Lis­ten: Side 1 | Side 2

1. Com­par­ing ele­ments of com­mon­al­ity between the Iron Guard (the Roman­ian fas­cist move­ment of the 1930s and 40s) and the Repub­li­can Party of the United States, this broad­cast high­lights the use of brown­shirt tac­tics in Amer­i­can politics.

2. The pro­gram begins with review of a favor­able com­par­i­son made between Roman­ian far-right leader Corneiliu Tudor and Prince Vlad Tepes (“Vlad the Impaler”.)

3. One of Tudor’s sup­port­ers com­pared him with the 15th cen­tury Roman­ian prince, the role model for the Drac­ula leg­end. (“Greater Roma­nia Rhetoric Finds a Ready Audi­ence” by Phe­lim McAleer; Finan­cial Times; 11/24/2000; p. 2.)

4. Much of Tudor’s polit­i­cal agenda cen­ters around big­otry directed against Jews, Gyp­sies and the Hun­gar­ian minor­ity in Roma­nia. (Idem.)

5. In this regard, Tudor’s pol­i­tics are sim­i­lar to the Iron Guard. Tudor’s sup­port­ers have also com­pared him favor­ably to the Guardists. (“Roman­ian Right Feeds on Mid­dle Class Fears” by Ste­fan Wagstyl and Phe­lim McAleer; Finan­cial Times; 11/29/2000; p. 2.)

6. The broad­cast then high­lights the career of Iron Guard leader Viorel Trifa. Trifa led a bru­tal pogrom in Bucharest in 1941, kicked off by an anti-Semitic speech that he deliv­ered. (Wanted: The Search for Nazis in Amer­ica; Howard Blum; Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Com­pany; Copy­right 1977 [HC]; ISBN 0–8129-0607–1; pp.94–96.)

7. In addi­tion to rabid anti-Semitism, Trifa’s speech attacked the val­ues of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, “Lib­erty, Equal­ity, Fra­ter­nity.” (Ibid.; p.94.) (A sim­i­lar denun­ci­a­tion was deliv­ered by Bun­deswehr Inspec­tor Gen­eral Klaus Nau­mann. Nau­mann made his state­ment in a speech to his offi­cers given in the early 1990s.)

8. Many of the vic­tims of the Trifa-led pogrom were butchered, hung on meat hooks in the munic­i­pal slaugh­ter­house with signs say­ing “Kosher Meat.” (Ibid.; p. 98.)

9. Next, the pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion about the incor­po­ra­tion of Euro­pean fas­cist groups (such as the Iron Guard) into the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ments. One of the cen­tral ele­ments in this process of incor­po­ra­tion was an ille­gal domes­tic intel­li­gence oper­a­tion known as the Cru­sade For Freedom.

10. Ille­gally import­ing fas­cists and war crim­i­nals into the United States so that they might become lead­ers in East­ern Euro­pean eth­nic groups, the CFF was the brain­child of Allen Dulles and admin­is­tered for him by Richard Nixon. (The Secret War Against the Jews: How West­ern Espi­onage Betrayed the Jew­ish Peo­ple, by John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; St. Martin’s Press; copy­right 1994; ISBN 0–312-11057-X; p.122.)

11. The State Depart­ment machi­na­tions bring­ing these fas­cists into the United States were han­dled by William Casey, Reagan’s cam­paign man­ager in 1980 and later direc­tor of the CIA. (Ibid.; p. 593.)

12. Rea­gan was the chief spokesman for the CFF. (Idem.)

13. Howard Weaver and Samuel Sloan Walker Jr., two of George H.W. Bush’s fel­low “bones­men” (fel­low mem­bers of the elite Skull and Bones soci­ety at Yale), both worked with Allen Dulles’ “Fas­cist Free­dom Fight­ers” pro­gram. (Ibid., pp. 592–3.)

14. As head of the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee, the elder George Bush over­saw the for­mal incor­po­ra­tion of this fas­cist milieu into the Repub­li­can Party. (Ibid., pp. 369–70.)

15. As part of the CFF, the VorKom­mando Moskau (an SS intel­li­gence unit) was set­tled (com­plete and intact) in the New York/New Jer­sey area. (Ibid.; p. 496.)

16. The VorKom­mando Moskau had per­formed the mass exe­cu­tions of Jews and other “unde­sir­ables” on the East­ern Front dur­ing World War II. (Idem.) One of the fas­cists who found his way to the United States under the CFF was Trifa.

17. Trifa had worked for the Rein­hard Gehlen spy out­fit near the end of the war. (Wanted: The Search for Nazis in Amer­ica; p. 116.)

18. Hav­ing become the head of the Romanian-American Ortho­dox con­gre­ga­tion after the war, Trifa was invited by then Vice-President Richard Nixon to give the open­ing prayer before the United States Sen­ate in May of 1955. (Idem.)

19. Trifa had become the head of the Romanian-American Ortho­dox Epis­co­pate through a vio­lent, brownshirt-style takeover of the Vatra (the church’s head­quar­ters) by some of Trifa’s Iron Guard asso­ciates. (Ibid.; pp. 109–110.)

20. The Guardists con­tended that the church was under the con­trol of the com­mu­nists, since Roma­nia was part of the Soviet Bloc at the time. (Idem.)

21. Later, Bishop Moldovan’s attempt to regain his posi­tion was rejected by the courts. (Ibid.; p. 115.)

22. Much of the rest of the pro­gram com­pares Trifa’s vio­lent ascent to his posi­tion as Arch­bishop and the legal system’s recog­ni­tion of his takeover with the mob vio­lence uti­lized by the Repub­li­cans in Dade County in Novem­ber of 2000. A writer for the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle char­ac­ter­ized the Repub­li­can demon­stra­tors in Broward and Dade coun­ties to the Nazi brown­shirts. (“See Foot, Shoot Same” by Jon Car­roll; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 11/28/2000; p. E12.)

23. The vio­lent demon­stra­tors suc­ceeded in intim­i­dat­ing the Dade County elec­tion offi­cials into halt­ing their recount­ing of bal­lots. (“Mob Rule Wins for W” by The Con­sor­tium for Inde­pen­dent Jour­nal­ism; 11/24/2000; avail­able on their web­site at consortiumnews.com.) Just as an Ohio Dis­trict Court did in the early 1950s, the U.S. Supreme Court rewarded the Repub­li­cans’ tac­tics with success.

24. The Supreme Court granted a review to the Bush camp, but not on the equal-protection issue on which the Repub­li­cans had asked the court to inter­vene. (“A fail­ure of Rea­son” by Anthony Lewis; New York Times; 12/16/2000; p. A31.)

25. The integrity of the Supreme Court’s rul­ing in favor of Bush was fur­ther under­mined by the fact that Jus­tice Clarence Thomas’ wife was help­ing the Her­itage Foun­da­tion gather resumes for prospec­tive Bush admin­is­tra­tion appoint­ments. (“Prospec­tive Jus­tices May Face Strug­gle” by William Carlsen; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 12/14/2000; p. A16.)

26. In addi­tion, two of Jus­tice Antonin Scalia’s sons worked for the law firm that rep­re­sented the Bush cam­paign before both the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts. (Idem.)