberty whenever it stood between them and a profit, and whenever that liberty threatened their financial interests or the interests of their wealthy friends. Just look at W’s dad.
George Herbert Walker Bush left Yale and entered Brown Brothers Harriman, just like his father. He then entered Dresser, which produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and pumps for the Manhattan Project. Dresser later merged to become the logistical giant we know today, Halliburton.
Bush was also involved with the CIA from its earliest years. In 1953, he formed Zapata Petroleum which became a front for the Nixon-Dulles Bay of Pigs invasion (indeed, the failed CIA invasion of Cuba was dubbed Operation Zapata). His Zapata Offshore had oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and South America (as well as the Middle East) and it’s been suggested they were used as a cover for CIA arms and drug smuggling operations (strongly suggested).
In ’54, when the CIA staged their coup in Guatemala, toppling the democratic government for requiring United Fruit to sell its unused land to starving peasants, an endless series of U.S. interventions began. Governments audacious enough to request their land were denigrated as dupes of the Kremlin. And when the Brazilian ambassador asked Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (who just happened to be a former attorney for United Fruit) if, in fact, he had proof that Guatemala was a Soviet satellite, Dulles answered curtly, “We don’t have that proof, but we’re proceeding as if it must be so.” And when Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent who carried out the coup in Iran that same year, briefed Dulles about his activities, “Dulles smiled.” And why not? A new America had emerged. An America poisoned by Nazi collaborators like John and Allen Dulles and a network of like-minded sympathizers. An America that was now in the business of murdering democratically-elected officials overseas who challenged her rapacious elite. Is it really a stretch to imagine that policy extending to domestic politics?
The connection between Bush and Edwin Pauley is especially telling. Pauley had been a Dulles spy in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. With the fall of Nazi Germany, Truman made him U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, which put him in a unique position to negotiate the Yalta reparations to the benefit of Dulles’ wealthy clientele. He was also in a unique position to distract the Soviets long enough for the Dulles brothers to sneak their ill-gotten Nazi gains out of Berlin. And his efforts didn’t go unnoticed. After successfully keeping the Nazi riches in Nazi hands (Dulles), Pauley was sent to Japan to do likewise.
In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum with Howard Hughes and expanded his offshore oil production to Mexico. And in Mexico he laundered CIA money and created slush funds for campaign contributions through the country’s oil monopoly, Pemex, and pumped oil for pennies on the dollar. In fact, it was Pauley who originated the use of Mexican oil fronts for the slush funds that Richard Nixon used for his dirty deeds―a fact Nixon tried to hide by invoking “national security.” And who was Pauley associated with? He was associated with Bush through Zapata and Pemago Oil in 1960 (which, too, served as a front for the Bay of Pigs) and through deals he cut in Mexico. In fact, it was those Mexican deals that rocketed Bush into the political limelight and established him as a protégé of Richard Nixon.
In 1964, when Bush lost his bid for the Senate, Nixon was there. And in 1972, when Nixon surrounded himself with only his most devoted loyalists, he instructed John Ehrlichman, “Eliminate everyone except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.”
Interesting choice of words, wouldn't you say? "Cause?"
As head of the Republican National Committee, Bush was instrumental in pressing “ethnic émigrés” into service for that “cause” through the Republican Party’s National Heritage Groups Council. That council included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic organizers, including various Nazi émigrés brought into the United States by the Dulles brothers. One of them, Lazlo Pasztor (who served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government embassy in Berlin during the war) became a leader in Bush’s ethnic outreach arm, The Coalition of American Nationalities, during his presidential campaign.
Indeed, one of the main concerns for those in the inner circle when Nixon’s tapes were uncovered, was the chance that Nazi skeletons would be discovered in the Republican closet. There was also the distinct possibility that references to JFK’s assassination would incite a call to reopen the investigation and expose those same individuals. No doubt, this was on his mind when Bush advised Nixon to resign. And when he agreed, Nixon took his tapes with him, leaving historians to fill in the blanks.
As to our current Bush, the parallels to Hitler are compelling notwithstanding his IQ and seeming inability to complete sentences. Hitler was appointed in 1933. Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court. The Nazi’s burned the Reichstag to seize control by creating an emergency. 9-11 created a similar emergency, and evidence points to foul play. Hitler was granted emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag Fire. So, too, was Bush granted emergency powers through the so-called Patriot Act. Concentration camps opened just after Hitler’s rise. CIA camps were opened overseas just after Bush took office. The Gestapo was formed. So have all intelligence-gathering agencies in the U.S. been subsumed under military tutelage.
The signs are as blatant as they can be. The question is, is anyone listening?
Nefarious forces have always been at work in American politics. But those forces have become so entrenched in the national mindset lately that we find ourselves excusing things like torture and secret prisons, or yawning at the television when we hear that our mail will opened or our phone calls tapped because we belong to a church group or animal rights organization or some other collective that someone, somewhere considers a threat. This challenge to our fundamental system of government must not be met with complacency. Congress must act to assert its control over the Executive Branch. If not, our fate may be no different than that of our overseas brethren. And historians will be left to shake their heads.
Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net
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http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=BushCh01#WarIndustry
http://www.spectrezine.org/resist/bush.htm
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/timeline.html
http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/George_H._W._Bush
Amazing. Amazing this man has been "elected" twice without any of this coming to public knowledge and outcry. Thank you for compiling your impeccable research.
Posted by: Joan | February 06, 2007 at 12:31 PM