In 1933 when Hitler became chancellor, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess granted Heinz Spanknobel, who had entered the United States as a Christian minister, approval to create an American Nazi organization called the "Friends of New Germany". By 1936 this group had become known as the "German-American Bund", a US group devoted to advocating for Nazi Germany and Hitler.
The German-American Bund, which conducted a summer youth camp on Long Island, New York for its members, reached its zenith in 1939 with a membership of about 25 thousand sympathisers. Nearly 22 thousand of them gathered at Madison Square Garden, ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of George Washington, who Bund leaders considered "America's first fascist". Several thousand Bund members were also members of Hitler's paramilitary "Sturmabteilung" (SA), the so-called "Brownshirts". At the start of World War 2, many Bund members were placed in internment camps, and some were deported at the end of the war, but many remained in the US.
After Hitler assumed power, he hired a prominent New York City public relations firm, Carl Byoir & Associates, to improve his US image. The firm's clients included the American Tobacco Company, Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, and many others. One of the firm's associates was Edward Bernays--Sigmund Freud's son-in-law who public relations (PR) flaks today generally consider the "father" of PR and spin. Most people have never heard of him or his books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), yet Life magazine named Bernays one of the most influential people of the 20th century. As a relative of the famous German psychoanalyst, Bernays had developed insight into the dynamics of the "Unconscious" and subliminal motivation, and he quickly and deftly exploited that knowledge to fleece the Americans by persuading them to buy junk they didn't need, to adopt habits like smoking (and later a campaign persuading them to stop), and, politically, by coaxing them to accept policies harmful to their own interests. He called it "engineering consent" and deemed it crucial to democracy (it was certainly important to the Third Reich). Some just call it "propaganda", and it was pitched as the way to control populations when direct force is "ill-advised". American advertising, largely based on Bernays' persuasive techniques, embodies racist and elitist assumptions along with a paternalistic, yet unsympathetic, view that people are too dumb to manage their own affairs and must be guided. Using similar techniques whether selling the public hamburgers or wars, this self-appointed class of ubermensch presumed to "guide" the People using devious and deceptive means derived from the new "science" of Psychology, relieving them of money and liberties in the process.
Bernays had engineered a political propaganda campaign in the early 1950s on behalf of the United Fruit Company to destroy the popular president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, by traducing the reformer as a godless Communist and paving the way for US supported coups d'e'tat. The term "banana republic" originated in reference to United Fruit's control of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries where the company extracted profits. The company's brutal policies and inhumane treatment of workers resulted in cheaper bananas for US consumers and poverty for the country's peasants. Arbentz, for trying to lessen the disparity between the extremely wealthy elite and the poor in Guatemala-- on whose backs the elite's wealth was founded-- was deposed in a 1954 CIA-arranged coup. This episode revealed to many that multinational corporations, with greed and treachery in their hearts and military power behind them, can make life hell for anyone opposing the Order.
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, in his 2008 New York Times book review of Peter Chapman's Bananas, How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, describes the company as "more powerful than many nation states ... a law unto itself." He said:
"United Fruit defined the modern multinational corporation at its most effective -- and, as it turned out, its most pernicious. At home, it cultivated clubby ties with those in power and helped pioneer the modern arts of public relations and marketing. After a midcentury makeover by the 'father of public relations,' Edward Bernays, the company started pushing a cartoon character named Senorita Chiquita Banana [based on Carmen Miranda]. Abroad, it coddled dictators while using a mix of paternalism and violence to control its workers."
As for repressive regimes, Chapman writes in Bananas, United Fruit was their best friend--, with coups d'e'tat among its specialties. Kurtz-Phelan noted that "United Fruit had possibly launched more exercises in 'regime change' on the banana's behalf than had ever been carried out in the name of oil," and he pointed out that the company's successor, Chiquita Brands International, has admitted to paying nearly $2 million to right-wing death squads in Colombia." Edward Bernays' persuasive techniques were key to manufacturing the consent necessary to make the US public ignore reports of atrocities and support government policy conducive to profit-making.
German Propaganda: Joseph Goebbels
Germany's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, admired Bernays and followed his work despite Bernays' being s Jew; the techniques were too useful to ignore. It was from Bernays that Goebbels learned the propaganda techniques he used to market fascist ideology to the German public.
An undercurrent of US fascism had come to the astute attention of Major General Smedley Butler, a decorated United States marine who in 1935 wrote a book called War is a Racket . He testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans' group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler's allegations were credible although no-one was prosecuted. A similar scenario played out successfully nearly thirty years later when President John Kennedy was ambushed and killed under highly suspicious circumstances. There were many reasons for his assassination, but his threatening to dismantle the CIA, home base for so many Nazis, may have been primary.
A key figure in the Kennedy assassination and cover-up was Allen Welsh Dulles (1893--1969). An icon of US Intelligence, Dulles mingled with Nazi elites, embraced fascism, lived in neutral Switzerland during the war, and knew for far too long what was happening to Jews and other unfortunates in Germany while doing nothing to stop it. After the war Dulles worked tirelessly to cut deals for his Nazi connections, especially those on trial for war crimes at Nuremburg, and he actively facilitated the transfer of Nazi technology (and ideology) to the United States after World War 2. By most definitions, Dulles was a traitor. Instead, he is remembered as an elder statesman and diplomat.
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