A "Mysterious" History ??
Readers of this blog know that the fist ten years of my long life were packed with several events of global, as well as personal, significance. To a child whose world awareness was dawning, events like Pearl Harbor, WW-II, Roosevelt's Death, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of major significance and had a daily impact; even on someone at or near the age of six.
Our child-hood play included "hunting for Tojo", and the drama of the "blackouts". Popular slang included many anti-Japanese terms, but, strangely, no slurs against Germans. That was probably because I grew up among, and was segregated against (along with the few Jews in our town) by German-Americans. We did know about "Hitler", though.
By the time I was ten, the war to defeat the Germans, the Naziis, and Hitler, was over; and, according to our media and institutions of the United States, quickly "vanished" from our daily awareness. All attention was switched to the "Red Menace" posed by our former ally in WW-II: the Russians. Attention was turned away from Naziis, toward Communists. A "switch" was flipped.
Over the next 30 years, I was drawn deeper and deeper into anti-Cold War activities, to include nuclear technology development and the development of delivery systems and methods.
The politics of that period of my life was dominated by the likes of Joe McCarthy and other extreme-Right reactionaries. There was general fear in the populace, much greater than that of the early War years. That kind of fear re-surfaced post 9/11. In both cases, the fear was driven by extreme-Right players, for domestic political purposes.
I remained haunted by the question: "What happened to all those Naziis who survived Hitler"? I was able, thanks to C-Span, to pose that question to the editor of a leading German magazine in the early 1990(s). His answer: "they all fled to the Americas".
In the latest issue of The Economist there appears a full-page obituary to Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, recently dead at the age of 90. His career as a Nazi is detailed, to include the influence of Catholicism over him, and his influence over the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, and Edward Teller. Have "They" become "Us"??
Stay Vigilant! Read Your History!
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