We are witnessing America going fascist in appalling lurches. Little is gradual about it although certainly the prep-work took all the decades since WW II. Bigotry, intolerance, and militant nationalism rooted in trumped-up fear and hate usher in textbook Nazi-style fascism just as Sinclair Lewis warned it would back in his 1932 novel It Can’t Happen Here.
More recently, Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone warned of how a clownish populist spouting utter hateful nonsense could easily win superficial popularity and be swept into the Presidency, only to reveal his hollow core of psychopathic nihilism and end up literally destroying us all in nuclear exchanges.
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When I was about 15 I rode shotgun with my dad one very snowy night to pick up my aunt at a lonely, makeshift railroad station — an empty trailer with a Franklin coal burner in it, and a double line of knocked-together plywood benches against either long wall — in the industrial train yards of Altoona, PA. We got there about midnight, snow falling so densely it dimmed the one street light they had mounted on a pole over the doorway. We went in and found the train had not yet arrived, so we waited, and that’s when I saw an old man on the bench facing the door.
He was hunchd in an overcoat at least a size too big for him, with a fedora on his head. He dropped a rolled newspaper and leaned down to get it. Hat fell off. I picked it up to hand to him and, as I did so, noticed through his thinning hair a long number tattooed in blue ink across his scalp. He glanced up at me, snatched the hat, and put it on his head as if covered it in shame. He nodded but said nothing and did not smile.
It’s the number of thoughts in his head, I remember thinking. When he gets to that number he’ll die of a stroke.
It was chilling later to realize it was probably a death-camp tattoo from when he was a little kid. He looked haunted, or maybe like a haunting.
When the train came we met my aunt outside and hustled her into the car for the long ride home.
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Last year, quietly, the FBI released 750+ pages of documents that had been classified since WW II. They cover the FBI’s search for Adolf Hitler.
Hitler escaped.
He flew out of Berlin, rested in Spain, submarined to the Canary Islands , rested there at Winter Haus, then submarined to Argentina, where he was kept protected in a safe house behind an estate mansion in woods, accessible only by lake, eight miles from the nearest town, itself a haven for SS officers with one road in and out, and a loyal populace tight-lipped to this day.
Not yet sure if Hitler moved on from there or died there but he did not commit suicide in that bunker.
He reached Tempelhof Airport via a tunnel from his bunker. It has been found and confirmed, along with seven stories of underground city built by Speer for Hitler and used during the end of the war to get people and loot out. Tunnels are often big enough to drive convoys of trucks through.
Hitler’s personal belongings, listed on the manifest as such, flew out days earlier, then he was flown out with many others in a twenty-plane flight on 21 April 1945, a day after the last time he was ever seen in public, which had been greeting troops and well-wishers on his birthday.
The FBI found invoices, bills of lading, and flight manifests in typical Nazi detail. Recent investigations found witnesses to corroborate this flight, and many other things.
In Spain he stayed at one of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s more isolated manors. Keep in mind that, although officially neutral, Franco was fascist and did covertly support the Nazi regime, lending aid and assistance when he could.
Some of the aid rendered consisted of a chain of monasteries run by the Vatican allowing fleeing Nazis to hide as monks while further preparations for re-settlement were made via the Odessa rat lines.
Hitler was ill with a severe stomach ailment, among other things. He required both medical attention daily and rest between stints of fleeing.
Submarining was difficult on the healthiest of sailors and hard on Hitler, a withering old man. At least one nurse and possibly two other women accompanied him. He would not have survived the trip across the Atlantic to Argentina if done in one leg so a rest at a huge Nazi/Spanish submarine base let him break the journey.
Keep in mind, this huge underground sub re-supply base on Spanish soil was there despite Spain having no submarines.
The tunnels, hoists, and winches in the Canary Islands sub base are huge, suitable for moving tons of supplies and torpedoes. Sealed rooms housed explosives and allowed torpedoes to be armed without threatening the entire facility, which exists extant to this day. It’s a huge complex.
Witnesses still alive tell of four Enigma machines at this base, and of mysterious movements of a cadre of people from an unannounced sub just after the war ended. They were taken to an estate, the Winter Haus, named after its owner, a wealthy Nazi ex-patriot businessman. At least, that was his cover.
This mysterious group is thought almost certainly to have been Hitler and his escort and entourage.
The Winter Haus is fortified, even walled, and has a tower that can see and signal the ocean. It’s on a slanted plain barren for miles around it, so no one can approach it unseen. Guard shacks perch in mountains behind and around it. There is a single road.
It is also due to be demolished to make way for a resort.
Hitler’s bunker was filled in with concrete and paved over for a parking lot.
The safe house hidden behind the estate’s mansion in Patagonia was imploded, razed, and buried.
Systematically these sites associated with the flight of Adolf Hitler are being expunged, as was Spandau Prison almost immediately after the sole prisoner, ostensibly Rudolf Hess, was “found dead” in impossible circumstances.
What happened with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the resultant WW II is being erased from history, swept into memory holes planned all along.
The old guard Nazis gotten out of a collapsing Third Reich starting in 1945 via Odessa rat lines, with the help of sympathetic countries including Spain, Argentina, (long a refuge-of-choice for retired Nazis and with huge German enclaves throughout the country), and the Vatican, who chose Catholic Hitler over Atheist Stalin to receive its support and compassion — these old guard Nazis remain rich and powerful. They are quite obviously influential in current GOP politics, for example.
In France, currently reeling from the Daesh terror attacks, currently seething with lust for revenge, it’s been a problem since WW II ended to ferret out the identities of Vichy collaborators who remain in the government bureaucracy. Third-tier life-long sinecures have allowed such comfy hiding. It is known there were and remain many such fifth columnists, to borrow a cold war term of paranoid art. These cancers lodged in the body politic often influent things toward a resurgence of fascism, when possible. Witness the current anti-muslim scapegoating, fear, and hate, which is used to create both crackdowns and profitable war.
Britain never came to grips with its pro-Nazi, fascist-boosting aristocracy. Blue bloods wanted to hand Britain to the Nazis in exchange for a separate peace. Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB offers detail insights into plans never implemented, which were uncovered after the war. He depicts how it might have been, even as Philip K. Dick imagined the Axis powers having won and having divided America at the Mississippi between a triumphant Japan and Nazi Germany in his superb Man In the High Castle. In Fatherland, Robert Harris novelizes a British SS officer whose innate decency solves a crime regardless of consequence, set against a backdrop of Nazi Britain.
We see a strong fascist streak still in Britain’s Tory party and even in its Freemason police scandals and banking murders, all of which perhaps cover much worse.
So Hitler is long dead of old age and infirmity. So the death camp tattoos face as what were once children behind barbed wire wither into old folks with feeble memories. So history is rewritten by a modern crop of fascists determined to finish what Hitler started. So generations grow today who have no idea they’re being misled, lied to, and enslaved by ideas only psychopaths and sadists can embrace.
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, as Santayana wrote.
Trouble is, combined with today’s global reach of corporate corruption and fascist cancer, the ecology itself is mortally wounded, and cannot sustain higher life forms much longer. History itself is about to end, at least insofar as any meaningful primate participation is involved.
This is where space alien saviors, the religion scams, and other forms of delusional escapism come in to comfort the dying animal in its dark burrow as the predatory night brings endless dark and cold to its awareness.
A cynic is not a pessimist per se, but someone who sees the world at dog level. Ask any dog what it’s like to be kicked, despised, beaten, starved, abandoned, ignored, and condemned at every turn, eking a meager subsistence by scavenging, tortured by mange and fleas and broken bones from speeding cars, ask those street and woods dogs what it’s like, this existence, before being too quick to dismiss realism as “merely” cynical.
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Slavery, genocide, the holocaust, the disruption and destruction of WW II — yet Hitler escaped. He was arguably not even near the worst history can show us. Those psychopaths who do the worst to us rarely pay any price sane people would consider commensurate to the harm they do.
Villains skate. Predators gorge.
And we all fall down.
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Currently we’ve fallen to a new nadir, for American ideals, at which calls for marking, tracking, and banishing select groups of people based solely on bigoted category rooted in fear and hate without foundation, at which calls for outright murder and slaughter, vie for our attention with the daily mass shooting. We can get only a little bit lower before hitting the rock bottom of extinction, with pollution leading the way toward that, all so one tenth of one percent of mankind can get even richer than they are already, when they already control over 97% of the entire world’s wealth, which is unimaginable even for them.
They live and move among us, invisible, their world apart from ours, rarely impinging, never overlapping. Wealth and power are scoffed at by these few, who have it all and so have no need even to keep score. They do not win, they own.
We’re property, Charles Fort concluded. Of what or whom, he did not know and could not guess.
Now we know.
Didn’t turn out to be gods, extraterrestrial intelligences, or automated robotic machine code digital matrix Zen illusion, it turned out to be approximately 30 families, maybe 400 people total, of whom just under 100 pick, choose, arbitrate, and decide what goes for all we call reality.
These are those who believe they can survive even a mass extinction with ecological collapse. They believe they can ride it out in their underground enclaves of lush luxury and infinite supplies. They believe they can reduce the population to under half a billion and rid Earth of its “useless eaters” who clutter reality and spoil their view. They believe they can retain just enough of these Moloch & Eloi slaves to do the scut work required for them to live in a new paradise, a heaven they themselves design and own. They believe this is well under way and they are happy.
To believe is to pretend.
Mankind has been murdered by infantile delusions of grandeur on the part of a handful of people so wealthy and powerful their dreams become games in which entire nations are pawns.
We know who most of them are, even where.
We could, if we dropped our petty squabbles over skin color, god yap, territory, oil, minerals, and so many other unimportant things, rise up now and take them down, to redistribute their wealth and make a paradise we can all share.
Could have. It’s too late now, with runaway greenhouse affect already underway. Earth will soon resemble Venus, uninhabitable and sterile due to temperatures over 900° and maybe a burned-off atmosphere, if we break the Van Allen belts that protect us from radiation.
We coulda been a contender.
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I used to wonder but science fiction ruined that sense for me.
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