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‘SUBHUMANS’ RHYMES WITH ‘INFIDELS’ Netanyahu, Obama, Iran, nuclear bombs,
and a new Munich Historical
and Investigative Research - 20 mar 2015 (
first published in Times of Israel )
“¡Israel must vanish
from the page of time!” --Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of
the Iranian Islamist State (1979) “¡Israel must be
wiped off the map!” --Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of Iran (2005) “Israel… has no cure
but to be annihilated.” --Ali
Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran (2014)
Santayana
was right: lest we understand history we are doomed to repeat it. So let us
interrogate this history and find the rhymes to grasp our moment: How could
Chamberlain vault over public opinion to commit his diplomatic barbarities?
Historians have answered this already. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(1960) William Shirer remarked that the Times
of London, “This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, …play[ed]… a dubious
role in the disastrous British appeasement of Hitler.” How so? By raising the
Führer’s prestige every time he
interrupted his violent tantrums to communicate his commitment to ‘peace,’
promised always in return for some license (to reoccupy the Rhineland, rearm
Germany, absorb Austria, consume Czechoslovakia…).[1] This media barrage gave Chamberlain
cover when he repeated each time—another
time—that Hitler could be ‘appeased.’
It
wasn’t just the Times. Neville
Chamberlain’s Conservative Party created, in the late 1920s, “ ‘a little intelligence service of our own’ ” that jerked
the conservative press around with a clandestine bridle every bit as short as
that employed in the totalitarian states. It was led by Sir Joseph Ball,
Chamberlain’s most intimate friend, as documented in research published by
R.B. Cockett in The
Historical Journal. Ball began extending his control over the rest of the
British press when the Great Depression called forth the so-called ‘national’
government, in truth conservative to the hilt.[2] According to Anthony Adamthwaite’s
investigations, published in the Journal of Contemporary History, by
1936 this conservative government had “the BBC… firmly on the leash.” That
was not enough. In 1937, with Chamberlain installed as Prime Minister,
Goebbels complained about remaining criticisms of Hitler still daring to rear
their heads in the dailies. Lord Halifax, foreign minister, “promised to do
all he could to secure ‘the cooperation of the British Press’ ” and rushed to
solve the problem with the owners of the Daily Herald, the News
Chronicle, the Daily Mail, and the Evening Standard. There
were “awkward questions” about all this in the House of Commons “[that] were
met with denials, evasion and ambiguity.”[3] One
newspaper went to extremes: Truth. Chamberlain confessed in a letter
to his sisters that “the paper was ‘secretly controlled by Sir Joseph Ball’ ”
(he had purchased it clandestinely). And “Truth,” explains Cockett, “as an expression of the views of Ball and
Chamberlain, seems to have differed little in its ideological content from
the professed prejudices and beliefs of the Nazi leaders.” In fact, “Truth
adopted an overtly antisemitic and racialist tone…, [and] any opponent of
appeasement came to be branded as a Jewish/Communist traitor to the true
English cause.” Naturally, “Truth also became overtly pro-German and
pro-Italian as Chamberlain proceeded in his search for a diplomatic
settlement with Hitler and Mussolini.”[4] And
in the United States? Historian
Frederick Marks points out in The Historical Journal that Franklin
Delano Roosevelt projected in public positions quite at variance with his
backstage dealings, producing a “gap between appearance and reality” that was
“very wide indeed.” To British ambassador Ronald Lindsay, Roosevelt confessed
that he would be the first to celebrate the success of British and French
pressure on Czechoslovakia, but that he would be impeached if the US public
came to know his opinion.[5] What
about the press? Hearst all by himself owned half of the US press, and it was
by “making overtures to William Randolph Hearst and other like-minded
businessmen” that Roosevelt had managed to get the White House.[6]
What did Hearst want? This was well known, because “Hearst’s editorials were
usually printed in all of his 26 newspapers.”[7] Consider
a few of Hearst’s opinions, compiled by historian Rodney Carlisle in the Journal of Contemporary History: 1)
Nazism was a welcome barrier against communism; 2) the United States should
not threaten Germany or support the League of Nations; 3) Nazi demands about
redrawing Germany’s borders were reasonable and the desire to unify German
lands quite just; 4) the reoccupation of the Rhineland was justified; 5) if
the Nazis attacked US navy ships, this should be tolerated if they issued a
sincere apology (!?); and 6) Chamberlain did well in giving Czechoslovakia
over to the Nazis.[8] It was not by
accident that Hearst was called “the keystone of American fascism.”[9] Support
for the ‘appeasement’ (is that what it was?) of Hitler was an Anglo-American,
and not merely a British phenomenon. In
our time US and British leaders invade Afghanistan
and Iraq creating voids that Iran is quick to fill. Now they rush to
negotiate with Iran that country’s development of nuclear weapons. In charge
is Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state, author of the deal that allowed
North Korea her nuclear bombs and possessor of quite some gall for scolding
the South Koreans who insist those bombs are unacceptable.[10] And
to all this, the respected press of our day, what does it say? On
November 2014 the Economist confessed that “Iran is hard to fathom,”
and that “journalists who have been able to obtain a precious visa still
leave with a sense of uncertainty as few Iranians feel free to speak their
mind.” Despite these limitations the British magazine, the most prestigious
in the world, the most influential with ‘intelligent’ and ‘educated’ people,
stated confidently that “The [Iranian] Revolution is over” and that “the
country has unmistakably changed,” flooding its readers with statistics and
anecdotes that speak to the supposed liberalism, modernity, and education of
the Iranian population.[11] However,
the nuclear agreement will not be signed with the Iranian population but with
the tyrants who rule it. In November 2014, when the Economist published
said piece, those rulers were energetically financing, as they still do,
terrorist groups with a genocidal and antisemitic ideology; prosecutor
Alberto Nissman was still around to denounce with
his own voice the Argentinian government’s cover up of the Iranian officials
responsible for the terrorist attack against the Jewish community of Buenos
Aires (85 dead and 300 wounded); and in
that very month Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’ Ali Khamenei’s issued a threat
of “annihilation” against the Jewish State.[12] One
has got to take this seriously. Ayatollah Hashemi
Rafsanjani—former president of Iran and father of Iran’s nuclear program—has already made plenty clear what that program is for:
“the application of an atomic bomb would not leave any
thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the
Muslim world.”[13] Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, orated
eloquently some days ago before the US Congress on the intentions of the
ayatollahs and the dangers of signing with them. The Economist replied with firm support for Obama.[14] As
did the New York Times.[15] Thus were we spoken to right before Czechoslovakia
was thrown to Hitler. But that wasn’t (not exactly…)
a free press. Have things changed? What does recent historical research
reveal on the influence of the Western power elite over the media? Research
by Christopher Simpson, professor of communication at American University,
documents that US intelligence agencies spent rivers of money to create in
the postwar—in a snap—schools and academic departments of ‘communication’
(and related institutes) and staffed them with the researchers who had
created the WWII ‘psychological warfare’ programs for the US government.
(McCarthyism took care of any dissenters.) This infrastructure “underlies
most college- and graduate-level training for print and broadcast journalists,
public relations and advertising personnel, and the related craftspeople who might be called the ‘ideological workers’ of
contemporary U.S. society.”[16]
There
is more than enough here for whoever sees in the press nothing less than
Power’s megaphone. It was Chamberlain who celebrated Chamberlain’s policies;
now Obama sells Obama. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. We should take
heed, because antisemites are dangerous to us all. In World War II more than
54 million non-Jews lost their lives. For Hitler we were ‘subhumans’;
for Khamenei, ‘infidels.’ Will the outcome be very different?
Related readings Why Bush Sr.'s 1991 Gulf War? To
Protect Iranian Islamism Will the US attack Iran? The religion of peace? Here comes the Muslim Brotherhood Footnotes and Further Reading [1] Shirer
WL. 1960. The rise and fall of the
Third Reich: A history of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Shuster.
(pp.287-88) [2] Cockett
RB. 1990. Ball, Chamberlain and Truth. The
Historical Journal 33: 131-42 (pp.131-33) [3] Adamthwaite A.
1983. The British Government and the Media, 1937-1938. Journal of Contemporary History 18: 281-97 (pp.282-85) [4] Cockett
1990 op.cit. (pp.135-36, 139-140) [5] Marks FW. 1985. Six between
Roosevelt and Hitler: America's Role in the Appeasement of Nazi Germany. The
Historical Journal 28: 969-82 (pp.973, 976) [6] Ferguson T. 1984. From Normalcy
to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public
Policy in the Great Depression. International Organization 38: 41-94
(p.80) [7] Carlisle R. 1974. The Foreign
Policy Views of an Isolationist Press Lord: W. R. Hearst and the
International Crisis, 1936-41. Journal of Contemporary History 9:
217-27 (p.219, fn.3) [8] Carlisle 1974, op.cit. [9] Lundberg F. 1936. Imperial
Hearst: A social biography. New York: Equinox Cooperative Press (p.343) [10] “Column One: Life under the US
umbrella”; Jerusalem Post; 3 March
2005; by Caroline Glick [11] “The
revolution is over; To come”; The Economist; Nov 1, 2014 [12] “Netanyahu: Iran’s Ayatollah Tweets That Israel Must
Be Destroyed”; CNSNEWS.com; March 3, 2015 - 12:15 PM; by Melanie Hunter [13] “Rafsanjani says Muslims should
use nuclear weapon against Israel”; Iran Press Service; 14 December 2001. [14] “The best of bad options”; The
Economist; Mar 4th 2015, 16:01; by M.J.S. [15] “Mr. Netanyahu’s Unconvincing
Speech to Congress”; The New York Times;
MARCH 3, 2015; By THE EDITORIAL BOARD. [16] Simpson, C. (1994). Science of Coercion: Communication
Research and Psychological Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press.
(p.3) [17] National Security Act (1947),
Title V, SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (f) y SEC. 503
(e). See
also: “Did the National Security Act of 1947
destroy freedom of the press: The red pill... |
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