NEW YORK –
- Kate Green
It’s obvious to a lot of New Yorkers that
the Giuliani days of clean streets and police gunning down unarmed
black men are coming to an end under the uninspiring and often
aggravating leadership of Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
However, the legacy of “Benito” Giuliani remains in New York. It
is a legacy that, sadly, is currently sitting in the White House,
ensconced in the American middle class and is possibly the biggest
threat to the struggle to establish a democratic political
structure.
The legacy of which I speak is a political philosophy that is
deeply embedded in American cultural and political life but is not
often recognized. It is the legacy of a form of authoritarian
right-wing government called National Socialism, commonly referred
to as Nazism.
Unfortunately, what is not discussed in many of our history
books is that many of our influential political institutions, like
Giuliani’s Manhattan Institute, the Bush dynasty and American
industrialism are riddled with connections to the Nazi ideology and
the Germany hate party itself.
Giuliani drew many of his beliefs from the CIA-spawned Manhattan
Institute, which was not only inspired by European fascist ideology
and eugenics, but members of the organization also aided Nazi
criminals after the war in finding asylum. Giuliani’s targeting of
minority communities and his disregard for police brutality imposed
upon black men show that this institute’s Nazi leanings carried
over into his policymaking.
Grand-papa Bush, Prescott’s, and papa Bush, George Herbert
Walker’s, Union Banking Corp. was guilty of trading with Nazi
Germany in 1942, and took some hard hits from the Federal
Government for its treason. But it came out on top eventually.
Years later, the Bushes would secure a fortune through financial
ties to many Nazi institutions, like IG Farben, who supplied the
regime with death gas.
And we are seeing the influence today. We have already lived
through John Ashcroft’s Kristallnacht, where thousands of Arab and
Muslim men have been detained and even deported – denied the
American right of due process – not because of probable cause, but
due to their ethnic and religious affiliations, all under the
pretense of “fighting terrorism” after Sept. 11. As we saw in the
critically acclaimed CBS mini-series on the rise of Hitler this
summer, the Nazi regime justified curbing civil liberties in the
early days of the Third Reich by saying the new laws were to
protect national security and fight terrorism after the burning of
the Reichstag.
Also in the series, Hitler was cited as stating that any
opposition to his tyrannical measures would be taken as a rejection
of patriotism and disloyalty to the republic. Sound familiar?
It’s also well known that America’s most hailed industrialist,
Henry Ford, was a flag-waving fan of Nazi thought. But a more
penetrating insight into Ford’s legacy yields even greater concern
to the freedom seeker.
Fordian capitalism fused with America’s Protestant work ethic
has created a culture that forces us to put our work before
everything else, and we are taught that nothing but a devotion to
hard labor and seeking its rewards is what separates the happy from
the miserable, the winners from the losers. It sounds almost too
much like the proverb, “Work shall make you free,” which was
inscribed on the gates of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
It’s not a coincidence that this edict happened to be branded
onto a compound designed for the purpose of slaughtering whole
nations. The ideology that is so endemic in America to caste away
our desires, passions and aspects that make us individuals provides
for a society that in a cultural and spiritual sense is a machine
that systematically robs life from most Americans.
We also see overt Nazi outrages throughout modern American
history. When Martin Luther King sought to desegregate housing in
Chicago by staging a march through a white section called Gage
Park, the locals rebelled Southern style with excessive violence
and signs with swastikas and “White Power.” This is proof that even
in the so-called “free North” a challenge to the white hegemony
proved that many white Americans still harbored Nazi
tendencies.
We’d all like to think that America fought as Hitler’s enemy in
World War II as the good-guy. But under that war there were too
many hidden exchanges between the German murderous thugs and the
American elite that has left a scare on the face of what is
ostensibly the world’s greatest democracy.
Maybe I’m being a little oversensitive about the whole thing.
Maybe I get on this kick because I vote to the Left. Maybe I fear
our country’s dark political roots because I have family who
survived the Holocaust. Or maybe I’m just an American who loves his
liberty.
Paul can be reached at
“mailto:aspaul@umich.edu”>aspaul@umich.edu.