2011 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Gage Skidmore. Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
Dec. 13, 2015
What if I told
you about a nativist rally in which a charismatic white man drew a
massive crowd of avid followers, using hate speech to whip them into a
racist frenzy before pledging to cleanse America of a foreign threat --
all while 1,300 local policemen stood guard outside the building?
You’re probably thinking: Trump.
However, the particular event I refer to took place on Feb. 20, 1939, at Madison Square Garden
where 22,000 frenzied members of the German-American Bund cheered Fritz
Kuhn as he stood before a 30-foot high portrait of George Washington
flanked by black swastikas, leading them in a chant of “Free Amerika!”
A U.S. citizen
who served in the German Army during WWI, Kuhn stirred up his loyal
supporters by “explaining” how both Lenin and J. P. Morgan were Jewish
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s real name was “Rosenfeld.” (Other
Kuhn-spread rumors were often aimed at the high-profile First Lady, e.g.
Eleanor gave the president gonorrhea -- which she’d “contracted from a
Negro” -- and visited Moscow to learn “unspeakable sexual practices.”)
Kuhn’s
proselytizing did not go unnoticed by the Third Reich; he attended the
1936 Olympics as an honored guest and met Adolf Hitler by special
invitation.
The Land of the
Free™, you see, has a long history of embracing and supporting fascists.
This tendency, ever evolving in sophistication, is mocked or ignored at
our own peril.
“America’s most powerful radio commentator”
Donald J. Trump is hardly the first wanna-be dick-tator to both use and
attack the media as a method of spreading his xenophobic vision. During
the Depression, for example, Father Charles Coughlin was preying on the
fears of everyday Americans. the Canadian-born Catholic priest rose to
prominence as a radio commentator with as many as 40 million listeners
on 47 stations.
“Coughlin
believed that Professor Felix Frankfurter and labor leader David
Dubinsky exercised undue influence on FDR,” says historian Robert
Herzstein. “He called them communists.”
When Coughlin was asked by a Boston Globe reporter to prove this allegation, the priest belted the journalist in the face.
While his
anti-Jewish attacks cost him some of his audience, Coughlin remained
popular and undeterred in his rants against the “Christ-killers and
Christ-rejecters.” In 1938, he reprinted the notorious anti-Semitic
tract “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his newspaper, Social Justice.
For his efforts, the Nazi press labeled Coughlin “America’s most powerful radio commentator.”
Trump with Wings?
While
Coughlin was creating fertile ground, Charles A. Lindergh, Jr. was
bringing fascism to the skies. Still wielding international clout thanks
to his Spirit of St. Louis exploits, Lucky Lindy received an
invitation to visit Germany in 1936 “in the name of General Goering and
the German Air Ministry.”
After touting
German air power, the Lone Eagle was feted by Goering and attended the
opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympic Games where he characterized
Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man” who’d “done much for the German
people” and helped make Germany “the most interesting nation in the
world.” On his next excursion to the Fatherland, Lindbergh flew himself
and his wife to Munich in 1937 for more aviation-related meetings.
“Lindbergh
returned to America to become an outspoken leader of the isolationist
‘America First’ movement, funded with Ford money, that tried to keep the
United States out of World War II,” writes historian Kenneth C. Davis.
Lindbergh, in one speech, told American Jews to “shut up” and accused
the “Jewish-owned press” of pushing the United States into the war.
In his diaries, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels highly praised Lindbergh, e.g.:
April 19, 1941:
“Public opinion in the USA is beginning to waver. The Isolationists are
very active. Colonel Lindbergh is sticking stubbornly and with great
courage to his old opinions. A man of honour!”
April 30, 1941:
“Lindbergh has written a really spirited letter to Roosevelt. He is the
president’s toughest opponent. He asked us not to give him too much
prominence, since this could harm him. We have proceeded accordingly.”
June 8, 1941:
“These American Jews want war. And when the time comes they will choke
on it. Read a brilliant letter from Lindbergh to all Americans. It
really tells the Interventionists where to get off. Stylistically
magnificent. The man has something.”
After America
entered WWII, Lindbergh became a target of derision. Because he had
sided with America’s enemies, popular opinion quickly turned against
him. The “Lindbergh Beacon” atop a Chicago skyscraper was renamed the
“Palmolive Beacon,” and the Colorado Rockies mountain dubbed “Lindbergh
Peak” was judiciously re-christened “Lone Eagle Peak.”
However, the
damage done to his image was eventually forgiven, thanks to his storied
efforts as a pilot in the Pacific war. In the end, Lindbergh’s
reputation remained intact.
“Part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich”
The
above quote is Trump, of course, but the predatory pursuit of profit
long ago transcended national borders/loyalty. The “very rich” were
doing their fascist thing long before The Donald got his first “small
loan.”
In the
decades before WWII, doing business with Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s
Italy (or, by proxy, Franco’s Spain) proved no more unsavory to the
captains of industry than selling military hardware to Saudi Arabia does
today.
“Many leaders of
Wall Street and of the U.S. foreign policy establishment had maintained
close ties with their German counterparts since the 1920s, some having
intermarried or shared investments,” writes investigative reporter
Christopher Simpson. “U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly
after Hitler came to power.” Such investment increased “by some 48.5
percent between 1929 and 1940.”
Among the U.S.
corporations investing in Germany during the 1920s were Ford, General
Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, and IBM -- all of
whom were thrilled to see the German labor movement and working-class
parties smashed. For many of these companies, operations in Germany
continued during the war (sometimes using concentration-camp slave
labor) with overt U.S. government support.
“Pilots were
given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by
U.S. firms,” writes Michael Parenti. “Thus Cologne was almost leveled by
Allied bombing but its Ford plant, providing military equipment for the
Nazi army, was untouched; indeed, German civilians began using the
plant as an air raid shelter.”
Occupied Wall Street
The
support for global fascism also included Sullivan and Cromwell, the
most powerful Wall Street law firm of the 1930s. Allen and John Foster
Dulles -- the two brothers who guided the firm boycotted their own
sister’s 1932 wedding because the groom was Jewish while simultaneously
serving as the contacts for I.G. Farben, the company putting the gas in
Nazi gas chambers.
During the
pre-war period, the elder John Foster led off cables to his German
clients with the salutation “Heil Hitler,” and blithely dismissed the
Nazi threat in 1935 in a piece he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1939, he told the Economic Club of New York, “We have to welcome and
nurture the desire of the New Germany to find for her energies a new
outlet.”
Little brother
Allen, who actually got to meet the German dictator, promoted the
post-war idea that multinational corporations are instruments of U.S.
foreign policy and therefore exempt from domestic laws. This concept
eventually took root in institutions like the World Bank, International
Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, etc.
Leonard Mosley,
biographer of the Dulles brothers, defends Allen by evoking the
all-purpose alibi of anti-communism. The younger Dulles, Mosley claims,
“made his loathing of the Nazis plain, years before World War II … (it
was) the Russians (who tried) to link his name with bankers who financed
Hitler.” However, in 1946, both brothers would play a major role in the
founding of the U.S. intelligence community and the subsequent
recruiting of Nazi war criminals.
“Import shock troops to help him run for president”
A
Third Reich supporter with perhaps the most similarities to Trump was
Henry Ford, the autocratic magnate who despised unions, tyrannized
workers, and fired any employee caught driving a competitor’s model.
Ford, an outspoken anti-Semite, believed that Jews corrupted gentiles
with “syphilis, Hollywood, gambling, and jazz.” In 1918, he bought and
ran a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which became an anti-Jewish forum.
“The New York Times
reported in 1922 that there was a widespread rumor circulating in
Berlin claiming that Henry Ford was financing Adolf Hitler’s nationalist
and anti-Semitic movement in Munich,” write James and Suzanne Pool in
their book Who Financed Hitler. “Novelist Upton Sinclair wrote in The Flivver King,
a book about Ford, that the Nazis got $40,000 from Ford to reprint
anti-Jewish pamphlets in German translations, and that an additional
$300,000 was later sent to Hitler through a grandson of the ex-Kaiser
who acted as intermediary.”
An appreciative Adolf Hitler kept a large picture of the automobile pioneer besides his desk, explaining: “We look to Heinrich (sic)
Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.” Hitler
hoped to one day “import some shock troops to the United States to help
(Ford) run for president.”
On Henry Ford’s
75th birthday in 1938, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme
Order of the German Eagle from the Führer himself. He was the first
American (GM’s James Mooney would be second) and only the fourth person
in the world to receive the highest decoration that could be given to
any non-German citizen. An earlier honoree was none other than kindred
spirit, Benito Mussolini… you know, the guy who equated fascism with
corporatism.
Trump 2016
I
could go on (e.g. U.S. support for Mussolini) but I’m hoping you don’t
need further evidence that fascism, xenophobia, and demagoguery are as
American as genetically modified apple pie.
What sets Trump apart from his predecessors is that he’s not siding with official enemies. He’s demonizing the already-demonized. He first slandered Mexicans, then Black Lives Matter. When his poll numbers rose, he raised the rhetoric to another level.
Once the United States joined the Good (sic)
War, the Nazi supporters discussed here had to become more covert and
publicly contrite. The average 1940s American was conditioned to
temporarily loathe Germans (and Japanese) thus, you’d win no votes extolling the virtues of Nazism.
Today, however, every time ISIS (or any such group) kills Americans or American allies, Trump’s support grows, with voters saying stuff like: “Even though people don’t want to hear it because a lot of what he says is inflammatory toward certain groups, it is the truth” AND “He’ll keep a sharp eye on those Muslims.”
To anyone consciously and intensely programmed to fear and hate Muslims (and most non-white humans), Trump probably sounds sensible.
He’ll stand up to the bogeymen and allow frightened Americans to sleep
at night. Decades of relentlessly effective military-industrial
propaganda sowed these seeds and now Trump is reaping the low hanging
fruit.
In 2016, we’ll discover how many bad apples he can find.
"The Secret Behind Donald Trump’s Popularity" by
Mickey Z. is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at
http://worldnewstrust.com/the-secret-behind-donald-trump-s-popularity-mickey-z.
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Created
Sunday, 13 December 2015
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Last modified
Sunday, 13 December 2015
Photo credit: Mickey Z. 
