“Nazi Appeasement” and the Cringe Factor

The righteousness of the free enterprise system masking occasional greed, our President may well enjoy the family fruits of appeasement. 

I must confess that I cringe in embarrassment every time our President steps in front of a microphone – embarrassment for America, embarrassment for the once-dignified and balanced Republican Party and embarrassment for a Bush-sponsoring Christian Church that has sold its soul to the god of sound bites. 

Our swashbuckling President, only recently divinely "delivered" from the comatose condition of drug and alcohol addiction, has been the right guy for the times as we tread water in the cesspool of "world copdom."  The dead and dying stand as a grim Show-‘n-Tell of the narcissism of unchecked nationalism, patriotism and lust. 

In a speech before the Knesset on the 60^th anniversary of Israel's founding, President Bush gave as his mocking example of the futility of negotiating with the "enemy" the 1939 statement by Idaho's Sen. William Borah, "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." 

Setting aside the possibility that over time we create our own enemies in our inexplicable search for international boogeymen, our President's worldview equates diplomatic negotiation with appeasement, a policy of succumbing to hostile demands in exchange for peace.  The most referenced example of appeasement is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement in which Britain and France accepted that the Czech region of the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany.

The target of Bush's ridicule of negotiation was made purposely obscure in the hope, I suspect, that Sen. Obama would take the bait.  Take the bait he did, and he jammed it down the throats of both Bush and McCain.  Advantage Obama!

Let's be honest; Obama got it right.  Bush's diatribe before the Knesset on appeasement was targeted for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee – not the customarily-gentile and grandfatherly Jimmy Carter.

Appeasement or Preemptive War; America stands at the crossroad. Make no mistake about it; that is the looming focus for the 2008 Presidential campaign.  McCain vs. Obama – imperialism vs. civility; the past vs. the future; Old Testament Law vs. New Testament Grace; fear vs. hope.

That inevitable debate, only temporarily postponed in the unlikely event of a McCain/Clinton contest, is sorely needed in America as she struggles from the hidden agendas of a colonialist empire to the freewheeling information age.  Failure to act responsibly as a member of the international family of nations cuts instantly across cultural and class barriers worldwide, from the rice paddies of China to the cotton fields of America. 

Aside from acting in poor taste by airing our domestic dirty laundry where it cannot be defended nor retrieved, our swaggering President demonstrated a profound ignorance of history – that of his own family.

Robert Perry, in the May 18, 2008 edition of consortiumnews.com, reveals a Bush family secret that would drive any of its descendents to drink:[1] 

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

 

The business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.  It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the "Trading with the Enemy Act…"

 

Protected by layers of well-connected friends, Prescott Bush (the President's grandfather) brushed aside the Nazi scandal and won a U.S. Senate seat (1952) from Connecticut, which enabled him to start laying the foundation for the family's political dynasty. 

 

In recent years, however, the archival records from the pre-war era have been assembled, drawing from the Harriman (Averill Harriman) family papers at the Library of Congress, documents at the National Archives, and records from war-crimes trials after Germany's surrender.

At the expense of poor old Sen. Borah, who died in 1940, the Bush family super-appeasement strategy of aiding and abetting the Nazis well into 1942 remains one of America's best-kept secrets, according to Perry. 

The righteousness of the free enterprise system masking occasional greed, our President may well enjoy the family fruits of appeasement. 

The problem, of course, is that the American people will suffer the consequences for decades to come.

[1]Robert Perry, The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement, http://www.consotiumnews.com/2008/051808.html, May 18, 2008.