All the President's Nazis: An Open Letter to Bush from Laris Alexandrovna

[Imperialist Watch]

May 15, 2008

All the President's Nazis (real and imagined): An Open Letter to Bush
from Larisa Alexandrovna (At-Largely)

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)


Dear Mr. Bush,

Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was
nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the
Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in
order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs
from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. Let me remind you, Mr.
Bush, of your words today:

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and
radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have
been wrong all along," Bush said at Israel's 60th anniversary
celebration in Jerusalem.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to
Israel's parliament, the Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland
in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have
talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an
obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of
appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Well Mr. Bush, the only thing this comment lacked was a mirror and
some historical facts. You want to discuss the crimes of Nazis against
my family and millions of other families in Europe during World War
II? Let me revive a favorite phrase of yours: Bring. It. On!

The All-American Nazi

Your family's fortune is built on the bones of the very people
butchered by the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the
Knesset who applauded you today:

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank
seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German
industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power,
government documents show.

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp.
(search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the
Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives
documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi
party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism.

--snip--

Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm
of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial
transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with
several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were
confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.

Union Banking was seized by the (US) government in October 1942 under
the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Oh, but there is much more too:

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush
family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially
benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war,
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action
in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary
Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under
the principle of "state sovereignty".

I cannot think of one Democrat who can boast this kind of lineage. Can
you? No, I don't think so. But you can lie brazenly and attack a
sitting US Senator on foreign soil by comparing him to Nazi
sympathizers? Let us continue down memory lane to help those who
applaud you understand just what it is they are celebrating.



The All American Traitor

You family did not stop with supporting fascists and Nazis abroad, did
they Mr. Bush? Surely you must know of your grandfather's role in the
treasonous plot of 1933 to overthrow democracy in America? Let me
remind you.

Grandpa Bush - that is to say, your grandfather - wanted fascism
imported into the United States, or as you now call this type of
transformation, "exporting democracy." Prescott went so far as to
subsidize a coup attempt in order to achieve his dream of a fascist
America (see BBC report below):

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by
right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling
President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war
veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most
famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea,
Maxwell Hse & George Bush's Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their
country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the
great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known
about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American

In other words, not only was your grandfather a self-professed
fascist, he was a Nazi sympathizer and a war profiteer who should have
stood trial at the Hague instead of buying his way into the US Senate.
He was also a traitor, twice over.

Now clearly the crimes of Prescott Bush are not your fault, Mr. George
W. Bush. Let us therefore judge your actions and words on their own
merit.



Iraq is your Poland

Your reminiscence today about the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany
should have been seen as your own condemnation of your own abhorrent
actions against Iraq. The morbid irony of what you said will likely
never register with your or your speechwriter. To truly grasp the
grotesqueness of what you said requires that you have both a
conscience and some understanding of history. We know you possess
neither.

I will therefore make your history lesson brief, but to the point. The
unprovoked attack on Poland by Germany was a war crime just as your
attack against Iraq - based on lies - is a war crime. This is not my
opinion. This is not a political attack. This is a fact. Consider the
words of the esteemed former chief prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials,
Benjamin Ferencz, regarding your war of aggression against Iraq:

"...Prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of
the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of
aggression against a sovereign nation."

Moreover, your reckless verbiage and partisan pandering using
something as tragic and criminal as Germany's war of aggression
against Poland is an insult to all victims of those atrocities.

My grandfather's sister and parents were having supper in their Warsaw
home when a German bomb erased them from this planet. Your evoking the
German atrocities against Poland in order to play dirty politics
against Democrats is as offensive to me as if you had pinned a
swastika onto your lapel.

Even your own words appear to be penned by Hitler's ghost all the
while you imply that Democrats are Nazis and/or terrorists - something
you have done over and over. Your lies and Hitler's lies even have the
same purpose.

When you, Mr. Bush, said "see in my line of work you got to keep
repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink
in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," were you aware of Adolph
Hitler's eerily similar statement? Hitler said "If you tell a big
enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."

Yet if words alone were your only weapon and words strung together
into lies your only crime, you might be seen as simply the loathsome,
unethical dilettante and despot that you are. Unfortunately, your
crimes are many and so similar to those of the Nazi regime that at
times one wonders if you are not yourself reenacting that very history
you used today as an insult against a political opponent.



Your very own concentration camps

You ordered the creation of secret camps all over the world and on US
territory where you also authorized the torture of countless men,
women and children is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,
international law, and domestic law. In other words, you authorized
war crimes.

We don't know the number of people you have had disappeared, tortured,
and possibly murdered. Although we have some idea of what these
numbers may be, I doubt the full truth of it all will ever be known.

In 2005, I had a CENTCOM document leaked to me illustrating that since
the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, more than 70,000 men,
women, and children have been detained at one of your various camps
Mr. Bush. We don't know what happened to them, if they were tortured,
raped, or murdered. What we do know is that less than 2% of those
70,000 had any sort of charge brought against them in a court of law.
None of those alleged crimes, by the way, were acts of terrorism. We
don't know if that 70,000 figure was the actual and full count of
detainees in US custody around the world in 2005. But it is safe to
say that in the last 3 years since this document was published, the
number of detainees has likely grown.

What we also now know, in great horror, is that at least one of your
camps had a crematorium in it, which some of the US soldiers stationed
there suspected was used for burning bodies:

"We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,"
Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing. We
just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been
people, for all we knew--bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It
had bones in it," he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey,
you're at war," he said. "Suck it up or drive on."

What we also now know is that Dick Cheney and senior members of your
administration carried out a plan of torture and abuse that violated
international and domestic law with regard to human rights, down to
the type of torture tactics that would be used against prisoners in
our custody. This plan, we now know, was approved by you.

Has the mirror cracked yet from this much fact or are you still
peering into the political sphere hoping to ascribe your own crimes to
others? It won't work. It never has and it certainly won't work now.
We know far too much about you and yours.

I could continue listing the litany of your crimes, both against the
United States and against foreign nations. I won't. We know what you
are and what you have done. Having roughly 1,000,000 dead Iraqis under
your belt should have shamed you into the parasitic hole you came out
of, attaching yourself to the blood of this nation and sucking it dry.
Instead, you parade around, the globe-trotting horror show and
anti-Semite that you are.

Yes, you are an anti-Semite

Would you say no, you are not an anti-Semite? Consider your own words
when you thought no one was keeping score:

"You know what I'm gonna tell those Jews when I get to Israel, don't
you Herman?" a then Governor George W. Bush allegedly asked a reporter
for the Austin American-Statesman.

When the journalist, Ken Herman, replied that he did not know, Bush
reportedly delivered the punch line: "I'm telling 'em they're all
going to hell."

Only an anti-Semite would think this type of humor is acceptable. Did
you tell the Jews of Israel they were going to hell? No, instead, you
told them that American Democrats are Nazi sympathizers and in an act
of sheer indecency, the right wing Likud party orchestrated the
greatest applause you ever got. For shame!

What this blind adoration finally proves to me is that the right-wing
regime that has overtaken Israel cares nothing for its people, its
heritage, and the tragic history that they now honor by applauding a
man whose family-fortune was built on the bodies of their loved ones.
Like their Republican (and Lieberman) counterparts in the United
States, Likud does not represent its people, rather, it represents its
owners. Likud has traded Israel, its Jews, their heritage and history
for the same golden calf purchased and sold by the far-right wing in
the United States.

I am ashamed of you Mr. Bush. I am ashamed of those who applauded your
political porn played out against the hallowed backdrop of the
Holocaust. I am ashamed of those reporters with you, who between them
could not muster the moral courage to call you out on your ugly
rhetoric and ask you about your own family Nazi ties. You are, sir,
the most abhorrent human being of my lifetime. I dare say, in the
lifetime of this nation.