Which World War is it, Anyway?

"And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!" - from the fourth leaflet of the anti-Nazi resistance, The White Rose, 1942.

Among those wise enough to know America is in one and has been for some time, there's disagreement over which World War George Bush is actually waging. Should we call it number III? Or was that the Cold War, and now we're at number IV and counting? ("This is World War IV" is the favoured construct of the neoconservatives. See, for instance, such bloody-minded idealogues as John Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz. I imagine at some point they determined that decades of association with nuclear apocalypse had voided the potential positive spin for "World War III.")

So which World War is it? It's neither the Third nor the Fourth; it's still the Second. Even though the apologists of the Pirate Class in their red, white and blue shirts will never own the name "fascist." As Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language, "the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" But that's no reason for us to shy from using it. Just because goosestepping has gone out of style doesn't mean they've kicked off their jackboots.

When we talk about Nazis in America, we're talking about more than the more than passing resemblance to the Bush Cartel. That Prescott's family business profited handsomely by the Nazis is well known, at least by those who think it important to note such things. But the story is larger and uglier than more dirty dealings by a Bonseman.

It also goes deeper than the Republican Party's active recruitment of fascists and racists since the mid-50s through the aegis of its Heritage Groups Council, but since that's seldom recalled, let's pause for a moment to recollect.

When a number of senior members of George HW Bush's 1988 campaign team were revealed to be old school Nazi sympathizers it generated something of a media flap - Pete Hamill titled a New York Post column "George Bush and his fascist fan club" - but the scandal is little remembered today.

Some of Bush's team:

Radi Slavoff, GOP Heritage Council's executive director, and head of "Bulgarians for Bush." Slavoff was a member of a Bulgarian fascist group, and he put together an event in Washington honoring Holocaust denier, Austin App.

Florian Galdau, director of GOP outreach efforts among Romanians, and head of "Romanians for Bush." Galdau was once an Iron Guard recruiter, and he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa.

Nicholas Nazarenko, leader of a Cossack GOP ethnic unit. Nazarenko was an ex-Waffen SS officer.

Method Balco, GOP activist. Balco organized yearly memorials for a Nazi puppet regime.

Walter Melianovich, head of the GOP's Byelorussian unit. Melianovich worked closely with many Nazi groups.

Bohdan Fedorak, leader of "Ukrainians for Bush." Fedorak headed a Nazi group involved in anti-Jewish wartime pogroms.

Nazis staffing the VP's campaign? Oops! Tut tut tut. We need to run better background checks, wink wink.

The Nazi infection goes back much further. All the way back to the 1930s, when industrialists with fascist sympathies and names like DuPont and Morgan sponsored a coup against Roosevelt to dismantle the New Deal. And then the '40s, when men with names like Bush, Dulles, Favish and Rockefeller traded strategic goods with the enemy, prolonging the war and costing Allied lives.

Worst of all, Project Paperclip saw Nazis virtually co-found the "National Security State," bringing their advanced technology and criminal medical research to America. And something else as well, as Nick Cook is told by the pseudonymous "Dr Dan Markus" in The Hunt for Zero Point:

When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of nonlinear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough to realize that their home-grown scientific talent couldn't handle it. That it was beyond their cultural term of reference. That's why they recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of doing things. Von Braun's V-2s are a case in point, but so was their understanding of physics. The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus. You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well.

The Nazi virus entered America's system long ago. It's been Americanized. But what else would one expect, given the CIA was essentially a co-creation of Nazis like General Reinhard Gehlen and his Abwehr anti-Soviet intelligence apparatus and Nazi money launderers like Allen Dulles and the corporatist/intelligence old boy network of Sullivan and Cromwell. No. Such men got exactly what they expected.

"Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand," Mort Sahl said early in 1968. So early Dr King and Robert Kennedy were yet to join the body count. "They showed how arrogant they had become. Now it's a question of symptom. That crime was a national symptom. If we can turn our back on that, we will pay a terrible price. That will be the end of this democracy."

They showed their hand, and they've had forty years of getting away with it. And not for lack of evidence. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read Fonzi's The Last Investigation, Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much or Newman's Oswald and the CIA, to cite just three works. Rather, they got away with it because the truth is too terrible, and many who did not conspire in the killing conspired in the cover-up because they were led to believe that a finding of official complicity in Kennedy's death would shatter the system, when in fact it might have killed the virus.

And undoubtedly the same justification has been used over and over again, to shield Americans from the awful truth of state-sanctioned assassinations, the October Surprise, medical experiments worthy of Mengele, the introduction of crack to the LA underclass, BCCI, 9/11 and on and on. High treason, many times over. But so what? You know what they say about none daring to call it such should it prosper. And brother, has it prospered.

Here's the thing: we're not talking about discrete, singular, sui generis conspiracies here. Indeed, these are not even conspiracies, in the sense of representing aberrant breaks with the system. These are, rather, examples that the system works. It's just not the system Americans were taught in civics class. The examples evidence the criminalization of the state by the deep political nexus of underworld, intelligence, industrial and military interests. "America," to these players, serves as the legit front for their lawless enterprise. The Nazi virus has consumed the host. If it were eradicated and the host miraculously recovered, the poor thing would swear up and down it was still late Autumn, 1963.