Re: MEME: History, Nazis, and >H

Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Sun, 05 Dec 1999 20:43:42 -0500

Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:

> > Right! "National Socialism" is "State Capitalism". It is interesting that

> > this "State" (c.f. "Corporate State") subcontracted the management
> > of many death-camps to industrialists like Farben and Messerschmidt.
> > Some "detainees" were even sent to civilian factories to serve as
> > slave labor as a mode of compensation.
> >
> > Bob
> Exact-amundo Bob. One of the reasons Jews & Gypsy's were packed in trains
> was for "cargo" shipping reasons-just like in Western-hemisphere slavery in
> the 16th-19th centuries. Brutal, evil, and part of our history.

I'm not entirely sure we should be talking about this, but we have to, don't we? My family is German, and they are no more inhuman or less civilized than any other nationality. How did such a Bosch nightmare with anal trumpets, demonic toads, and anatomical grotesques ever happen?

I know a Latvian woman whose father was killed and she and her mother abducted as Nazi armored troop carriers blitzed across her front yard, killing chickens, cattle and demolishing buildings. Of course she was a small child, and they were shipped, as you noted, to a munitions factory in Munich. After some time, her mother began to express an admiration for Hitler as did many other deportees. Dagnija couldn't understand this then or now. But Hitler in fact was implementing a form of Welfare State at this time, including something like our W.P.A. during the "Great American Depression" (which was, of course, worldwide). Unemployed men became wage-earners as public projects workers -- everybody, Dagnija tells me, thought the Autobahn was a sort of engineering miracle.

At the same time, Hitler's "Corporate State" was busy negotiating with Volkswagen to provide equipment for the original execution chambers -- shower-stalls with, you guessed it, carbon monoxide from hundreds of VW exhaust pipes forced through the shower-heads, such a slow way to die that the condemned rioted frantically in the shower chambers, screaming and suffocating as they died. The VW's used are exactly the "Beetle" that became so popular in this country. Of course, this procedure attracted unwanted attention, so at Auschwitz and Auschwitz- Hitler's chemists experimented with more efficient agents, eventually formulating Zyklon-B.

I do not wish to offend anyone, but I haven't the slightest difficulty imagining Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt (who used impressed Chinese labor to build his railways and paid them with liquor), J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, and Andrew Carnegie (who tried to assuage his putative guilt by building public libraries) playing a similar role in the United States, given the opportunity.

I don't want to believe there are two kinds of people, but then neither do I wish to regard myself as a psychopathic predator who has learned to impersonate a civilized being, deceiving myself and others in the process.

Bob



Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA