Lis­ten:
MP3 One Seg­ment

Con­tin­u­ing a line of inves­ti­ga­tion that Mr. Emory feels is as impor­tant (or more impor­tant) than any work he has ever done, this pro­gram begins with a re-broad­cast of an excerpt from FTR-218.

Dis­cussing Bol.com’s IPO, this excerpt high­lights the pre­dic­tion by the head of the com­pa­ny that it will soon sur­pass Amazon.com in on-line book sales every­where but in the Unit­ed States. (Bol.com is the on-line sales divi­sion of Ber­tels­mann, the Ger­man media giant that stands astride Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing, along with the Von Holtzbrinck firm. The avail­able evi­dence sug­gests that Ber­tels­mann belongs to the remark­able and dead­ly Bor­mann Orga­ni­za­tion, the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal com­po­nent of the “Under­ground Reich”.

Ama­zon’s stock dropped pre­cip­i­tous­ly in mid-April of 2000, under­scor­ing Mr. Emory’s rumi­na­tion about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a Ber­tels­mann buy-out of Ama­zon in the even­tu­al­i­ty of an eco­nom­ic col­lapse. (Barnes&noble.com is #2 in on-line book sales in the Unit­ed States. BarnesandNoble.com, in turn, is 50% owned by Ber­tels­mann.)

Next, the pro­gram high­lights the inten­tion of a joint Ber­tels­mann-Pear­son PLC tele­vi­sion com­pa­ny to pen­e­trate the U.S. mar­ket.

The broad­cast reca­pit­u­lates the analy­sis of the Nazi tract Ser­pen­t’s Walk, against which this pro­gram must be viewed. Dis­cussing a Nazi takeover of the Unit­ed States in the mid-21st cen­tu­ry, Ser­pen­t’s Walk pred­i­cates the event on the con­trol of the Amer­i­can opin­ion form­ing media by the descen­dants of the SS. This con­trol, in turn, involves “one cor­po­ra­tion gen­tly cud­dling up to” anoth­er and “munch­ing it up” like a giant amoe­ba.

The pro­gram sets forth the grow­ing rela­tion­ship between Pear­son (the largest edu­ca­tion­al pub­lish­er in the world) and Ber­tels­mann. Ber­tels­mann is “gen­tly cud­dling up” to Pear­son. Whether it munch­es Pear­son up or mere­ly con­tin­ues to influ­ence it remains to be seen. One Of Pear­son­’s prin­ci­pal ele­ments is the Pen­guin pub­lish­ing out­fit.

Pen­guin and author Deb­o­rah Lib­stadt were the tar­gets of an unsuc­cess­ful (and high­ly pub­li­cized) libel suit by Holo­caust denier David Irv­ing. Although Irv­ing’s suit was unsuc­cess­ful, the views of Ber­tels­man­nts offi­cial his­to­ri­an (Dirk Baven­damm) should be borne in mind.

Baven­damm secured forged diaries and sketch­es attrib­uted to Hitler, which paint­ed a rel­a­tive­ly pos­i­tive pic­ture of the Fuehrer. These forg­eries were pub­lished by the Ger­man mag­a­zine Stern, a Ber­tels­mann prop­er­ty. Baven­damm has writ­ten two books blam­ing Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt for World War II and claim­ing that Hitler was blame­less for the war. His works also claim that Hitler’s actions toward the Jews were mere­ly a reac­tion to Roo­sevelt’s plot­ting against Ger­many. The most recent of these titles was pub­lished in 1993, and re-released in 1998.

Against the back­ground of Ber­tels­man­n’s dom­i­nance of Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing, the Ser­pen­t’s Walk sce­nario should not be too read­i­ly dis­count­ed.

The broad­cast sets forth The Tehran Times and its ref­er­enc­ing of Irv­ing’s work deny­ing the Holo­caust. This makes Iran the sec­ond Mid­dle East­ern coun­try to ref­er­ence Irv­ing’s Holo­caust denial. The pro­gram sets forth the offi­cial Syr­i­an pub­li­ca­tion Tishreen and its use of Irv­ing’s revi­sion­ism.

The pro­gram con­cludes with analy­sis of con­nec­tions between the “Under­ground Reich” and Iran­ian nation­al­ist Mohammed Mossadegh, over­thrown by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by Fazol­lah Zahe­di, a for­mer Nazi spy. (Record­ed on 4/16/2000.)