Americans Are No Different Than Germans Were (and Are)

Daniel Goldhagen blamed the Holocaust on «the Germans» (by which he meant the German people), and said that they perpetrated the Holocaust because they positively enjoyed murdering «the Jews». But, as has long been well understood by historians (except when they fail to point to it as being a disproof of Goldhagen’s bigoted and indefensible anti-German thesis), Hitler had to work long and hard in order to bring about a consensus, first amongst his own leadership group, and then in the population as a whole, favoring the extermination-option. Hitler, Der Fuehrer, «The Leader», clearly was the catalyst turning the chemical mixture into the chemical reaction known as the Holocaust. Without Hitler, it would not have taken place. Thus, the issue that has always been failed by ‘historians’ is not why «the Germans» did it (which Goldhagen botched), but why the Nazi leadership did it, and ultimately why Der Fuehrer did it.

David Bankier, in his 1992 The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism, documented this — that the Holocaust came from the top of German society, its leaders, not from the bottom, the masses (such as Goldhagen said). Bankier showed the difficulties that Hitler had to overcome in order to bring the public with him on his anti-Semitic policies. While Goldhagen did deal cursorily with Bankier’s evidence, he never really came to grips with it, perhaps because Bankier brought Hitler back to center-stage and Goldhagen was committed instead to viewing German cooperation with the Holocaust as having been essentially spontaneous, which Bankier proved not to have been at all the case. It really was a Fuehrer-state. It really was not a democratic state. The Holocaust was a dictatorial phenomenon, not a democratic one. Aristocrats hire and fire the ‘historians’ (such as Goldhagen), but blaming things such as the Holocaust upon any public, is not history; it is myth.

In my own 2000 book about the subject, Why the Holocaust Happened, I addressed, in more detail than has elsewhere been done, why Hitler did it; I documented, from his own statements, the gradual development, in Hitler’s mind, of his idea for the Holocaust-to-come, beginning from the motivation’s original inception in the Fall of 1919, through to the closing words of his final statement, his «Political Testament», at 4 a.m. on 29 April 1945: «Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the race laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry». Even when about to commit suicide, completing the Holocaust was his main concern. For Hitler, WWII was a means to an end: a Jew-free world. Even at his suicide, he still hoped that, somehow, the job would be completed successfully. He now recognized that he would lose the war, which war he had always thought would be the essential means in order to achieve his ultimate goal, but he did not lose all hope for that goal. Hitler’s goal was not merely that Germans would control the world (victory in WWII), but was also that the world they would control would have no Jews in it. At first, he had to deceive almost everyone about what his goal was; and part of the reason for this was that (unlike Goldhagen) he understood quite well that the German people needed to be manipulated toward this end — only a small minority of Germans would have voted for him if they had understood what he really had in mind.

This same misconception exists today with regard to Americans, though in a modified form. America’s shames are instead that America is today the world’s most aggressive, rabidly invasion-prone and coup-perpetrating country; and, in our past, slavery used to be accepted here. But, likewise, here as there, the shames are not against the general public: slavery was brought to this country and enforced by King George III, and polls generally show that the American public is far more inclined to avoid invasions than to seek them. In this country, just like in Germany, the atrocities come from the leadership-class, not from the public (regardless of what the aristocrats who own the publishing-houses might prefer to publish as constituting ‘history’ on the subject).

The most invasion-and-coup-perpetrating of all of the major U.S. Presidential candidates was Hillary Clinton, who received overwhelmingly more money from America’s billionaires than did any other candidate: «Whereas Hillary got 53.27% of her total appx. $775M as direct individual donations of $200+, Trump got only 13.94% of his appx. $425M that way». And Bernie Sanders (who would have won the general election if Hillary’s DNC hadn’t sabotaged the primaries) was even more of a «grass roots» candidate than Trump was. The U.S. aristocracy craves to conquer Russia, and toward that end has one-by-one overthrown the leaders of governments that are at all friendly toward Russia, but the public need to be dragged into the invasion-mode by the owners of the ‘news’ media and by the aristocracy’s many agents in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate — the American public don’t want World War III, but the top stockholders in corporations such as Lockheed Martin do.

If the U.S. aristocracy succeed in bringing about a war with Russia, the blame will rest upon the Americans who have purchased and are occupying their luxurious mulitimilliondollar nuclear bunkers (such as here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here), and not upon the Americans who had been given only a fake ‘choice’ between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and who had ‘chosen’ either the one or the other poison.

German democracy ended up being taken over by Germany’s aristocracy, and now American democracy has been taken over by America’s aristocracy, but in neither case is it the fault of the public, in either country. In neither country did the public want this — the aristocracy imposed it upon the public, in both cases. Bigotry pre-exists, everywhere, but genocides and other such atrocities are always the end-product of extensive organized and planned campaigns to deceive a mass of people into empowering some tyrant who is leading the dirty-work of his aristocracy. Almost all wars are between aristocracies; the public on the invading side need first to be deceived into invading — it’s not something that most people, anywhere, actually want to do.

Originally published on 2017-04-15

Author: Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

READ MORE!

Noel Malcolm: “Kosovo – A Short History”, 1999. A History Written With an Attempt to Support Albanian Territorial Claims in the Balkans (Second Part)

Noel Malcolm – Kosovo – A Short History A history written with an attempt to support Albanian territorial claims in the Balkans Historical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art Belgrade, 2000 Response to the Book of Noel Malcolm Kosovo – A Short History Milorad Ekmecic, Academician Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Belgrade Historiography By the Garb Only Reading, from necessity, the books by some Western, particularly American scholars, dealing with the past of the Serbs and the Balkans, I recall the impressions that are in my memory, for some reason, related to the socially committed painter Georg Grosz. Today the flashes of those recollections of my college ...

Chile, September 11, 1973

“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened through which will pass free men to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!” President Salvador Allende’s farewell speech, 11 September 1973. “It’s hard to find someone with the fighting spirit, courage and the story of Allende. He was a man who actually had the branded name in history: democratically the left came ...

The Myth of NATO’s “Humanitarian Intervention” in Kosovo (in 1999)

Some of those currently advocating bombing Syria turn for justification to their old faithful friend “humanitarian intervention”, one of the earliest examples of which was the 1999 US and NATO bombing campaign to stop ethnic cleansing and drive Serbian forces from Kosovo. However, a collective amnesia appears to have afflicted countless intelligent, well-meaning people, who are convinced that the US/NATO bombing took place after the mass forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this “ethnic cleansing”. In actuality, the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people from Kosovo ...

Israel Stamps Approval on Europe’s Largest Post-WWII Ethnic Cleansing

Back in February, we warned about the prospect of Israel selling F-16s to Croatia, a state in which WWII revisionism and Holocaust denial are running rampant, and memories of the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia are routinely glorified. In the meantime, that has become a done deal. But there is more. Not only will Israel sell half a billion dollars worth of fighter jets to Croatia, but on August 5, three Israeli F-16s, crewed by Israeli pilots, took part in a parade to celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the “Operation Storm,” in which more than 2,300 Serbs were killed, including more than 1,200 civilians, among which more ...

The 2001 War on Afghanistan is a Profit Driven “Resource War”

Author’s Note US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan more than 16 years ago in October 2001. It’s has been a continuous war marked by US military occupation. The justification is “counterterrorism”. Afghanistan is defined as a state sponsor of terrorism, allegedly responsible for attacking America on September 11, 2001. The war on Afghanistan continues to be heralded as a war of retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. US troops are still present and deployed in Afghanistan. The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade and occupy Afghanistan under “the doctrine of collective security” was that the September 11 2001 attacks constituted an ...

Netanyahu Victory Lays Bare Israel as Racist, Colonial State

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is elating after his right-wing Likud Party secured a firm victory in the Israeli elections on March 17. It was a very close race against the Zionist Union Party, led by Isaac Herzog. Our next guest, Shir Hever, in an interview he did with us last month, predicted that Prime Minister Netanyahu would win in spite of many strikes against him at the time. So, defying election polls leading up to the election, Prime Minister Netanyahu has ...

The US-NATO Plan for Macedonia: Keep Serbia Down and Russia Out

The role of the United States in the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is often overlooked by people who are critical of Washington’s intervention in the internal affairs of independent, sovereign countries. For it was in the former Yugoslavia that the precedent was set for future American intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo provided the launch pad for the West’s concept of humanitarian intervention, which, in reality, is a pretext for safeguarding and enhancing US global hegemony. However, intervention by Washington in the Balkans in the 1990s served a more immediate objective for the ...

Obama’s ‘Big Lie’: US has Supplied Ukraine with Arms from the Start

President Obama is still considering arming Ukraine in case the latest ceasefire is breached and the conflict escalates; but political analyst Stephen Lendman told Sputnik in an exclusive interview that the US leader is lying, and that the US has been supplying arms to Kiev from the very start of the military operation. The ceasefire between Kiev forces and independence supporters of Donetsk and Luhansk is generally holding, shelling in Donbas has stopped as the truce came in force on midnight, a spokesperson at the Kiev special operations headquarters said Sunday.But a day earlier Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US President Barack Obama, during a meeting by phone, agreed on the ...

Clash of Imperialists: 21st Century Competition and Confrontation by the Great Powers

Led by the US and NATO, the clash of imperialist powers accounts for the absence of stability not just in the Middle East and Africa, but also the Ukraine and parts of Asia. Behind the rhetoric of democracy, national security, and anti-terrorism there are direct diplomatic and indirect diplomatic efforts through government-financed and pro-business NGO’s. There are overt and covert military operations carried out by the US, EU, China, Russia and their less powerful allies motivated by aggressive intentions for spheres of influence and markets. Behind the “war on terror” and regional conflicts around the world rests the reality of ...

Ukraine Re-Writes History by Celebrating Nazi Collaborator

For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian ...

Kosovo is not Serbia’s Kurdistan, but Balkan’s IS/Daesh

In the article “Kurdistan – Turkey’s Kosovo” Prof. Sotirović compared different aspects of Turkish Kurdistan case to the Kosovo one, found some parallels and pointed out Turkey’s hypocrisy.While Prof. Sotirović is right in his assessment that Turkey is hypocritical to say at least, he failed to expose the fundamental differences between Kurdistan and Kosovo. His article contains some inaccuracies, misinterpretations and lacks in detail. Such an imprecise comparison may lead a reader who is not familiar with Balkans to acquire a false impression. A reader might come to conclusion that Kosovo Albanians had experienced the same level of suffering and ...

Why V. Yanukovych Said No to the European Union

Christopher Marsh and I, in our recently published book (Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors and Sectors), sketch out what we term "Putin's Eurasian dream"—the ambition to create a Eurasian economic and political zone where Moscow sets the overall agenda and is able to hold its own in the global geopolitical competition with the United States, the EU and China—and to have the foundations laid by 2015. A major obstacle to this vision was abruptly removed on Thursday when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych announced that his country would not sign a landmark partnership agreement with the European Union—which Russia had consistently ...

US, UK, & EU, are Now Dictatorships

How can it be that in virtually all of the Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but he almost certainly won’t be that Party’s nominee (and there’s more on that here); and the preferred Republican candidate against either one of the Democratic candidates was John Kasich, but he certainly won’t be the Republican nominee? Sanders and Kasich also scored the highest in his respective Party for net favorability rating, but almost certainly neither candidate will ...

Edward S. Herman (ed.), The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics (PDF Book)

Read the truth about "Srebrenica Massacre" in 1995. Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. The Al-Qaeda-linked ‘El-Mujahedeen’ brigade of the Bosnian Muslim Army parading in downtown Zenica in central Bosnia in 1995

Euromaidan Ukraine Today

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.SaveSave

Investment Оpportunities in Kosovo, America’s “Mafia State” in the Balkans

True, the majority of investors are Americans who bore a relation to the “democratization” of Yugoslavia that was carried out at the end of the 90s of the last century. Among them is the former commander of NATO forces in Kosovo retired general Wesley Clark, who is determined to invest more than 5.5 billion dollars in the former Yugoslav republic. Experts say that Washington’s strategy could be characterized by the following slogan: “Conquer and plunder”.His closest supporters say that Wesley Clark is a great strategist. He wrote the book “Winning Modern Wars” that was published in 2001. In his fundamental ...

End 50 Years of Genocidal Occupation & Human Rights Abuse by US-Backed Apartheid Israel

50 years after the June 1967 Israeli conquest of all of Palestine, the US Alliance-backed, invasion-, occupation- , theft- , genocide-, lying- and race-based pariah state of Apartheid Israel still comprehensively violates all basic human rights of the Occupied Palestinians. The Zionist ethnic cleansing of 90% of Palestine means that the Two-State Solution is dead and demands comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist, nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel and all its supporters. The World must demand an end to race-based Apartheid Israel after the example of post-Apartheid South Africa and its replacement by a unitary state in Palestine with ...

Classified Evidence: US Soldiers Raped Boys in front of Their Mothers

According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...

Washington’s “Humanitarian” War and the KLA’s Crimes

Revelations of fascistic crimes carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) prior to, during and after NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia should provide a salutary lesson whenever Washington again cites humanitarian concerns to justify its predatory war aims. A new report prepared by Swiss Council of Europe deputy Dick Marty slams Kosovo leader Hachim Thaci for organ trafficking and other abominable crimes, deftly shaded by the U.S. in pursuit of their own self-interests. A report by the Council of Europe describes Kosovo today as a country subject to “mafia-like structures of organised crime”. It accuses KLA commander and current ...

Ten Lies Told About World War I

This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.1. The war ...