Hitler won his war having left Nazi roots in the West

by Hans Vogel

Photo: Hitler won his war having left Nazi roots in the West

It is a historical fact that Hitler's Germany has lost the Second World War. But is it, really?

It may be dangerous to even question the defeat of the Nazis, since at the very least one runs the risk of being declared insane and locked up. After all, we have here a historical fact, whose “factuality” is so absolutely lapidary and evident as to be the cornerstone of the very world we are living in.

In 1945 absolute evil, incorporated by Adolf Hitler, was defeated by absolute good, represented by the forces of liberal democracy, led by the United States. Entire generations in “the West” have been instructed by their governments, their teachers, and by scholars and journalists what to think of World War II. The number of Hollywood films elaborating on all facets of the epic struggle between the United States and Germany is so great as to defy counting. For scope and intensity few propaganda campaigns can rival the US post-war offensive to persuade the world to accept its skewed version of history. Its results are impressive indeed: nobody in “the West” today will admit the undeniable fact that it was actually the Red Army that defeated Hitler in the most bitterly fought campaign in history. It can hardly even be discussed in an academic environment: its mere suggestion will cause contemptuous smiles and a loss of intellectual prestige.

Now that the true character of the US political system is increasingly apparent to the whole world, now that the parasitical nature of its economic system is causing ever greater numbers of victims, now that the lies that underpin the US domination of world politics are finally being exposed, the time has come to take a serious look at what the “US victory over the Nazis” has brought us.

Let us therefore consider some of Hitler's policies and compare them to present-day political practice in the US:

- When Hitler came to power in 1933, many German banks had already been brought under government control in an effort to reduce the effects of the world economic crisis. Through government control of the banks, the Nazis continued to influence many key economic decisions.

--The response of the Bush II administration to the credit crisis has been exactly the same, namely to nationalize the key banks.

- The Nazi economy was a war economy in that the production of armaments and the needs of the armed forces determined economic activity.

-- Under the administration of Bush II, the US defense budget has grown 75% and is about as big as the combined defense budget of the rest of the world. More than at any time since the 1950s, the US has a war economy. Moreover, war remains just about the only field of human endeavor in which the US still holds some competitive edge.

- Hitler brought preventive and colonial war home to Europe, after it had been practiced in Africa, Asia and Latin America by the great colonial powers. Hitler used fake evidence to justify his wars and provoked them by creating false-flag incidents. Incidentally, at the Nuremberg Trials, the very act of starting a war was judged the original war crime, the crime that cleared the path for all the other war crimes.

-- Bush II has started two wars in true Nazi fashion: no one has ever seen any proof that the Afghanistan government was responsible for the destruction of the WTC towers at New York on that fateful September 11, 2001. But the US administration has invaded and occupied Afghanistan and installed a puppet government. Bush II used fabricated evidence to justify a war against Iraq, invaded and occupied that country and according to recent estimates has killed a million Iraqi civilians.

- Domestically, the Nazi regime began a rigorous program of Gleichschaltung (synchronization, coordination), destined to bring all non-government organizations under state supervision, ensuring they would faithfully help fulfill official policies. Thus, the press and the education system were gleichgeschaltet, synchronized.

-- Today, non-government organizations in the US may not yet be completely gleichgeschaltet, but in actual fact, the educational system has long been synchronized, not to mention the media.

- All government policies were supported by a vast propaganda effort, ranging from the local newspaper all the way op to national radio and the Berlin UFA studios, the Nazi Hollywood.

-- The US “old” media (radio, tv, newspapers) have long since lost their independence. Widely esteemed icons of supposed quality and reliability, such as the New York Times, are little more than government mouthpieces. Hollywood regularly turns out films that support or at most seemingly discuss US policies. True criticism has no place and gets no funding.

- Any form of opposition was speedily and ruthlessly eliminated, forcing only a handful of courageous Germans to take their activities underground.

-- Today, the internet is the only place where any documented criticism of government policies is to be found.

- Hitler's Nazi regime created a whole new vocabulary, made up notably of a bewildering series of acronyms and neologisms denoting certain government policies, such as Volksdeutsche,ethnic German. Foreigners who dared resist the Nazi occupation of their country were branded terrorists and savagely persecuted.

-- In the US the love of acronyms may exceed that of the Nazis. During the US and NATO aggression against Yugoslavia and Serbia beginning in the 1990s, the Nazi term Volksdeutsche was resuscitated and transformed. Now it became “ethnic Albanian,” “ethnic Croat,” “ethnic Serb,” and so on and so forth: the Nazis would have immediately felt at home. As for “terrorists”, they come in as varied a garb in the US vocabulary as under the Nazis. Any Afghani or Iraqi who resists the US occupation of his country is a mere terrorist. Everyday speech is closely supervised by millions of citizens. Acting as an unpaid thought police, they see to it that no one strays beyond the confines of political correctness.

- Hitler being a fanatical non-smoker, a long-time vegetarian and loathing alcohol, he would tolerate no smoking in his presence and initiated a national anti-smoking campaign, the first ever.

-- Beginning in the US, a totalitarian anti-smoking campaign has spread around the world, changing sociability in all public places.

- In order to supervise the population and oversee the correct application of government orders on the daily and local levels, an elaborate state security system was created, with several competing security agencies.

-- The US has created a system of domestic security worthy of the most brutal dictatorship. There are at least 16 different intelligence and security services, employing unknown numbers of people, probably hundreds of thousands. There is also a nascent Gestapo called Ministry of Homeland Security. Today, no one can hide major secrets from the US government. It knows exactly what every individual US citizen spends and on what, it knows who he writes his e-mails to and what he writes, it knows what items he looks up on the internet and thus pretends to know his fears, insecurities, fantasies, everything. The government listens in on phone calls and has the means of tracking down the whereabouts of every US citizen using a cell phone.

Although not originally a Nazi symbol, the German armed forces were equipped with a distinctive steel helmet that covered the neck and the ears. The Hollywood image of the bad German is indissolubly linked to this helmet. Even Darth Vader, the personification of evil in the Star Wars series, wore a stylized version of the German Helmet. Since the 1980s, however, the US armed forces have been reequipped with a kevlar helmet that has an uncanny resemblance to the helmet worn by the Wehrmacht and the SS, thus its nickname “Fritz helmet.” Hence, not only has the US been acting like the Hitler regime, but even the soldiers it sent into other countries to invade, occupy, kill and pillage look like Nazi soldiers.

This summary list of “Western” analogies to the Nazi regime is quite disturbing. It suggests there is no essential difference between the US and the Nazi regime. Most US citizens today certainly do not think they live in a repressive state. Most citizens of Nazi Germany would have felt the same. Indeed, why should they not? After all, those who bore the brunt of the system's brutalities were not Germans but above all, foreigners in faraway places. Likewise, US violence is mostly directed outward, to places like Korea, VietNam, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

There is, however, one crucial difference between the US and the Nazis: the systematic persecution and mass killing of entire groups of people such as Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals and the mentally retarded. Although the US has been killing millions of innocent men, women and children in Asia, Latin America and Africa, it cannot be said that the killings took place in a systematic way or that these were committed in specially built “death camps.”

How come the US today has so much in common with Nazi Germany? Why have all post-war US administrations emphasized the differences with Nazi Germany? Why did the US fight Nazi Germany at all?

These questions are disturbing, but the answers are even more so.

I believe the resemblance of today's US to Nazi Germany results from the fact that like Nazi Germany, the US considers itself a country blessed with divine protection and with a permission granted by heaven, to ignore any and all accepted principles of civilized behavior between states. Underlying it all, a sense of frustration, jealousy and anger. The Nazis focused their hatred on the Jews, whom they held responsible for an international conspiracy that caused Germany to lose the First World War. The 1919 Versailles peace treaty humiliated and damaged Germany in ways no great power had ever experienced before.

The US has traditionally focused its feelings of frustration and repressed anger on Europe in general and France in particular. Despite all its efforts to be superior to Europe, even to be an “anti-Europe,” the US even today is still lagging far behind in the most important field: quality of life. The sense of being an exceptional country with a special mission has always been more deeply engrained in US popular culture than in Germany, where it began in the 1870s and ended in 1945. In the US, the sense of being a special country, a country with a mission, predates even its independence. When in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers founded a colony in Massachusetts, they did so in the firm conviction of being blessed by God. Their subsequent savage persecution and annihilation of the original inhabitants was also justified by invoking divine blessing. By the time the US proclaimed its independence, most colonists were convinced to be living in “God's own country”.

Whereas the US had defeated Japan almost singlehandedly in the Second World War, the victory over Germany, in which it mainly participated as a purveyor of weaponry and a destroyer of cities and art treasures, was much more significant from any point of view. Germany, technologically by far the most advanced country in the world was, of course, the real enemy. Its defeat meant at the same time the definitive elimination of Europe as a major actor on the world stage. This is why the US propaganda industry has made such an effort to present the victory over Germany as an accomplishment of the US, though admittedly with some help from their British friends. The logical concomitant of this falsification of history was to present the war in Europe as a struggle between absolute evil and absolute good. Hence also the insistence on the differences between the US and Nazi Germany.

As for the true reasons why the US waged war against the Nazis, these had more to do with imperial designs than anything else. Here was a splendid chance for securing the long-awaited dominance of Europe. It was only the Soviet Union that prevented the spread of US rule over the entire continent, at least until its own dissolution in 1991.

But once Germany had been defeated, how was the US to rule the world? From where should it get inspiration, ideas and technology?

Since 1898, the US had acquired considerable expertise in colonial rule through the administration of its own colonies (Puerto Rico and the Philippines), protectorates (Cuba and Nicaragua) and the bullying of assorted small Caribbean and Latin American states. However, it had no experience whatsoever ruling highly developed European states. It could only militarily occupy two of them, namely Germany and Austria, but in order to keep dominating the others, the countries until recently occupied by the Nazis, a different approach was needed.

Under the circumstances, to look for guidance at the German occupation of Europe was not such a bad idea. After all, Nazi rule in occupied Europe, though it occasionally met with stiff resistance, was by no means entirely impopular. Millions of Europeans enthusiastically supported the persecution, deportation and annihilation of the Jews, hundreds of thousands of Europeans joined the SS and fought the Red Army.

In its early phase, the Nazi occupation of Europe was sustained mainly by psychological factors. Dazzled by the shock and awe of the Nazi armed forces, most Europeans were too disoriented to even think of resistance and tended to accept the occupation of their countries. The Nazis had considerable success in acquiring a base of popular support by focusing public fears and anger on the Bolsheviks, since many Europeans resented the Nazis, but feared the communists even more.

After 1945, the US continued the Nazi propaganda campaign against communism and thus started the Cold War against the Soviet Union. While spreading the most outlandish and outrageous lies about the Soviet Union, the US began cajoling, pressuring and blackmailing European politicians. Presenting the Marshall Plan as a unique humanitarian program US propagandists, taking their cues from the Nazi propaganda minsiter Josef Goebbels, began to flood the continent with a incessant avalanche of disinformation that has not stopped since.

If Nazi ideas and political practice inspired the US, so did Nazi technology. Almost every post-war US weapons system has been inspired by Nazi examples or prototypes, ranging from anti-aircraft guided missiles, through flying saucers to stealth technology. Even the much-vaunted US exploit of sending a man to the moon would have been unthinkable without Nazi rocket technology.

To first defeat an enemy who has been consistently depicted as absolute evil and to subsequently use this very same enemy as a source of inspiration obviously gives rise to considerable psychological problems. The inspiration has been so strong that today the US in so many respect resembles its enemy of yore.

Hence the web, or rather the thick carpet of lies the US has been weaving with respect to World War II and the Nazis.

If tomorrow Hitler would rise from the grave and look at the world, he would be a happy man, but also a confused man. He would look at the US and see a country that had adopted so many facets of Nazi Germany. Why then, he would wonder, had the US fought his Nazi Germany? He would think he had won the war after all.

I am afraid Hitler would be right. He has indeed won the war.

In 2001 just after the destruction of the WTC towers in New York, Jean-Marie Colombani, editor-in-chief of the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde wrote in an editorial “we are all Americans.”

I am afraid, we in “the West” have all become Nazis now.