America: A new Roman empire? by Jonathan Freedland

They came, they saw, they conquered. Now the United States dominates the world. With the rise of the New Age Roman empire, Jonathan Freedland asks how long before the fall?

The word of the hour is empire. As the United States marches to war, no other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the scale of its ambition. "Sole superpower" is accurate enough, but seems oddly modest. "Hyperpower" might appeal to the French; "hegemon" is favoured by academics. But empire is the big one, the gorilla of geopolitical designations - and suddenly the US is bearing its name.

Of course, enemies of the US have shaken their fist at its "imperialism" for decades: they are doing it again now, as Washington wages a global "war against terror" and braces itself for a campaign aimed at "regime change" in a foreign, sovereign state. What is more surprising, and much newer, is that the notion of a US empire has suddenly become a live debate inside the US. And not just among Europhile liberals either, but across the range - from left to right.

Today a liberal dissenter such as Gore Vidal, who called his most recent collection of essays on the US The Last Empire, finds an ally in the likes of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who earlier this year told The New York Times, "People are coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'." He argued that Americans should admit the truth and face up to their responsibilities as the undisputed masters of the world. And it wasn't any old empire he had in mind. "The fact is, no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman empire."

But is the comparison apt? Are the Americans the new Romans?

The most obvious similarity is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest budgets and finest equipment the world had seen. No-one else came close. The US is just as dominant - its defence budget will soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries combined, allowing it to deploy forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in its technological lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival.

There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or Guam, the US does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans did. There are no American consuls or viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.

But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of conquering and colonising. For some historians, the founding of America and its 19th-century push westward were no less an exercise in empire building than Rome's drive to take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took on the Gauls - bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them - American pioneers battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux.

"From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation," says Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

More to the point, the US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40 countries - giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases are today's version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as "forward deployment", says Johnson, but colonies are what they are. On this definition, there is almost no place outside America's reach.

So the US may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the US approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done - and today's Americans follow it religiously.

Lesson one in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a realisation that it is not enough to have great military strength: the rest of the world must know that strength - and fear it. The Romans used the propaganda technique of their time - gladiatorial games in the Colosseum - to show the world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news coverage of US military operations, including video footage of smart bombs scoring direct hits, or Hollywood shoot-'em-ups at the multiplex serve the same function. Both tell the world: this empire is too tough to beat.

The US has learned a second lesson from Rome, realising the centrality of technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds - rates that would not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example of how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome commercially.

Today those highways find their counterpart in the information superhighway: the Internet also began as a military tool, devised by the US Defence Department, and now stands at the heart of American commerce. In the process, it is making English the Latin of its day - a language spoken across the globe. The US is proving what the Romans already knew: that once an empire is a world leader in one sphere, it soon dominates in every other.

But it is not just specific tips that the US seems to have picked up from its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire that echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it was to last, a world power needed to practise both hard imperialism, the business of winning wars and invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political tricks that worked not to win power but to keep it.

So Rome's greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through its power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating - never realising that these were the symbols of their "enslavement".

Today the US offers the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural package, a cluster of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform. It's not togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage, the global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.

When the process works, you don't even have to resort to direct force; it is possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states. This is a favourite technique for the contemporary US - no need for colonies when you have the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job for you - but the Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever they could. The English know all about it.

One of the most loyal of client kings, Togidubnus, ruled in the southern England of the first century AD.

Togidubnus did not let his masters down. When Boadicea led her uprising against the Roman occupation in AD60, she made great advances in Colchester, St Albans and London - but not Sussex. Historians now think that was because Togidubnus kept the native Britons under him in line. Just as Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf have kept the lid on anti-American feeling in Egypt and Pakistan, Togidubnus did the job for Rome nearly two millennia ago.

Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the borders. Some accounts suggest that the rebels were not always fundamentally anti-Roman; they merely wanted to share in the privileges and affluence of Roman life. If that has a familiar ring, consider this: several of the enemies who rose up against Rome are thought to have been men previously nurtured by the empire to serve as pliant allies. Need one mention former US protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

Rome even had its own 9/11 moment. In the 80s BC, Hellenistic king Mithridates called on his followers to kill all Roman citizens in their midst, naming a specific day for the slaughter.

They heeded the call and killed 80,000 Romans in local communities across Greece. "The Romans were incredibly shocked by this," says the ancient historian Jeremy Paterson, of Newcastle University, England. "It's a little bit like the statements in so many of the American newspapers since September 11: 'Why are we hated so much?"'

Internally, too, today's US would strike many Romans as familiar terrain. America's mythologising of its past - its casting of founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence - is very Roman.

That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course - starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Most would deny it. But that may come down to the US's founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they cannot quite accept their current role as master.

One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from beginning to middle to end.

"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says the Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a non-territorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders, what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman empire."

Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch. But it's just as possible that the US is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it?

Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.

Beyond the Drumbeat: Iraq, Preventive War, ‘Old Europe’ by Arno J. Mayer

Published in Monthly Review, March 2003

Arno J. Mayer is Professor Emeritus of history at Princeton University and author of numerous works including Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final Solution” in History(Pantheon Books, 1988) and The Furies: Violence and Terror in The French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2000). He dedicates this article to the memory of his editor and friend, Angus Cameron.

The letter of support, signed by the leaders of eight European countries last January, for the Bush administration’s inexorable push for war with Iraq was both singularly ideological and shortsighted. The list of values that the signatories claim to share with the United States is altogether unexceptionable: “democracy, individual freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.” But there is a crying omission: free-market capitalism. This omission is all the more striking since there is no fathoming the infamous terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 without bearing in mind that its main target was the World Trade Center, a prominent symbol and hub of globalizing capitalism.

It is no less striking that the signatories should still, at this late date, embrace the hallowed but highly debatable Cold War interpretation of the presumably indispensable place of the United States in the recent history of Europe: “Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity, and farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism.” The facts are that in both world wars Washington was an ally of last resort. In 1914–1918, as in 1941–1945, Europe’s blood sacrifice was immeasurably greater and more punishing than America’s. To be sure, the Allies might not have won the day without Uncle Sam’s intervention; perhaps one should recall that Washington’s contribution was primarily material, financial, and ideological.

Certainly during the Second World War the Red Army contributed infinitely more “blood, sweat, and tears” than the U.S. military to turning the tide of battle against the Axis powers in Europe. Had the Red Army not broken the back of the Wehrmacht in 1942–1943, more than likely the American-led landings in Normandy in June 1944 would have turned into a tragic bloodbath. Moreover, during that war, unlike the European and Soviet noncombatants who died in the millions, the United States civilian deaths were infinitesimal by comparison. This anomaly largely explains the avenging furor of Americans in the wake of September 11, which ended the self-perceived innocence of U.S. exceptionalism. Protected, as always, by two oceans, the United States means to keep its own casualties to an absolute minimum. It may even be said to be looking for, perhaps demanding or even buying, cannon fodder (and sinews of war and occupation) among both the cautious governments that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has labeled Europe” and the mainly eastern European countries we might call the “new-old Europe.”

Inasmuch as the eight signatories implicitly subscribe to the Bush administration’s loudly trumpeted and not so novel doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, they ought to remember that the logic of preventive war played a central role at two crucial turning points of the Thirty Years’ War of the twentieth century: in July–August 1914, Kaiser William II and his advisors precipitated war to forestall the balance of military power turning to the advantage of the Entente in 1917, when Tsarist Russia was expected to complete the modernization and preparedness of its armed forces; in the spring of 1941, Hitler rushed into war against the Soviet Union to avoid having to face Stalin in the spring of 1942, when the Red Army was expected to complete its modernization and preparedness. Since this history is as well known to the “new-old” Europeans—seeking to demonstrate fealty to their new American friends—as it is to the cautious schismatics of the “old,” both Europes might wish to remind their Washington colleagues that the logic of preventive war also significantly informed the preparation and timing of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. And they might want to remind Bush and his strategists that all three meticulously planned preventive wars had enormous unintended consequences: Verdun, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima.

It is a truism that the United Nations Security Council, to “maintain its credibility” must “ensure full compliance with its resolutions.” But that “credibility” surely must require rectification on another score on which there has been a crying omission or silence: since at least 1967 the Security Council has closed its eyes to Israel’s consistent violation, if not disregard, of successive UN resolutions. Could it be that like the governments of the old-new Europe-particularly the governments of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy, perhaps in an excess of New Testament charity, blindly side with Israel against the Palestinians in atonement for their nefarious role in the Judeocide? Needless to say, for its own political and geopolitical reasons the United States supports, not to say imposes, this naked incongruity, if not duplicity.

There is, of course, no denying or minimizing the despotism of Saddam Hussein and his regime. But America is known to have nurtured such Frankenstein monsters in the past, and today the world accommodates not a few such despots in the third world. This raises the question of why America, as it renews Woodrow Wilson’s mission to “make the world safe for democracy,” obsessively focuses on Saddam Hussein, portraying him as a crossbreed of Stalin, Hitler, bin Laden, and Satan. Surely, it is sheer hyperbole to claim, “the Iraqi regime and its weapons of mass destruction represent a clear threat to world security.” This characterization echoes yesterday’s demonization of successive Soviet leaders and their regime. Compared to the late Soviet Russian superpower, which between 1945 and 1989 was contained without recourse to war, in military and ideological terms Iraq is a pygmy.

If lraq’s economic base were the cultivation of tulips for export, rather than the world’s second largest oil reserve, the United States would turn a blind eye to Baghdad’s arsenal of weapons, which is not really all that much out of the ordinary. Ever since before the outbreak of war in 1914, control of the Mesopotamian and Arabian oil fields has been a major stake in the diplomacy of the Great Powers. During and immediately following the First World War, Britain and France all but divided the greater Middle East’s oil deposits between themselves, the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916 serving as a road map. Created overnight in the wake of the Great War, Iraq was the big prize, and it went to Britain. In compensation London yielded nearly one-quarter of the oil production of Iraq’s Mosul region to France, which secured oil-less Syria. London’s regional hegemony was bolstered by its continuing control of the Suez Canal and its mastery of Palestine.

The Great War confirmed that in times of war and peace oil was, in the words of the then–French Premier Georges Clemenceau, “as necessary as blood,” particularly for imperial Europe and the United States—what we know as the “first world.” After the Second World War the United States supplanted Great Britain as the dominant power in the greater Middle East. The inability of London and Paris to preempt Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956 not only confirmed their demise as world powers, it affirmed the consolidation of America’s military and economic hegemony in Mesopotamia and Arabia. With this region’s oil resources of greater importance today than ever before, the White House is not about to permit any challenge to its domination of the Middle East, which is vital to Washington’s imperial reach, including its leverage over the other economies of the first world as well as that of China. As part of the new power arrangements, Washington means to give privileged access to Middle Eastern oil to the United Kingdom, to the disadvantage of France and Germany which, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are the core of the authentic “New Europe,” whose economy bids fair to one day challenge America’s economic and dollar primacy.

There is a whiff of ideological affinity between and among the members of the emergent “axis of virtue” that proposes to fight the emergent “axis of evil,” especially since “New Labourite” Tony Blair’s support is strongest among Britain’s—and Australia’s(!)—Tories. In point of fact, the White House, perhaps mimicking the late Soviet Kremlin’s relation to its clients, means to preside over an aggregation of like-minded governments and submissive regimes (a veritable “fifth International”), and any country that refuses to fall in line will be excommunicated—or worse—for siding or fellow-traveling with the enemy. In this perspective, in the (not too likely?) event that they will stay the course, for seeking a third way Schroeder’s Germany and Chirac’s France might well become the functional equivalent of yesteryear’s Yugoslavia (which had been communist but outside the Warsaw Pact), writ large and strong. Tito redivivus!

At this juncture Iraq is not an end in itself: for the United States Iraq is a pawn, a way station in the evolving geopolitics and geo-economics of its imperial power. But for the genuinely New Europe it is a test and measure of its growing political and economic autonomy and muscle in the world system.

It is natural for America to try to head off or slow down Europe’s emancipation by rallying, in particular, the ex–Warsaw Pact countries whose first debt and loyalty now are to NATO rather than to the European Union. It is no less natural, however, for this union, which recently bid them welcome, to demand that they face up to their responsibility and make their oath. (As for England, perhaps it should not be discouraged from applying to become the fifty-first state of the American Union.)

Meanwhile Europeans, all too familiar with the wages of war, should remind Washington that classical cross-border wars, in the mode of von Clausewitz, are all but a thing of the past. As Israel is learning by experience, a war on terror(ism) cannot be won by bombing a seat of government, overthrowing a regime, and dismantling an armory. In thinking and preparing for tomorrow’s uncharted hybrid warfare, the European Union’s strategic elites ought to stress the importance of combining a new generation of military weapons and tactics with a new generation of political, social, and cultural policies without which the blight of terror will be difficult, if not impossible, to contain.

Evil Righteousness From Hitler to Abu Ghraib by Edward Jayne

www.dissidentvoice.org
October 12, 2004


Virtue, I think, consists of whatever is healthy for everybody concerned, pretty much as Jeremy Bentham tried to explain. More often than not it may be appreciated for improving one’s chances of survival, and of course it brings into play Aristotle’s Golden Mean--moderation as much as possible, even in one’s commitment to moderation. But the question remains, what of evil as virtue’s supposed antithesis? This somewhat archaic Manichaean distinction turns out to be of crucial importance to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and others of their White House entourage, so we are now confronted--all of us, it seems--with the hoary question how evil might be defined? I would argue that, if evil does in fact exist (which might not be the case), all evil acts, as opposed to merely “bad” acts, belong to at least one of three basic categories:

Erotic Monstrosity: the sadistic gratification that derives from inflicting torture and even death upon others.

Rapacious Monstrosity: the ruthless pursuit of gain for oneself, or family, or the cause one supports, and with total indifference to the pain and ruination brought on others.

Righteous Monstrosity: the zeal to destroy others who provoke one’s moral disapproval. One actually resorts to evil behavior in combating perceived evil, and this in itself turns out to provide excessive gratification.

These three categories reflect Freud’s useful trichotomy among the id, ego, and superego. And, as Freud would insist, they are relevant to both individual and group behavior, in the second and third instances involving entire nations as well as smaller and more limited circles of people.

Almost inevitably evil entails acts of extraordinary violence. The first category is obvious and applies to perpetrators of such crimes as rape-homicide. The second category applies to aggressors who are able and willing to destroy anyone who gets in their way or whose destruction is somehow directly or indirectly beneficial to their cause. And the third applies to those who are so dedicated to supposedly high moral principles that they take righteous satisfaction in the destruction of anybody who defies these principles. Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, Irish terrorists, Sri Lanka terrorists, Balkan mass murderers, and Hutu hatchet killers all fit this description. Patriotic triumphalists who rejoice in victorious U.S. wars abroad against insufficiently respectful non-western nations also fit this description, though of course on a relatively modest scale.

Believe it or not, Hitler best illustrates this third category, of righteous monstrosity. He also fits category 2 (rapacious monstrosity), since he was almost exclusively concerned with the benefits to Germans when he launched World War II. However, his most despicable crimes put him in category 3, since it was his warped moral righteousness that led to his “final solution” in eradicating Europe’s Jewish population. What was his motivation? Contemporary holocaust literature circumvents the issue by treating Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a kind of motiveless malignity. Studies published during the thirties, e.g., F.R. Benenfeld’s The Germans and the Jews (Ungar, 1939), shed light on Hitler’s feelings and intentions, but more useful yet are Hitler’s texts, Mein Kampf and Hitler’s Table Talk (Enigma Books, 2000)--the latter an amazing record of twisted political sophistication. What becomes plain is Hitler’s misguided confidence in his role as Germany’s savior--and therefore Europe’s as well--in the grand cosmic struggle against Jews and communists as well as labor unions, decadent art, and other transgressions against Teutonic decency. Hitler was convinced he was Germany’s most virtuous citizen, a courageous soldier who had won the Iron Cross once during World War I and perhaps should have a second time. He was also a teetotaler, a vegetarian, a lover of dogs and the opera, a book collector (with supposedly 15,000 volumes in his personal collection by 1935), a competent artist (better than Churchill and Eisenhower), and a sensitive soul who blanched at the sight of blood. His sex life was hardly sadistic, since he seems to have been able to consummate sex only when kicked by a female companion while he groveled at her feet. As an orator he inspired audiences with righteous enthusiasm verging on collective insanity; as a negotiator he shouted wily foreign diplomats into cowed silence. All others had to bend to his will as the inspired guarantor of a better German future.

Why then Hitler’s psychotic anti-semitism? Because Hitler considered Jews, comprising something on the order of 2 percent of German’s total population, to be greedy troublemakers who had profited from Germany’s involvement in World War I, then engineered its defeat followed by the ruinous Versailles agreement. He shared the common suspicion that the Rothschilds had financed both sides of the war and that Jews both caused and profited from German’s 1921 and 1929 depressions as well as its 1925 hyper-inflation. And he was angered by Jewish leadership roles in labor unions and the communist movement, the latter most notably because of the failed 1919 Spartakist rebellion led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Only slightly less disturbing to him was Jewish ownership of banks, major newspapers, publishing houses and department stores as well as the disproportionate participation of Jews in the stock market, the legal and medical professions, the faculty of major universities, and the effective leadership of the Weimar Republic as exemplified by Walther Rathenau’s dominant role until his assassination in 1922. Not to omit the Jewish leadership in philosophy (Husserl, etc.), fiction (Zweig, etc.), music (Schoenberg, etc.), psychoanalysis (Freud, etc.), popular entertainment (Brecht, Weill, etc.), and even the scientific establishment (Bohr, Einstein, etc.). Everywhere Jews were doing well, and the rest of Germany was not--or so it seemed to Hitler.

What was the basic source of these complaints? At the turn of the century Jewish exiles from Russian pogroms had doubled Germany’s indigenous Jewish population, and it seemed to Hitler and others of his persuasion that the two subpopulations in combination played a totally dominant role. This, Hitler felt, was totally unacceptable, and only he was in the position to redeem Aryan supremacy by eliminating Jews from Germany, indeed from all of Europe. If possible, he would deport them elsewhere, for example to Palestine, the U.S., or South America, but, when this ceased to be possible, he was willing to exterminate them in gas chambers, just as German troops had been gassed in the trenches during World War I. Hitler’s pursuit of this “final solution” became operational in 1941, when deportation was no longer feasible--and with horrific success, for even today all of Europe from Lisbon to Moscow lacks a Jewish sub-population large enough to play any kind of a cultural or political role comparable to before. One suspects Germany would be a more talented nation today if it had a sufficient Jewish population to help catalyze its potential.

Was Hitler evil? More than anybody else if in fact evil exists. In the end he destroyed tens of millions of people, both Jews and gentiles, and the overwhelming majority of his Jewish victims were ordinary people, most of whom sought assimilation in European society: teachers, musicians, small shopkeepers, workers, artisans, and mothers and children who were totally innocent of the transgressions Hitler wanted to eradicate. Moreover, most wealthy and prominent Jews had already bought their escape from Germany earlier in the decade. Those whom Hitler despised were therefore mostly gone, and those he destroyed did not fit his stereotypes to any appreciable extent. As a result, his uncompromising righteousness had no justification whatsoever and turned out to be a hideous crime against humanity. Today, few disagree with this assessment of Hitler’s status as modern history’s most evil public figure, but what is conveniently overlooked is that he was also at the top of the list as its most righteous person, since he took it upon himself to exterminate an entire culture that he considered to be evil. Evil he saw, or thought he saw--evil he became, illustrating category 3 that people obsessed with the issue of evil are only too capable of becoming evil once they take their obsession to the limit.

Also verging on evil were those who supported Hitler’s takeover strategy in Germany, including, among others, Henry Ford (whose photograph Hitler kept on the wall behind his desk), the DuPont family, much of the Readers Digest staff, the radio audience of Father Coughlin, and many German-American immigrant groups (see Georges Seldes, Facts and Fascism, In Fact press, 1943). Also supportive was the Vatican, as documented by John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, 1999). According to Cornwell and the many sources he cites, the Vatican played an essential role in bringing Hitler to power during the early months of 1933. Without Vatican support, the Catholic Center Party led by Ludwig Kaas would not have encouraged its voters to join the National Socialist ranks by March, 1933, thereby giving Hitler a sufficient plurality for him to be catapulted into the role of Chancellor. Moreover, the Vatican also induced the Catholic Center Party to capitulate to Hitler’s demand for extraordinary powers in the following month, thus forcing most of the rest of the parties except communists and socialists to join ranks with the National Socialists in accepting Hitler’s status as a dictator. Five months later, in August, 1933, Hitler repaid the favor by accepting a Concordat with the Vatican that gave German Catholics a variety of special rights, especially in the field of education. The architect of this strategy, Cardinal Pacelli, who later became Pope as Pius XII, was prejudiced against Jews (see Cornwell, pp. 74-75, 139-40), but he also shared Hitler’s aversion to communism and had no idea of his full intentions or the catastrophic turn of events that would follow. It can also be maintained that Pacelli’s ties with Hitler came to an end as early as 1936, when Hitler dramatized his rejection of the Concordat by prosecuting and convicting a couple hundred Franciscan monks on the charge of sodomy (see Joseph McCabe’s The Papacy in Politics Today, Watts, 1937-rev. 1951, pp. 41-47). Nevertheless, Hitler’s potential threat was already plain by 1933, as was his rage against Jews, and the choice to help bring him to power partakes of evil at least to this extent.

Today, paradoxically, Israeli Jews have become victimizers with victims of their own, indifferent to the impact of their expansionistic policies on Palestinians, as explained by category 2, and, as explained by category 3, finding righteous satisfaction in the destruction of those who retaliate against these policies with random acts of violence. Prime Minister Sharon typifies unconstrained rapaciousness when he suggests the “transfer” (i.e., expulsion) of Palestinians in order to confiscate their lands. But if and when his thoughts drift to the destruction of Palestinian society because of their violent opposition, he is putting himself in category 3, especially in light of a kill ratio well more than 25-to-1 favorable to Israeli Jews. And sometimes the slaughter is horrific, for example in the 1982 massacre of as many as 2,000 Palestinians in camps under the command of Sharon at Sabra and Shatila. Sharon later won a defamation lawsuit against Time magazine for having blamed him for what happened, but there is no doubt that Israeli troops permitted Falangist killers to enter the camps, that Israeli spotters watched the massacre with telescopes from towers at the perimeter of the camps, and that they continued to guard this perimeter in order to prevent Palestinians from escaping while the slaughter took place. Israeli headquarters were located adjacent to Falangist headquarters which directed the operation. The entire episode is nothing to be proud of, and current profiles of Sharon either ignore or gloss over the specifics of what happened

The recent conflict in Israel has been more Sharon’s responsibility than Arafat’s. With Sharon’s election as Prime Minister in February, 2001, just weeks after Bush was inaugurated as U.S. president, peace negotiations with Palestinians in Taba, Egypt, automatically terminated, as Sharon had promised the electorate, and a steady escalation in violence followed beginning with air attacks on automobiles occupied by PLO officials. While Palestinians have depended on suicidal bombings against Jewish civilians (the only enemies they could reach), Sharon has been far more effective, razing entire communities and destroying much of the Palestinian infrastructure, thus making negotiations impossible and permitting the further expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory on the West Bank.

When he came to power, Sharon confided in a radio interview that he largely agreed with the goals of his predecessor, Barak, but that he felt he could obtain more concessions from the Palestinians through renewed hostilities. This was supposedly to be followed by a “road map” more favorable to Israeli settlers, but when it came time to implement this road map it was decided there was even more to be taken. Today the level of hostilities has been brought to such an extreme that many Israeli support total victory, even the transfer abroad of Palestinians who are still in the process of being dispossessed of their lands, houses, and olive groves, not to mention their lives. Just as happened during the prolonged struggle between settlers and Native Americans across the U.S. through the late nineteenth century, the actual kill ratio between Jews and Palestinians tells an entirely different story from the propaganda of Israeli victimization.

The Vietnam war represented more global mixture of evil rapaciousness and evil righteousness, a “freedom loving” war economy pitted against an emergent peasant population willing to endure totalitarianism in their effort to kick-start a relatively primitive industrial economy. Again there was ample evidence of a willingness to kill and destroy much of a population in the grand strategy to defeat the supposedly evil forces of communism in every corner of the earth. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (a devout Christian, anti-communist and Nazi sympathizer during the 1930s) refrained from signing the 1954 Geneva Accords between French occupiers of Vietnam and the Viet Cong leadership under Ho Chi Minh, who had led the struggle against Japanese occupiers during World II. Dulles’s excuse was that the U.S. had no interest whatsoever in the Vietnam conflict, so it was unnecessary to participate in peace negotiations. Then, having bypassed diplomatic involvement, he rekindled conflict by imposing in the “free” portion of Vietnam (the southern half) a U.S. client government led by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese refugee on the faculty of Michigan State University. With U.S. support, Diem thereupon jettisoned a plebiscite election in 1956 as required by the Geneva Accords for determining whether to maintain its independence or join with North Vietnam under a communist government led by Ho Chi Minh. The reason Diem avoided doing this was because, as remarked by President Eisenhower, it seemed obvious that the communists would win by an overwhelming margin if such an election took place, largely because of Ho Chi Minh’s enormous popularity. Soon everything escalated into a major war in which as many as three million people were killed until the communists finally prevailed after the “decent interval” requested by Kissinger. 58,000 Americans also died, so the overall death ratio (inclusive of the kill ratio) may be estimated to have been something on the order of 50-1. And what do you suppose? No dominoes fell as repeatedly predicted by the most strident U.S. apologists.

“S-s-sometimes I-I-I th-think we were on th-the wrrrong side,” an ex-student of mine once explained to me over a couple of beers. He had been an interrogator in the Phoenix Program, having spent most of his tour of duty in Vietnam directing the torture of Vietnamese peasants for about three days apiece, after which his Vietnamese assistants would take out the prisoner and mercifully put a bullet in his head. Then the team would spend a couple of hours cleaning up the hut’s interior before the next prisoner was brought in. Less horrifying, perhaps, was another first-person account I heard, of a former helicopter pilot who gave himself and the troops he was ferrying extra protection by directing excessive machine gun fire on a quiet but potentially hostile village before landing on an adjacent field. The first thing he observed on the ground was a small child nearby who was hysterically screaming over the dead bodies of both his parents, who had been killed just couple of minutes earlier by helicopter gunfire. It turned out the village was “friendly” and did not need to be attacked, so these deaths were totally unnecessary. Of course this pilot was “doing his job,” “war was war,” and his orders were from above, so the principle of evil might not have seemed to apply. However, something very terrible happened, and he can be expected to spend the rest of his life worried about his role in the chain of command that made his performance acceptable but so very wrong.

Rapacious evil seems to have been primarily involved with the U.S. strategy during the early eighties of keeping Iran and Iraq in perpetual warfare in order to diminish their potential military threat to both Israel and the gulf states inclusive of Saudi Arabia. Today, everybody decries Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians and separatist Iraqi Kurds at the time, but few seem concerned that the United States and its allies exported many of these weapons to Iraq by the United States and others for this purpose. Nor is sufficient weight given to the presence in Iraq of approximately sixty U.S. military advisors when these weapons were put to use [see New York Times, Aug 18, 2002, and Washington Post Weekly Edition, Jan. 6-12, 2003]. Chemical weapons had been avoided since World War I, so it seems quite likely that U.S. advisors taught Iraqi troops how to use them and took the opportunity to observe their effectiveness in battle. So who was more evil, Hussein for having resorted to the use of these weapons in order to protect his regime, or those who supplied them to keep the war going and very probably to observe their use under battle conditions?

Nor can one forget that Hussein’s initial experience in politics during the 1950s was as an unsuccessful CIA hit man, and that his rise to power toward the end of the seventies was undoubtedly assisted by the CIA. Our present Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, actually visited Iraq twice as President Reagan’s special envoy after Hussein deployed chemical weapons in order to assure him of U.S. support despite official U.S. government press announcements of indignation. Rumsfeld even went so far as to announce that Washington’s financial assistance to Iraq was to be doubled, hardly a gesture of outrage in response to Hussein’s use of these weapons. What compounds this hypocrisy is that the CIA was financing illegal guerrilla operations in Central America at the same time by making secret arms sales to Iran that kept it sufficiently equipped to maintain combat against the Iraqi on equal footing. In effect our government was providing weapons to both Iraq and Iran to perpetuate warfare between them, but also, at least in the case of Iran, in order to subsidize an illegal war it was conducting in Central America. That a couple million Iraqi, Iranians, and Nicaraguans were killed resulting from this Machiavellian strategy did not really seem to matter.

Today, our government and its well “imbedded” media pundits (tucked in and kissed good night) make an issue of Hussein’s evil practices in order to generate public support for our current occupation of Iraq. We are supposed to overlook how this occupation also serves to benefit, (a) oil profiteers, (b) Israel’s geopolitical strategy of neutralizing frontier Arab states while Sharon escalates the war against Palestinians, and (c) all the military contractors (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) whose enormous income derives from our nation’s pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy. The Iraq boondoggle was also useful to the Republican Party in fall, 2002, when it drove from the front pages of U.S. newspapers the recession and Wall Street greed stories regarding Enron, WorldCom, and a half dozen other corporations. This it accomplished, simply enough, by beating the drums for patriotic support, thereby giving Republican candidates the edge they needed to recover the Senate and enlarge their majority in the House of Representatives.

And how could all this be justified? By the rhetoric of evil supportive of one particular axis (the U.S., G.B., Israel, and the “coalition of the willing”) pitted against another, the latter a random assortment of terrorist operations as well as a couple “rogue” states having very little contact with each other. Unfortunately, however, this concocted geopolitical strategy is now reaping its consequences in a real and far more terrible conflict (call it a “crusade”) between Muslim extremists and U.S. triumphalists who are almost as fanatic in their misguided patriotic enthusiasm. Iraq has become the battlefield of choice, and American enthusiasts and their reluctant allies now join forces in conflict with unemployed Arab youth from throughout the region who are outraged by the invasion and willing to join the terrorist cause. The medieval clash between two civilizations, Muslim and Christian, thus seems to have been resurrected, and with such fury that it will take many decades to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Now Bush apologists try to justify the torture conducted by U.S. troops and intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq. They argue that it was little more than fraternity hazing by a few sadistic hillbillies, and that few were killed compared to the victims of Saddam Hussein. None of this is valid. First and foremost, torture was specifically condoned at every level of command up to and including the White House in order to ferret out the leadership of the Iraqi resistance movement [see New York Times, June 9, 2004--also May 17 and 18, and June 8, 2004--also Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command (HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 4-5.]. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales is reported to have advised President Bush beforehand that there is a “reasonable case in law” that the intended level of torture is permitted under the War Crimes Act of 1996. Obviously, Gonzales could only have provided such advice if torture was under consideration by the White House, and his argument was flat wrong. The War Crimes Act specifies its subsumption to the Geneva Conventions, which preclude exactly the justification of torture offered by Gonzales and the legal staff of both the Pentagon and Justice Department. Contrary to their assurances, torture is indeed a war crime, and its definition extends to most of the interrogation practices recommended by Maj. General Geoffrey Miller based on his hands-on successes at Guantanamo Bay.

Administration apologists argue that only twenty or so Iraqi prisoners have died as a result of torture--relatively few compared to those killed under Hussein’s authority. True enough, but inhumane practices by Hussein do not justify their use by foreign invaders who attack and subjugate his nation supposedly to terminate these practices. Moreover, the whole purpose of torture by the U.S. military has been to gain quick access to information about the insurgency, and, if and when necessary, this has meant producing effects as close as possible to death short of letting it happen. The twenty or so who actually died can accordingly be dismissed as “failures” in this task, as compared to all the rest, who were tortured as much as needed short of being killed. Not surprisingly, sadism occurred typical of category 1, of course buttressed by category 2 ruthlessness justified by sufficient category 3 vindictive righteousness to sooth the ethical misgivings--if any--of troops assigned to interrogation centers. Maybe only twenty prisoners died, but hundreds--perhaps thousands more--were exposed to excessive pain levels as well as the possibility of being killed in the same manner, as they had already been told by their captors if nobody else. Photographs of dead bodies were actually circulated for this purpose.

Americans cannot be proud of this military “pragmatism”--especially following an illegal invasion justified by “cooked” intelligence solicited by Vice President Dick Cheney when he made his unprecedented daily trips between the White House and CIA headquarters preceding the invasion. Iraq’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a myth, as disclosed by U.N. inspectors preceding the invasion, but also as early as 1995 by Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, to U.S. intelligence. And no less mythical was the al Qaida connection except on the most tenuous basis, since Saddam Hussein, a secularist, and Osama bin Laden, a devout fundamentalist Muslim, avoided dealing with each other. Moreover, Iraq’s tank corps was half its size in 1991, and its air force was defunct. If anything, Iraq was chosen to be attacked, as Paul Wolfowitz is said to have recommended on a confidential basis, not because it posed a military threat, but precisely because it could be defeated without much trouble. It was ripe for the taking, and its inflated military posture to disguise its weakness could be used to justify its invasion. Afterwards, quite aside from its oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia, it could be transformed into a democratic paradise to inspire surrounding nations mired in poverty and misguided hostility to Israel. Toward this pseudo-Utopian end, we have killed as between 10,000 and 40,000 Iraqi (the latter giving us a roughly 40-1 kill ratio advantage), though we cannot be certain exactly how many have died, since the Pentagon understandably refrains from tracking this statistic for the media. Reconstruction is promised to repair the damage we have produced, but as much as possible funded by Iraqi oil profits siphoned off to swell the net income of opportunistic U.S. corporations, many of which profited from outfitting the invasion in the first place. As to be expected, they primarily employ Americans and others recruited from abroad instead of Iraqi to carry out this task.

And what kind of a democracy can be expected? As yet unacknowledged by the U.S. press, Iraq’s first new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, a thuggish former CIA associate, is reported by an Australian newsman, Paul McGeough of Sidney Morning Herald, who based his story on the testimony of two independent witnesses, to have used a handgun to execute point blank six handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners just a day or two preceding his ascent to office. This spontaneous act of “justice” is very much in the tradition of Hussein--all the way back to the fifties--as if a brand-new Saddam Hussein has been dredged up who is able and willing to support U.S. interests. And it is no less evil of both the Bush administration and American media, led by Fox Network, to have kept the American public as ignorant as possible of what has been going on except for the inexhaustible Panglossian distortions of military talking heads and “Happy Iraq” and G.I. Joe “patriotic commitment” stories.

Right now Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket, and most of the American public doesn’t have the slightest idea. Supposedly the liberators of Iraq, our troops have kicked in front doors, beaten up fathers in front of their wives and children, blown up automobiles full of families trying to escape gunfire, forced into unemployment numerous former government employees (troops and police included), turned prisons into U.S. torture centers, reduced the medical system to a shell of its former efficiency, and converted a large population of supposedly grateful liberated victims into implacable enemies willing to die in their effort to kill Americans. We have radicalized Iraq in just a year and a half, providing a magnet for large numbers of others in the region who are outraged by Arab television coverage and willing to martyr themselves in an international Muslim campaign to combat U.S. oppression. Suddenly we are the Nazi storm troopers, and most of the rest of the world shares this assumption, as illustrated by the very tepid response (as cold as ice cubes) that President Bush received for his most recent U.N. speech--less than twenty seconds of lukewarm applause just a couple hours after there was a standing ovation in response to a speech by Kofi Annan, the U.N. Secretary General, when he declared his opposition to U.S. policies in Iraq. And we are actually indignant because others don’t accept the violence we inflict as the unfortunate byproduct of what seems a grand and noble struggle to promote universal freedom.

How did all this come about? At least partly because President Bush has invoked the Manichaean struggle against evil in his effort to justify the invasion of Iraq. As to be expected, his colossal mistake (in the words of John Kerry) has produced exactly the abomination it was intended to prevent, and it might eventually bring the destruction of something between fifty and a hundred thousand lraqi citizens, real people and their children who deserve to enjoy life just as much as anybody else. U.S. patriotic macho-triumphalists might find satisfaction in our unstoppable military juggernaut against non-Christian societies that do not sufficiently appreciate the gift of democracy we think we can provide. However, our present quagmire in Iraq contaminates our national reputation both at home and abroad, and no less effectively than Vietnam’s hideous nightmare thirty-five years ago. Once again we have become a nation to be feared, and Vietnam turns out to have been a precursor of future transgressions rather than a forgivable mistake to be chalked up to an earlier generation. Evil righteousness once again thrives, and it will take another couple decades or more to recover our self-respect as a nation.

Edward Jayne is a retired English professor with experience as a '60s activist. He can be contacted at: edward.jayne@wmich.edu.

Edward Jayne is a retired English professor with experience as a '60s activist. He can be contacted at: edward.jayne@wmich.edu.

Other Articles by Edward Jayne

* The Illegal Iraq Invasion
* Georgie Boy: An Election Year Ballad
* 31 Similarities between Hitler and President Bush

A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People - Winston Churchill, 1940

By the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill SOME people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world. Disraeli, the Jew Prime Minister of England, and Leader of the Conservative Party, who was always true to his race and proud of his origin, said on a well-known occasion: "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Certainly when we look at the miserable state of Russia, where of all countries in the world the Jews were the most cruelly treated, and contrast it with the fortunes of our own country, which seems to have been so providentially preserved amid the awful perils of these times, we must admit that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli's confident assertion.

Good and Bad Jews.

The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified. We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation.

And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.

"National" Jews.

There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognisable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men -- good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent -- in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive.

At the present fateful period there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews, two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive.

First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, "I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith." This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the "National Jews" in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.

The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organizations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

International Jews.

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Terrorist Jews.

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

"Protector of the Jews."

Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, in relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offences against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalised their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms.

The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated. This is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime. It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.

A Home for the Jews.

Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project, backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement.

Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

Duty of Loyal Jews.

It is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. In this way they will be able to vindicate the honour of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.

But a negative resistance to Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest.

The Identity of the Bolsheviks of Russia

[Commentary: In an attempt to discover the answer to why and how the Nazi Party rose to power with such dynamic force and brutality, it is important to study the question of the spread of atheism in Russia through the Bolshevik Party, and Lenin's brutal policies for implimenting an atheistic Soviet state. The ensuing communist state was designed to develop into a universal, or global mission enveloping all nations of the earth. The reaction and enmity to the Bolshevik party by Europe and the US and Germany was a no less brutal counter revolution. By 1921, fourteen nations were fighting in Russia against the Bolshevik regime. As bitter horrors came upon Russia as a result of the tenacity and power of this party, Jews became the obvious object of scorn and scapegoating. This is clearly foundational in Hitler's rise and popularity, along with the ubiquitous fear, and eagerness to destroy Jews as a means of preventing the proletariet movement from spreading among godless Jews in other parts of Europe. The following information supports this postulate identifying the Bolsheviks as a Jewish society. It is in no means intended to inspire anti-semitism. On the contrary, it is meant to clarify who was responsible for formulating the kind of government that would bring bondage, misery, suffering and moral degredation, in fact, a global war against all those who believe in God. Was it the Bolsheviks who brought on the Holocaust? How many souls had experienced enihilation by firing squad, labor camps in Syberia, forced starvation and many other abuses, twenty million? thirty? The emotional, psychological, and physical abuse of the innocent resulting from Bolshevism left the West in a state of shock, fear, anger, hatred, and a pressing need to contain the spread of this madness. Did the United States and Europe supported the Nazi party to insure reparations for World War I, to protect business interests, and to contain the spread of Communism? Did the ensuing bloodlust, sexual crimes, idolatry, excess, and viciousness cause the Nazis to become as a rabid monster which itself needed to be destroyed? Who is ultimately responsible for the inspiration and financing of Bolshevism, Nazism and now Terrorism? -Wildfeather]

Revised 1-26-05

Most of the top Bolshevik officials in communist Russia from 1917-onward were Jewish by race/ethnicity. The few non-Jewish officials in the list below are specifically noted as being not Jewish. [Note on name spellings: Russian names are spelled differently depending upon the source, e.g., Yoffe is also spelled Ioffe and sometimes Joffe; Grigory is sometimes Grigori or even Grigorii].

It should be noted that most of the Bolshevik leaders who were not Jewish nonetheless had Jewish wives, e.g. Bukharin, Rykov, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kirov, Dzherzhinsky, Lunacharsky. As such, the Jewish taproot that ran through Soviet government from 1917-onward is larger than many people realize. Also, the term 'Bolshevik' is used rather loosely here.

1. Vladimir I. Lenin [1870-1924]: first Premier of the USSR; Marxist theoretician; a lawyer; founder of the Bolsheviks [1903]; supreme dictator of early Bolshevik regime; founder of the Comintern; author of the Marxist handbook "State and Revolution"; Lenin was one-quarter Jewish, and is rumored to have been married to a crypto-Jew, however, evidence of that seems lacking.

2. Joseph Stalin [1879-1953]: an early Bolshevik; supreme dictator of Soviet Union from 1927-1953. After V. Lenin's death, and prior to 1927, the Bolshevik regime was run by a triumvirate composed of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Stalin was the editor of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda ["Truth"]. Stalin was married to a Jewess, i.e. his third marriage, which apparently wasn't officially formalized. Stalin was not a vigorous supporter of forcing Communism upon other countries -- unlike Trotsky -- a feature which likely prevented a Soviet assault upon various Western countries. [Not Jewish].

3. Leon Trotsky [t/n Bronstein] [1879-1940]: Trotsky was a Menshevik; was Commissar of Foreign Affairs; supreme commander of the Soviet Red Army; member of Politburo; he rebelled against Stalin and his supporters and was murdered by Stalin for that reason. Trotsky strongly advocated the idea of global -- not simply local -- Marxist revolution.

4. Lazar M. Kaganovich [1893-1991]: a prime director of mass-murder for Stalin; held a series of vocations, including commissar of transport, heavy industry and the fuel industry; a Politburo member; he was Stalin's brother-in-law and also his chief advisor; many execution orders bore Kaganovich's signature [1], evidence that he had the power to order the deaths of civilians [2]. During the 1930s, he was in charge of the deportations of "enemies of the state" to Siberia; was nicknamed the "Wolf of the Kremlin" because of his penchant for violence. He was considered by many to be the most powerful and important man under Stalin. Died of old age in Moscow.

5. Grigory Zinoviev [aka Apfelbaum; aka Radomyslsky] [1883-1936]: great pal of Lenin; member of the Central Committee; chairman of the Comintern; member of Politburo; executive of secret police; first president of the Third International; A. Lunacharsky called him "one of the principal counsellors of our Central Committee and [he] belongs unquestionably to the four or five men who constitute the political brain of the Party."

6. Grigori Y. Sokolnikov [1888-1939]:a Bolshevik; friend of Trotsky; Commissar of Finance; a diplomat; member of the "Left Opposition"; Soviet ambassador to England; creator of the "chervonetz," the first stable Soviet currency; was part of "Russian" delegation that signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918; member of the Central Committee and Politburo.

7. Moisei Uritsky [1873-1918]: Uritsky was a Menshevik; chief of the Petrograd Cheka, in which capacity he ordered many people who opposed Communism to be executed as "counter-revolutionaries"; Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region; the commissar of the Constituent Assembly; member of the Central Committee; a member of the "Revolutionary Military Center."

8. Felix Dzherzhinsky [1877-1926]: a Pole; a high-strung fanatic; founder/director of the Cheka [All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage], which was later renamed the State Political Directorate [GPU], which later became the OGPU and then the NKVD [Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs]; member, Central Committee; Commissar of Transport. [Not Jewish but philosemitic and married to a Jew].

9. Maxim Litvinov [aka Wallakh] [1876-1951]: Soviet foreign minister/diplomat/ambassador; in 1933, he persuaded the United States to recognize the Communist Soviet government as "legit" -- thanks, in part, to America's president F. D. Roosevelt being part-Jewish; first chairman, State Committee on the Anthem [official musical anthems].

10. Lavrenti Beria [1899-1953]: member of the Cheka; later became head of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD] in Georgia, then later the NKVD proper. Beria had large numbers of prisoners executed [3]; was involved in the Atomic Bomb project in the USSR; [Beria was roughly 1/4 Jewish from his mother's ancestry].

11. Yakov [Jacob] Sverdlov [aka Solomon] [1885-1919]: member, "Revolutionary Military Center"; member, Central Committee; close buddy of Lenin; aided Lenin with Lenin's political theories; Sverdlov ordered the massacre of the Czar's family in 1918. Sverdlov succeeded Kamenev and became the second Jewish president of the so-called "Soviet Republic."

12. Sergei M. Kirov [1886-1934]; early Bolshevik; member of the Politburo; Secretary of the Central Committee; Communist Party boss in Leningrad. Stalin used Kirov’s murder in 1934 to justify the party purges and treason trials of the late 1930s. [Apparently not Jewish but married to a Jew].

13. Nikolai V. Krylenko [1885-1938]: an early Bolshevik; member of editorial board of Pravda; member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet; famous chess player; member of the Communist Party Central Committee; a military commissar; as President of the Supreme Tribunal he prosecuted most political trials in the 1920s; in 1931, Stalin appointed Krylenko Commissar of Justice; he was involved in the convictions of many Communist Party members during the Great Purges. [Not Jewish].

14. Karl Radek [aka Sobelsohn] [1885-1939]; early revolutionary; old confidante of Lenin; member of the Central Committee; an "international" Communist activist; a key player in the creation of the Comintern; a writer for the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia; participated in the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations with Germany; he also was active in Germany, working with Jewish-German Communist Rosa Luxemburg.

15. Viacheslav I. Molotov [1890-1986]: early Bolshevik; helped found Pravda newspaper; head of the Ukrainian Communist Party; member of the Politburo; Commissar for Foreign Affairs; headed a Politburo commission to "eliminate the kulaks as a class." [Apparently not Jewish but philosemitic; his wife was Jewish, named Zhemchuzina].

16. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko [1884-1939]: a former Menshevik; Chief of Political Administration of the Red Army; an unofficial ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Poland; Commissar for Military Affairs in Petrograd; Commissar of War; led the Red Army invasion of the Ukraine; led the attack on the Winter Palace; editor of the Menshevik "Nashe Slovo" newspaper.

17. Yakov [Jacob] Yurovsky [y/b/d unknown]: head of Ekaterinburg Cheka; "Commissar of Justice" for Ural Regional Soviet; the leader of the Bolshevik squad that carried out the murders of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918. The murder of mild-mannered Nicholas was carried out almost completely by Jews, including Goloshchekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov, in addition to Yurovsky.

18. Grigory Sergo Ordzhonikidze [1886-1937]; member of the Politburo; Commissar for Heavy Industry; helped solidify Bolshevik power in Armenia and Georgia; Chairman of the Caucasus Central Committee of the Communist Party; First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Communist Party Committee; Chairman of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party; became Stalin's top economic official. [Apparently not Jewish].

19. Genrikh [Henry] Yagoda [1891-1938]; a Polish Jew; former Cheka member; an officer in SMERSH, the Ninth Division of the OGPU, its liquidation arm; People's Commissar of Internal Affairs; chief of the NKVD; also in charge of gulag forced-labor camps. Developing fast-acting poisons was a Yagoda hobby; he created a laboratory for that purpose.

20. Lev Kamenev [aka Rosenfeld] [1883-1936]; member of the Central Committee; Chairman of the Moscow Soviet; member of Politburo; author of Marxist handbook "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," 1920; was elected first President of new Bolshevik government, aka "Soviet Republic" [Lenin was Premier]; was married to Trotsky's sister.

21. Anatoly V. Lunacharsky [1875-1933]; an early Marxist; Commissar for Education and Enlightenment; League of Nations ambassador; key player in persuading Russian workers to support the Bolshevik Revolution; was an author - wrote the "Revolutionary Silhouettes" of top Bolshevik pals; [Apparently not Jewish but married to a Jew].

22. Fedor [Theodore] Dan [1871-1947]: was a Menshevik; was a member of the editorial board of the Menshevik journal "Iskra"; was author of the book "The Origins of Bolshevism" [1943], where he claimed that Bolshevism had been chosen by history to be "the carrier of socialism"; but he was actually an opponent of most Bolshevik ideas; he was sent into exile in 1921 after being arrested; he was married to Menshevik leader Julius Martov's sister.

23. Nikolai Bukharin [1888-1938]: Lenin's chief Marxist theorist; general secretary/chairman of the Comintern; member of the Politburo; member, Central Committee; he was editor of Pravda and also Izvestia, a political newspaper; led, with Rykov, the "Right Opposition" to defend the NEP [New Economic Policy]; [Apparently not Jewish yet married to a Jew].

24. Nikolai Yezhov [1895-1939]: early Bolshevik; served in various capacities in the Cheka, GPU, and OGPU; was military commissar in various Red Army units; was G. Yagoda's deputy; People's Commissar of Internal Affairs; head of NKVD; was deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture for the USSR.

25. Mikhail I. Kalinin [1875-1946]; early Bolshevik; cofounder of the newspaper Pravda; nominal, "puppet" president of Soviet Union until 1946; replaced Sverdlov as Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party; Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

26. Isaac Steinberg [y/b/d unknown]; Commissar of Justice. Later brought Jewish-flavored radicalism to Australia.

27. Alexei Rykov [1881-1938]; Premier of Soviet Union until 1930; member of Lenin's Politburo; Commissar of the Interior; Chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy; Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars; led the "Right Opposition" with Bukharin to defend the NEP [New Economic Policy]. [not Jewish, but married to a Jew].

28. Matvei D. Berman [y/b/d unknown]: chief of gulag system and Deputy Commissar of the NKVD; brother of Boris.

29. Naftaly Frenkel [y/b/d unknown]: a director of the gulag prison camp system; Turkish-born; was works chief/chief overseer of the one-hundred-and-forty-mile-long Belomor [White Sea-Baltic] canal project in Russia, a canal linking the White Sea and the Baltic, built from 1931–34; it was created entirely with slave labor; 60,000 workers died building the canal, the project having a mortality rate of roughly 10%.

30. Adolph Yoffe [aka Ioffe] [1883-1927]: Commissar of Foreign Affairs; ex-Menshevik; close friend of Trotsky's; helped publish the Pravda newspaper; delegate at the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations; member of the State General Planning Commission; was later Soviet ambassador to China, Japan and Austria.

31. Lev Inzhir [y/b/d/ unknown]: chief accountant for the gulag prison system.

32. Boris Berman [ -1938]: served as the Byelorussian NKVD's Commissar until 1938; brother of Matvei.

33. K. V. Pauker [y/b/d unknown]: head of the Operations Department of the NKVD.

34. Aleksandr Orlov [aka L. Feldbin] [1898-1970]: member of the Cheka; advisor to Spanish Communists in Spain; commander, Soviet Red Army; later worked at the Law School of the University of Michigan in America [!].

35. Ilya Ehrenburg [1891-1967]: Soviet propaganda minister during WWII; delegate for Moscow in the Supreme Soviet; Communist writer; organizing member of JAC [Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee]; worked for Izvestia newspaper; performed research regarding Spain for the NKVD; author of book "The Ninth Wave," and winner of two Stalin Prizes.

36. Yemelyan Yaroslavsky [t/n M. I. Gubelman]; [birth/death dates unknown]; head of the Central Control Commission; apparently was in charge of stopping the Christian religion in Russia.

37. Pavel [aka Paul] Axelrod [1850-1928]; co-founded Russia's first socialist party with Georgii Plekhanov.

38. A. B. Khalatov [ ]; Commissar of publishing, head of food allocations in the Soviet Union.

39. Yona Yakir [ -1937]; Soviet military general; a commander in Kiev; purged by Stalin.

40. A. A. Slutsky [ ]; boss of Boris Berman [see above].

41. Semyon [aka S.G.] Firin [ ]; a commander at the White Sea-Baltic canal project.

42. Jacob [aka Yakov] Rappoport [ ]; a Latvian Jew; deputy commander at the White Sea-Baltic canal project.

43. V. Volodarsky [t/n M. M. Goldstein] [1891-1918] ; a Bolshevik; press commissar in Petrograd; Ukranian; lived in America for some time; assassinated.

44. G. D. Sachs [1882- ]; a Bolshevik; a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee which directed the Bolshevik takeover of Russia.

45. Dziga Vertov [t/n Denis or Dennis Kaufman] [1896- ]; involved in Soviet propaganda programs involving film/movies.

46. Mikhail Koltsov [ ]; a top Communist journalist in Russia.

47. Jaan Anvelt [1884 - 1937]; head of the Estonia government controlled by Moscow.

48. Martyn Latsis [ ]; top Cheka official; author of an early book about the Cheka.

49. I. A. Teodorovich [ ]; Commissar of Provisions.

50. Simon [aka Simeon] Dimanstein [ ]; Commissar of Nationalities; author.

51. Jacob Fuerstenberg [aka "Ganetzsky"] [t/n Jakub Hanecki] [1879-1937]; Polish; a top aide to Lenin and a key player in Lenin's rise to power.

52. Alexander Israel Helphand [aka "Parvus"] [1867-1924]; helped Trotsky develop the theory of "permanent revolution."

53. David Riazanov [aka Goldenbach] [1870-1938]; responsible for Soviet government publication of Karl Marx's literary works.

54. Mikhail Milshtein [ ] a military officer; deputy director of Soviet military intelligence during WWII.

55. Gregory Gershuni [1870-1908]; an early revolutionary in Russia; was involved in the assassinations of Russian political leaders.

56. Polina S. Zhemchuzhina [1884 -1970]; wife of Molotov; Deputy Commissar of the Food Industry; Commissar of the Fish Industry.

57. Nikolai N. Sukhanov [aka Nikolai Gimmer] [1882-1940]; an economist; a member of the Contact Committee; an author.

58. I. P. Meshkovsky [aka I. P. Goldenberg] [ ]; a member of the Central Committee.

59. David A. Dragunsky [1910-1992]; a Colonel-General in the Soviet army.

60. Ivan D. Chernyakhovsky [1906-1945]; Soviet military general.






[1] Kaganovich's signature as appearing on execution orders/lists: the book "The Black Book of Communism," Harvard University Press, USA, 1999, page 189, hardcover.

[2] about Kaganovich's crimes: Here

[3] Beria instigating the mass executions of the Katyn massacre: book "The Black Book of Communism," page 368-369, hardcover.

Sources for the above document include, but are not limited to: the book "Red October," by Robert V. Daniels, Scribners, 1967; the book "The Harvest of Sorrow," by Robert Conquest, Oxford University Press, 1986; the book "The Black Book of Communism," by Stephane Courtois et al, Harvard University Press, 1999; plus web searches and public library research.

WHO FINANCED HITLER

Read the Reviews:

Revealing work., August 29, 2002
Reviewer: Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews

Pool is able to give us a compelling report about who really financed the Nazi-party and why Hitler had friends in high places, and that despite the fact that many first hand historical documents disappeared.
First, there was the fear for communism (Fritz Thyssen, Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch, Norman Montagu of the Bank of England ...). These people supported Hitler's party to win the working class and the ruined lower middle class away from communism.
Secondly, his anti-semitism (Henry Ford). Third, his racist/nationalist stance (the secret Thule society: a group of lawyers, judges, professors, policemen, aristocrats, scientists and businessmen). Fourth, friendly régimes (Mussolini).
And last but not least, the donations of his party members and his daily newspaper (a milk cow).
Pool gives us a penetrating picture of the political/economical situation in Germany after the First World War: the unbearable Versailles Treaty, the poverty, the unemployment, the hopeless division of the political parties and the plotting of von Papen and his backers, who supported Hitler when his party was losing support, for fear that his followers would jump over to the communists. Von Papen thought that after the elections, he would easily get rid of Hitler, a terrible mistake.
Pool convinced me of the ease with which money can subvert the democratic process.
One of the more controversial statements in this book is the reason of the abdication of King Edward VIII of England: not because of Mrs. Simpson, but because of his pro-Nazi attitude. This statement needed more underpinning.


Customer Reviews
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prejudice, December 30, 2003
Reviewer: Cees Peperzak (Netherlands) - See all my reviews
The book obviously is written from the point of view that Jews were not to blame for anything.

A significant part of the book is dedicated to Henry Ford Sr.'s warnings about the jewishation of the USA.
I've read Ford's book, a summary of his articles.
The book does not incite against Jews, it just explains increasing Jewish influence in the USA since 1880.
A book as `From prejudice to destruction', Jacob Katz, 1980, Cambridge MA (Katz is an Israeli lecturer), explains why Jews after they had become full citizens in Germany, and even after they no longer were religious, still remained Jews, a distinct social group.
`Christianity and the Holocaust of the Hungarian Jewry', Moshe Y Herclz, 1993 New York University press, describes how in Hungary Jews monopolised the press.
David Sinclair, `Hall of Mirrors', London, 2001 describes how Roosevelt's behavior in 1918 Versailles was influenced by New York bankers, who needed German reparations payments to France and Britain, so that these countries could pay back the WW I loans.
Last but not least, the Malaysian president in his statement to the conference of the Arab League a few months ago said about the same as Henry Ford Sr. published: 'Jews rule the world, by proxy'.
But with the obvious pro Jewish prejudice in mind it's not a bad book; that Hitler was in close contact with Ford can be read in: `Rudolf Hess, Briefe 1908-1933, Herausgegeben von Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Einführung und Kommentaren von Dirk Bavendamm, München 1987.
Several letters to and from Ford are mentioned, also about matters that needed personal contact.



An untruthful and unscholarly book, September 17, 2002
Reviewer: A reader
This book was comprised mainly from speculation and from rumors without true evidence to support the claims that were made. The author has admitted to not researching nor fully reviewing the sources and archives listed in his works cited. If you want to read a truthful, honarable scholarly work pertaining to the subject of Hitler and his financiers (or lack there of), you should take you time and read Henry Ashby Turner's "German Big Business and The Rise of Hitler." Don' waste your time on this "get rich quick" book.

A must-read for anyone interested in Nazi history., February 16, 2002
Reviewer: J. Wilson "diatom7" (Felton, CA USA) - See all my reviews
Who Financed Hitler is well written and interesting to read. It brings out many facts not normally found in books about Hitler and Nazism. For instance, it explains that the Reichstag fire led to the passing of the Enabling Act which made Hitler a dictator.

Hitler blamed the fire on a plot by communists and had all 100 communist members of the Reichstag arrested. While they were in jail he had the Enabling Act passed by the Reichstag, which met elsewhere because of the damage to the Reichstag building. Without the 100 communist members present, Hitler had enough votes to get the Enabling Act passed.

Most texts on Nazism mention the Reichstag fire, and either leave it at that or just mention that the communist members of the Reichstag were arrested. They do not point out that with the communist members in jail, Hitler had enough votes to have the Enabling Act passed.

The book brings out many other facts about Hitler and Nazism that I have not seen elsewhere. The author, James Pool, is to be congratulated for doing much original research on the Nazi era.



Good starter book, May 8, 2001
Reviewer: A reader
The author makes numerous grammatical errors and misspellings, but that does not deter the reader from making the correct conclusion that Pool took some time to research this writing.

After reading this book I am wanting to read more about the subject and find more on the people who helped an uneducated man rise to power.


Finally some facts, February 5, 2001
Reviewer: H. Jonat Hecht (CA USA) - See all my reviews
The author points out that one third of Germany by 1932 is on public assistance allowing for one meager meal a day, due to the Great Depression, the following high unemployment and the extreme burdens of Versailles.The several city blocks long lines of soup kitchen recipients are well documented in numerous photographs of that time . The book details the results of the Presidential Election April 10, 1932 with a clear majority for Hindenburg. The Government of Prussia declared that they found evidence that the Nazis prepared for a putsch. Chancellor Bruening and General Groener ,Minister of interior declared the SA , SS and Hitler youth banned. The Social Democrats and trade unions supported banning the Nazi activities and President Hindenburg signed the decree, which officially disolved the uniformed Nazis. Nazis urged resistance and continued underground. These by German law illegal uniformed Nazi groups had 400.000 members , who furnished their own uniform. The German army had 100.000 men, which was all Germany was allowed to have according to the Wilson "Versailles Peace Treaty ",which was never sanctioned by the USA . So the German army was outnumbered 4 to 1 by the rogue Hitler troops. Now the following part is not mentioned in the book: July 20, 1932 Hitler troops came to Berlin and ousted by Military Coup the legitimate Social Democratic Prussian Government under Otto Braun .With these legitimate groups out of the way Hitler took over by dictatorship. Foreign business financed him. Hitler now had the money to create work and feed the hungry masses. On July 20, 1944 a last attempt of several earlier ones to oust the dictator Hitler and regain the legitimate government,failed. The leaders were hanged overnight. For details check Berlin Ploetzensee . Otto Braun took refuge in Swizerland and after the war ended he asked the allies to help him restore the legitimate government. The allies were not interested in restoring legitimacy. Instead the military occupiers of the German Reich by the decrees of August 1945 in Potsdam and March 1947 Allied Control Council abolished the State of Prussia ,thus cleared the way for the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 15 Million Eastern Germans, whose land was and to this day is illegally taken. At the same time a new Cold War was in the best interest of the allies economies. Again big business made policies and profits . The book asks the question "Who financed Hitler ?" My question : " Who financed all the 20th century dictators ? "