A voice from the past, William Shirer, talks about American businessmen's warm feelings toward Nazis

[geefloyd46]

This week the blog Naked Capitalism, which is a well written and researched blog, had egg on it's face over publishing a phony Newsweek cover praising Mussolini. Where the blog had to admit its mistake, maybe people would not have been less likely to believe Newsweek would do this if it wasn't for the country's past.

Shirer wrote:

At Garmisch I became so alarmed at the way that some American businessmen were being taken in that I gave a luncheon for several of them and invited Douglas Miller, our commercial attache in Berlin and one of the best-informed men on Germany we had at the embassy, to talk to them. He got nowhere. The genial tycoons told him what the situation in Nazi Germany was. They liked it., they said. The streets were clean and peaceful. Law and Order, No strikes, no trouble-making unions. No agitators. No Commies. Miller, a patient man, could scarcely get a word in.


In Berlin a group of American businessmen - Norman Chandler, the conservative owner and publisher of the Los Angles Times, was one of them-invited me and Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune to lunch in the Hotel Aldon bar. They were puzzled, they said, that the Germany they were seeing was quite different from what they had conceived from our reporting. They had never seen people so happy and content, and so enthusiastic about their leaders. They had talked to Goring, they said, and he had told them that we American correspondents in Berlin peddled nothing but lies about National Socialist Germany.

For an hour Barnes and I, tried our best to tell them the truth. "I don't think," I noted in my diary that night "that we convinced them."

I was rather puzzled that our American businessmen and our rich tended to sympathize with Fascist countries. I wonder if it was because the right-wing dictatorships claimed to be anti-Communist. (The play is still working in America in the 1980's, not only with our well-heeled men of affairs, but with our government.

William Shirer The Nightmare Years pgs: 207-208

Full article here: http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-voice-from-past-william-shirer-talks.html

[freshwest]

1. 'The government should be run like a business...'

Forget that liberty and freedom spiel, you might not be that high up in the biz...

[Warpy]

2. I was the first name on the library waiting list

when his massive work on the Third Reich came out. My mother joked that the books were bigger than I was and to date they remain the most impressive works on that era I have ever read.

And yes, business was ambivalent at best, hating the obvious insanity but loving the fascist oppression of the working class. They've always believed the man was the problem, not that the system itself turned brutally oppressive.

The man wasn't the problem in Peron's Argentina. Fascism was. The man wasn't the problem in Pinochet's Chile, fascism was. The same can be said for Franco's Spain.

Business has simply never admitted this. Unfortunately, neither has the Republican Party.

[annabanana]

3. Learn from history

or else, well, you know what.

[fascisthunter]

4. The Republicans seemed to like em too

gee, I wonder why?

[geefloyd46]

5. That period before World War II has been conveniently forgotten

or in many cases just white washed. You could have had no fascism without a failure of Capitalism but that has conveniently been forgotten.

[leveymg]

6. Much of the worst of Nazi Germany (race theory) and Fascist Italy (corporatism) are US imports

And it was some of the most powerful American industrialists, lawyers, and Wall Street bankers such as the Dulles Bros., Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker, Morgan Bank, Ford Motor, DuPont, and Standard Oil that financed the rise and rearmament of what became the Axis Powers. Without these Titans of Wall Street, there could not have been the Rise of the Third Reich for Shirer to write about.

These same men went on to sow and reap the fertile ground for the Cold War that followed. The tychoons and media barons that Shirer observed in their visits to Berlin (before and after World War Two - read the books, it's in there) weren't blind to the crimes of the Fascist powers, they were the same ones who had been doing business with Nazi financiers like Herr Schroeder and Fritz Thyssen since before Hitler. Shirer and the American Ambassador knew about it, and wrote about it, but were publicly ignored by most of the establishment because these same Wall Street Titans who had a major role in creating the Nazis also owned much of America, including its press and government. They still do.

[geefloyd46]

7. Thanks for added information and I agree totally.

I always remember when I first read this, many years ago, being stunned that they were so vocal. Of course once the war was underway and their were plenty of dollars to be made fighting it their earlier opinions were completely forgotten. It was like that segment of the population had selected amnesia.

[bemildred]

8. There has always been a faction of our ruling elites that has been fascinated by the Roman model.

(I know, I know, the irony. But actually I think the British model is more the idea, we are not very good at it either.)

But anyway, walk around in DC some time and look at the architecture, consider the "manifest destiny" meme, the constant wars of expansion right from the beginning, it all fits.

So anyway, those guys need to be kept far away from the levers of power, if you want to have a sane foreign policy.