Bush, the Nazis and America

[Concluding a brief series: See parts 1, 2 and 3.]

4: Keeping Conscience

It is clear that, while the Bush/Walker clan was utterly conscienceless in its dealings with the Nazis, and at least a substantial portion of the Bush family's fortune is in fact built upon that blood-tainted business, there is no evidence that they had any serious ideological ties to them. In a literal sense, of course, it is silly to refer to them as "Nazis," since one had to be a German citizen and join the party to earn the name factually. But even in the generic ideological sense, the evidence of even an affinity, let alone an identification, with the Nazi ideology is very thin.

Yet when this aspect of the Bush family's history is raised by their critics, it almost inevitably comes attached to the notion that the "Bushes were Nazis." A site called Unknown News, for example, asks, "Were Bush's great-grandfather and grandfather Nazis?" and answers: "While there are no recorded incidents of them goose stepping or giving the 'Heil Hitler' salute, the short answer to the question is yes...." David Romm asks the identical question. Even a column devoted to debunking the notion (to which Romm was responding), Cecil Adams' "The Straight Dope,", asks, "Was President Bush's great-grandfather a Nazi?" (Of course, when you frame the question that way, it is a bit simpler to knock down.)

And those are all relatively reasonable sites that try to deal with the serious underlying issues. Even more responsible Web sites, including TakeBackTheMedia, which only focused on the "Bush-Nazi connection" (which, as I already noted, is a factually accurate characterization) indulged itself in the accusations about George H.W. Bush's military service, and moreover featured various pieces of parodistic altered photographs placing member of the Bush administration in Nazi regalia. This latter, of course, is also common at some of the more shrill and irresponsible sites attacking Bush as a Nazi, and is familiar to those of us who have seen the ridiculous "Bush=Hitler" signs.

All of these images underscore a crude misunderstanding of what actually is taking place. As I have argued in "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism," there is a significant difference between corporatists and fascists. I provided a general outline there, but let me try to delineate them more clearly:

Corporatists are typically mainstream conservatives who have been a feature of the American landscape since the onset of the Industrial Age. They are supremely self-interested, and their politics over the years (particularly in their resistance to communism and labor unions) have adapted accordingly to resist change in whatever privileged position they enjoy, and in recent years to roll back impediments to that privilege. Their alliances with various ideological factions have shifted accordingly over the years to reflect those interests, at times aligning themselves with extremist factions as a lever against left-wing radicalism, though since World War II corporatists have maintained a steady power-sharing agreement with mainstream liberals that has been closely associated with the rise of the American mass-consumer society. In recent years, that arrangement has become frayed as conservatives have become increasingly aggressive about rolling back features of the post-Depression rise of federal power, particularly progressive taxation and minority civil rights.

Fascists represent a distinct phenomenon related to the mass politics of the 20th century and beyond. At its core, fascism is a kind of ultranationalist populism in pursuit of the rebirth of a mythical national spirit, of which it claims be the sole true representative. Depending on social conditions, it typically is relegated to the fringe of the cultures in which it arises, especially in its nascent stages. Indeed, small proto-fascist groups can be found in nearly every democratic society.

What is essential to remember is that, historically speaking, fascism has only ever taken root as a genuine political power when it has formed an alliance with mainstream corporatist conservatives. While proto-fascist elements have had their moments in the sun in America -- particularly the ascendant Ku Klux Klan of the early 1920s -- they have fallen short mainly because the nation's corporatist conservatives have not deigned to ally themselves with them. This was not true in Germany or Italy, where corporatists such as Fritz Thyssen were all too happy to ride the fascist tide until it began to reveal its true nature and turn on them -- by which point, of course, it was all too late to do anything about it.

In that respect, today's mainstream corporatist conservatives -- and I think it is clear that not only President Bush but the bulk of his administration fit that description -- do not resemble Hitler and the Nazis so much as they resemble the Thyssens and Hindenburgs, the fools who believed that by co-opting their nation's growing extremist contingent, they could control it. And they resemble the Prescott Bushes and Averell Harrimans who only saw the chances for increased profits and consolidation of their power in underwriting the Nazi military machine. In the process, they all combined to unleash one of history's greatest nightmares.

And to the extent that today's Republicans pander to and traffic in extremism within their own ranks, the more they create the actual conditions that give rise to fascism. Especially troubling in recent weeks has been the increasing repetition of the meme that dissent is treason and that therefore liberals are seditious traitors. This ranges from Ann Coulter's attempts to revive McCarthyism to Donald Rumsfeld's charge that critics of the administration are "opposition to the U.S. President was encouraging Washington's enemies and hindering his 'war against terrorism'."

This really is why the questions around the Bush family's connections to the Nazi regime are relevant today. The episode does not point to some secret ideological affinity for fascism so much as it reveals a willingness to empower them if it furthers their ends. The really interesting question raised by the "Bush-Nazi connection" is not so much a hidden skeleton in the family closet as what the episode says about American society's willingness to ignore inconvenient truths of history, and how that affects the ethos of current public policy.

Cecil Adams, in his attempt to debunk the connection, alludes to this when he argues:

So, did Bush and his firm finance the Nazis and enable Germany to rearm? Indirectly, yes. But they had a lot of company. Some of the most distinguished names in American business had investments or subsidiaries in prewar Germany, including Standard Oil and General Motors. Critics have argued for years that without U.S. money, the Nazis could never have waged war.

While this is quite accurate as far it goes, for some reason, Adams considers this an excuse of some kind: "Hey, everybody did it, and we still do it." This elides the larger question of the real moral culpability that exists for aiding and abetting not just the Nazi nightmare, but violent totalitarian regimes through succeeding years. While it is true that certain American figures -- notably Henry Ford -- faced even greater degrees of culpability for their overt support of fascism, the people who gladly profited from providing essential cogs to the Nazi war machine cannot escape accountability by merely claiming that it was "just business." This defense for all kinds of atrocities is common among American capitalists, and it is at base corrupt and amoral. Indeed, it continues to serve as a handy excuse for the kind of foreign policy that has been practiced ever since the war, and which was specifically shaped by the same self-interested forces that gave way to the Holocaust.

Two other texts -- both balanced, accurate and reliable -- have tackled the larger issue of the role of corporate America's investment in and financial and logistical support for the Nazis, both in their nascent and military-building phases: New York Times reporter Charles Higham's groundbreaking 1983 book, Trading With The Enemy; The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949, and Christopher Simpson's 1993 The Splendid Blond Beast: Money Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.

Both books -- which deal at least tangentially with the Harriman-Bush connections -- focused on the question of why these captains of industry never had to confront their culpability in the Nazi nightmare. According to Higham, investigations were begun by international tribunals to look into this matter but "the government smothered everything during and even after the war." Higham contended that government officials believed "a public scandal ... would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services," and thought "their trial and imprisonment would have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war effort."

Simpson delves even deeper into this point and ultimately concludes that when it came time for accountability in the mass genocide sponsored by corporatists, international tribunals were stymied by the same machinations of privilege and power that were in fact responsible for the problem. The elites whose fortunes were at stake found that the structure of international law was weak and easily manipulated so that they could simply "get on with business."

As Phil Leggiere argues persuasively in his 2002 article, "The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush Nazi Web Conspiracists":

What … Aaron-Loftus and Simpson substantiate with more detail and in a far wider historical context, is that the relationships between Harriman Bank and other corporations and Nazi-era Germany need to be understood as part of a larger pattern. There is little evidence that the free-form meta-diplomatic modes of international financial deal making developed by Harriman, Bush and company in the 1920s and '30s signaled pro-Nazi or pro-fascist political ideology. However, it did help form a template for U.S. international finance and politics in which support for dictatorships, (financially in the '30s, financially and politically-militarily during the cold war) would become business as usual in U.S. foreign policy. One of the most interesting aspects of both the Simpson and the Aaron and Loftus books is their examination of how the private sector style of international affairs pioneered by Dulles, Harriman, Lovett and Bush in the '30s gradually metaphorphosed, during and after World War 2, into the official realpolitick of the U.S. government, often under the guidance of these same men. The ruling precepts of anti-communism and free trade that guided the international banking elite in the '30s in their dealings with Hitler would become the official policy through which the U.S. would support a wide variety of corporate-friendly dictators throughout the world, from the '50s to the present.

Leggiere's exegesis, by the way, is easily the most thorough and considered account of the matter on the Web, and I recommend it as essential reading for anyone wanting a balanced examination of the facts. I only came across it late in my research for this piece, and was pleased and slightly astonished to see he reached exactly the same conclusion as I had [I should also note that he is a superior writer]. This is its essence:

There are sharp distinctions between the "Bush is a Nazi" vulgarizations of the conspiranoia-ists, and the documented corporate-Nazi connections delineated by Simpson or Aaron. Where one sees ideology, the other sees opportunism. Where one sees intention, the other sees unintended consequences. The theorists who see this historical episode not as evidence of Nazism but of business-as-usual are clearly the more sophisticated of the bunch, but this is small comfort. The results were (and are) the same.

The vast majority of the Bush-Nazi conspiracy discourse is eccentric and clearly over-the-top. However, it is these web-based amateurs, and not our allegedly working professional journalists, who have kept alive a significant, largely ignored, body of evidence. This evidence is only partly about the Bushes. More significantly, it traces the origins of the cavalier, amoral relationship between American and global financial elites and genocidal dictatorships that has characterized U.S. policy for decades.

Americans have a well-noted tendency toward convenient historical amnesia -- witness the broad lack of awareness of such episodes in American history as the lynching era, or for that matter the current popular tendency toward the easy dismissal of minority grievances as "identity politics," which is clearly based on forgetting where such politics originated.

Coming to terms with the American role in unleashing the Nazi death machine is not a matter of "guilt" or self-hating recrimination: It is a matter of conscience, of keeping faith with real American ideals, such as decency and fair play. It is important to understand that having a conscience affects not only our views of the past but our present behavior. The relevance of the "Bush-Nazi connection" is what it says about the kind of politics being pursued by present and future administrations.

It is unfortunate, of course, that a discussion of the "Bush-Nazi connection" is inspired by the kind of partisan attacks that not only afactually assert the nature of the ties but, in doing so, muddy the waters so that the important underlying issues are obscured. Regardless of how the issue arises, however, it is such a serious matter with far-reaching implications, that eventually serious-minded Americans must confront it.

In this respect, the reaction of the mainstream right to the issue has been particularly telling: Rather than deal with the facts of the matter honestly, conservatives have simply tried to pretend that they don't exist. This is a falsification of history that smacks of the same kind of intentional omissions practiced by Holocaust revisionists or the Communist regimes who were, as Milan Kundera put it, dedicated to "obliterating memory."

George Santayana's famous admonition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," has become such a commonplace that we seem now not to even recognize it when it manifests itself in public view. And when we dismiss the "Bush-Nazi connection" with a sneer and a roll of the eyes, we partake in nurturing the stuff of nightmares.

- 30 -

A question or two

So George W. Bush wants the taxpayers to foot the bill to the tune of $85 billion for his Iraqi adventure.

Of course, knowing the competence with which Bush's team handles such matters, one can assume the price tag will be closer to $185 billion.

But all this seems to beg a few questions:

Just how, exactly, does Bush plan to pay for this? With another tax cut for the rich, perhaps?

And why doesn't anyone in the press mention the long-range implications of all this for social spending?

Bush, the Nazis and America

[A short series: See Parts 1 and 2.]

3: The Bush ideology

It must be said that none of their business dealings build any kind of case for the contention that either Prescott Bush or George Herbert Walker, the president's forebears, had anything more than a superficial ideological affinity for the Nazis. It is clear that from the majority of these actions that they primarily saw Nazi Germany as an excellent investment opportunity and had not the least hesitation about either doing business with Hitler, nor did they seem to consider the consequences of doing so very grave -- if anything, they were advantageous to their worldview.

This is grossly amoral, of course, but it is on a different plane than the enthusiastic and grotesque support for the Nazi ideology that was trumpeted by other American industrialists, including Henry Ford. Ford, of course, also invested heavily in German industry in a way that was later to haunt America deeply; his German motor plants, after being nationalized by Hitler, were later to produce the engines that propelled Nazi Messerschmitts and tanks.

Tarpley and Chaitkin make much of the Bush family's supposed connections to the eugenics movement, which played a major ideological role in Hitler's eliminationist policies, particularly his anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s. The problem is that they never definitively make such a connection.

It is an unquestioned fact that the Harriman family indeed was deeply involved in eugenics. The matriarch, Mary Williamson Averell Harriman, was one of the original benefactors of Charles Davenport's Eugenics Record Office; her $10,000 grant in 1910 had established the organization. On her death in 1932, Davenport delivered the eulogy at her memorial service, which included this observation:

"As she often said, the fact that she was brought up among well bred race horses helped her appreciate the importance of a project to study heredity and good breeding in man."

This bears a remarkable resemblance to a passage in Tarpley and Chaitkin:

She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old George Herbert Walker -- they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with "breeding thoroughbreds '' among horses and humans.

The book cites "among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39 Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, Feb. 21, 1925, in WAH papers," but neglects to detail any of the contents of these letters that could support this characterization. This is, unfortunately, typical of this text's propensity to make damning assertions without supporting evidence. Obviously, we know that the Walkers and Bushes were socially close to the Harrimans, but that does not necessitate that they shared views on race and eugenics. It's not an unreasonable surmise, but there is no hard evidence currently available to assume it is true.

Averell Harriman, too, was a major and reportedly enthusiastic contributor to various eugenics causes, including sponsorship of the 1932 International Congress of Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Harriman also personally arranged for Hamburg-Amerika to bring Nazi eugenicists, notably the "scientist" most often fingered for inspiring the Holocaust, Dr. Ernst Rudin, who was then a psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin. (Rudin was elected president of the Congress at the New York gathering.) I have found one report that says Bert Walker was among the lesser contributors, but I have found no substantiation of this.

Beyond this, there has never been any hard evidence introduced that would substantiate any connection between either the Walkers or, particularly, Prescott Bush and eugenics. This has been a particularly persistent myth for the latter; it is common to find anti-Bush rants on the Web which claim that the elder Bush lost his campaign for the Senate in 1950 because his supposed connection to "the eugenics movement" had been uncovered.

This is afactual. What happened was that Bush, who had worked hard to recover his public image through his tireless USO work, had won the Republican nomination. But on the Sunday before the election, nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson intimated that Bush was president of the Birth Control Society, the predecessor of Planned Parenthood.

As the aforementioned Boston Globe profile details:

At the time, Connecticut was one of two states to ban the use of birth control, including condoms. (The other state was Massachusetts.)

Connecticut was then 55 percent Catholic, ''and the archbishop was death on this birth control thing,'' Prescott Bush recalled. Many voters phoned the Bush home, asking whether the story were true. Bush denied it all, but it was too late. He lost the Senate race by 1,102 votes, setting the family standard for razor-thin elections until his grandson, George Walker Bush, was elected president a half century later.

There is an important subtext to all of this: The eugenics movement, from its very origins late in the 19th century, was divided into two wings. "Positive" eugenics emphasized encouraging the healthiest and ablest people to reproduce. "Negative" eugenics stressed culling the "less fit" from the population as a means of improving the common stock.

The latter form of eugenics was that which was practiced by the Eugenics Record Office, which went on to gain notoriety not only for its ideological connection to the Nazis (who, following one of the "model laws" developed by Davenport's ERO colleague Harry Laughlin, established laws that led to the sterilization of 350,000 people in Europe) but for its own record in America, where the sterilization laws he promoted were responsible for the involuntary sterilization of some 60,000 Americans.

Vehemently opposed to this -- and particularly to the racialist orientation that was the thrust of so much of the "negative" eugenics that enjoyed so much popularity -- were the less-known "positive" eugenicists, who soon began abjuring the term altogether to avoid association with their ostensible cousins. Much of this latter philosophy gradually transformed from advocating sound reproduction for the "fit" to emphasizing sound and healthy reproductive choices for everyone, a decidedly more egalitarian approach. It was also, however, far more controversial, since it inherently argued for greater rights for women.

Foremost among these was the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, as well as other multiculturalists such as Margaret Mead and Franz Boas. These thinkers specifically and ardently rejected the tenets of white supremacism and "negative" eugenics. Of course, in subsequent years, all of these people have been tarred -- mostly by anti-abortion activists -- with guilt by association to the eugenics movement. (Planned Parenthood has a thorough and well-argued defense of Sanger up on its Web site.) But there was no mistaking the differences between them at the time.

And if subsequent history is anything to go by, Prescott Bush was ultimately drawn to this segment of the eugenics movement, in contradistinction with that favored by his family friends the Harrimans. There is in fact no evidence produced yet that Bush himself participated in the "negative" eugenics popular in the 1930s.

Indeed, Bush had in 1931 set himself apart politically from his father and his partners, who all were Democrats, by announcing that he was a Republican -- which, at the time, was decidedly the more progressive of the two parties on issues of race and civil rights. When his real political affiliations and beliefs became even more manifest in the 1950s and '60s, as a U.S. senator from Connecticut, it was clear that this progressivism was a central feature.

Prescott Bush was, in fact, the model of the patrician "progressive Republican" from the Northeast whose tradition continues in such moderates as Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island. In those days, of course, they were the predominant force in GOP politics; nowadays, in a GOP dominated by the politics of the Southern Strategy and the "conservative movement," they have been relegated to the party's powerless fringes. But in his day, Prescott Bush was an outspoken and effective advocate of civil rights, women's reproductive rights, and a number of other progressive platforms that earned him the enmity of the party's conservative wing. Indeed, it is one of the more grotesque ironies of the presidency of Bush's grandson that it has done its utmost to empower the same kind of religious extremists who once tormented his forebear.

For that transformation, of course, George H.W. Bush's craven capitulations to the religious right beginning in 1988 and throughout his administration are largely responsible. In many ways, it marked the death knell for any genuinely progressive wing of the Republican Party, and finalized the exodus of many former party stalwarts (myself included).

However, before then, George H.W. Bush's politics had primarily been modeled after his father's, which were decidedly progressive in nature. And his own combat service in World War II should lay to rest any questions about his relationship to the Nazis.

In that respect, one of the accusations hurled by the "Bushes were Nazis" theorists -- that George H.W. Bush signed up for service in the Pacific to deflect questions about the family's patriotism -- is fairly bothersome. TakeBackTheMedia put it this way:

To offset their reputation as World War II traitors, former President Bush joined the U.S. Navy as a pilot.

Tarpley and Chaitkin (and others as well) take this a step further: They argue that young Bush was specifically sent to the war in the Pacific because the war in Germany was viewed by many on the right at being against our "friends," while the war with Japan was being billed as a "race war," which would have meshed with the Bush family's ostensible white-supremacist views.

As a matter of fact, the Pacific war indeed was being widely portrayed as a fight against the "Jap race." Consider the following speech from John Rankin, the Mississippi Democrat, on the floor of Congress Dec. 15, 1941:

This is a race war! The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. ... Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ... I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or on the mainland ... I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii, now and putting them in concentration camps... Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!

While Rankin was a Democrat, these views were held across the range of American politics. And as one might infer, their broad acceptance in fact played a major (if not the decisive) role in causing 110,000 Japanese-Americans to be interned in concentration camps during the war. This project was clearly bipartisan in nature, and indeed many Republicans played leading roles in it. Prescott Bush, however, was not one of them.

In this regard, it is important to remember that there is no evidence that Prescott Bush himself was either a eugenicist or a racist. He may have been utterly amoral and conscienceless in his willingness to do business with Nazis and his eugenicist friends the Harrimans, but there is even yet no evidence he in fact shared their views. We might be able to surmise such views from the circumstances, but there is no real proof of them.

Likewise, there are no letters or statements even intimating that George H.W. Bush fought in the Pacific for any purpose other than patriotism, and there is no evidence he was shipped there instead of to Europe by any kind of deliberate efforts on his father's part or his own, let alone for any racist reasons. To suggest otherwise is, frankly, a groundless and careless smear.

In the end, it should be fairly clear that the grounds for claiming that the Bush forebears were "Nazis" are thin and largely nonexistent. However, that does not relieve them of culpability, moral and otherwise, for their roles in the rise of the Nazis.

Next: Keeping Conscience

Bush, the Nazis and America

[A short series: See Part 1]

2: The Bush fortune

The bulk of the information about the Bush family's Nazi connections comes from a couple of books of varying quality: The Secret War Against the Jews, by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, which is generally quite accurate, though somewhat tendentious; and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. The latter is the text that is most commonly cited by critics who make the Bush-Nazi connection, but it is also decidedly the most problematic. Tarpley and Chaitkin are followers of the right-wing extremist Lyndon Larouche, and their book is primarily devoted to "exposing" George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, as a leading member of a secret cabal intent on enslaving mankind.

Like most Larouche texts, the Bush "biography" is a mélange of fact and distortion, written in a highly suppositional style that makes numerous leaps of logic and asserts connections where there is no real evidence to support it, at other times omitting exculpatory or contrary information that reveals a more complete picture. Sifting through it requires a great deal of work, but there are nuggets of fact woven into their text that are substantiated and which deserve proper consideration. (Here are the relevant chapters, two and three, from the book that cover this material. You can read the remaining chapters to see how it weaves a classic right-wing conspiracy theory about Bush.)

Loftus' work is thesis-driven and likewise does not take much into consideration exculpatory points; at other times it makes assertions supported by intuition but not hard evidence. However, it is considerably more reasoned and factually sound than the Tarpley/Chaitkin text. It is not available online, but Loftus maintains a Web site, including this piece: "How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis". (A piece by Toby Rogers, "Heir to the Holocaust," is largely derived from Loftus' work.)

The core facts, gleaned from both books and other sources, and which are completely documented and appear irrefutable, are as follows:

The current president's great-grandfather, George Herbert "Bert" Walker (the surname provides the "W" by which the president is widely known), was a close business associate of railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman. Walker was CEO and president of the W.A. Harriman & Co., their Wall Street investment firm. Over the years, the Walker/Bush and Harriman fortunes became closely interconnected.

In 1920, Walker and Harriman obtained the Hamburg-Amerika Line, reportedly the world's largest private shipping line, from the United States government, which had seized it during World War I. Among the people who reportedly facilitated this deal were Samuel Pryor, chairman of Remington Arms, the largest U.S. gun manufacturer; and Samuel Prescott Bush, an Ohio steel manufacturer who had been director of the arms and facilities division of the U.S. War Industries Board during World War I. S.P. Bush's duties primarily were a liaison between the government and various arms makers, notably Remington Arms. (Bush already had a long business relationship with the Harriman family, since his company, Buckeye Steel Castings, had provided much of the steel rail used by Union Pacific Railroad.)

Prescott Bush, his son, married Bert Walker's daughter Dorothy in 1921.

In 1924, Harriman and Walker set up the Union Banking Corporation, whose primary purpose was to funnel American capital to German industry. Walker was president of the company, and Harriman its chief stockholder. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors.

It is important to remember, however, that during these initial years of operation, Union Banking was primarily doing business with non-Nazi Germans. Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who was the company's chief client, in fact had helped finance Hitler's nascent organizational campaign in October 1923, but after the failure of the "Beer Hall Putsch" the next month, severed his ties with them. Hitler was jailed for a year, and the party remained in dire financial straits for the following four years. However, in 1928, Thyssen changed his mind and became a major benefactor of the Nazis. That clearly was when the Harriman-Nazi connection took root as well, though as we will see, there already were certain ideological commonalities.

In 1926, Walker named young Prescott Bush a vice president of W.A. Harriman, made him a director of Union Banking, and placed him in charge of overseeing the firm's German operations, particularly its capital investments in Thyssen's various industrial ventures, notably his Vereinigte Stahlwerke, or United Steel Works.

The Depression, however, hit the Harriman firm hard. It started losing money hand over fist, and as a 2001 Boston Globe profile of the Bush family dynasty (which noticeably mentions the 1942 Vesting Order, but then fails to give any further detail on Bush's dealings with Germany, though it does obliquely refer to Bert Walker's "dangerous dealings") revealed, Harriman used his family fortune to bail it out.

But beginning in 1931, the firm began recovering, in no small part because of Prescott Bush's successful work in Germany. In just one three-year period (1932-1934), the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. It was during this period, indeed, that investment in German industry was considered one of the most solid investments available; the reason for this, as the retrospective of history has shown, was the Nazi military buildup that was occurring then.

A 1942 U.S. government investigative report would later tally the industrial output that created the Nazi war machine, and determined that during the 1932-41 period, Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following proportions of Nazi Germany's total national output: 50.8 percent of its pig iron; 41.4 percent of its universal plate; 36 percent of its heavy plate; 38.5 percent of its galvanized sheet; 45.5 percent of its pipes and tubes; 22.1 percent of its wire; 35 percent of its explosives.

In the meantime, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was playing its own significant role as a major pipeline for Nazi propagandists and American money. This paragraph from Tarpley and Chaitkin in fact is perfectly accurate (and can be confirmed at the source document, Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934, Hearings No. 73-NY-7):

According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.

Hamburg-Amerika also played a more insidious role in events unfolding within Nazi Germany. Hitler's notorious Brownshirts -- the armed "citizen" platoons of the Sturmarbteilung, or SA -- who were providing so much of the violent thuggery associated with its rise to power, particularly in such events as Kristallnacht, were in fact being armed primarily with American weapons, many of them made by Remington Arms.

Samuel Pryor, the Remington Arms chairman, was also a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp., which was the company that controlled Hamburg-Amerika. In 1934, U.S. Senate investigators began examining the traffic in weapons from the United States to other nations where conflict was erupting, and they began looking into Remington after it entered into a cartel agreement with the German explosives firm I.G. Farben (which would go on to gain infamy for its notorious role in many of the Nazis' concentration camps, as well as in creating the Zyklon B poison gas that killed millions of victims in the Holocaust). Testimony produced in the so-called "Nye Committee" revealed that Remington guns were being unloaded from Hamburg-Amerika boats to the waiting arms of the SA.

A Col. William J. Taylor told the committee that "German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great."

In any event, it is clear that Harriman's enterprises, with Prescott Bush playing at least a significant role, was an important player in providing the capital that produced the Nazi war machine during the 1930s, and its activities had also played a role in facilitating the violent eliminationist politics that were being practiced by the fascists throughout Europe (Harriman also had major dealings with Italy's Benito Mussolini).

After 1937, the picture becomes much murkier. Thyssen in 1939 fled Germany because he believed Hitler was about to turn on him, following the Fuhrer's first military invasions and the nightmare of Kristallnacht. The German government confiscated all of his holdings. That same year, Hitler invaded Poland and the German government took control of the United Steel Works plants in Silesia, which were a significant interest of Union Banking and W.A. Harriman & Co.

According to Loftus, Harriman's firm, with Prescott Bush in charge, nonetheless continued to oversee operations at the Silesian plant. Indeed, Loftus charges, Bush was involved in obtaining slave labor from the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp to work at the operation's mines and mills. His basis for making this charge is a 1941 memo from a Dutch intelligence agent, though Loftus' reporting does not evaluate the reliability of the memo or its contents.

However, the 1942 vesting memo that seized Union Banking Company's assets tends to at least corroborate the contention that the Harriman firm remained active in managing its German and Polish assets and in trading with Nazi industries. That is the basis, after all, of the seizure.

What is completely unknown is the extent to which the gains in wealth made during the 1928-37 period of heavy German investment by the Bush and Harriman families were significant. Certainly Loftus and others believe that the bulk of the Bush family fortune actually arose during that period, and it may be reasonable to surmise this, but there is simply no evidence to prove it definitively, mainly because the Harriman and Bush families' investments were extremely diverse. Germany was decidedly not the only place they invested. The family has never opened its books, and considering the extreme secrecy with which it has dealt with issues and records regarding the presidential behavior of George H.W. Bush, it is not likely to any time soon.

However, it is worth noting that when the Union Banking Company's assets were finally unfrozen in 1951 and distributed to the owners of the original shares, Prescott Bush received $1.5 million for his single share -- in those days, a large fortune in itself.

Next: The Bush ideology

Bush, the Nazis and America

[Introducing a short series ...]

1: Falsifying History

I'd like to return, if I may, to the Rich Lowry column, "Among the Bush Haters," which I examined earlier as a prime example of the way conservatives are increasingly not only trying to revise history, but falsify it, by presenting a version of reality that stands fact on its head.

There was a snippet of this column that particularly caught my attention as an example of the way conservatives' propaganda elides factual history about prominent Republicans so as to tar their critics as extremist:

The anti-war Web site Takebackthemedia.com features a Flash movie complaining that "the media will not tell you of the Bush family Nazi association" and theorizing that in order "to offset their reputation as World War II traitors, former President Bush joined the U.S. Navy as a pilot." (Clever, those Bushes.)

Thus with a simple, sneering aside Lowry casually dismisses what should in fact be a serious question worth addressing. Other conservatives, notably Jonah Goldberg, have given this question more or less the same contemptuous treatment -- as if the accusation were too over-the-top, too ludicrous to even dignify with a serious response.

The problem is, it isn't. In fact, there is a great deal of factual truth to it.

The questions raised by the known facts about the Bush family's connections to the Nazi war machine should really be a matter of some national moment, because they raise serious issues about the relationship between America and Nazism and its atrocities, and the ramifications of those ties in today's world.

These are not only serious but deeply disturbing issues, which may be why there has been relatively little mainstream effort to address them. Unfortunately, the highly partisan way that they have been framed to date has done little to make the debate a serious or thoughtful one. And conservatives' attempts to pretend that the questions should not even be taken seriously are a sort of historical revisionism -- falsifying history by pretending it didn't even happen.

TakeBackTheMedia has already fired back at Lowry and other critics, including Fox News, by observing:

The point was that George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had the assets of the family business seized by the U.S. Government under the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1941. Much of the Bush family fortune was made by dealing with Nazi Germany -- both before and during World War II.

This in fact is entirely accurate -- more so, I might add, than the TakeBack's original description of the connection. More on that later.

The claim that some of Prescott Bush's assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act for his dealings with Nazi Germany has been thoroughly documented. Here, for instance, is a copy of the 1942 Vesting Order naming Bush, among others.

Michael Kranish at the Boston Globe discussed this in an April 23, 2001 piece titled "Triumphs, Troubles Shape Generations," that explored some of the Bush family's past troubling connections. It began like this:

Prescott Bush was surely aghast at a sensational article the New York Herald Tribune splashed on its front page in July 1942.

"Hitler's Angel Has 3 Million in US Bank," read the headline above a story reporting that Adolf Hitler's financier had stowed the fortune in Union Banking Corp., possibly to be held for "Nazi bigwigs." Bush knew all about the New York bank: He was one of its seven directors. If the Nazi tie became known, it would be a potential "embarrassment," Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman worried, explaining to government regulators that their position was merely an unpaid courtesy for a client. The situation grew more serious when the government seized Union's assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the sort of action that could have ruined Bush's political dreams.

As it turned out, his involvement wasn't pursued by the press or political opponents during his Senate campaigns a decade later. But the episode may well have been one of the catalysts for a dramatic change in his life. Just as the Union Banking story broke, Bush volunteered to be chairman of United Service Organizations, putting himself on the national stage for the first time. He traveled the country raising millions of dollars to help boost the morale of US troops during World War II, enhancing his stature in a way that helped him get elected US senator. A son and grandson would become presidents.

The Globe story, however, manages to overlook some of the grave issues that are raised by Bush's connections to the Nazi regime. Foremost among these: To what extent is the Bush family fortune -- which is unquestionably one of the foundations of the current American presidency -- based upon the wealth engendered by its role in building the Nazi war machine?

However, a close examination reveals this is not so easy to answer as either side would suggest. What is clear is that the evidence that doing business with the Nazi regime substantially enhanced the Bush family fortune is nearly overwhelming.

The main remaining questions are: What proportion of the Bush fortune is based on this trade? And what were the family's ideological connections to the Nazis? These are much murkier issues that remain unresolved.

Next: The Bush Fortune

On MEChA's 'radicalism'

A reader named Thomas writes in about MEChA:

I've no direct experience with MEChA, but was involved in student politics in the UK (worked for the National Union of Students as an area officer for a year, full-time). During that time, I learnt to just *love* in-fighting between student political groups (these were the happy, happy days when the UK Labour Party was kicking out Trotskyist entryist groups -- mmm, good times, what can I say).

Reading some of the MEChA documents, given the time that they were written in, makes me slightly surprised that they weren't *more* rabid. Remember, this was in the late 1960s, in the days of the Black Panthers, and SDS. If there's a radical student organization (that isn't an offshoot of some Trotskyist-like sect) that's survived from the early 1970s, I can't think of one.

The other question I have is: Why has MEChA survived this long? SDS disintegrated after the Maoists of the PLP infiltrated it -- why didn't MEChA suffer the same fate, of getting raided by splinter Leninist groups looking for recruits to sell godawful newspapers?

Well, it seems that MEChA has dealt with entryism in the past, c.f. the Berkeley version of "Philosophy of MEChA" (scroll down to "Historical Examples of Infiltration into M.E.Ch.A." and the section "M.E.Ch.A.'s Relationship to Outside Organizations")

This includes: "Meanwhile, on an apparent 'different' side, opportunistic, multi-national 'left' organizations continue in their manipulative covert attempts to control and/or destroy our Movement."

Reading the Philosophy of MEChA, it looks like:

(1) MEChA survived as a fairly loose organization until sometime in the mid-1990s, after which, 'cos of infiltration by Trots or other left sects, it adopted a more centralized constitution, presumably to allow it to kick out individual MEChA chapters. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a national infrastructure for MEChA (frex, I haven't found a website for National MEChA).

[I should point out here that I seem to have: MEChA National Web Pages, which is hosted at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg's MEChA section.]

(2) El Plan de Aztlan, which predates MEChA, is less important in MEChA's than the later El Plan de Santa Barbara. The "Philosophy of MEChA" states:

"Objective One: We recognize that Chicanismo is evolutionary and that a Chicano identity is not a nationality but a philosophy. Chicano nationalism is the key to taking our people forward. M.E.Ch.A. will not discriminate against any Mechista who works for and adopts Chicanismo as indicated in El Plan de Santa Barbara, and the Philosophy of M.E.Ch.A. This philosophy is the key to taking our people forward."

Note that adopting El Plan de Aztlan isn't included as a requirement for adopting Chicanismo. So, although reading El Plan de Aztlan is noted elsewhere in the "Philosophy of MEChA," the more radically nationalist position of El Plan de Aztlan doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for membership of MEChA. I'd read this as suggesting that the more separatist El Plan de Aztlan is (rightly) controversial within MEChA.

(3) The motto of MEChA is "La Union hace la Fuerza" not “Por La Raza Todo, Fuera de La Raza Nada!” There's a (not that great) refutation of some of the charges made against MEChA at http://www.azteca.net/aztec/mecha/MechaFact-Myths.html.

I'm originally from Northern Ireland, and the mixture of class-based and "anti-colonialist" nationalism in MEChA's rhetoric does remind me a bit of the Scottish Nationalists.

I should add that OC Weekly has a terrific, nicely balanced account that examines MEChA's admittedly radical roots:

Fear of a Brown Planet

MEChA and the Transmission Belt

Following up on the recent post about MEChA and the right-wing meme that it is a "racist organization" …

I argued in that post that the meme has its origins in the racist right, and has become a prime example of the way extremist ideas and agendas work their way into the mainstream. Let's explore that in more detail.

As I mentioned, it has long been a favorite theme of the extremist right -- particularly neo-Nazis like David Duke and William Pierce, as well as Identity types like Pete Peters -- that civil-rights advocacy groups like the NAACP and the ADL are themselves racist. A fine recent example of this is Duke's rantings about "Jewish supremacism," which throws neoconservatives into the pot too.

The MEChA meme clearly resembles these claims in both form and substance, as I demonstrated, since the group clearly is multicultural in its orientation and not merely benign but probably a genuinely beneficial organization, at least in most regards. (We'll save a discussion of the merits of "identity politics" for another day.) But are the meme's origins in fact extremist?

Well, yes.

I did a Google for "MEChA racist" and came up with 9,550 hits. The vast bulk of these have in fact originated in the past 30 days. I wasn't able to spend the time to count just how many have, but I scanned each page and was astonished by the count. A number of the hits included pages from MEChA activists denouncing racist behavior, which of course is not representative of this meme. But I would have to guesstimate that at a bare minimum, half of the 9,550 hits have been published since early August, when it first began gaining traction.

Nearly all of the oldest hits that seem to have originated the meme are in fact extremist in nature, including a few minor Web sites, but most significantly the far-right American Patrol.

Patrol, you may recall, is in fact designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is because it engages in heavily exclusionist rhetoric that constantly demeans Latinos. It also promotes a variety of anti-Latino conspiracy theories, including Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, which claims that both Mexico and American Hispanics secretly intend to return "Aztlan" to Mexico.

Since the mid-1990s, American Patrol -- which is operated by a man named Glenn Spencer -- has also been closely associated with, and in some cases directly involved with helping to organize, a variety of Patriot/militia "border patrols" in various locales of the Southwest. The most recent manifestation of this (one in which Spencer has been again involved) is the "border militias" in Arizona, which in recent months have been reported to be harassing Latino Americans out camping in border areas.

Spencer seems to have been one of the first to begin claiming, on a regular basis, that "MEChA is racist." Indeed, his first foray into the argument appears to have been in 1996, with an article titled, "MEChA calls for the Liberation of 'Aztlan' ". As it happens, this was one of the first attempts to depict the "Aztlan" mythos as racist and exclusionist -- which, as the meme has been transmitted into the mainstream, has become the chief form of argument. (I hope I demonstrated clearly enough in the last post why the mythos is neither racist nor exclusionist, but as practiced by MEChA -- compared to such radical offshoots as La Voz de Aztlan -- is largely inclusionary and multiculturalist.)

Of course, American Patrol has since then made a positive festish out of MEChA in subsequent years, as demonstrated by the Web page its has devoted to the issue, "The Scourge of MEChA". On this page you'll find a collection of pieces to which it either has contributed material or simply continues the meme. Throughout, you can find Spencer's regular comparisons of MEChA to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis as well.

Spencer's agenda has been seeping into the mainstream for awhile. Of particular note was Patrick Buchanan's regurgitation of David Duke's longtime talking point, namely, that the "white race" is about to be swamped by a horde of colored people, in his bestseller The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. According to Buchanan (who cites Spencer), MEChA is "a Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation ... and is unabashedly racist and anti-American."

Also of note was a piece in the Feb 25, 2002, edition of the Washington Times headlined "Activist warns of border war," which described an address Spencer gave to a Los Angeles group in which he argued that a "border war between the United States and Mexico 'could happen any day,' " and goes on to quote Spencer as saying: "We have on our hands a Mexican border civil war that could happen tomorrow … I think it's a matter of time.":

With hundreds of Mexicans illegally crossing the United States' southwest border daily, Mr. Spencer said, conflict between the U.S. Border Patrol and Mexican authorities could touch off strikes, protests, and riots by Hispanic militants in the United States -- a combination border war and civil war that "could happen any day," he said.

Spencer cites MEChA documents to support his claims in the piece.

Similarly noteworthy is Bill O'Reilly's hostile March 8, 2002 interview with a Mechista in which he depicted them as desiring to retake "Aztlan" for Mexico and kick out whites in the process.

The "MEChA is racist" meme began percolating again last fall. The right-wing ChronWatch, which devotes itself to critiquing the San Francisco Chronicle through an ultra-right lens (and in fact has proven on several occasions to be a transmitter of extremist memes, most recently in its suggestion that, apropos of Ann Coulter's neo-McCarthyism, dissent against Bush's war agenda is seditious), attacked MEChA in a Nov. 19, 2002, piece, "More Reporting on MECHA at U.C. Berkeley. Disturbing", which describes MEChA's supposed "hatred and prejudice" by citing a piece from the right-wing California Patriot, which itself repeats Spencer's characterization of MEChA, citing (like Spencer) the early MEChA documents as proof of its ill intent.

But the piece that clearly kicked off the current frenzy about the meme was Lowell Ponte's Aug. 11, 2003, piece on David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine, "Bustamante: The Racist in the Race?" (As I have noted previously, Horowitz already has a history of spreading extremist memes at his Webzine.) Interestingly enough, Ponte does not cite Spencer as a source anywhere in the piece, but repeats Spencer's core themes: Aztlan is a racist concept, therefore MEChA is comparable to the Klan and Nazis. He also repackages much of Spencer's alleged "proofs"; most of Ponte's charges against the group can be found at American Patrol's Web site or in articles citing Spencer as the chief source. It also features bizarre speculation that Cruz Bustamante secretly fancies himself the future ruler of Aztlan.

Perhaps also worth noting about Ponte's piece: Its original versions included the accusation (since edited out) that MEChA was connected to the racist and anti-Semitic hate group La Voz de Aztlan, a charge thoroughly debunked here. This claim immediately surfaced in the blogosphere, notably at Alan Henderson's blog, and it has continued to resurface at such high-profile sites as Instapundit (who has since corrected the error) [more on that below].

The real spread of the "MEChA is racist" meme in the blogosphere came from Tacitus, who specifically cites both Ponte and American Patrol, though it disavowed Ponte's speculations about Bustamante's motives, and noted that he only cited American Patrol after satisfying himself that it was "factually correct" (a hazardous claim to make when citing anything Spencer produces). He also sounds a disturbingly McCarthyesque note by also hinting at a MEChA-La Voz connection, calling them "fellow travelers." (!) However, Tacitus mostly tries to make a reasonable argument that MEChA is racist, though as I have argued, his grounds for making that charge are more than thin -- and make no mistake, labeling someone "racist" is a very serious charge, one that requires solid ground. As I have suggested previously, one would think conservatives should be more aware of this than anyone.

Alas, Michelle Malkin a few days later demonstrated just how happily conservatives can bandy the "racist" label willy-nilly when given the chance. Her Aug. 20 column, "Bustamante, MEChA and the media," repeated the core points of the meme, comparing MEChA to Nazis and the Klan and various white supremacists (only revealing, once again, how little they understand or appreciate the horrors of those groups, and frankly demonstrating their crude insensitivity to the reality of those horrors). Malkin, of course, also contends that Aztlan is a racist and exclusionist program.

Malkin appears to be the source of the false translation of the MEChA slogan, Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada, which appears in an early MEChA document called the Plan Spiritual de Aztlan. Malkin translates this as "For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing." This translation has subsequently appeared in a multitude of conservative attacks on MEChA, both in the mainstream media (see, for example, Bustamante's Fox interview, cited by Mickey Kaus, at which he was obviously baffled by the distorted translation) and throughout the blogosphere.

As I noted last time out, this is false; the slogan is intended as a declaration of fealty to one's cultural heritage. Its syntax is clearly inward, not outward, in orientation. A more accurate translation would read, "In service of my people, everything; [for] apart from my people, [I have] nothing." There is neither the exclusionist nor the racist content that Malkin implies. La Raza, it must be noted, is not a racial concept but an ethnic one (it comprises multiples races, in fact).

Moreover, Malkin characterizes the slogan as its "motto." In reality, it is only a slogan that appears in a handful of MEChA documents. As Rodolfo Acuna points out, MEChA's actual motto is La union hace la fuerza, or "Unity creates power."

Shortly after Malkin's column, the meme exploded in the blogosphere and throughout the right side of the media, including WorldNetDaily.

The same day, Investor's Business Daily produced a story titled "Who's Cruz?" that mostly duplicated Ponte's material. But it provided a springboard for whwat was unquestionably the most significant transmission of the meme into the mainstream: namely, at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, who on the same day produced his own version of the tale, "Bustamante Fondled Racist Group, Terms." Notably, Limbaugh conspicuously promotes that American Patrol favorite, Victor Davis Hanson's paranoiac Mexifornia.

The meme has continued to spread throughout the mainstream conservative media, notably at Fox News, where it has been receiving prominent play on its newscasts and talk shows as well. [It should be noted that the original version of the Fox story cited Spencer extensively; that material, as well as the original, more inflammtory headline -- which called MEChA "racist" -- has since been edited out.]

None of this should be a surprising development by any means. Fox has an extensive track record in transmitting extremist ideas into the mainstream, as does, of course, Limbaugh.

Finally, it is worth noting that all of this came bouncing back to American Patrol, whose Web site now proudly displays all these stories. It is clear that the proliferation of the meme is viewed by the hate group as a major validation of its agenda.

What is probably more disturbing is seeing the meme making its way from the conservative into the broader, centrist and even liberal mainstream. The most prominent example of this is Glenn Reynolds' extraordinarily shallow treatment of the issue, beginning with this post two days ago, and which continues with further nonsense yesterday and today. Most of all, Reynolds clearly has swallowed whole the falsehood that MEChA is racist and separatist. It is important to note that not one of the sources he cites is able to provide an adequate definition of just what they mean by "racist." Again, it is an extremely serious charge, and the thoughtless abandon with which it is now being flung is a disgrace.

Reynolds is widely regarded as more or less centrist, or at worst libertarian, though he is of course vehemently pro-war and has become increasingly conspicuous as a Bush apologist. Nonetheless, he is broadly viewed as a "common-sensical" voice by a broad range of pundits and commentators as well as readers, not to mention of course his outsize influence in the blogosphere.

In other words, for perhaps the first time since the early days of the civil-rights era, we have seen a mainstream, clearly multiculturalist organization being broadly portrayed as "racist." And if MEChA is "racist," in short order we will be hearing that the NAACP and the Urban League and the ADL and other ethnic "uplift" organizations, too, are "racist." Which, as I mention, is what white supremacists have been claiming for years.

The logical end point of this meme is the spread of the belief that multiculturalism itself is a kind of racism, an argument we also see in the easy dismissal of "identity politics" by people like Reynolds and Mickey Kaus.

My previous discussion of the transmission belt of ideas and agendas from the extremist right into the mainstream mostly provided a rough outline of the mechanisms by which it operates. But the MEChA meme provides us with an up-close view of the transmission as it proceeds.

Setting the record straight

Glenn Reynolds calls my credibility into question in his floundering about on the MEChA question, after he rather lamely corrects the grotesque smear of MEChA and Cruz Bustamante he perpetrated by falsely connecting them to La Voz de Aztlan:

It's a bit behind the curve, [my emphasis] but here's a post by David Neiwert defending Bustamante, just in case you're interested. Flatteringly, he seems to think that I'm more influential than Fox News, though that in itself may undercut his credibility.

Actually, anyone who reads the post can see clearly that I don't suggest Reynolds is "more influential" than Fox. What I said was that his post was one of the most "disturbing" aspects of the debate, and I briefly mentioned his "outsize influence". I describe in greater detail at the end of the post above just why I find it so. Nowhere do I suggest that Reynolds is "more influential" than Fox.

Reynolds' characterization is either purposely dishonest or a strangely egocentric misreading of what I wrote. I hope he corrects it.

Moreover, let me gently suggest that if Reynolds wishes to question someone's credibility, he should do so without misrepresenting what that person actually says.

As for being "behind the curve": I would be remiss if I did not point out that the false connection between MEChA and La Voz Aztlan which Reynolds egregiously repeated and then was forced to correct was in fact completely debunked at this site two and a half weeks ago. In fact, I have been involved in the MEChA debate since it first began popping up, and have played at least a minor role in its progress through the blogosphere.

It is likewise dismaying to see Reynolds use a false pretext to offhandedly dismiss a reasonably careful and logical post, which I think the post he links to is. Nowhere in Reynolds' discussion does he even remotely attempt to address any of its points -- particularly its debunking of the charge that MEChA is racist, secessionist or radical. For that matter, he has continued to trumpet these accusations throughout the week. Indeed, Reynolds continues to freely apply the "racist" label without ever clarifying what are his criteria for making that charge.

Tell you what, Glenn: Contact our Militia Watchdog listserv colleague, Mark Potok of the SPLC, and ask him whether or not MEChA is a racist group. Perhaps then you can begin getting up to speed as well.

An answer

Kynn Bartlett at Shock and Awe has followed up on my question about the supposed discrediting of "identity politics" with a great post:

Identity Politics: History of a Discredited Term

Kynn tracks through the data and essentially concludes that the attacks on multiculturalism by renaming it "identity politics" has been an important project of the right since about 1994, when the term first began appearing in the media. Indeed, the use of the term has clearly become the chief means of derogating multiculturalism.

I'll talk more about this next week. In the meantime, be sure and read Kynn's post. If anyone cares to comment at his site, I'll be lurking and may chime in.

A question

Say, can anyone tell me just when it was that "identity politics" officially became "distasteful and discredited"? And by whom, exactly?

Of course, I have yet to be convinced that it is "virulent and misguided" either.

Just wondering.

Blitzing Rush

The fine folks at Cursor have now published the entirety of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" at their Web site. It's featured at the upper right of the site with a button headlined, "Has the 'F' word lost its meaning?", takes you to the introduction. From there you can navigate through the entire body of the series.

If you've already read the essay, you might want to click through just to look over some of the art we added. And if you've been putting off examining it because it's just too damned long and intimidating, let me recommend Cursor's nice work, which makes the reading experience much easier and rather more pleasant.

And of course, I'm flattered because Cursor is a cool site -- great navigability, aesthetically pleasing, and very smart.

The MEChA meme

The claim that the Chicano advocacy organization to which California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante once belonged, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, is "racist" (which I have discussed a couple of times) has been picking up a great deal of momentum in the past couple of weeks.

Now we're reading about it and hearing about it from Fox News, as well as Slate's Mickey Kaus and that paragon of right-wing virtue herself, Michelle Malkin. Most recently, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has weighed in.

The last is one of the most disturbing of these, because Reynolds (whose outsize influence is especially concerning) links to an article from the clearly racist and anti-Semitic La Voz de Aztlan to suggest that MEChA, and by extension, Bustamante, is "racist and homophobic." Yet this connection has been thoroughly debunked, particularly in these quarters. Most of the MEChA critics have, since then, avoided this clearly false meme -- and yet Reynolds repeats and endorses it here, giving it fresh life. One wonders how many times it has to be exposed before it will finally die.

In any event, these developments are extremely interesting to me, because the more I've examined MEChA, the more persuaded I am that it is decidedly not a racist organization. Indeed, the further I've looked, the more persuaded I am that this charge is itself a form of transmission of the right-wing extremist agenda into mainstream conservatism -- which is, of course, the main concern of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism."

You may recall that much of this discussion originated with the eminently reasonable and intelligent Tacitus, with whom I've been engaged in something of a running debate over this (though I dropped out last week so I could finish the manuscript I've been working on). In his most recent post on the subject, he continued more or less the same line of argumentation, and discarded much of my analysis over my use of the definition for "hate" groups in analyzing MEChA.

Yet for all his extensive arguments, neither Tacitus nor anyone else offers what might pass for a reasonable definition of racism, nor (even more to the point) what constitutes a racist organization or group -- though they seem all too eager to bandy the term about. I thought I'd done so in the previous post, but obviously I need to make the point clearer. So let's begin by stipulating our terminology.

Definitions

First, what is racism? Many are content to settle for a formulation derived from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech: that racism means we "judge the content of a man's character by the color of his skin." This is a nice intuitive definition, but applied to the real world, it's also clearly incomplete, because it would also subsume the view of those people who seek to protect and promote their ethnic identities (this runs the gamut from Hutterites to Jews to Irish-American societies), including those who would lift up victims of racial oppression by reassuring them of their worth in society (including the JACL and NAACP). In the latter case particularly the term "racist" is inapplicable, because these groups are specifically devoted to combating the effects of racism. In other words, merely advocating the worth of one's racial or ethnic identity does not make one racist.

Racism has important elements that extend beyond mere racial awareness or advocacy: specifically, it emphasizes exclusion and bigoted discrimination, and often extends to outright eliminationism. (Some have argued that it must also include elements of power, that is, it is only real racism if it arises from the element that controls society -- viz., white people are the only American racists. I believe this argument is neither logically sound nor reflective of the real world. What is true is that racism's effects are especially pernicious when practiced by those in power and institutionalized.)

Now, to define a racist organization obviously must take these elements into account. This is why, last time out, I referred to the SPLC's definition of a hate group:

All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

Let's make the use of the term "hate group" clear. This term is meant as an umbrella to include various kinds of bigotry, including racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Just so we can describe specifically racist organizations, we can refine our terms further, i.e.:

All racist groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire race of people.

To which, just for purposes of clarity, let's specify: these attacks are characterized by exclusionism, eliminationism and bigoted discrimination.

All right, let's see how well MEChA fits this definition. We'll start by looking at the area on which most of its critics have focused, its rhetoric.

MEChA's rhetoric

Most of the characterizations of MEChA's rhetoric have ranged from the extremely tendentious to outright gross distortions. And nearly all of them are devoid of both historical and current social context.

One of the prime examples of distortion in the debate is the way a number of the anti-Mechistas, including Malkin and Kaus, have zeroed in on the MEChA slogan: Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.

Kaus offers the translation of this slogan that in fact has been used by every one of the MEChA critics:

(Many American Jewish groups fight against assimilation too, but I haven't seen any with a slogan equivalent to "For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.")

Before supposedly smart people go publishing such nonsense, it would help if they consulted, say, a native Spanish speaker (and one would think one would be available somewhere in Santa Monica).

A more accurate translation of the slogan would recognize that though "Por" translates to the English "For," it is used in a very specific sense of the word -- namely, "On behalf of" or "In the service of". "Fuera" is not "for those outside" but rather refers to the speaker, and means "Apart from." So what the slogan actually says is this:

In the service of the race, everything
Apart from the race, nothing

There is nothing remotely racist, particularly in the sense of being exclusionist or derogatory, about this, of course. The second line clearly only refers to the need to maintain one's ethnic and cultural identity. It is only racist if you deliberately mistranslate it: "For those outside the race, nothing."

Others have focused on the rhetoric contained within MEChA's founding documents, particularly certain passages in El Plan de Santa Barbara, which I explored in depth last time out and observed was only exclusivist under an extremely tendentious reading, and is only mildly derogatory in one notable instance, the use of the word "gabacho" to describe non-Latinos (and this is only mildly derogatory; it roughly translates as "Frenchy").

To this, Tacitus responds with a post in which he displaces the nouns in El Plan de Santa Barbara referring to Latinos and whites and Aztlan with similar nouns describing whites and other races or ethnicities and a "white homeland." The resulting statement, of course, is rather nakedly racist, and Tacitus concludes that El Plan de Santa Barbara must be so as well.

This is not a real argument but a rhetorical trick, one that conveniently elides both the historical and social context of the respective statements in a way that occludes the respective truthfulness and purpose of each. It assumes a kind of zero-sum view of both history and the current society in which the real-world oppression of minorities is a null factor, when in truth it affects the entire meaning of the words.

It is important to remember who were the chief practitioners of racism for most of this nation's history: namely, its dominant white majority. Blacks, Indians, Asians, Jews and certainly Latinos have all, in the past few centuries, faced an uphill battle against this institutionalized racism, and they have only made gains by asserting without apology their right to a full place at the table -- full political, social and economic equity.

And America, to its credit, has finally responded in the past half-century. There can be little question that all these races have made great strides, in no small part because of a massive change in attitudes among majority whites. However, anyone assuming that these changes have meant that racism is dead and a non-factor in modern society is conveniently ignoring the 8,000 or more hate crimes that occur every year in this country; they overlook the continuing overwhelming poverty that is endemic both to Indian reservations and migrant-labor camps; they gloss over the continuing effects of redlining on creating racial balkanization, all the while undermining genuine attempts to address these problems by claiming that they actually deepen our racial divisions.

If indeed racism is only a problem in our rear-view mirrors, then why the uproar over Trent Lott's fondness for segregation and his long-term connections to white-supremacist organizations? Why are we still having debates over whether or not such clear continuing manifestations of mainstream white supremacism as Charles Murray and The Bell Curve are racist? Why are we now faced with fresh anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about "cultural Marxism" from mainstream conservatives?

It is also important to remember that the chief factor in the past half-century's change of attitudes among the white majority has been the rise of multiculturalism, which as I've discussed previously, was specifically a response to white supremacism, which it ultimately replaced. This was, frankly, a necessary step for any democratic society that extols equal opportunity and fair play.

Multiculturalism, it must be understood, is not reverse racism, as some of its current critics might have you think. Rather, it is a sort of cultural expression of the economist's adage, "A rising tide lifts all boats." The empowerment of every member of society, of every racial group, is a net gain for society and benefits everyone of every race. Gains for Latinos, as such, do not need to come at the expense of other groups, nor should they be viewed that way in a democratic society.

It may be convenient for a privileged white male like Mickey Kaus to sniff about "a distasteful and discredited identity politics," which has become a code word for multiculturalism. The reality, however, is that the primary alternatives to this worldview remain either white supremacism or watered-down versions of it that are nonetheless essentially anti-egalitarian and undemocratic. Moreover, multiculturalism has been the chief vehicle for a cultural change that has been both necessary and healthy. Of course, much of today's conservative movement is making a concerted drive to undermine it, while conveniently neglecting to offer constructive alternatives.

Placed in its proper context, the rhetoric of the early Mechistas is clearly a reaction against the historical oppression of Latinos by whites; its characterization of the invasion of the North American continent by whites may be colored by resentment and a desire to refute the white-supremacist view that Latinos are undeserving of a place at the table, but it is essentially accurate. Whites did invade the continent. They not only displaced the native peoples, they committed widespread acts of murder and genocide against them, and oppressed them politically and economically for centuries. Anyone who tries to claim this is not historical fact is either self-blinded or unread.

Nor, for that matter, is there anything essentially exclusionist or derogatory about the early Mechista worldview. (I must also note that while the language may be read as suggestive, it is never specifically secessionist.) After all, there is a significant difference between refuting the worldview that justifies the practice of racial discrimination against you and your fellow minorities, and practicing that racial discrimination. Indeed, they are diametrically opposed to one another.

Comparatively, the document produced by Tacitus is in fact fairly typical of the kind of nonsense practiced by whites: a paranoia about an invasion of "blacks" or other races, and depredations by Jews and other conspirators, is only a fantasy that has been deployed over the past century or more by the historically dominant white majority to heighten the bigoted oppression of minorities. The altered context makes it quite specifically exclusionist as well as derogatory.

Indeed, it well echoes the kind of genuinely racist material that is produced by such former Trent Lott allies as the neo-Confederate League of the South (about whom, it must be noted, conservatives continue to evince strangely little concern, at least compared to the volumes now spewing about MEChA). Consider, for instance, "Statement of Purpose" from the LoS:

Consequently, we reject the central government's continuing usurpation of state sovereignty and support the restoration of self-government to the Southern people. If this means secession and formation of a Southern nation, then so be it. Self-government, as our forebears understood, is necessary for the preservation of ordered liberty.

If the South were its own nation, its GNP would rank it in the top five nations of the world. Its laws would better reflect the natural conservatism and Christian roots of the Southern people. We could enjoy low taxes, sound money, secure private property rights, and a free-market economy. We could follow a foreign policy of armed neutrality, leave the UN, and oppose the New World Order. We could once again reward merit and abolish the Welfare State and Affirmative Action. We could severely limit immigration. We could get government out of our children's education. We could remove ourselves from the current judicial tyranny. In short, we could seize control of our destiny as a distinct people.

Or this "Position Paper on Race":

This does not mean, however, that we must subscribe to the flawed Jacobin notion of egalitarianism, nor does it mean that white Southerners should give control over their civilisation and its institutions to another race, whether it be native blacks or Hispanic immigrants. Nowhere, outside of liberal dogma, is any nation called upon to commit cultural and ethnic suicide. Furthermore, our surrender would ultimately be regretted by all parties as the remaining liberties were squandered by those who had no desire to preserve the Eurocentric, (and therefore "racist"), institution of the rule of law.

This language is not only clearly derogatory and exclusionist (you can look elsewhere on the LoS site for lots more of both) it is quite openly secessionist. Notice that the language here is unmistakable; one does not require a tendentious reading to find these passages all of the above.

In contrast, the MEChA documents are quite benign. Its rhetoric is, undoubtedly, inflammatory and angry, but it is only vaguely exclusionist and decidedly short on the attacks on other races and derogation of them. The strident tenor seems shrill and overstated in today's context -- but then, it is important to remember that most of these documents were written in 1969, a time when the effects of white racism were still much more apparent.

Perhaps more representative of the direction taken by the organization is "The Philosophy of MEChA", written apparently in about the same time frame. Especially noteworthy is this passage:

As MEChA, we must accept the challenge to combat all forms of oppression, and manifestations as experienced through racism, sexism, and homophobia, both inside and outside of our Movement.

Indeed, the entirety of this document is focused on civic duty and coordinated action, all of which are time-honored principles of peaceful social change. Its orientation is unquestionably multicultural.

Moreover, a survey of campus Mechista Web sites reveals this same kind of benign advocacy. It is clear that this, and not creation of an exclusivist Aztlan and a plan to "drive out the gringos," is what MEChA is primarily about.

MEChA's actions

Rhetoric, of course, is one thing. But any organization's true purpose is revealed by what it does.

In this context, it is clear that not only is MEChA not racist, it is a constructive and entirely mainstream organization that is in the best tradition of civil-rights advocacy in America.

Perhaps it would help first to review the histories of definitively racist groups in America, particularly in what their actions were compared to their rhetoric. It is worth observing first broadly that white supremacism as a general factor has been responsible for a multitude of atrocities, ranging from slavery to the genocide of Native Americans to the "lynching era" to segregation and Jim Crow -- as well, of course, as the mistreatment of Latinos.

Consider the record of racist organizations -- particularly those to which MEChA has been compared by conservatives in this current brouhaha. First, there is the Ku Klux Klan, which has endured even today through multiple incarnations in America. The first of these was, according to Robert Paxton, the first historical emanation of fascism, the Reconstruction Klan. Here is its record, according to Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America:

Richard Maxwell Brown's comprehensive study of vigilante violence in America estimates that in the four years 1868-71 there were more than four hundred Klan lynchings in the South, Union general Phil Sheridan calculated that 3,500 whites and blacks were killed between 1865 and 1875, Ida Wells-Barnett, writing in the 1890s, put the number of Negroes killed by whites since 1865 at 10,000m with only three white men executed for crimes against blacks in that period. … Author Dorothy Sterling, who combed through man thousands of documents and oral histories in her preparation of a noted compendium on the Reconstruction era, cited 20,000 as the number killed by the Klan just in the four years 1868-71.

The Klan revived in 1916 after years of dormancy and was responsible for a broad range of lynchings, "race riots" and anti-black purges in the South over the ensuing 15 years or so. And it has continued to be associated even today with an array of hate crimes and heinous acts of terrorism against various minorities.

Overseas, the most notorious racist organizations were the European fascist governments, particularly Nazi Germany. I trust I don't even have to go there.

For those who would argue that a group like MEChA is only nascent in its racism, and could eventually wreak such horrors if its agenda flamed out of control, it is worth remembering that racist organizations nearly always display their true colors almost immediately. The Klan, as just seen, was violent and terroristic from the start; so, too, were the European fascists, particularly during the fascista and SA years.

And what has MEChA done? Advocate for increasing the numbers of Latinos in higher education. Organize student rallies. Emphasize self-determination.

Here is how one commenter named "cat" on Atrios' boards put it:

MeCHA has been an integral part of student life for decades; many, if not most, of my Chicano friends and acquaintances were involved with it; it was then and probably is now an advocacy organization which worked to bring Chicanos (now Latinos) into the educational institutions, to feed and clothe underprivileged children in the community, including those of the migrant farmworkers, was involved with Caesar Chavez in advocating for better working conditions for the migrant workers, and provided tutoring, mentoring, and fellowship for students, as do many other student organizations.

This view is one expressed consistently by people who have experience with MEChA. Among these is O. Ricardo Pimentel, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, who recently penned a column addressing the current campaign from the right, "California coup plays a race card on Bustamante":

But let us acknowledge that MEChA was born in the racial turmoil and rhetoric leading up to 1969. Its founding historical documents, El Plan de Aztl?n and El Plan de Santa Barbara, contain incendiary language.

But the truth is, few joining even back then were thinking of overthrowing government. They were talking about changing society, for the better.

"We all understood the history of MEChA," says Loredo, a MEChA president at Phoenix College in 1987. "We took it in the context of the times, 1969 (the founding year)."

To liberate Aztl?n, Loredo and other MEChistas pushed to get more Latinos into college and performed community service. Many, like Bustamante, entered public service.

MEChA elsewhere also led walkouts and protests to form Chicano studies programs and to push for more Chicano faculty hires.

Indeed, Republicans who wish to push the argument that MEChA is racist might want to talk to Mike Madrid, an advisor to the GOP on Latino affairs (and someone for whom this meme is probably the biggest nightmare since Proposition 187), who had this to say in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

"It's bizarre to assume this is some kind of radical group, seeking to overthrow part of the United States," said Mike Madrid, who has worked on Latino affairs for the state Republican Party. "It was part of the Brown Beret and Chicano studies movement, but it's mainly a social group and has been for years. To suggest it's involved in paramilitary training or some underhanded conspiracy is ludicrous."

Or, as Nathan Newman adroitly puts it:

No doubt there were individual members within MEChA way back who used such language, but for the organization as a whole, the idea of self-determination has been one of educational uplift within a multicultural country, as American a goal as apple pie. Anyone who has worked with MEChA students -- as I have -- can tell you they are committed to multi-racial organizing and respect towards people of all races, genders, and sexual orientation.

They are a hell of a lot more tolerant and supportive of diversity than any of their critics.

Let me extend that point even further: Their critics, intentionally or not, are actually helping to popularize one of the extremist right's longtime favorite claims: that the civil-rights groups that oppose them are themselves racist.

The origins of the meme

People who have tracked the extremist right for any length of time are more than abundantly familiar with one of the favorite arguments of such folk as David Duke and William Pierce: The NAACP, or the Urban League, or the Anti-Defamation League are all secretly racist.

We've been hearing it for years, and we still hear it today. Consider, for instance, Duke's latest opus, which is titled Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question.

What is clearly advocacy on behalf of minorities in the face of the long-term effects of white supremacism, and is in fact its clear antithesis, is declared by its very opponents to represent the same bigotry they practice. This is a kind of Newspeak or Doublethink that we have come to expect of incipient fascists, but it is not what we expect to hear from mainstream conservatives.

And yet that is precisely what has been happening as increasing numbers of conservative and even ostensibly "neutral" voices have been repeating the meme that MEChA is racist. The organization, as I've demonstrated, is discernibly neither radical nor extremist, but is in fact an effective, civic-minded and valuable component of the wholly appropriate advocacy of civil rights for Latinos.

If there is any doubt that the anti-MEChA meme is extremist in its origins, consider the Fox News story on the matter -- which is not only factually wrong throughout (it incorrectly identifies, for instance, violence that occurred at a 1996 San Diego rally as being caused by Mechistas, when in fact the attacks on anti-immigration protesters were carried out by a splinter group with no affiliation with MEChA), its original version (which has since been edited to remove the references) cited as one of its main sources none other than Glenn Spencer of American Patrol, which in fact is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. Spencer, of course, has been one of the chief progenitors of this meme, and there is little doubt that he is both a racist and an extremist.

This is not the only place it's turning up. In addition to mainstream conservative sites, the "MEChA is racist" meme is turning up all around the far right, particularly in racist anti-immigrant circles. And with it is emerging an attached stream of genuine and rather naked racism. This is occurring even in respectable circles of the blogosphere, including at the intelligent and thoughtful blog run by Tacitus, where this comment was made by one of his readers, someone named "J":

So when they see aztlan belongs to us (those wo plant the seeds, water the fields) and not the foreign Europeans. Additionally they do not recognize the border between the countries. Now put into context the saying "For the race (Raza) everything. For those outside the race nothing."

Starting to get the picture.

That could explain why Mexicans are streaming into california like ants at a picnic. They are trying to take over Mexico from within because they believe it is theirs. So in addition to being racist against gringos, they are actually espousing takeover of sovereign american states. Makes you wonder about Bustamante in california, considering he was in Mecha at its most revolutionary time and refuses to dissacosiate himself fromt he group. Also his policies and those of Gray Davis seem to suggest that he is seeking unlimited imigration and benefits for all illegals. I guess, if you can take over a state without using guns why not work the system.

If California has any sanity whatsoever they will not elect Bustamante, and they will close their borders asap, instead of alowing themselves to be overrun by those who believe California belongs TO THEM.

Hint to Tacitus: One of the giveaway earmarks of genuine racism is vermin references, particularly comparisons of an entire racial group to various low forms of life. And arguments that we close the border are the purview of outfits like American Patrol and their white-collar counterparts like U.S. English.

I am fairly confident that bloggers like Tacitus and others who are presenting their arguments are devoid of any racist tinges themselves. They are arguing from a kind of logic and facts, misplaced as they might be. However, in many ways, this meme is simply the latest permutation in a meta-theme we've been hearing from the right for the past several years -- namely, that whatever stupidity the right might be guilty has its equal counterpart in the left (see, e.g., Jack Shafer's recent blithering nonsense).

Well, the truth is that sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the left is stupid in ways that are unique to itself. And sometimes, as in this case, so is the right.

It is hard in the end not to come to the conclusion that the proliferation of the "MEChA is racist" meme is intended to blunt the emerging news over Arnold Schwarzenegger's substantial connections to U.S. English, a group whose racist underpinnings are themselves fairly substantial. And indeed, there are good reasons why Schwarzenegger should distance himself from them and resign his position with them.

Cruz Bustamante, on the other hand, frankly has nothing to apologize for.

[Update: Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber has a long and insightful post on this topic too. He covers some of the same ground, but has other material -- and makes some key points too. Go read it.]