BBC: Bush’s Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America
BBC: Bush’s Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America
New investigation sheds light on clique of powerbrokers, including
Prescott Bush, who sought to overthrow U.S. government and implement
Hitlerian policies
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
A BBC Radio 4 investigation sheds new light on a major subject that
has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of
a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, to
overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based
around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.
In 1933, Marine Corps Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler was approached by a
wealthy and secretive group of industrialists and bankers, including
Prescott Bush the current President’s grandfather, who asked him to
command a 500,000 strong rogue army of veterans that would help stage
a coup to topple then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
According to the BBC, the plotters intended to impose a fascist
takeover and “Adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the
great depression.”
(Article continues below)
The conspirators were operating under the umbrella of a front group
called the American Liberty League, which included many families that
are still household names today, including Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye
and General Motors.
Butler played along with the clique to determine who was involved but
later blew the whistle and identified the ringleaders in testimony
given to the House Committee on un-American Activities.
However, the Committee refused to even question any of the individuals
named by Butler and his testimony was omitted from the record, leading
to charges that they were involved in covering the matter up, and the
majority of the media blackballed the story.
General Smedley Butler, author of the famous quote “war is a racket”,
exposed the fascist plotters but was subsequently demonized and
shunned by the government and the media.
In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter
to President Roosevelt in which he stated,
“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist
state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely
with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of
opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our
American ruling families are to the Nazi regime…. A prominent
executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that
he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into
America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.
Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing
fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended
aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to
keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the
fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists
ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek
recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government
compel them to comply with the provisions.”
The proven record of Prescott Bush’s involvement in financing the Nazi
war machine dovetails with the fact that he was part of a criminal
cabal that actively sought to impose a fascist coup in America.
Prescott did not succeed but many would argue that two generations
down the line the mission has all but been accomplished.
In his documentary film Martial Law, Alex Jones interviews John
Buchanan, who was instrumental in uncovering the documents tying
Prescott Bush to the financing of the Third Reich. Watch a clip above.
The subject is also covered in Alex’s upcoming film, End Game, which
includes rare video of Smedley Butler’s testimony.
Click here to listen to the BBC Radio 4 investigation.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/240707fascistcoup.htm
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:10 am
Published on Thursday, August 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent
by Alan Nasser
Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is
virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American
history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and
an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime
human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper’s magazine, will
sound an alert.
In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an
investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of
president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on
the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the
investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives.
While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including
The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after
the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was
the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that
prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.
The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members
of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed
hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist
coup in America. The owners of Bird’s Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz, among
others, totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street
financiers, planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely
of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force
behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might
generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to
sustain the new government.
The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement at the
stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have sufficiently disenchanted
the masses with FDR’s policies to make the coup an easy ride. And they were
appalled at Roosevelt’s willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies
that economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist departures from
economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could
enforce the kind of economic “discipline” that would reverse the Great
Depression and restore profits.
Interestingly, it was a military man, a prominent retired general assigned
the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after pondering
the grotesque implications of the undemocratic installation of a fascist
dictatorship in Washington. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.
The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the
anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this of
course would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other
anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some
ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people.
It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with
Communist-inspired sentiment.
And of course we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade)
member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to
watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades
were, his commitment (like Keynes’s) to the “free enterprise” system was
unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a
public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to
out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end,
class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee
cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.
Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S.
ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political
mobilization.
Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding
of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis
of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush,
grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had
maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government
of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class
conspirators a working relationship with that government.
While Bush-bashing is highly recommended, the implications of this
unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper than many of us would
like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to George W.
Bush’s commitment to the irrelevance of the Constitution, which he has
sneeringly referred to as “a piece of paper”, his corresponding contempt for
hitherto taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion of
unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political power and corresponding
bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy - there is the temptation to regard these
genuinely fascist elements as the most significant contemporary remnant of
the 1934 conspiracy.
But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal attempts to
educate the public to, and mobilize the population against, the fascist threat.
FDR stood down.
Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary Democrats do
sustain one of FDR’s least seemly qualities, namely his refusal to encourage
effective mass opposition to fascist and imperialist politics. John Kerry
boasted of having contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the
most recent round of crucial legislation regarding the war in Iraq, the
Democrats gave Bush everything he wanted. All the major presidentail contenders of
both parties support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated
the conceit that Uncle sam is and should ever be the global hegemon. And most
importantly, none has repudiated the Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the
market should be left to operate as “freely” as the public can be persuaded
to allow it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be
imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem with such
powerful global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities between
national classes and between the global North and South have widened
dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the
Mondale candidacy, no Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his
presidential platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since 1973, and the
distribution of national income between capital and labor has not been as
skewed toward capital since the Great Depression. But no member of either party
has made a major issue of this.
One of the most powerful obstacles to appreciating the relevance of the 1934
planned coup to our times is the virtually ubiquitous misconception that the
gross inequalities and anti-working-class policies now evident, and the
reckless carnage that characterizes U.S. foreign policy, is the result of the “
neoconservative revolution” ushered in by George W. Bush. But it was Clinton’s
cynical jettisoning of his relatively progressive Economic Stimulus Plan, his
abolition of “welfare as we know it” without providing a replacement, and
his ruthless bombing of Yugoslavia and “sanctions” against Iraq that both
foreshadowed and paved the way for Bush’s atrocities. The truism that the
Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the Republicans since the Carter
administration must not be forgotten. Indeed it is an understatement. To fully
appreciate the reality of democratic capitulation as an alleged “opposition party”
we need only reflect upon the consequences of Clinton’s sanctions against
Iraq.
Clinton bombed Iraq several times weekly for eight years. Defense
Information Agency documents, now available through the Freedom of Information Act,
reveal that the strategy of the bombing was to extensively bomb water
purification facilities and power generating facilities with the explicit intention to
spread diseases that would affect children. The idea was to pressure ordinary
Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, with the knowledge that if they did so, the
pedicide would cease. But Iraqis blamed Washington for this catastrophe, not
Saddam. When Saddam offered to accede to Clinton’s requirements for ending the
bombing, Clinton abruptly replied that no possible concessions on Saddam’s part
would lead him to end the bombing/sanctions.
Extensive investigations by widely respected sources, including the
distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, determined that the number of Iraqi
children who died as a direct result of the pedicidal bombardment was
467,000. And it added a fact unreported in the U.S. media, that the U.S. use of
depleted uranium in the attacks had resulted in the first known cases of breast
cancer afflicting four-year-old girls. When Clinton’s Secretary of state
Madeline Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl in 1996 on 60 Minutes whether she
thought that the removal of Saddam from power was worth killing a half million
children, she replied that “Yes, it was worth it.”
Is this qualitatively different from the death and destruction that Bush has
wrought? Of course not. The British playwright Harold Pinter has
characterized both Clinton and Bush as “mass murderers”, and the accusation sounds
indeed brutal. But is it accurate? How can one deny that it is?
Today’s Democrats’ abdication of the role of opposition party is far more
consequential than Roosevelt’s decision to permit our embryonic fascists to
continue to gestate. The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists
was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats
today. Today’s Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests
of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The
Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in
the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the
party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by
railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up
constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged “
opponents”.
Effective opposition at the current historical juncture requires the only
force capable of defeating the neoliberal and imperialist obsessions of the
mainstream parties and their financial masters: street politics, the
mobilization and eventual organization of the people against a ruling establishment seen
by an increasing number of Americans as terminally corrupt and indifferent
to their most pressing needs.
Lest this popular disaffection be siphoned into an impotent and resigned
cynicism, it would seem that intense educational efforts regarding the
desirability and possibility of a third party, a genuine party of labor, become a
priority for serious progressives. MoveOn must yield to MoveBeyond. As harder
economic times threaten the not distant future, the economic stagnation and
austerity that is fertile soil for the growth of fascist politics poses an
unmistakbly clear and present danger. Thinking and acting outside the political box
has never been as pressing an impertive as it is now.
Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen
State College in Olympia Wa. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Monthly
Review, Commonweal, Common Dreams and a number of professional journals.