Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Steel Cage Match: Founder of the Crips vs. Founder of the CIA
It’s no secret that Tookie Williams was a “co-founder” of the Crips. This fact, of course, was used by his detractors and the mainstream media (am I being redundant?) to create a climate amenable to his execution. Even some on the Left (like the predictable Marc Cooper: http://tinyurl.com/cmudw) were careful to distance themselves from Tookie’s thuggish past. So, this got me thinking. How would the founder of the Crips stack up against the founder of a far more dangerous, deadly, and global gang: the Central Intelligence Agency?
To follow are some excerpts from There is No Good War: The Myths of World War II:
Sullivan and Cromwell was the most powerful Wall Street law firm of the 1930s. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles—the two brothers who guided the firm; the same two brothers who boycotted their own sister’s 1932 wedding because the groom was Jewish—served as the contacts for the company responsible for the gas in the Nazi gas chambers, I.G. Farben. During the pre-war period, the elder John Foster led off cables to his German clients with the salutation “Heil Hitler,” and he blithely dismissed the Nazi threat in 1935 in a piece he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. In 1939, he told the Economic Club of New York, “We have to welcome and nurture the desire of the New Germany to find for her energies a new outlet.”
“Hitler’s attacks on the Jews and his growing propensity for territorial expansion seem to have left Dulles unmoved,” writes Robert Edward Herzstein. “Twice a year, [Dulles] visited the Berlin office of the firm, located in the luxurious Esplanade Hotel.” But, it was little brother Allen who actually got to meet the German dictator, and eventually smoothed over the blatant Nazi ties of ITT’s Sosthenes Behn.
(Sosthenes Behn: RIP?)
“(Allen) Dulles was an originator of the idea that multinational corporations are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and therefore exempt from domestic laws,” author Jonathan Vankin writes. This idea later took root in U.S.-dominated institutions and agreements like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and WTO.
Leonard Mosley, biographer of the Dulles brothers, defends Allen by evoking the never-fail, all-purpose alibi of anti-communism. The younger Dulles, Mosley claims, “made his loathing of the Nazis plain, years before World War II…(it was) the Russians (who tried) to link his name with bankers who financed Hitler.” However, in 1946, both brothers would play a major role in the founding of the United States’ intelligence community and the subsequent recruiting of Nazi war criminals.
Although Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List, offered a dramatic recreation of the forced labor camps, it did not fully depict the depth of the role played by German businessmen in perpetrating the slaughter. “The real Oskar Schindler’s success in saving Jews depended upon one terrible reality,” journalist Christopher Simpson says. “[German] industry’s cooperation with the genocide program was so complete, so pervasive, so taken for granted that Schindler could actually get away with a thousand Jews, and nobody would particularly notice.”
Since corporations like BMW and Volkswagen profited mightily from the slave labor, one might expect the men who ran these and many, many other companies to face charges upon the war’s end. That is where the list comes in. Not Schindler’s list, but Dulles’s list. You recall Allen Dulles: Sullivan and Cromwell, meetings with Hitler, smoothing over Sosthenes Behn’s treason, calling the Holocaust (in September 1942) “a wild rumor, inspired by Jewish fears.”
During WWII, the younger Dulles brother headed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. After Hitler’s suicide, says Simpson, Dulles “personally signed off on [a] list of German executives believed useful for restoring private enterprise in Central Europe. [He] sent messages to the U.S. authorities listing the names he wanted in high positions in postwar Germany. Dulles’s lists are real, they’re in the National Archives, and they’re quite explicit.”
(Dulles made a list...and he checked it twice)
Among the German bankers “rescued” by Allen Dulles was Karl Blessing, a business associate of Dulles’s before the war. Blessing, a Nazi party member, was the youngest-ever Reichsbank director and a regular at Heinrich Himmler’s meetings held to discuss industry’s cooperation with the death camps. Blessing’s company, Kontinental Oil, used Jews and Poles from the camps as slaves.
After the Nazi regime’s surrender, Blessing’s past was reinvented by Dulles. He was suddenly listed as a Nazi resister who deserved a position of influence in post-war Germany. This was not an isolated case. Telford Taylor, senior U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, admitted that prosecution of I.G. Farben executives was merely a symbolic gesture—a method of demonstrating the role of hundreds of companies in the perpetration of the Holocaust.
Dulles vs. Tookie
Who was responsible for more misery?
...and I didn’t even go into the specifics of Dulles’ recruiting of Nazi war criminals after the war, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/djy57 ... or, of course, what the CIA has done since Dulles started things (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/83z5b)
(Pre-order There is No Good War: The Myths of World War II here: http://tinyurl.com/9awtt)
+++
P.S. For those of you keeping score at home, here’s Arnold’s next victim: http://tinyurl.com/7dqkb
Start e-mailing now to request clemency:
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
