January 18–25, 2001

slant

The Bush Gang

by Robert Lederman

As promised, George W. Bush has recruited competent and experienced advisors. Despite their seeming diversity, however, they have a common denominator. The America they reflect is the oil, pharmaceutical, armament, Wall Street and eugenics interests long associated with the Bush family.

Seventy years ago a similar configuration of oil, pharmaceutical, chemical, military supply and eugenics interests were organized by Wall Street into IG Farben/Standard Oil — Hitler’s industrial powerhouse. To grasp the real significance of what Bush’s cabinet has been brought together to accomplish, it is essential to understand the history of IG Farben, its relationship with American corporations and how together they applied modern technology to the task of eugenics or scientific racism.

According to former U.S. Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor John Loftus — who is today the director of the Florida Holocaust Museum — "The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich,"according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Along with the Rockefellers, DuPonts, General Motors and Henry Ford, banks and shipping companies operated by the Bush family were crucial players in setting up the industrial power behind the Third Reich. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into IG Farben and provided it with technology for tactically essential synthetic materials — while withholding the same materials and patents from the U.S. government. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, IG Farben built and operated more than 40 concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz. At their slave labor/factory/death camps chemicals, weapons, drugs, synthetic fuels and other materials vital to the Nazi war effort were manufactured. In addition, eugenicists like Dr. Josef Mengele used the human subjects in the camps for experiments, the data from which are today the basis for many drugs marketed by the pharmaceutical industry. At the end of WWII the Allies split up IG Farben into companies that are now the top pharmaceutical concerns on earth, including Bayer, Hoechst, BASF, the Agfa-Gevaert Group and Cassella AG.

For those who scoff at the validity of comparing the Bush administration to the Nazis and IG Farben, please note that I’m not suggesting that Bush is a literal Nazi nor am I implying that everyone who is an oil or pharmaceutical company executive automatically deserves to be linked to IG Farben. That the Bush wealth and prominence in American politics is derived from Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker’s support of Hitler is a historical fact. If the connection ended in 1945 with the destruction of Nazi Germany that might have been the end of it; it didn’t end there however. Not only has the eugenics agenda continued but many of the top Nazis who were advancing it during WWII were brought to the U.S. after the war and installed in academia, the media, government research institutions and the CIA: by the same American officials who worked with the Bush family to build up Nazi Germany in the first place. Their ideas formed the basis for much of the agenda promoted by this nation’s most influential right-wing think tanks — the same think tanks that are the sponsors of George W. Bush and virtually every one of his appointees. Why is it significant that many of Bush’s staff and cabinet appointees are former pharmaceutical company executives as was former President George Bush? These corporations are voraciously patenting the earth’s life forms: its plants, bacteria, viruses, animals and even human genetic lineages. The Human Genome Project, as it admits on the very first page of its website (vector.cshl.org/eugenics.html), is derived from the eugenics movement in the U.S. and Nazi Germany during the first half of the 20th century. The Eugenics Records Office at Cold Springs Harbor, NY, where American eugenics started, was built by the Harriman family, the Bushes’ Wall Street business partners in funding Hitler. This is the new frontier of colonialism in the 21st century; the New World Order both former President Bush and Adolf Hitler so frequently called for.

Robert Lederman is president of Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (650 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper news editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.