I'm watching Wouk's Series about WWII and the naked bodies and Dogs

[KoKo]

are reminding me of Abu Graib Prison. It's the SAME THING in my mind if Rummy had a free hand, the Iraqi's would have been gassed, also! Jews hearded into Concentration Camps, stripped of all they know and then gassed and stacked like "cord wood" to be buried in mass graves. But the humiliation of those Jews being forced to strip naked in front of their Nazi humiliators and the dogs used to intimidate them barking at the children and the old and sick and the middle aged is what I think of when I say the photos from that prison.

Who are these Bushies that they would allow humiliation of their fellow human beings just like the Nazi's? And they used the same jargon that the PNAC seem to use after their years at Harvard or University of Chicago where they learned this crap they have filled the "Chimp's head with."

I'm watching the Herman Wouk "WWII Series." And, at this point I'm at the rational for the NAZI Corporatists to gas and bean count the number of bodies they've processed and gassed for the Fuhrer! All in the name of the German Empire.

I see Rumsfeld, Perle,Rove, Wolfowitz, Cheney and all of their followers in this Miniseries....it makes me sick. And, I see US here on DU who tried to stop this war in this Series, also. The "intellectuals" like Aaron Jastrow, the "fence sitters" like Natalie, the Military doing what it can like Pug Henry...and their children who died or suffered because of this NAZI DREAM to Conquer the World.

Wouk wrote this Chronicle so that it would never happen again to anyone. And here we are, again...stacking naked bodies, using dogs and fear to intimidate and secrecy to mask it all.

We have become THEM...How short our memories are, and how lacking our teachers were who didn't warn us enough about this and that it could happen again, so soon...:-(

[seventhson]

1. I share your revulsion. Remember Always that the Bushes CREATED Hitler

Hitler was financed by a consortium of corporate fascists which included the Bushes, the Dubyas (Walkers) Rockefellers, Morgans, Harrimans, Fords, IBM, General Motors, Pharmaceutical Companies (Bayer, Merck, etc.).

THEY were not defeated in WWII yet their straw man was (Hitler).

Hitler, like Karl Rove or Goebbels, or Limbaugh or even Dennis Miller and Bill O'Lielly, was a corporate product with a brand (the swastika) and a couple of effective memes (foreigners, terror, terrorists, Communists, Jews, Patriotism, Fear, racial superiority).

It was drooling and blithering drooling lunacy - but it was bloodthirsty and effective in mindfucking a nation to become the support system for a million brutal killers - necrophiles, who lusted after blood and death.

This is THEIR brand of government. Fascist brutality and totalitarianism.

This is the Bush brand of government.

THIS is why it is so reminiscent of the dogs and the naked humiliation of "the other".

It is the same people doing it - only the next generation of greedy bloodthirsty killers.

Financed by the murders of millions in the extermination camps and war factories and petrochemical plants of Nazis in league with WASPS from Yale from Wall Street and the "best schools".

[tlcandie]

3. I must agree. Hitler wasn't the evil as much as those around him

who were more than willing and pushing the agenda just like we see with this regime.

It takes more than one person to commit these type of atrocities! I'm not saying Hitler or * are angels by any step of the imagination, but I believe it is the people surrounding them who are doing the dirty deeds and pushing things beyond their limits with the consent of the fuehers!

All because of power, greed, and vain imaginings...very sick individuals!

[seventhson]

7. Hitler was MAD evil, but that is WHY the Bushes financed his run

he needed money. Creepy nasty perverts and mammon-worshippers financed him.

But he WAS the embodiment of evil. No question about that. Just as much as the members of the BFEE who are promoting the very same death machine today.

[tlcandie]

16. I stand corrected.. thanks seventhson!

:hug:

[seventhson]

22. not a big correction so much as Bush is the moral equivalent of Hitler IMO

Seeing as how he personally benefitted from his Dad's and grandad's Nazi past and profits.

Dubya is exactly the beneficiary of the death camps. And he and his demonic minions were spawned by those camps and those who financed them.

That is also what they want to return to. Abu Ghraib is no different than the locked ghettoes of Lithuania or Poland - or the labor camps.

Murder and human destruction was their way of life - these types. We can never forget that.

Several Holocaust commentators have said that BECAUSE of the Holocaust we (who are not persecutors) are ALL Jews to the persecutors - no matter our faith or ethnicity. We are all just fodder and expendable grist for their mills of gold, uranium and diamonds, and, of course, oil and its byproducts.

[stavka]

25. ...so My grandfather, who was dead when I turned eight....

I'm equally to blame for whatever he did?

THis is a VERY flakey argument. Bush is to Blame for what he has done, and is tainted by what his father did for him, not even everything his father did. (Some of which is ok in my opinion - not what I would have agreed with, but not EVIL)

[seventhson]

28. No, but if your grandfather murdered my family and you live

in the house which was stolen from my family, - and you use it against me and hurt me too, then you are equally responsible.


Nothing flakey about the fact that Dubya profitted from (via inheritance of the fruits of the crimes) and continues to cover up crimes of the Holocaust - including the betrayal of our troops in WWII (treason) - and the same crimes are being carried on today by the same cadre of rich wasp families along with their nonWasp collaborators resulting in the deaths of thousands if not millions (and I would argue millions due to their global policies of economic annihilation of all opposition).

Abu Ghraib represents a historical and intergenerational crime and ongoing criminal and fascist conspiracy.

That is how I see it.

Defend Bush all you want. He's guilty from my perspective.

[DrWeird]

2. You know how US troops found some survivors?

Do you know what we did with the homosexuals?

[KoKo]

12. Maybe I don't want to know what "WE" did with the homosexuals, but I will

believe anything...just as I will believe that govenments, regimes, empires, dictators will cover up their crimes through history...all in the name of retaining power.

But, WWII was a more "honorable war" (if any war can be called that...I don't know) that what we did in North Korea, Vietnam or now in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the many other places we are working night and day to destabilize...

So what did they do with the homosexuals?

[Eric J in MN]

19. Tell us (nt)

nt

[stavka]

26. I suspect, we let the few go....

...given the only camps US troops liberated were in Southern Germany and what is now Czechoslovakia - which served as far more actively political camps (none of which were extermination camps) - and thusly had pretty few locally captured homosexual males left alive if any come 1945- and they, along with all other internees were turned over to refugee organizations about as fast as local US commanders could stop GI's from killing SS guards dumb enough to stick around.

"Pink Triangle" is great source material for this........

[madfloridian]

4. Winds of War....what channel?

That was an excellent series, except for the acting of the girl who played in Love Story. I would love to see it again, not because it was pleasant but because it is so relevant now.

[KoKo]

6. I had to buy the whole series: Winds of War, War & Rememberance and

and Part III: The Final Chapter, Holocaust and Redemption.

It's available online at "Critics Choice video," "Amazon" and at your local Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million stores.

I think some libraries might rent it, also.

[Eric J in MN]

5. letter to NY TIMES from Holocaust survivor about Abu Ghraib

To the Editor:
It was with dismay and horror that I viewed the photo of a cowering Iraqi prisoner menaced by vicious military guard dogs at Abu Ghraib prison (front page, May 10).

As an Austrian Jew imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939, I was an eyewitness to similar inhumane behavior by sadistic Nazi SS guards.

OTTO PERL
Teaneck, N.J., May 12, 2004
------------------------------------

The relevant photo and more information is at:

http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2004_06_14_stripping_prisoners_of_their_clothing_and_dignity.asp

[KoKo]

8. Well, then it IS the same. I can't believe the photos from that Prison

and how outside of DU and some other websites, there's so little outrage for these crimes agains humanity. Our bodies are our dignity. To make us appear naked before our humiliators or conquerors is the most heinous of crimes against humanity.

And, that there are folks alive today who remember this...and do nothing is an abomination...

[Eric J in MN]

20. The big differernce is that Abu Ghraib isn't for systematic

killing.

But there are significant similarities.

[seventhson]

23. I disagree, It IS sytematic killing. The scale is smaller, that's all

and it has all the hallmarks of racism, antiSemitism and genocide - especially in this context.

It IS sytematic murder.

I only need to point out that while the scale is not comparable (YET) in Iraq - that even the Nazis had to start out with a few thousand murders here and there - a little torture, etc., before the mass killings could begin in earnest.

What kills me is that the same entities and families which backed Hitler also backed Saddam and now back Allawi.

[Cleita]

9. I don't know if you have read it, but pick up a copy of

"The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer. Page by page you get chills reading about Nazi Germany because it so closely parallels what is happening with this administration. I hope our last chapter doesn't end like theirs with the almost complete destruction of Germany.

[KoKo]

11. I read it many years ago and never forgot it. But Wouk's miniseries is so

detailed it brings it all back, and being visual makes it so human and real. Wouk's books focus more on our side and then goes into Germany...so it's an interesting juxtaposition.

[never cry wolf]

13. Also please read "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer

Being an architect, I was fascinated by his story. were he alive today he would readily recognize what the hell is happening today from an insiders POV.

on edit: I don't think we are there yet, but that is the path we are on. Bully of the world, by far the most technologically and powerful military in the world. So damn many similarities in the rise to power. Sorry, I feel sick...

[Cleita]

14. I will.

It sounds facinating.

[never cry wolf]

17. I, too, have been fascinated by how a modern nation could turn

Maybe that is why for 3 years I have been "out of step charlie" in trying to tell everyone I know about the bushistas. I have read extensively on the rise of fascism in Germany. My ancestry is German, and I always had a curiousity as to just how the hell this could have happened. I grew up, as a boomer, mainly in the 60's, everyone's parent were WWII kids. We played army or cowboys. We watched Combat on teevee, at the movies it was war, war, war. Our comic books were Sgt. Rock or other war comics, if not superheroes.

(As an aside, now that I think about it we were frikkin brainwashed, or at least it was attempted, fer sure! How I ended up a pacifist, I'll never know, though many of my peers are not.)

Anyway, Speer's book is a good read. An inside POV from an intelligent middle class citizen about just how the F the fascists came into power and the mindset current at the time.

I have chills thinking about 4 more years.

[Cleita]

18. Four more years will be our undoing.

We can't let it happen. I'm a pre-boomer myself. I lived in Chile part of my growing up years. Chile at that time was very democratic if poor. I can't believe to this day that the Pinochet regime ever happened, but even the most democratic of states can be toppled if you aren't watching your back.

At that time though, right after WWII, there were lots of eastern europeans, who had become stateless persons, wandering around South America trying to make new lives for themselves. They had stories to tell, especially the poles and Czechs. All I can say is, the horror. There were also ex-Nazis among them. They kept a low profile, but generally everyone knew who they were. If they had a particular skill to offer, even the Americans and Brits looked the other way.

[KoKo]

21. Thanks for sharing that Cleita... I think now that it creeps silently as

T.S. Eliot said about the night creeping on silently on cat's paws (I think it was Eliot) but that we don't see it coming until it's hear, many of us. The others of us become Cassandra screaming into deaf ears to hear us. My empathy is with Cassandra because I think we here got it with the Selection of 2000, and there are so many yet who don't see the direction we are going. And, it becomes even more frightening with what we all know and can't even speak about here because many are not ready even here to see how far we've gone down that road.

It' is chilling. I think it's helping get through some feelings by my watching this series, though. It takes me back to another time when America did have a cause, even if our Corporatists were in that one, too...the cause was more easily defined as to what we sent our men into battle for. It's now more, or as obscure as Vitnam was. Which makes it hard for those of us who lived through Vietnam, like myself and some of you who came out of that WWII time and remember stories from our very young years.

[seventhson]

30. My parents and siblings lived in Latin America and suffered at the hands

of the fascists who took over in that region.

I was born after that, but I remember the stories. Assassinations, disappearances, death threats (my father was an ardent anti-fascist), and ultimately flight to America to protect his family.

It is partly where I get my politics and why I am so strident in my devotion to pacifism and justice (as well as peace and security and a healthy planet).

[KoKo]

10. The Miniseries is Very Graphic...Actors by the hundreds naked being

rolled into carts dumped into mass graves, and the gas chambers, the firing squads. I don't know who they got to volunteer for these scenes. The women and children naked marched before the SS Officers and required to give their names...the screams of the children in the long lines...the brutality done with the smiles of a Cheney, Rumsfeld or Bush.

It's chilling...The visuals are so much Abu Graib...and what probably happened there, in Iraq or Afghanistan, with women and children and men being caught up off the streets and marched into that place, and grilled by grinning military folks who belittled and berated them, then the threats, the showers the nakedness, the torture, the humiliation, the leashes and dogs.

It's the same. We are living in it. We don't even know the half of it until these people are out...what has gone on...in Germany and here in Bush's Amerika.

[Disturbed]

15. More than intimidation by attack dogs.

The photo of the man that was intimidated by the dogs had a second photo showing that one or maybe more of those dogs were let lose and they bit the man. The photos that the Media screened for American public consumption were mild compared to the ones that the Pentagon refuses to release. Many in Congress have seen the unreleased photos and videos and refuse to discuss those.

The Prison Torture Policy and Secret US Prisons sanctioned by the US Govt. Neo Fascists has been a mass Cover Up.

[stavka]

27. ...it was, like many films of the day

Filmed in Yugoslavia.....

easy to find people willing to portray victims - they were very skilled at this point, and easier to find a few to relive their previous occupations, or those of their fathers as the executioners - the production designer in Europe was Croation.

History as NBC writes it....

[stavka]

24. Herman Wouk is such crap! He's like the Danielle Steel of history

His "Winds" material is less accurate than the crap the History Channel calls documentary programming.

..and never compare 50 people, no matter who ordered them to do what abusing prisoners to wholesale extermination engineered by one state and faithfully carried out by like minded people on an entire continent numbering in the thousands.

I for one didn't reap any great benefit from any Iraqi beaten to death in a US military prison, and I didn't agree to it either. - to name but two "subtle" differences in situations.

[KoKo]

32. My father-in-law who was a decorate Navy Captain served in WWII,

Normandy, Sicily and North Africa, Korea, too, was very fond of Wouk's book. He said it made the experience of the "American Military and those on the home font involved or waiting for the troops to come home very real...and as much as he loved reading all the WWII books, since he lived it he still appreciated Wouk's view.

He didn't live long enough to see the miniseries. But the attention to detal Wouk puts into this long miniseries is worth the view. Especially the counterplay and underlying psychology of those caught up in WWII from the beginning "Winds of War" through to the "Final Chapter" (i.e. the German's "Final Solution." He makes it real...and engages you...and then one goes and looks for more information and buys the other books to really get into it all from the often "dry" historical perspective.

I would not paint this epic mini-series as Danielle Steele to those who have not seen it. You won't see the attention to detail anywhere today that you see in this wonderful "epic."

And, the similarities to Abu Ghraib are just stunning...in the eerie view that we could do to Iraqi's what the Germans did to Jews.

Sorry, you trivialized this...Obviously you haven't seen how much Wouk put into the mini-series and why it's worth viewing...because of how much he added in perspective...

[seventhson]

29. For those interested on this subject: "Der Fuehrer" (1944)by Konrad Heiden

and his "History of National Socialism" (1935!!!)are both required reading.

In his "History.." Heiden describes what Goebbels' called the "Electoral Bomb" of the burning down by the Nazis of their Legislature (Reichstag) - equivalent of fire-bombing the Capitol in DC.

It was blamed on foreign terrorists and usded ot to pass "Homeland security" acts to abandon their Constitution.

If you want to understand how it all works, you must read these books. They will blow your mind in terms of how reminiscent it all is of today, altho written 70 and 60 years ago.

The reason isd that the Bushes backed Hitler and THAT is why the modus operandi of the BFEE is virtually the SAME as Hitler/ There is virtually no difference in who is behind the power and what there goals are (global coreporate fascist totalitarianism)

It has to be said

All the time


It IS happening here.

[seventhson]

31. must read thread

kick