Recorded Octo­ber 14, 2007
MP3: Side 1 | Side 2
REALAUDIO

Fur­ther dis­turb­ing an already tur­bu­lent Mid­dle East polit­i­cal land­scape, the diplo­matic dis­pute between the U.S. and Turkey over a con­gres­sional res­o­lu­tion brought the Ottoman Empire’s World War I geno­ci­dal cam­paign against its Armen­ian minor­ity briefly into the fore­front of world events. This broad­cast explores the cyn­i­cal diplo­macy fol­low­ing “the Great War,” and how an early man­i­fes­ta­tion of the pol­i­tics of petro­leum or “oleagi­nous diplo­macy” led to the exon­er­a­tion of most of the Turk­ish indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that per­pe­trated the crimes against the Arme­ni­ans. Eager to divvy up the petro­leum rich por­tions of the defeated and dis­solv­ing Ottoman Empire amongst them­selves, the vic­tors of World War I were eager to col­lab­o­rate with Turk­ish polit­i­cal patri­arch Kemal Attaturk’s realpoli­tik, which skill­fully and effec­tively traded access to oil-rich ter­ri­tory for the cover-up of Turk­ish war crimes. Among the key State Depart­ment offi­cials behind the crit­i­cally impor­tant Amer­i­can involve­ment in this cyn­i­cal maneu­ver­ing was Allen Dulles, whose expe­ri­ence in the obfus­ca­tion of the cam­paign against the Arme­ni­ans served as a pre­lude to his col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Third Reich. From the stand­point of inter­na­tional law, the adju­di­ca­tion of the Turk­ish crimes against the Arme­ni­ans and the tri­umph of “busi­ness neces­sity” over moral­ity and law served as an impor­tant prece­dent and foun­da­tion for future gen­er­a­tions to turn a blind eye to mur­der. The suc­cess­ful cover-up of the Armen­ian geno­cide was a major influ­ence on Hitler’s polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary think­ing, con­vinc­ing him that his plans for mass mur­der could be real­ized with reper­cus­sions that were rel­a­tively small in rela­tion to the enor­mity of the crime. The pro­gram high­lights the preser­va­tion of the Ger­man busi­ness elite that served Hitler and prof­ited from his cam­paigns of con­quest. Once again, Allen Dulles and other prime movers of the Amer­i­can power elite were instru­men­tal in neu­tral­iz­ing the machin­ery of inter­na­tional jus­tice, in order to pre­serve a strong Ger­many as a bul­wark against com­mu­nism. Note that this descrip­tion con­tains sup­ple­men­tal infor­ma­tion that was not in the orig­i­nal broadcast.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of the Ger­man city of Aachen and how it set a pat­tern for post­war preser­va­tion of the bus­ni­ness elite that had allied with Hitler; Pales­tin­ian national move­ment leader and Waf­fen SS gen­eral Haj Amin el-Husseini’s ser­vice in the Turk­ish army dur­ing World War I; post­war Ger­man chan­cel­lor Lud­wig Erhard’s work with SS-connected indus­trial plan­ning groups dur­ing the clos­ing phase of World War II.

1. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the influ­ence of the Armen­ian geno­cide on Hitler’s think­ing, the pro­gram notes how he used the Armen­ian mas­sacres as a prece­dent for his own geno­ci­dal actions. “Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s geno­cide of Arme­ni­ans and of the fail­ure of the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to respond ade­quately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler com­mented in an inter­view that the ‘exter­mi­na­tion of the Arme­ni­ans’ had led him to ‘the con­clu­sion that masses of men are mere bio­log­i­cal plas­ticine’ over which Aryans would even­tu­ally tri­umph. He returned to this theme in a for­mal talk to his com­mand­ing gen­er­als on the eve of their inva­sion of Poland in 1939: ‘Our strength is in our quick­ness and our bru­tal­ity,’ he exclaimed. ‘Genghis Khan had mil­lions of women and chil­dren killed by his own will and with a gay heart. His­tory sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill with­out pity or mercy all men, women, and chil­dren of the Pol­ish race or lan­guage. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowa­days of the exter­mi­na­tion of the Armen­ian?’ On at least three other occa­sions, Hitler pointed to the bru­tal­ity of Turkey’s regime and its will­ing­ness to strike with­out mercy as a wor­thy model for his own gov­ern­ment. . . .”
(The Splen­did Blond Beast: Money, Law and Geno­cide in the 20th Cen­tury; Christo­pher Simp­son; Com­mon Courage Press [SC]; Copy­right by Christo­pher Simp­son; ISBN 1–56751-062–0; p. 76.)

2. The Armen­ian geno­cide was covered-up because of a famil­iar dynamic—the real­ity of “petro-politics” or, quot­ing the title of the pro­gram, “oleagi­nous diplo­macy.” Adju­di­ca­tion of the slaugh­ter of the Arme­ni­ans was eclipsed by the desire of the vic­to­ri­ous pow­ers in World War I to con­trol the enor­mous oil resources becom­ing avail­able in the dis­solv­ing Ottoman Empire. Turk­ish patri­arch Kemal Attaturk exer­cised great cun­ning and savvy in manip­u­lat­ing the vic­tors off against each other, in order to effect the acquit­tal of the per­pe­tra­tors of the Armen­ian geno­cide. In addi­tion to the openly big­oted Mark L. Bris­tol, one of the prin­ci­pals who brought about the cover-up of the Armen­ian geno­cide was Allen Dulles, who was estab­lish­ing a per­sonal and pro­fes­sional prece­dent. Dulles not only was deeply involved in the oleagi­nous diplo­macy that divvied up the Ottoman Empire and covered-up the Armen­ian geno­cide, but played a cen­tral role in help­ing to finance Nazi Ger­many, cov­er­ing up the Nazi geno­cide and aid­ing the Nazi flight cap­i­tal pro­gram after the war. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR# 361, 578.) “Impor­tantly, Britain, France, and the United States were at that time vying with one another to divide up the vast oil and min­eral wealth of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Kemal skill­fully played the three pow­ers against each other and insisted on amnesty for the Itti­hadists as part of the price for his sup­port in the divi­sion of the defunct empire. Though often over­looked today, the Ottoman hold­ings were of extra­or­di­nary value, per­haps the rich­est impe­r­ial trea­sure since the Euro­pean seizure of the New World four cen­turies ear­lier. The empire had been erod­ing for decades, but by the time of the Turk­ish defeat in World War I, it still included most of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Ara­bia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jor­dan, and the oil sheik­doms of the Per­sian Gulf. The Euro­pean gov­ern­ments sensed that the time had come to seize this rich prize. . . . The U.S. High Com­mis­sioner to Turkey was Admi­ral Mark L. Bris­tol, a man with a rep­u­ta­tion as a bigot and a deter­mined advo­cate of U.S. alliance with Mustafa Kemal. ‘The Arme­ni­ans,’ Bris­tol wrote, ‘are a race like the Jews—they have lit­tle or no national spirit and poor moral char­ac­ter.’ It was bet­ter for the United States, he con­tended, to jet­ti­son sup­port for the Armen­ian repub­lic as soon as pos­si­ble, sta­bi­lize U.S. rela­tions with the emerg­ing Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, and to enlist Kemal’s sup­port in gain­ing access to the oil­fields of the for­mer Ottoman Empire. Bristol’s argu­ment found a recep­tive audi­ence in the new Hard­ing admin­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton, whose affin­ity for oil inter­ests even­tu­ally blos­somed into the famous Teapot Dome bribery scan­dal. . . . As High Com­mis­sioner to Turkey, Bris­tol had con­sid­er­ably more power than might be enjoyed by any con­ven­tional ambas­sador. As the civil war unfolded inside Turkey, Bris­tol barred news­pa­per reporters from access to areas where renewed mas­sacres of Arme­ni­ans were tak­ing place, pur­port­edly to avoid incit­ing fur­ther atroc­i­ties against civil­ians. His cor­re­spon­dent at the State Depart­ment in Wash­ing­ton was Allen Dulles. After the Paris con­fer­ence, Dulles had served briefly as chief of staff to Bris­tol, then moved on to Wash­ing­ton to become chief of the State Department’s Near East desk just as ‘oleagi­nous diplo­macy’ was reach­ing its hey­day. . . .”
(Ibid.; pp. 32–37.)

3. As World War II in Europe drew to a close, the dynamic that we saw in the cover-up of the Turk­ish geno­cide against the Arme­ni­ans once again man­i­fested itself—business con­sid­er­a­tions took prece­dence over mat­ters of law and decency. And once again, Allen Dulles played a lead­ing role in the pro­ceed­ings. (For more about Dulles and his cen­tral role in aid­ing the Bor­mann cap­i­tal pro­gram and reestab­lish­ing the Ger­man busi­ness elite after the war, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 532, 578.) Of more than pass­ing inter­est in this episode is the fact that the Mar­shall Plan was, in real­ity, a pro­gram designed to return to power the Ger­man busi­ness elite that had sup­ported Hitler and the war and prof­ited gen­er­ously from Nazi slave labor. It was mis­rep­re­sented to the Amer­i­can peo­ple. “By Decem­ber 1945, the pub­licly man­dated denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­gram sharply col­lided with the unof­fi­cial (but actual) polit­i­cal and eco­nomic objec­tives of the U.S. occu­pa­tion gov­ern­ment. That month, the U.S. Denaz­i­fi­ca­tion Pol­icy Board con­fi­den­tially rec­om­mended that exist­ing poli­cies and prac­tices be shifted to bet­ter fit the ‘longer term’ goals of the occu­pa­tion. Pub­licly, the ori­en­ta­tion of the denaz­i­fi­ca­tion pro­gram was to remain the same as it had been under JCS 1067. ‘Every per­son who exer­cised lead­er­ship and power in sup­port of the Nazi regime should be deprived of influ­ence or power,’ the board rec­om­mended, ‘whether or not he was for­mally affil­i­ated with the Party or any other Nazi orga­ni­za­tion.’ At the same time, how­ever, the board intro­duced a new con­sid­er­a­tion that would fun­da­men­tally alter the pro­gram in the U.S. zone of Ger­many: ‘Denaz­i­fi­ca­tion . . . should not be car­ried so far as to pre­vent the build­ing of a sta­ble demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety in Ger­many. . . we must avoid the cre­ation of a huge mass of out­casts who will pro­vide fer­tile soil for agi­ta­tors and a source of social instability.’18 . . . Oppo­si­tion within the U.S. to denaz­i­fi­ca­tion and decarteliza­tion in Ger­many was led almost exclu­sively by the cor­po­rate and for­eign pol­icy elite that had been most active in U.S.-German finan­cial rela­tions dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s. The dis­pro­por­tion­ate polit­i­cal lever­age of this group, its abil­ity to shape media cov­er­age of for­eign pol­icy issues, to influ­ence gov­ern­ment pol­icy, and even­tu­ally to shift pub­lic opin­ion was dra­mat­i­cally man­i­fested in the realign­ment of U.S. pol­icy con­cern­ing denaz­i­fi­ca­tion and decarteliza­tion in the brief period between 1945 and 1947. . . . The reports of Brown and Reed were in real­ity briefs for the Euro­pean Recov­ery Program-the Mar­shall Plan. They illus­trate the extent to which that enor­mously pop­u­lar and respected pro­gram became entan­gled with the revival of Ger­man busi­ness­men who had par­tic­i­pated in Nazi crimes. Par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in this effort was the ‘Com­mit­tee for the Mar­shall Plan,’ founded in Sep­tem­ber 1947. It labeled itself a cit­i­zens’ orga­ni­za­tion but was in real­ity funded and admin­is­tered by the same eco­nomic and for­eign pol­icy elite that has been dis­cussed thus far. Its ini­tial spon­sors included Averell Har­ri­man and Robert Lovett (who will be remem­bered from the Brown Broth­ers, Har­ri­man bank). Allen Dulles, Dean Ache­son, Winthrop Aldrich (chair­man of the Chase Bank), Philip Reed (of GE), and oth­ers of sim­i­lar stature, most of whom had been active in U.S.-German finance since the 1920s. Labor was rep­re­sented by hard-line anti-Communists active in the CIA-sponsored pen­e­tra­tion of Euro­pean trade unions, such as James Carey and David Dubin­sky. . . .”
(Ibid.; pp. 262–268.)

4. An early “test case” with regard to pros­e­cu­tion of Nazi war crimes con­cerned the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of the Ger­man city of Aachen. Note that the infor­ma­tion is pre­sented in the Sup­ple­men­tal Sec­tion in order to flesh out the lis­ten­ers’ under­stand­ing. It was not in the orig­i­nal pro­gram.
(Ibid.; pp. 186–187.)

5. The Ger­man busi­ness elite that had ele­vated Hitler to promi­nence and then served him loy­ally was restored to its for­mer dom­i­nant posi­tion. The tri­als of the indus­tri­al­ists were a farce, and a super­fi­cial one at that. This infor­ma­tion, too, was not in the orig­i­nal broad­cast. (Ibid.; pp. 269–271.)

6. Emblem­atic of the con­ti­nu­ity between the busi­ness elite of the Hitler period and that of the “new,” post­war Ger­many is the fact that the sec­ond chan­cel­lor of the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many was Lud­wig Erhard, who worked closely with the SS dur­ing the clos­ing years of the war. Erhard was cred­ited with Germany’s “eco­nomic mir­a­cle,” while serv­ing as Adenauer’s prin­ci­pal adviser. “ . . . But as the was turned against the Third Reich, a num­ber of busi­ness lead­ers in the Himm­lerkreis began to coop­er­ate in clan­des­tine and semi­clan­des­tine con­tin­gency plan­ning for the post­war period. Two of the best known of these groups, the Arbeit­skreis fur aussen­wirtschftliche Fra­gen (Work­ing Group for For­eign Eco­nomic Ques­tions) and the Kleine Arbeit­skreis (Small Work­ing Group), were nom­i­nally spon­sored by the Reichs­gruppe Indus­trie asso­ci­a­tion of major indus­trial and finan­cial com­pa­nies. They brought together Bless­ing, Rasche, Kurt von Schroeder, Lin­de­mann, and oth­ers from the Himm­lerkreis with other busi­ness peo­ple, such as Her­mann Abs (Deutsche Bank), Lud­wig Erhard (then an econ­o­mist with the Reichs­gruppe Indus­trie and later Kon­rad Adenauer’s most impor­tant eco­nomic advi­sor) . . .”
(Ibid.; pp. 154–155.)

7. Another point of com­mon­al­ity between the Armen­ian geno­cide and the Third Reich, is the career of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The first leader of the Pales­tin­ian national move­ment, Hus­seini held the rank of gen­eral in the Waf­fen SS. The Mufti began his career as an offi­cer in the very Turk­ish army that per­pe­trated the geno­cide. “ . . . Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el Hus­seini was born in 1893 in Jerusalem, then the cap­i­tal of Pales­tine, which was then a part of the Turk­ish Ottoman Empire. His grand­fa­ther Mustapha and his half-brother Kemal had been the Muftis of Jerusalem in the 1890s. Hus­seini attended the Al Azhar Uni­ver­sity in Cairo, Egypt, where he stud­ied Islamic phi­los­o­phy, but he never com­pleted his stud­ies and left after a year. In 1914, he obtained a com­mis­sion in the Ottoman Turk­ish Army as an artillery offi­cer, sta­tioned in Smyrna. . . .” For more about the Grand Mufti, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 332, 369, 414, 416, 456.]
(“Islam Under the Swastika: The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Pro­tec­torate of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1941–1945” by Carl Savich.)

8. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­ated by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit TheAntiFascist.com.