WWII // Current

Oliver Stone says Hitler was 'Enabled by Western Banks'

BANGKOK, Thailand — Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but rose to power thanks to big business leaders and other supporters who appreciated his vow to destroy communism and control workers, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone said Monday.

Stone, who is working on a 10-part documentary on the 20th century titled "The Secret History of the United States," said the German dictator was "enabled by Western bankers" and managed to "seduce" Germany's military industrial complex.

"Hitler is a monster. There is no question. I have no empathy for Hitler at all. He was a crazy psychopath," Stone told reporters in the Thai capital. "But like Frankenstein was a monster, there was a Dr. Frankenstein. He is product of his era."

He said the aim of his documentary, which two historians are helping him with, was to offer a fuller understanding of the 20th century and how some of those lessons may be relevant to President Barack Obama in 2010.

"What has America become? How can we in America not learn from Germany in the 1930s," the Oscar-winning director asked.

Earlier in the day, Stone told about 300 students that his 1991 movie "JFK," was his most controversial to date and that the United States remains in denial over the possibility that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald could have assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Stone said exploring alternative theories over the JFK assassination remains too sensitive for those in the media or academia who "would be endangering their careers and their position."

"To this day, many key Americans in power are in total denial about this story," Stone said. "They don't even want to know about the possibility that he was killed by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. It is a national fairy tale."

A fairy tale is correct. All it takes is very little research to find that Prescott Bush, the Rockefellers (Standard Oil/Chase Bank), the Fords, GM, JP Morgan and countless other American corporations built up the Nazi powerhouse after the country was destroyed after WW1.

The best work on this subject is Professor Antony Sutton, whose 3 books 'Wall Street & the Bolshevik Revolution,' 'Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler' and 'Wall Street and FDR.' (books can be found on Scribd)BANGKOK, Thailand — Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but rose to... more

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Two Generals bet £5 over the outcome of WWII

Two generals have been revealed to have placed a £5 bet over the fate of Europe... more

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Sarah Palin's War on Taxes - and History

Among the qualities that uniquely define Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know... more

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American WWII veteran had Hitler's art book

DALLAS – After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone... more

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Monuments

This is a short video commemorating the service of veterans

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Everyone's Talking About Stupak, But What About the Health Care Bill's More Insidious Features? | Re

Sounds a lot like family services right after WWII. You call that reform, I don't.

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Two Sunken Japanese Submarines Found Off Hawaii

The NY Times reports that two World War II Japanese submarines, including one meant to... more

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Two Japanese Subs Are Found in Waters Off Hawaii

A research documentary team Thursday reports the discovery of two Japanese... more

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Navajo Code Talkers break silence for Veterans Day

By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer – Tue Nov 10, 4:08 pm ET

NEW YORK – The famed Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marine unit whose unbreakable code stymied the Japanese in World War II, fear their legacy will die with them.

Only about 50 of the 400 Code Talkers are believed to be still alive, most living in the Navajo Nation reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many are frail or ill, with little time left to tell the world about their wartime contribution.

But on Tuesday, 13 of the Code Talkers, some using canes, a few in wheelchairs, arrived in New York City to participate for the first time in the nation's largest Veterans Day parade, set for Wednesday.

The young Navajo Marines, using secret Navajo language-encrypted military terms, helped the U.S. prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles, serving in every Marine assault in the South Pacific between 1942 and 1945. Military commanders said the code, transmitted verbally by radio, helped save countless American lives and bring a speedier end to the war in the Pacific theater.

They were sworn to secrecy about their code, so complex that even other Navajo Marines couldn't decipher it. Used to transmit secret tactical messages via radio or telephone, the code remained unbroken and classified for decades because of its potential postwar use.

"We were never told that our code was never decoded" or given identities of the original 29 Navajos who created it, said Keith Little, 85, who joined the Marines at 17 and remembers crouching in a bomb crater amid heavy fire on Iwo Jima.

"It was all covered by secrecy. We were constantly told not to talk about it," Little said. The Code Talkers felt compelled to honor their secrecy orders, even after the code was declassified in 1968.

The oldest of the 13 living Code Talkers is 92, and the group includes one of the original 29. Many Code Talkers who served in the war were young farmers and sheepherders who had never been away from home.

"The code did a lot of damage to the enemy," said Samuel Tom Holiday, 85, of Kayenta, Ariz., who also is joining the parade. He was a 20-year-old Code Talker when he and two other Marines went behind enemy lines on Iwo Jima to locate a Japanese artillery unit advancing on American forces

more at link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091110/ap_on_re_us/us_navajo_code_talkersBy ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer... more

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GameVisions Review: IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey

IL-2 Sturmovik is one of the first names in WWII combat simulations. Does Birds of... more

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Spawn Kill Hands-on Preview: The Saboteur

Spawn Kill's Tigresa was able to get her hands on EA's upcoming WWII spy... more

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87-year old WWII vet "Becomes Face of Same Sex Marriage Campaign"

87-year-old Philip Spooner supports same sex marriage. The World War II veteran spoke... more

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How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance?

Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System

If you want to understand how to fix today's health insurance system, you'd be smart to look first at how it was born. How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance? After all, they don't pay for our groceries or our gas.

It turns out there never was any central logic at work. The evolution of the American health care system began in the 1920s, when choices boiled down to which crazy cure you preferred.

Dr. John Brinkley, for instance, was a huge hit in American radio with his health advice shows. For whatever problem folks had, Brinkley had one fabulous solution: transplant a goat gland into your body. He pitched it as being perfect for everything from dementia to impotence to flatulence. But if, somehow, a goat gland didn't cure your ills, you could always use Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid or Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.

Before the birth of modern medicine, hospitals were poorhouses where the indigent went to die. Then came the advent of effective medicines, especially antibiotics, along with a revolution in medical schools.

Suddenly, says economic historian Melissa Thomasson, "hospitals are marketing themselves as places to have babies." The professor at the Miami University in Ohio says that in the early part of the 20th century, hospitals were able to focus on happy outcomes.

Health care became much more effective, and much more expensive. Clean hospitals, educated doctors and real pharmacological research cost money. People proved willing to pay for care when they were really sick, but it wasn't yet common to go for checkups or survivable illnesses.

By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren't deathly ill to start coming in.

"The war economy is an entirely different ballgame," Thomasson says. The government rationed goods even as factories ramped up production and needed to attract workers. Factory owners needed a way to lure employees. She explains that the owners turned to fringe benefits, offering more and more generous health plans.

The next big step in the evolution of health care was also an accident. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive.

Thomasson cites the huge impact of those measures on plan participation. "You start from 9 percent of the population in 1940 to 63 percent in 1953," she says. "Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows by gangbusters. By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan."

Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.

But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there's nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents.Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System If you want to understand how to... more

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Auschwitz gets on Facebook

Following on from a YouTube channel launched earlier this year, the Polish authorities... more

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Michael Jackson believed he could 'cure Hitler'

In a series of interviews with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, with whom Jackson became close... more

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During WWII UK used Monopoly to help free British POW's!

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines... more

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Hitler's secret family: How researchers tracked down 39 living relatives

Thirty-nine living relatives of Adolf Hitler have been discovered by Belgian... more

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British PM apologizes for treatment of gay code-breaker

LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued a posthumous... more

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The Ill-Fated Pact

The Ill-Fated Pact
Bartosz T. Wieliński
2009-08-21

The German and Soviet invasion of Poland was a prelude to a destructive war and the communist enslavement of eastern Europe, 140 German intellectuals write in a declaration.

'We thus respond to those in Russia who are trying to defend Stalin. They don't seem to be living in the 21st century,' says CSU deputy Hartmut Koschyk, one of the declaration's signatories.

The declaration is an appeal to Europe to not forget, while celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, the circumstances in which the continent was originally divided seventy years ago.

'We are aware, and this is a painful awareness, that without the German-started World War II neither the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe nor the division of Europe and Germany would have happened,' write the German intellectuals. Rather than identifying 1 September 1939 - the day of the German invasion of Poland - as the beginning of the tragedy, they point at 23 August 1939, when the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed in Moscow. In it, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union divided Central Europe between themselves. 'It was an ill-fated pact,' reads the declaration.

The declaration was initiated by Marianne Birthler, head of the Stasi Records Authority and the Foundation for Research into the DDR Dictatorship, and former DDR dissident, Wolfgang Templin. It was signed by nearly 140 persons, including, among others, ex-president of the Bundestag, Prof Rita Süssmuth, the first head of the Stasi Records Authority, Joachim Gauck, historians Arnulf Baring, Dieter Bingen and Heirinch Winkler, journalists and politicians.

The declaration is unprecedented. To avoid being accused of historical revisionism - diminishing German responsibility for WWII - Germans seldom speak about Russia's responsibility for the war. Politicians usually steer well clear of the subject in order not to damage relations with Moscow. Yet the declaration leaves no doubt about what communism meant for eastern Europe.

'In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and part of Germany, all weakened by the war and Nazi rule, the Soviet Union introduced a new regime. That had disastrous consequences for society, the economy and culture, as well as for the masses of people who were persecuted or lost their lives because they stood in the communists' way,' reads the declaration.

Markus Meckel (SPD), one of the signatories, assures Gazeta that no one wants to whitewash Nazi Germany. 'But we need to remember that there was another totalitarianism which also committed crimes and left scars on central Europe's collective memory. People in the West have to finally acknowledge this,' says Mr Meckel.

Moreover, the German declaration comes at a time when a group of Russian historians, acting on the Kremlin's orders, is trying to defend the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. They are arguing that Stalin wanted to buy himself time to prepare for the war against Germany, that he was forced to sign the pact by the inflexible position of Poland which didn't want an alliance with Russia. Some have gone as far as to suggest that it is Poland that bears responsibility for the wear because it refused to meet Hitler's 'moderate' demands and surrender the 'Gdańsk corridor.'

Mr Meckel adds that the declaration is also an appeal to Russia to start an honest debate about the past. 'They should finally confront the vision of history of the Poles or the Balts,' says the SPD deputy. The signatories Gazeta has talked to hope that chancellor Angela Merkel speaks in a similar tone during the 1 September celebrations on Westerplatte, Gdańsk.

The German declaration is also a homage to the democratic opposition in Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. 'We will never forget that it was especially the Poles who, fighting for our freedom and theirs, dealt the first blows to the communist regime,' reads the declaration.The Ill-Fated Pact Bartosz T. Wieliński 2009-08-21 The German and Soviet... more

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Army wives recreate WWII Vargas Girls images for nude calendar

group of military wives launched this full-frontal assault today - bravely baring all... more

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tagged w/ WWII

Oliver Stone says Hitler was 'Enabled by Western Banks'

Two Generals bet £5 over the outcome of WWII

Sarah Palin's War on Taxes - and History

American WWII veteran had Hitler's art book

Monuments

Everyone's Talking About Stupak, But What About the Health Care Bill's More Insidious Features? | Re

Two Sunken Japanese Submarines Found Off Hawaii

Two Japanese Subs Are Found in Waters Off Hawaii

Navajo Code Talkers break silence for Veterans Day

GameVisions Review: IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey

Spawn Kill Hands-on Preview: The Saboteur

87-year old WWII vet "Becomes Face of Same Sex Marriage Campaign"

How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance?

Auschwitz gets on Facebook

Michael Jackson believed he could 'cure Hitler'

During WWII UK used Monopoly to help free British POW's!

Hitler's secret family: How researchers tracked down 39 living relatives

British PM apologizes for treatment of gay code-breaker

The Ill-Fated Pact

Army wives recreate WWII Vargas Girls images for nude calendar

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