Like many of you, I watched parts of Vera Sharav’s new documentary series, Never Again is Now Global, this week. With its sharp focus on the Holocaust and Nazi tactics in general, I felt the need to reach back into some of my older research and remind readers who was supporting and enabling the rise of Hitler.
Spoiler alert: It is the same class of folks responsible for tyranny today.
What we’re taught about the years leading up to the Second World War involves alleged appeasement of the Third Reich, e.g. if only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the Axis powers could have been stopped.
Perhaps the first step in challenging this so-called analysis would be to demonstrate that it wasn’t appeasement that took place prior to WWII. It was, in the best cases, indifference. More often, it was a collaboration based on economic greed and more than a little shared ideology.
The pursuit of profit long ago transcended national borders and national loyalty. In the decades before WWII, doing business with Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy (or, as a proxy, Franco’s Spain) proved no more unsavory to the captains of industry than selling military hardware to Saudi Arabia does today. What’s a little repression when there are boatloads of money to be made?
In other words, when William E. Dodd, US ambassador to Germany during the 1930s, declared “a clique of US industrialists is working closely with the fascist regime[s] in Germany and Italy,” he wasn’t kidding. (more...)
Never Again? The Same Criminals Who Funded Hitler are Imposing Tyranny on Us Today
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