by Jim Marrs
Not publicly listed, Bertie, as Bertelsmann is sometimes called, is 76.9 percent owned by the Bertelsmann Foundation created by the German Bertelsmann and Mohn families. The remaining 23.1 percent ownership resides with the Mohns.
Heinrich Mohn, chief of Bertelsmann house from 1921 onward, was a member of a patrons group sponsoring the Nazi SS. During wartime, Bertelsmann had close ties to Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and published 19 million books, which made it the largest publisher for the German Army, according to the Independent Historical Commission for Investigating the History of the Bertelsmann House During the Third Reich (IHC), a group created in Britain in the late 1990s. In announcing the group’s findings in 2002, chairman Saul Friedlaender, an Israeli historian, said, “Bertelsmann published a variety of papers and books that clearly had anti-Jewish bias.” The group also found that Bertelsmann made indirect use of “slave labor” in some occupied countries. The IHC found that Bertelsmann particularly targeted wartime propaganda toward youngsters with series like Exciting Stories and the Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth.
Bertelsmann’s history came under scrutiny in 1998, when the company took over Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States. In public announcements, the firm said it was closed down by the Nazis. The IHC, however, reported that this story was a “legend” and that the firm’s closure in 1944 was more likely due to shortages of material than any subversive activities.
The IHC’s report forced Bertelsmann chairman Gunther Thielen to publicly state, “I would like to express our sincere regret for the inaccuracies the commission has uncovered in our previous corporate history of the World War II era as well as for the wartime activities that have been brought to light.”
Although Bertelsmann spokesman Tim Arnold said, “The values of Bertelsmann then are irreconcilable with the company today. The company is now a global player in the media industry,” many Americans, especially World War II veterans, might wonder about the propriety of a German corporation once tied so closely to the Nazis controlling so much of their media. As has been noted here previously, many of today’s wealthiest multinational corporations might deserve the same scrutiny as Bertelsmann.
IT HAS BEEN said that freedom of the press belongs to whomever owns the press, and when it comes to media ownership, the name of the game is money.
Like other major monopolies, money is the purchaser of influence for the communication corporations in Washington, D.C. A Center for Public Integrity (CPI) investigation of campaign contributions through November 2006 showed the communications industry has spent $486 million since 1997 to affect election outcomes and influence legislation before Congress and the White House.
Whose money is this and what has the American public gotten in return?
“Since the landmark 1996 Telecommunications Act, in which the cable industry promised that deregulation would stimulate market competition and lower monthly cable bills for all Americans, rates shot up 45 percent, nearly three times as fast as inflation. That same law relaxed the rules on ownership of radio, and since then the two largest companies have greatly enriched themselves, increasing their number of stations owned from 130 to 1,400. In 1997, broadcasters lobbied and received portions of the digital broadcast spectrum worth, according to some estimates, upward of $70 billion—for free…. With the past relaxed ownership and control rules, I have not seen any evidence to credibly suggest that the quality of information provided to the American people has improved, or that the values and commitment to serious journalism in this country have changed for the better,” said Charles Lewis, former executive director of the CPI, in a 2003 talk at the Columbia University School of Law in New York City.
Lewis also explained how media companies win influence with lawmakers and regulators. “They do it the old-fashioned way, by using the time-honored techniques with which business interests routinely reap billions of dollars worth of subsidies, tax breaks, contracts, and other favors. The media lobby vigorously. They give large donations to political campaigns. They take politicians and their staffs on junkets…. Not only does the media aggressively lobby and contribute to the two political parties and politicians at the federal level, they also decide whose face and voice make it onto the airwaves. Such raw power provokes fear and trepidation in the political realm.”
Lewis illustrated this power by noting that when President Clinton requested that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provide free or reduced-cost television time to candidates, within days “the powerful broadcast corporations and their Capitol Hill allies managed to halt this historic initiative. In the Senate, incoming Commerce Committee chairman John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana and the chairman of that panel’s communications subcommittee, announced that they would legislatively block the FCC’s free air-time initiative. ‘The FCC is clearly overstepping its authority here,’ McCain declared.”
Lewis concluded: “So this is where we are. A regulated industry has a stranglehold over the regulator and its congressional overseers. Not a new story in Washington, I’m afraid, but one of the reasons Americans frequently distrust government, its officials, and its policies.”
And has this tightly controlled news media brought us better coverage of the events and issues crucial to national well-being? Not according to studies by the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism. They found that “hard” news stories, which constituted more than half of all news reports thirty years ago, today have fallen to less than one-third. Furthermore, story content today has moved away from discussions of the political process, war and peace, and policy, to people, human interest, and news you can use. There is also increasing emphasis on scandal, the bizarre, and fear of the future.
Declining viewership and readership has become commonplace in the mass media and does not seem to overly concern corporate managers. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher and board chairman of the New York Times Company, recently stated: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care.”
Increasingly, the attempt to present news objectively has given way to advocacy, which borders on sheer propaganda. According to a State of the News Media 2007 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, “A growing pattern has news outlets, programs, and journalists offering up solutions, crusades, certainty, and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people.” Comparing programming today with “shock jock” radio talk-show hosts, the report stated, “The tone may be just as extreme as before, but now the other side is not given equal play.”
Distraction, ignorance, and fear are integral parts of the fascist globalists’ plan for a new American empire. Like Hitler before him, President George W. Bush has used both nationalism and middle-class moral values to gain the unquestioning allegiance of a large swath of the public.
Georges Eugene Sorel, a French conservative Socialist whose philosophical work provided a foundation for fascism, noted at the start of the twentieth century that all great political movements are generated by “myths,” defined as the belief held by a group who believe themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil.
The Nazis used the myth of Aryan brotherhood and superiority to create their National Socialist empire. In the United States, it has become the myth of America’s God-ordained right to create an empire which has launched a worldwide war for American-style freedom and democracy. Today, numerous books and articles have been written about a new American empire—or Reich, in German. “No one can argue credibly that America today is not an empire. Militarily, economically, and culturally, the United States wields a hegemonic influence unparalleled in world history,” stated Jim Garrison, founder of the State of the World Forum and author of America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power?
The creation of this empire has been facilitated by the power of the corporate mass media, increasingly fall
ing into fewer and fewer hands. The ownership of the corporations that today control the information available to the broadest portion of the public can be traced back to the same families and companies who backed Hitler.
Like Hitler, who sought to bring individuals alienated by the Industrial Revolution and Depression into a hive-like German Volk, or united people, the globalists who control America’s mass media have attempted to bring citizens into one common worldview by the unremitting dissemination of homogeneous news and information. Networks and cable channels routinely accept reports from “pool” reporters, which results in many channels presenting the same version of the news. Furthermore, news content has increasingly been simplified down to the lowest common denominator; 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer argued: “I challenge any viewer to make the distinction between [TV talk-show host] Jerry Springer and the three evening newses and CNN.” Only those who consciously tune in to alternative media or surf the Internet gain access to information differing from the party line.
Hitler achieved this conformity of thought among his followers through the use of radio, mass rallies, and meetings. Today, it is the corporate-controlled mass media that determines the worldview of most Americans. The corporate media owners, many of them members or close associates of the fascist globalists’ secret societies, have learned the lessons of Nazi media manipulation well—i.e., simplistic catchwords repeated constantly with no real opposing viewpoints allowed. For example, at the time of the Iraqi invasion, the corporate media called the enemy “insurgents,” defined as anyone who opposed the established authority. This, of course, meant Iraqis opposed to the U.S. occupation, but the term “Iraqis” did not fit well with government pronouncements about U.S. troops being well received by that nation’s population. By 2007, the term “insurgent” was being superseded by the term “al-Qaeda” in an effort to connect fighting in Iraq to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This attempt came in the wake of President Bush’s admission that neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq played any role in the attacks. Likewise, the mass media long and loudly has trumpeted the term “War on Terror,” with its attendant warnings to be watchful for terrorists trying to slip weapons of mass destruction into the United States, yet noticeably failed to report that even seven years after 9/11, no serious attempt has been made to secure the nation’s borders. Official government pronouncements are merely broadcast uncritically, with very little effort to check their reliability.
Also, like Hitler, the directors of modern American viewpoints speak of a brighter and better tomorrow, yet constantly regale the public with images and evocations of great moments in history. The attacks of 9/11 initially were compared to Pearl Harbor, and President Bush early on garnered criticism for calling his War on Terror a “crusade,” a term with ugly historical connotations. The sacrifices of wartime America during World War II were pointed to as models for the war against terrorism.
The Nazis brought complex social and economic issues down to one single concept—the Aryan German in a death struggle with the International Jew. Nearly the same concept is widespread in America—the freedom-loving American in a “war on terror” with Muslim fanatics. Such “us against them” mentality has been used by despots for centuries to rally populations behind them.
“Media manipulation in the United States today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth,” said Professor Mark Crispin Miller of New York University, who specializes in propaganda and the media.
The arrogance of the Nazi mindset along with their accepted method for hoodwinking the public was voiced by an unnamed aide to President George W. Bush in 2002. In a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, this person referred to Suskind, and apparently all media reporters, as living “in what we [the Bush administration] call the reality-based community.” Such persons, stated this presidential aide, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This clearly echoes Hitler’s stated belief that big lies repeated loudly and often will sway the masses of people more effectively than well-articulated arguments based on reason and facts. It also reflects the arrogance of the fascist globalists, those who feel they are somehow superior to others and that they alone are fit to rule.
This reach for empire—the “Future Belongs to Us” Nazi mentality—cannot be separated from its cultural context, for a nation’s culture clarifies its worldview and sensibilities.
In describing Nazi culture under Hitler, Professor George L. Mosse might well have been describing popular tastes and prejudices reflected in America today. “The mass of people (and not just in Germany) do not like ‘problem art.’ Do not care for the distorted pictures of expressionists; they do not understand the searchings of such art. The same can be said about literature, indeed all cultural endeavor. People like their pictures simple and easily understandable and their novels should have gripping plots and large amounts of sentiment. The lowest common denominator of popular taste has a sameness about it which does not vary from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, or indeed from country to country.”
As America’s economic wheels slow in the New World Order’s global economy, the poverty numbers have continued to rise, with an estimated 36.5 million impoverished persons counted in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The bureau did note a three-tenths of a percent decline for the first time in a decade in mid-2006 but termed it “not statistically different from 2005.” Meanwhile, America’s middle class is being squeezed out. The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., has continued to drop since 1970, according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, as cited in the New York Times.
It would be wise to reflect on the words of psychiatric researchers Roeder, Kubillus, and Burwell as the U.S. economy threatens to topple, like that of post–World War I Germany: “In time of virtually universal economic ruin, it was far easier to sell an ideology which supported the extermination of the social and political—and, inevitably, economic—‘deadweight.’”
NO ONE QUESTIONS that the attacks of 9/11 were the result of a large conspiracy. The question has become: whose conspiracy was it?
A cursory count showed more than four hundred Web-site citations on Google, a major Internet search engine, in which Americans have drawn parallels between the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Reichstag fire that launched Hitler’s Third Reich—the destruction of a prominent national structure with the immediate affixing of blame on terrorists, the rapid passage of restrictive laws and the curtailment of civil liberties. But because of the tight corporate control over news and information in America, many citizens still have not been exposed to the controversies, contradictions, and unexplained events of 9/11.
Despite attempts by both government and corporate leaders to deny that the attacks were anything but what was claimed, separate national polls show a growing number of Americans have declined to fully accept the official explanation, which, when carefully examined, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. In mid-June 2006, when questioned as to why Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted poster did not include any mention of the 9/11 attacks, Rex Tomb, FBI chief of Investigative Publicity, stated, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11” (emphasis added).
The conspiracy theory accepted by the Bush administration and the corporate mass media contends that nineteen fanatical Muslims someh
ow overcame the $40 billion U.S. defense system, simultaneously hijacked four commercial airliners, managing to disconnect their transponders at approximately the same time, and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, with the fourth crashing in western Pennsylvania as the result of a revolt by the passengers—the entire operation conducted under the command of a Muslim cleric using a computer in a cave in Afghanistan.
Zogby International poll results released in September 2007 showed that 90 percent of persons on the East Coast and 75 percent of those in the western United States believe the attacks of 9/11 have been the most significant historical event of their lifetime. However, 65 percent of those polled gave President Bush’s attempts to combat terrorism negative marks, a dramatic drop from those who supported his efforts just after 9/11. And despite the globalist control over the mass media, national polls, such as a September 2006 poll of more than 64,000 persons, have shown more than half the country has failed to buy into the official story of the attacks. Only slight mass media coverage was given to a Zogby poll conducted between August 24 and 26, 2004, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. The poll showed that almost one half of New York City residents (49.3 percent) and 41 percent of New York state residents believed that some national leaders “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.” Despite the political implications of such an accusation, nearly 30 percent of registered Republicans and more than 38 percent of those who described themselves as “very conservative” supported this proposition. A September 11, 2006, MSNBC Question of the Day poll asked, “Do you believe any 9/11 conspiracy theories that indicate the U.S. government was involved?” An astounding 58 percent answered, “Yes, I believe there is evidence,” with only 30 percent voting “No, that’s ridiculous,” and 11 percent stating, “I’m not sure.” This means a whopping 68 percent were at least open to the suggestion that 9/11 was contrived within the U.S. government.
