Chris Floyd was exactly right about Bush and his address to the Knesset, and you should read "Progressive Vision Failure: The Real Scandal of Bush’s Knesset Speech" in its entirety. Pay particular attention to what Chris has to say about the work of Will Bunch. I'll wait.As Robert Parry writes:
The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.Parry has even more detail on the connection between the Bush family and rise of Hitler and the state-sponsored evil we call the Nazis, and you should read "The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement" too -- especially if you have any doubt as to the correctness of what Floyd wrote in this regard. I don't mind waiting again.
There are ironies galore in this story -- which continues to reverberate despite its lack of newsworthiness -- and in the short time I have available I wish to mention a few of them...
The fixation on the "appeasement" angle -- the focus on one short passage of the speech and the interpretation of that passage as an oblique attack on Barack Obama -- is not only a "progressosphere" phenomenon, although, as Chris Floyd points out, this is the angle you will get from the big "progressive" sites. But it's also an angle that got substantial play in the mainstream -- and even the foreign -- press. I got tired of reading about it in the Washington Post so I turned to a Canadian television network, and they -- CBC -- were saying exactly the same thing -- and treating the story as if nothing mattered in that speech except the angle they were pushing. It seemed strange to me that these independent [sic] news [sic] sources should independently [sic] land on the exact same point and put the exact same interpretation on it. But at the same time other elements within the blogosphere were picking up on that loony-sounding point and amplifying it. Hmm.
The appeasement Bush decries is already happening. But it's Bush who is being appeased. His "commander in chief" presidency has not been seriously tackled by any Democrats, none of whom, apparently, want to end up like Cynthia McKinney, much less Paul Wellstone. (There are of course other reasons why Bush's policies have been largely unopposed by the Democrats.) So the "unitary executive" madness continues to deepen and there's no end in sight.
Bush is also being appeased on the international level, where his doctrine of "preemptive warfare" -- meaning the US can attack anyone anytime for no reason at all -- has the rest of the world scurrying for cover. Nobody wants to become the next Iraq, or the next Afghanistan, or the next Pakistan, or the next Somalia ... so they sit back and watch America destroy one country after another with barely so much as the odd "Tut, tut." (This appeasement is not new, of course. America has been destroying one country after another for more than fifty years.)
Historically speaking, the United States didn't exactly vanquish the evil embodied in the Nazis. The US didn't even vanquish the Nazis. They did arrange war crimes trials for the top leaders, but many of the second-level administrators -- the technicians of the giant evil machine -- were smuggled into the USA after the war and became the nucleus of the CIA. How very convenient is it that this is never mentioned?
The US didn't have a monopoly on the recruitment and absorption of German evil monsters, though: Some professional bad guys went to Russia and worked for the KGB. Others stayed in East Germany and became key figures in the secret police there. Others may have suddenly become British, for all I know.
We were told the Cold War was an epic struggle of good vs. evil. But what if it was a power struggle between two different brands of evil? What if our evil was just a shade more potent than the evil possessed by the Russians? What if we won the Cold War because we had more and better Nazis?
The only thing about the Holocaust that matters to the Knesset is the political cover it gives Israel. Because of the anti-Semitism displayed before and during World War II, Israel can now do anything it wants to do, as long as the Americans don't object too strenuously. And the US almost never objects -- strenuously or otherwise.
With their veto power in the UN Security Council, the Americans can protect Israel from the indignation of the rest of the world, and they do -- every time. So when Bush appears before the Knesset and talks about the evils of appeasement, he's really giving the aggressive Israelis a clear signal that the aggressive Americans still support them to the hilt. Some analysts say the speech encouraged Israel to attack Iran if the Americans don't do it themselves, or if they don't do it soon enough. Thus the American hawks are actually Israel's Number One appeasers in this regard.
There's an interesting parallel between the militarized industrialized Nazis proclaiming "God is with us" while persecuting stateless defenseless Jews ... and the militarized industrialized Israelis claiming to be God's chosen people while persecuting stateless defenseless Palestinians ... and the militarized industrialized United States where the culture is rife with mutant militant Christianity and the prevailing mentality looks approvingly on a nation that wages war wherever it wants, whenever its unelected president says God tells him to smite somebody.
But the experts in the national media don't want to talk about any of this, any more than they want to talk about how the Bush family facilitated the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. And the progressosphere wants the very same thing. Hmmm. Once again. Hmmmmmm.
I've said for a few years now that all the big "liberal" or "progressive" blogs are running psy-ops. Saying things like this brands me as a "conspiracy theorist". But on the other hand you can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that president Bush's grandfather helped to facilitate the rise of Adolph Hitler. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that 9/11 was an inside job. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that John Kennedy was killed as part of a military coup supported by elements deep within the American power structure. There are a number of other things you can say which are obviously true, any one of which will get you branded as a "conspiracy theorist", which is beginning to seem like a compliment.
So here's my question: Who issues the talking points to the Washington Post and the CBC and Atrios and Digby and Will Bunch? Who feeds the American media, the international media, and all the prog-bloggers to the extent that they can all be found saying the very same thing at the very same time?
Who tells them all:
"This is the passage to concentrate on. This is where Bush attacks Obama. Nothing like this has ever been done before. This is worse than torture. This is worse than indefinite incarceration without charge or trial. This is worse than a war of choice based on lies which has killed more than a million people. When I snap my fingers, you will open your eyes, and you will forget this conversation ever happened."Who tells them? That's what I want to know.
I promise I'll be polite about it. I won't mention any of the ways in which Israeli and American policies and tactics mimic the policies and tactics employed by Hitler and the Nazis. I won't mention the Reichstag Fire and 9/11 and how similar they appear from a certain perspective. I won't say anything at all about Hitler's Enabling Act and Bush's PATRIOT Act. I won't talk about unprovoked attacks on non-threatening foreign countries. And I won't mention any other false-flag attacks that were staged in order to mobilize political support for war.
... because we all know that it's OK to kill millions of people, provided they're not ours (we can only kill thousands of ours), but it's considered impolite to ask questions about it.
And I would never wish to be impolite. Not in the Valley of Endless Spin.