George Soros calls for de-Nazification. A serious consideration of Soros's proposal will mean a serious re-evaluation of the progressive left's elections only strategy and a turn to supporting a mass anti-war and pro-impeachment movement from the grassroots.
"To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future. America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."
George Soros
While the idea that George Bush can be compared to Hitler has become an acceptable topic in polite conversation among most liberals and progressives, it almost always begins and ends with the Bush himself. The assumption is that if we vote him out of office, everything goes back to normal. That George Bush is supported by a mass movement lavishly funded not only by private groups like the Scaife Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute but also by tax money through abstinence education and faith based programs is not something most of us like to think about. What’s more, the yes votes for the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts by large parts of the Democratic Party have served to blunt the urgency most liberals and progressives would otherwise feel about legalization of torture and other extreme forms of repression. And even liberals and progressives have decided to give to the idea that the trains should run on time priority over the restoration of civil liberties, putting the restoration of habeas corpus on the backburner so as not to threaten the increase in the minimum wage and the election of a Democrat to the White House in 2008.
That makes it all the more striking and important that Democratic Party supporter George Soros is now using the term "de-nazification" to describe what needs to be done about the Bush Administration and American government in general. "We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/...
It’s very important to note that Soros is not a protester at the Capitol Mall during a United for Peace and Justice rally. On the contrary, Soros, although reviled on the extreme right, is best known for funding groups like Moveon.org and Media Matters, people who, while on the progressive left are also Democratic Party loyalists who are indifferent at best and more often outright hostile to the antiwar and protest movements.
This distinction is worth dwelling on. George Soros is a policymaker, not a protester.
When Hugo Chavez called George Bush "the devil" he was playing to the political equivalent of the bleacher creatures at Yankee stadium, to ruffians like me who go to protests, who use terms like "imperialism" and "Christian fascism", who sell communist newspapers, wear black masks and turn over trash cans after setting them on fire. It was protest, provocation, not policy. Soros, on the other hand, speaking to the staid economic conference at Davos, was playing to the 2000 dollar a seat corporate boxes at Madison Square Garden. He mumbled it under his breath in between endorsing Barack Obama and taking a sip of bottled water. It was policy not protest. His intention wasn’t to outrage. His intention was to influence the elite. Hugo Chavez doesn’t really believe Bush is the devil but Soros was deadly serious when he announced that the United States government should be de-nazified.
We should listen to him.
So what precisely does Soros mean by "de-nazification"? Obviously the United States hasn’t just lost a war and isn’t being occupied by a foreign power. Nobody in the Bush administration wears swastikas and black armbands (in public anyway). And nobody from the Bush administration moved in to cancel November’s election after the Republicans lost control of Congress. On the surface, the United States is a functioning democracy with a weak, lame duck right wing President and a resurgent opposition party in control of both houses of one branch of government. Protest is legal. The corporate press is a quasi government controlled press that fully participated in the run up to the war in Iraq but that doesn’t stop you from reading Media Matters, the Daily Kos, the Washington Report on the Middle East or even the Revolutionary Worker. We’re not a fascist country, right? The Constitution is working, right?
The destructive and radically authoritarian quality of the Bush Regime did not spring full grown from the head of the stolen election of 2000, and it wasn’t conjured by Osama Bin laden out of the poisonous smoke pouring from the World Trade Center on 9/11. What’s more, it’s not a direct mirror of the ruling class nor is it the inevitable result of late capitalism or even imperialism. Rather, the fascistic nature of Bush Regime comes out of a powerfully distorted reaction of the ruling class to the political and cultural dislocations that came out of the 1960s and the backlash against the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. It was allowed to continue to grow by compromises made by Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, and can roughly be divided into three branches:
1.) The cross-fertilization between the Republican Party and a radically authoritarian brand of evangelical Christianity, commonly known as "Dominionism" or "Christian Fascism".
2.) A persistent and extralegal shadow foreign policy establishment that began as a reaction to the reforms that came in response to the Vietnam War.
3.) The faux grassroots radical right that came out of the Nixon administration, the ruling class media, and from powerful conservative money men like Richard Mellon Scaife’s creation of shadow organizations to match and blunt the effect of the genuinely grassroots organizations that came out of the Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam war and feminist movements. The takeover of large parts of the "independent" media by the Republican Party.
While it is easy to assume that the Christian Right has been dealt a lethal blow by the circus around Terri Schiavo and the recent news of Ted Haggard’s homosexuality, this is a dangerous assumption and it ignores the way the Dominionists have continued to grow in power and influence over the past three decades in spite of periodic setbacks and bad publicity. Indeed, each time the Christian right suffered a setback during the 1980s and 1990s, the sex scandals around Tammy Faye Baker or the fallout from the Clinton impeachment, they only came roaring back with even more power and penetration into the US government.
Who watching the spectacle of Jimmy Swaggart’s hilarious televised apology in 1988 would have imagined that only 12 years later the Christian right would capture huge parts of the United States government up to and including the White House and the Attorney General’s office? But the penetration of the Christian right into the US government has a history that goes back several decades and includes funding and enabling genocidal dictator, Rios Montt in Guatemala. Billy Graham, for example, who was close to Richard Nixon and was recorded trading viciously anti-Semitic statements with the disgraced president, is now considered an elder statesman and a "moderate" and his son Franklin is deeply involved in today’s Christian fascist movement, regularly speaking before stadium sized crowds which he holds spellbound with over the top anti-gay and anti-Muslim propaganda.
Any de-nazification process would have to include dealing with the Christian right’s deep penetration into the government bureaucracy. It would include radically slashing faith based programs and getting rid of abstinence education money, which has essentially become a slush fund for the Christian right in general. It would include strictly enforcing the separation of church and state as well as reversing the extensive damage the Christian right has done to the ability of government scientists to report on global warming and the world Aids epidemic. Ideally it would include the arrest and conviction of members of the Christian right connected to the mass murder of the native population in Guatemala in the 1980s under Rios Montt. It might even include exploring the idea of impeaching members of the Supreme Court, specifically Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both possibly members of the radically anti-democratic Catholic cult Opus Dei.
The shadow foreign policy establishment behind The Project for the New American Century, PNAC, and incidents like the yellowcake forgery was, ironically, the unintended result of democratic reforms that came out of the Vietnam War. Limited by the War Powers Act and the Church Commission and prevented from openly waging war by the backlash against the fiasco in Vietnam, the Carter and later Reagan administrations were driven underground. Their funding of the Islamist movement in Afghanistan would result in the horrific blowback of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the Boland Amendment, passed in 1982, which prevented the Reagan administration from directly giving money to the Contras, led to the Iran Contra incident in 1987. To look at the rogue’s gallery around the Iran Contra prosecutions, Michael Ladeen, Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams, John Poindexter is to be shocked to realize how many of them are still deeply involved in making American foreign policy. The Project for the New American Century, which not only began advocating regime change in Iraq in the 1990s but also provided the nucleus for the Bush foreign policy establishment, is the direct outgrowth of the radical right’s dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration’s lack of a sufficiently militarist and aggressive response to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Any de-nazification process would have to include a deep and thoroughgoing investigation into the Yellowcake forgeries, the involvement of Ahmed Chalabi in the run up to the war in Iraq, and to the ongoing intimidation of members of Congress by unelected right-wing groups like AIPAC. The outing of Valerie Plame and the humiliation of Colin Powell on the state department in 2003 are only the most obvious and well-known results of the shadow foreign policy establishment. A de-nazification process would include putting as many members of PNAC and the old Iran Contra group as possible in prison and permanently banning as many as possible from any contact with the US government. It would also include stringent safeguards that would prevent unelected thugs like Michael Ladeen and Ahmed Chalabi from interfering with the operations of legitimate government agencies like the State Department. It would put military policy back in the hands of trained military personnel and keep it far away from amateurs and frauds like the Kagan brothers, and it would greatly increase the power of congress, of legitimately elected members of the government, over when we go to war and when we don’t go to war.
The faux grassroots radical right is a conscious creation of the Nixon administration in an attempt to counter the genuine grassroots movements that came out of the 1960s. The best-known example, of course, is the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, a key player in the 2004 presidential election. John O’Neil, the leader of the Swiftboat Vets, was an angry right wing Vietnam Vet who was picked up by Nixon to shadow John Kerry in his days as an activist for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That O’Neil remains obsessed with Kerry after 35 years is testament to his own mental instability. The fact he could influence a presidential election is testament to something worse. Jerome Corsi, O’Neil’s partner in the Swiftboat campaign against John Kerry is now a key player in the Minutemen who’s authored a well-publicized, well-marketed book that not only advocates radically right wing "solutions" to illegal immigration but also serves as an ideological justification for a well-armed right-wing paramilitary group.
Any de-Nazification process would have to prevent the White House and Congress from using the power of the federal government and our tax money to set up organizations designed to influence who gets elected to Congress and to the White House. It would thoroughly examine the possible penetration of government agencies like the CIA into the media and document examples of the government’s use of the independent press to influence government policy. Judy Miller at the New York Times is only the tip of the iceberg. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, for example, began as an employee of the Nixon administration. Vice President Cheney, in turn, helps inflate Fox’s ratings and influence by requiring Fox to be played at various times in various government agencies. But Fox is only the most obvious example of a quasi government agency posing as an independent media outlet. Any denazification process would prevent the government from essentially owning and operating major media organizations like Fox. It might mean bringing back the Fairness Doctrine but it would certainly put up a wall between the media and the government.
I could go on but nothing about the specifics of a ne-nazification process can really be set in stone without an impeachment hearing followed by some type of truth and reconciliation process. We simply don’t know how deep a lot of this goes. But here’s the sobering thought. Germany was never fully de-nazified, even though British, American and Soviet troops had complete control of the country after 1945. Indeed, there were Nazis at the highest level of the Germany government well into the 1960s.
This is sobering to think about, especially if you’re George Soros. Soros is a wealthy, powerful man and immune from some of the pressures and intimidation that could be brought against most of us, but nobody gets to his position in life without knowing exactly how power works and exactly how the powerful maintain their position. While nobody in the Bush administration is especially concerned about a protester on the capitol mall holding up a sign that says "George Bush International Terrorist", the idea that a wealthy, powerful man like George Soros is calling for a denazification process in this kind of cool, matter of fact way is not going to sit well with the Nazis he’s is calling to be driven out of the government. Michael Ladeen, Pat Robertson, Otto Reich, Jerome Corsi, these are dangerous men who might react violently to the idea that they’re going to spend any time in jail. You don’t talk shit about Tony Soprano (and these men are essentially high tech gangsters) unless you mean business and while Soros does in fact seem to mean business here, he doesn’t talk about where the power will come from to drive these Nazis out of the government. His track record, supporting groups like Moveon.org, groups that don’t believe in political organizing outside the Democratic Party, and supporting bland, uninspiring candidates like Barack Obama isn’t very promising. History is actually full of examples of social democrats, liberals, and even communists winding up dead because they never thought that the fascists they threatened would take the fight outside of the rules and react violently.
Think only about Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala or the Communist Party in Indonesia in 1965. In each case, the progressive forces of the country attempted to seize power and transform society through parliamentary means and wound up being drowned in blood.
Even more sobering is the realization that Soros’s political allies in the Democratic Party will not engage in any kind of denazification process on their own. This has nothing to do with speculation but with recent history. While Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon and the disastrous consequences of a lack of a real impeachment hearings are well known (the careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney being only two of them), much less known is the way Bill Clinton essentially sealed the fate of his own administration by refusing to pursue the Iran Contra investigations, essentially shutting down the inquiry into the hard right’s extra parliamentary influence on the American government in order to pursue some illusory compromise with the Republicans in Congress.
As Robert Parry makes clear in his book "Secrecy and Privilege", "centrists" in the Democratic Party very pointedly told Clinton not to pursue the Iran Contra matter any further.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
My book, Secrecy & Privilege, opens with a scene in spring 1994 when a guest at a White House social event asks Bill Clinton why his administration didn’t pursue unresolved scandals from the Reagan-Bush era, such as the Iraqgate secret support for Saddam Hussein’s government and clandestine arms shipments to Iran.
Clinton responds to the questions from the guest, documentary filmmaker Stuart Sender, by saying, in effect, that those historical questions had to take a back seat to Clinton’s domestic agenda and his desire for greater bipartisanship with the Republicans.
The results of Clinton’s disastrous choice not to pursue de-nazification are obvious:
Clinton’s failure to expose that real history also led indirectly to the restoration of Bush Family control of the White House in 2001. Despite George W. Bush’s inexperience as a national leader, he drew support from many Americans who remembered his father’s presidency fondly.
If the full story of George H.W. Bush’s role in secret deals with Iraq and Iran had ever been made public, the Bush Family’s reputation would have been damaged to such a degree that George W. Bush’s candidacy would not have been conceivable.
But it goes further than this. In his attempt to strike a bipartisan note of compromise with the Republicans and the people who would later become known as "neocons" Clinton allowed them to infiltrate his own administration.
Instead, in another accommodating gesture, Clinton gave the CIA director’s job to right-wing Democrat, James Woolsey, who had close ties to the Reagan-Bush administration and especially to its neoconservatives.
One senior Democrat told me Clinton picked Woolsey as a reward to the neocon-leaning editors of the New Republic for backing Clinton in Election 1992.
"I told [Clinton’s national security team] that the New Republic hadn’t brought them enough votes to win a single precinct," the senior Democrat said. "But they kept saying that they owed this to the editors of the New Republic."
Woolsey of course was one of the founding members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
His tenure at the CIA gave the shadow foreign policy right unprecedented access to information about the workings of American intelligence and helped pave the way for the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And Woolsey hasn’t gone away. He was last seen on Fox News lobbying for an immediate bombing campaign on Syria.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/...
In other words, these people simply don’t go away when their patrons in Washington lose elections. They got jobs at right wing think tanks, work as commentators on the cable news networks, go into the universities. They pull strings of their protégées who stay inside the permanent Washington bureaucracy and wait for their chances to get back into the government.
The real problem is not that Gerald Ford or Bill Clinton knowingly chose to enable a shadow government inside official Washington (in fact Woolsey never had much access to Clinton) but that they never had the option of a real de-nazification process because they never had the political support to pursue de-nazification. Gerald Ford was operating in the context of a stalemate between mass support for the anti-war and Black Nationalist movements on one hand and the growth of the "silent majority" and proto Reagan democrats on the other. Ford could have made the decision to permanently fumigate the Republican Party but instead chose to finesse Nixon out of office with the promise of a pardon. One can’t help but notice how Ford died shortly after the Republican party’s disastrous crash in November of 2006. The nostalgia for the old school Republican conservative Gerald Ford in the ruling class media was an unmistakable sign of regret over their not having pursued denazification in the 1970s and the subsequent neocon and Christian fascist takeover of the party.
Clinton’s compromises, on the other hand, continue to haunt the Democratic Party and are currently a major factor in Democratic Party politics. It’s easy to see that without a mass movement outside of both parties to support a genuine de-nazification process, the Democrats will continue to back down on the war in Iraq and will continue to push for the escalation of the war to Iran. Even if Russ Feingold were elected to the White House in 2008 with an obvious mandate from the American people to overturn the Patriot and Military Commissions Act, the ruling class media and the pseudo Republicans in the Democratic Party would quickly derail the agenda and turn the narrative towards "bipartisanship" as surely as they have clouded the clear mandate that came out of the mid-term elections of 2006 to end the war in Iraq. You might as well just elect Obama or Hillary and keep Feingold in the Senate where he can do more having only to worry about appealing to the voters in Wisconsin and not in the rest of the country.
So what will work?
Denazification needs to be a grassroots, popular movement outside of both parties. Libertarian Democrats like Russ Feingold and anti-war Republicans like Chuck Hagel are possible allies, possible instruments of denazification but if left on their own they will simply back down exactly the way Gerald Ford and Clinton backed down. It has nothing to do with their own personal qualities but simply the fact that they wouldn’t have the political leverage. A popular, grassroots process of denazification might include the following:
1.) Student strikes at the major universities that call for the university administration to deny credit for high school biology courses that teach "intelligent" design instead of evolution. On their own, university administrations won’t pursue any policy resembling denazification and will most likely back down in the face of Christian fascist extremists who have access to money and to powerful people in the government. They need to be pushed into it by their own students and faculty, people who want to guarantee that their kids won’t be reading the Bible in science class in 2012.
2.) Mass anti-war marches on the scale of the immigrant rights marches of 2006. The Democratic Party and Soros’s employees in groups like Moveon.org have to get behind the anti-war movement and stop sniping at it from the sidelines. Yes, there are left wing "extremists" in the anti-war movement but there are also pro Israel extremists in the "Save Darfur" movement and extremists in the Immigrants rights movements and major Democratic Politicians (Nancy Pelosi at the Save Darfur rally in Washington of April of 2006 and Hillary Clinton at the immigrant rights movement in New York in April of 2006) openly support both. Anti-war Democrats need to give up their purism about the anti-war movement and jump onboard. The only people on the leading edge of the Democratic Party left can push them into it. You can push for an end to the war in Iraq or you can get a job with the John Edwards campaign. Your choice.
3.) An impeachment hearing that will probe deeply and widely into the Bush administration. This in and of itself will do very little since it’s more likely than not to lead to a compromise like Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon. But it will get everything on paper and go through a necessary legal step that will precede the kind of popular movement that will lead to a true denazification process.
4.) Americans need to reach out to people in Western Europe who are beginning to move against war criminals in the Bush administration. The indictment of Donald Rumsfeld and arrest warrants for the CIA agents by the German government are good examples. We need to support the democratic governments when they make moves against our own war criminals. This means writing congress, marches, petitions, threats to deny money to their campaigns. They need to get the message that the American government isn’t above the law.
Obviously this is far from a complete list and any action taken towards denazification will have to come out of a mass popular movement that influences and interacts with legitimate elected politicians in both parties. But we need to understand that simply electing a Democrat to the White House in 2008 will do little more to denazify than electing Clinton did in 1992. It might in fact embolden and empower them.