Tag: WalmartBlairsville

Bernie Sander’s Socialism

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

I am ahead of Bernie Sanders in only one thing, if not two, but I do not really know. I actually lived in a socialism, unlike probably him; I was born there and grew up in it, for nearly three decades. Like most folks back then, I despised it.

His latest book: As an eyewitness and observer in three countries, each as different from the next as night and day, I have great difficulty refuting Bernie Sanders’ theses.

However, this was more than likely a different socialism than Sanders is striving for. It was a dictatorial, for especially outwardly inhuman socialism in the former GDR, today widely known as “East Germany.” The Cold War circumstances played a big role. In the fall of 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesting people were able to get rid of this socialism, while Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not send tanks to crush the revolutionary movement. I was 29 years old at that time and, as today, just a sand corn in the process.

Without our rejection of the socialist form of government, the upheaval leading to German reunification, which took place peacefully in 1990, would not have been possible. The discontent did not come out of nowhere; it had been building up among the people for years.

The second thing that distinguishes me from Bernie Sanders – I don’t know exactly – may be the fact that I spent eight years in the U.S. working with ordinary people at a lower level, so to speak. Here, too, I can base my opinion on personal experience.

After immigrating to the United States for family reasons and going through a period of acclimation – including working for an insurance company in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, and attending college in Clearwater – I was eventually employed by Pinellas County government, wrongly concluding that all the social benefits I could enjoy there were part of the general standard in the United States, a country I still believed at the time to be the freest country in the world. For ten years, so to speak, I walked around with half-closed eyes, seeing only what concerned myself. Actually, a not unusual human trait.

Then my wife and I moved to beautiful Blairsville, Georgia, where we still live today, now retired, aided by circumstances that originated not in the United States of America but in my home country. It was here in North Georgia that I first encountered the social issue in my life, through an employer famously named “Walmart.” Never in my life would I have thought such a thing possible; the way the American upper class treats Americans. My whole way of thinking has changed since then.

I am not a friend of socialism. For nothing in the world would I like to live again in a socialism as I had to get to know it from the GDR. But in the USA, there is also a dictatorship – that of big money, which takes away people’s rights or restricts them, such as health insurance or workers’ rights; for example, the right to organize unions.

I was born in the dictatorship of socialism and will most likely die in a dictatorship of big money. Neither dictatorship leaves much for members of the working class, as I have seen with my own eyes. In the GDR, Socialism locked up its own people behind an impenetrable western border. Anyone who did not agree with the political system had to fear repression.

Those who, through no fault of their own, live under financial constraints in a rich country like the U.S. simply because they needed surgery or are not academics are not living free lives. Fundamental rights such as the right to freedom of expression or freedom of religion do not change this. You do not feel free if you have to worry about health care or food, the rent for your apartment or the mortgage for your house. In the USA, 60 percent live from paycheck to paycheck, and I was one of them for eight years in Blairsville, Georgia.

I am a proponent of a social order in which the capitalist economy is controlled by the legislature through regulations and laws to protect the working majority, rather than allowing corporations a free hand in return for billions in campaign contributions – to the detriment of the many and the benefit of the few at the top. A human system that was once called a “Social Market Economy” at the time I left my home country in 1998.

Be clear about it – in Germany, too, a once comparatively exemplary system is disappearing with each passing day.

If I am not mistaken, Social Market Economy is the kind of “socialism” Bernie Sanders is striving for. I don’t care what he calls it. I don’t care what he calls it. All I know is that he’s right, because he stands up for the human side of society.

When Hitler’s Experts Shot the USA to the Moon

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The Brain of American Space Travel was exclusively Nazi-German

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

It is extremely remarkable that former SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), the “Father of the American Space Travel”, received his professor title from Adolf Hitler personally. The corresponding document bore the Fuehrer’s signature – write unanimously American historians in their books.

No less than 1600 Nazi scientists had been transferred right after World War II to the U.S. by early 1946 as part of operation “Overcast”, later renamed “Paperclip.” Many had skeletons in the closet, some had even participated in experiments on humans in concentration camps, like Hubertus Strughold, who is considered the “Father of America’s Space Medicine.” The more than dubious background of the Germans didn’t bother the Americans much, because expedience superseded principle. The German scientists had been classified as “indispensable.”

Most of the staunch Nazis had been recruited by the U.S. Army. There was (and, frankly: is) hardly a more suitable institution than the U.S. Military for falsifying documents, in this case the biographies of former hardcore Nazis, with which they could effortlessly qualify for American citizenship from 1950 on.


NASA briefing room, 11 September 1962: Former SS-Officer Kurt Debus sitting conveniently between US-President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (second from left). Photo by NASA/photographer unknown.

Another German expert was Kurt Debus*, an ardent SS-Officer who wore his uniform to work at the rocket center in Peenemuende and denigrated others that did not return his Hitler salute. There is a documented case in which a Peenemuende employee was arrested by the Gestapo and interned for two years at the instigation of Debus’.

The very same Kurt Debus in 1962 became the first director of NASA’s launch operations center at Cape Canaveral, later renamed to John F. Kennedy Space Center.

To this day, the Debus Award is still in use – created by the National Space Club Florida Committee (NSCFL) to recognize significant achievements and contributions made in Florida to American aerospace efforts.

Another one, Arthur Rudolph, served in the Third Reich as operations director at the V2-facility Dora-Mittelbau in Nordhausen in Thuringia, responsible for the replenishment of slave labor from concentration camps. Thousands of them died cruelly in the underground tunnels during the assembly of the V2 rockets. Horrifying photographic documents exist, taken by American soldiers immediately after the liberation of the survivors. – Rudolph would later become known as the “Father of the American Saturn V Rocket” – the very same rocket that carried the first men to the moon as part of the Apollo-program.

My dear Americans, history is interesting – isn’t it?

Notes:

*Kurt Debus (1908-1983) joined the SA (the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing) in 1933, the SS in 1940. Adolf Hitler appointed him as the V-Weapons Flight Test Director. In 1958, Debus was in charge of the launch of the first US-Satellite, Explorer 1, in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik in 1957. He died in Rockledge, Florida.

In the Name of Christianity

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The History of the Church is the Story of Moral Failure and Crime

From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Particularly since the beginning of the second millennium Anno Domini, it was the Christian church that commissioned whole armies of knights to plunder and murder their way through the history of the world. At no time since has there been another institution in mankind, so blatant, so full of insolence, treachery and mendacity.

To make a complete list – if such an undertaking is possible at all – of the Christian essence would mean to fill whole volumes. As a logical consequence at the previous end, it is no coincidence that churches in the United States are the stirrup holders of a character like Donald Trump – basically, they were and are his principal base. In this, the churches have remained in their millennia-old tradition of moral failure: Trump could talk as often as he wanted about “if you have money, if you are famous, you can grab every woman between her legs”; he could pay hush money to “adult actresses” as often as he wanted, or state “I could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and still not lose voters” [1] – the overwhelming majority of the church people voted for him anyway.

As if that wasn’t already enough: Most of them still support him. And it was the churches and many of their blatherer that actively brainwashed their sheep in the decision-making process.

We deliberately are not mentioning here the storm on the Capitol. We are talking about historic facts, in this particular case the most recent ones included, to emphasize the path leading to the insurrection of 6 January 2021 and that this path, although not predictable from the outset, nevertheless was not an absolutely surprising element for all those who have followed Trump’s presidency attentively and with an impartial mind, including the words he used in conjunction with racism and radical, militant groups on the far political right. [2] All this did not keep millions of church people from praying for “our president Donald Trump.”

To return to the topic at hand: “Criminal” is not a foreign word in connection with churches – it is, at the same time, a rather very mild description for the work of the churches. Their involvement in criminal activities is as old as the church itself. To this day, the history of the Church is the history of mass stultification of the people for the purpose of self-enrichment and plenitude of power; it is a history of lies and hypocrisy, of oppression, exploitation, and extermination; it is the history of persecution and murder of dissidents, the history of the cruelest wars of conquest in the name of forced Christianization. [3]

Christianization, conducted in brutal, bloody campaigns by church warriors like the chivalric order with the cross on their rear, was a common method in the early medieval Europe and later in the New World (America) – and, in each single case, the crusades were nothing else but ruthless wars of conquest under the guise of God; with the Cross in one hand, and the Sword in the other, translated to the enslaved precisely as follows: ‘If you refuse to accept the former, you will get to feel the latter.’ It was not millions, but billions who suffered under the cruelty and brutality of the Christian cross – to the extent of seismic proportions. One Holocaust took place after the other, and no God to this day has ever intervened.

The churches justified slavery and told people that were treated like cattle to obey their masters. And, it is the church’s history of chumming up with dictators like Adolf Hitler; the history of scandals, of cover-ups and corruption up to the systematic rape of Altar boys; and it is also the history of tax avoidance for their own benefit while evincing charity to the justification of their purpose; it is the reality of the churches being the largest fan club for a demagogue and pervert like Mob-President Donald Trump.

The church as a whole has never been judicially indicted for its ruthless criminality, let alone convicted – as, on the other hand, has occasionally happened with other criminal organizations. It is as if Adolf Hitler with his National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had never ceased to exist – and everyone today is kindly invited to participate. This is the church.

Notes:

[1] Donald Trump, 23 January 2016, at a campaign rally in Iowa. – Americans voting for Trump must have been well aware what they were doing, unless they were completely out of their mind.

[2] “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Donald Trump during the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, when being asked if he is willing to condemn white supremacist and militia groups.

[3] To give an example: The Pruzzen, the “Old Prussians (Alt-Preussen)”, were a tribe on the Amber Coast between the estuary arms of the Vistula (Weichsel)- and the Memel Rivers into the Baltic Sea. They resisted forced Christianization by the Teutonic Knights in the 12th/13th century and were subsequently almost completely exterminated. In the following period settlers from the Holy Roman Empire migrated into the Pruzzen’s territory (note the similarity of the Christian conquest of the North American Continent) and astonishingly assumed the name of the “infidels”. – The terms “Prussia” and “Prussians” result from this historical context. Technically speaking, the “real” Prussians as they became known later on, virtually never existed; for they had long since been exterminated. – My later ancestors descend from the former area of the “Old Prussians”.

“Behind Me are Millions”

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A German warning to America from History

From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

It would be a mistake to assume that Donald Trump, the mob-president, depends on the Republican Party. Instead, it must be feared that the bulk of his 74 million voters will foolishly follow him, if not within the GOP, so in any other political movement – after all, idiocy is sufficiently established in this society to serve as the trailblazer. No law will be an issue anymore.

This man with limited intellectual faculties, stricken by pathological egotism and vindictiveness, will very likely be back in public “in one form or the other”, as he himself put it in his last hours in office. America’s democracy, including a shocking number of citizens, has failed in the most despicable manner, which will result in more consequences for this country.

Of course, Trump is not Hitler, who once boasted “Behind me are Millions.” Unfortunately, it was true. And yet, the situation is insofar comparable as Trump, still supported by millions, can play cat and mouse with the Republican Party, and, as the attack on the Capitol has proven, challenge the American democracy and its institutions to the core, virtually at will and without being punished. This fact will not have escaped his followers.

In 1932 and before, when Hitler did pretty much something very similar even before he became Chancellor in the following year, the illusory “Cabinet of the Barons”, the stirrup holders of the Austrian corporal, had degraded itself to powerlessness, because after all the assurances it was now too late to do something against Hitler – for millions were following him in ecstasy, spurred on with simple paroles against the establishment. Notice something?

To be sincere: If there had not been an American 1 June 2020 (when local law enforcement cleared peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square) and a 6 January 2021 (when the Capitol riot occurred), any comparisons with Hitler would not have even remotely entered my mind. As an historian, like so many Americans, I would have never thought such events possible as it happened in Washington D.C.

The darkest chapter in German history will certainly never repeat itself in an American way. For this, in retrospect, not least the foreign and domestic policy accents are as different as day and night, not to mention the historical and economic situation of both countries – Germany back then and the US today. But the danger that something more entirely atypical by American political standards could happen on a grand scale, can no longer be considered impossible. Much will certainly depend on the outcome of the next elections, and also if any of the various criminal investigations against Trump as a private individual will derail him.

It is much to be hoped that Nikki Haley, former Republican South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, who broke with Trump, is right about her prophecy: that Donald Trump will not return.*

But, how does she know that?

Note: *Nikki Haley, interview with “Politico”, 12 February 2021.