On Tuesday last week the SABC3's Special Assignment screened the William Karel documentary titled "The World According to Bush." (Karel is French but was born in Tunisia.)
One of the many slanderous points made by the documentary is that George Bush's grandfather - Prescott Bush - was a Nazi. The theory goes that Prescott Bush helped finance the Nazis and managed Jewish slave labour from Auschwitz during WW2.
Cecil Adams from the Straight Dope comments on this:
The slave labour charge is easy to dismiss. SAC plants in Poland were taken over by the German government after the Nazi invasion of 1939, and the Auschwitz prison camp wasn't established until 1940. No one can seriously claim that Prescott Bush managed camp inmates in any of those plants.
Regarding the allegations the Anti-Defamation League has stated
Rumors about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, have circulated widely through the Internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated."
Prescott Bush owned a single share in a German bank called Union Banking Corporation (UBC). UBC was owned by Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938. By 1939 he fled Germany after Krystallnacht and bitterly denounced Hitler. (Source: Wikipedia)
After fleeing Germany Hitler seized Thyssens fortune and stripped him of his citizenship. Thyssen wrote a book called I paid Hitler in which he confessed his role in financing the Nazis, and denounced Hitler.
So then, indirectly Prescott Bush did finance the Nazis. But he owned alot of company. Cecil Adams says
Some of the most distinguished names in American business had investments or subsidiaries in prewar Germany, including Standard Oil and General Motors.
The documentary called Bush "Hitler's Financial Angel". The accusation is that the New York Herald-Tribune referred to Bush by this term. But it's a lie. "The Tribune referred to a German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, as "Hitler's Angel," and mentioned Bush only as an employee of an investment banking firm Thyssen used in the USA." (Wikipedia).
It seems to me that Prescott Bush was guilty of being a greedy capitalist. But he was no Nazi.
The World According to Bush also claims that several neocons led by a Jew, Paul Wolfowitz, "are pulling all the strings" in America.
Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun comments:
(History News Network)
Wolfowitz is "abusing America's power" to work for Israel, and is helped by another Jew, defence Analyst Richard Perle, "one of the three most dangerous people" in the US. "These people are calculating and manipulative". A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, lists the four who actually run their idiot president: "Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bernard Lewis the academic, Paul Wolfowitz."
In fact, Lewis is just a historian with no government job, Feith a Pentagon official a few rungs from the top, and Perle a private citizen who hasn't met Bush since he became president. But who cares, when we've got here a list of . . . Jews.
THE film doesn't label them all as Jews, but a wink's as good as a yellow star to a bigot. Baer helps by explaining that these men aimed to "crush Saddam Hussein for the benefit of Israel . . . A pretext, that's all they needed".
The documentary pulled out many similar deceptions to the ones used by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. I have seen F9/11 and was almost convinced with what Moore had to say. But then I read Dave Kopel's Fifty Nine Deceits in F9/11 and I realised how Moore almost managed to dupe me.
Kopel's document actually also dismisses many of the deceits in "The World According to Bush" - seeing as so many of the points made were the same as those made in F9/11.
An example of this is the conspiracy about the Bush-Saudi connection and the Saudis being allowed to fly out of the US after 9/11.
Kopel points out:
- The Saudis left the U.S. only after air travel was opened for the general public. (The documentary suggests that they were allowed to leave before anyone else.
- According to Richard Clarke and the September 11 Commission, Clarke personally approved the Saudi departures, and the decision went no higher in the chain of command.
- Contrary to what Fahrenheit and The World According to Bush claim, the September 11 Commission found that many Saudis were asked “detailed questions” before being allowed to leave.
- Prince Bandar has way too much influence on the U.S. government, as both documentaries show, but American coddling of the Saudi tyranny is a long-standing bi-partisan tradition, not a Bush invention.
- Moore claims, and Karel suggests, that the Saudis “own 7% of America.” Bu the Saudis own only about 7% of total foreign investment in America, which is over 10 trillion dollars. Only if all of America were owned by foreigners could Moore’s claim be correct.
- The Saudi embassy does not receive special protection. It is not the only foreign embassy which is guarded by the U.S. Secret Service. An international treaty signed by the U.S. requires the U.S. to protect any embassy which asks for protection.
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