Dialog International

9/11 Truther Daniele Ganser delivers a "lecture" at Witten/Herdecke University

What on earth is going on at German universities?  First the University of Cologne allows DKP "historian" Werner Rügemer to teach his conspiracy theories about (Jewish) Wall Street bankers being responsible for World Wars One AND Two, as well as for the Holocaust.  Now the Uni Witten invites the well-known Truther "historian" Daniele Ganser on its campus to speak about the media. His appearance was protested by the SPD, Green Party, and Pirate party who, in an open letter wrote:

"Gerade in Zeiten von einer erstarkenden PEGIDA braucht es unserer
Meinung nach keinen weiteren Nährboden für ähnliche, weltfremde und undifferenzierte Äußerungen – erst recht nicht bei einer öffentlichen Veranstaltung unter dem Deckmantel der Wissenschaft." 

("We believe that especially in these times where PEGIDA is showing strength the university shouldn't serve as another hotbed for similar crazy and unbsubstantiated  statements - especially not in a public forum under the cloak of scientific inquiry.")

According to the official announcement about Ganser's lecture, the topic was supposed to be "who controls the fourth estate?"  - a general discussion of the media and propaganda, not 9/11 conspiracy theories.  But blogger Mercedes Nabert from the blog Ruhrbarone attended the lecture and reports that Ganser brought up the famous "third building" (Man erfuhr von ihm, wie das berühmte „dritte Gebäude“ des 11. Septembers, das WTC7, nur durch kontrollierte Sprengung in die Luft hätte gegangen sein können.) a favorite topic of Truthers that has been debunked many times for over a decade.

Ganser told the audience at Witten, which listened with rapt attention, to beware of "newspapers", since they were primarily "outposts of NATO public relations" ("überwiegend Außenstellen der Nato-Pressestelle"). He did have some reading recommendations for people who want to develop a more "objective" view of happenings in the world:

 "(Ganser)er nimmt es sich auch heraus, zu einem Vortrag zum Thema Medienkompetenz eine Liste von unbedenklichen, empfehlenswerten Journalisten und Publizisten mitzubringen. Scharfsinnig stehen dort der KenFM-Betreiber Ken Jebsen, der „weis, wer den holocaust als pr erfunden hat“ und der langsam senil werdende Israel-Boykotteur Noam Chomsky auf einer Folie. Daneben eine Reihe der üblichen Verdächtigen: 9/11-Verschwörungstheoretiker und einige Namen, die so unbekannt sind, dass sie wömoglich bei einer Schülerzeitung in Freital oder Heidenau beschäftigt sein könnten. In der anschließenden Diskussion jedoch wird die Liste noch um Jürgen Elsässer, das Compact-Magazin erweitert.

Of course, reading a Holocaust denier like Ken Jebsen or a Putin fanatic like Jürgen Elsässer will serve to round out the perspective of everyone.

Daniele Ganser is a success because he delivers exactly what the audience wants to hear.  He has a simple business model: anti-Americanism.  The audience always roars with approval when told that America is responsible for everything bad in the world. And they ALWAYS thrill when told that "9/11 was an inside job."

I am a firm believer in freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  Ganser should be allowed to present his fake "theories" to the public.  But not at a university, where there has to be a commitment to scientific inquiry and truth.  Daniele Ganser's lies have no place on a university campus.

Deutsche Bank: The Dream is Over

As an ex-Deutsche Banker, I was somewhat saddened but not at all surprised to read this in the New York Times:

Deutsche Bank said it would cut as many as 35,000 jobs over the next two years as part of a strategy to overhaul the German lender, Chad Bray reports in DealBook.The plans came after the bank reported a loss of $6.6 billion in the third quarter.The bank said it would close its operations in 10 countries, move its trading operations in Brazil to other hubs and further centralize back-office operations.It also plans to cut its investment banking clients by about 50 percent, especially in ountries with higher operating risk.

The bank said it would cut 9,000 full-time jobs internally, elimate 6,000 external contractor positions and cut an additional 20,000 through selling businesses in the next two years.Deutsche Bank is also edging nearer to settling one of the many government investigations it faces,

I worked at Deutsche Bank in New York and Frankfurt back when it had the ambition to be become the most powerful bank in the world. Alfred Herrhausen was the executive board member responsible for the North American business, and I had the pleasure of meeting this visionary thinker several times. Unlike the heads of the biggest banks today, Herrhausen thought about the bank's role and responsibility in the world. He startled the international banking scene in 1987 when he proposed that global banks forgive their loans to Third World countries.  He recognized the risks and opportunities posed by the fall of Berlin Wall, just weeks before his death, and proposed establishing a development bank in Warsaw to bundle incoming aid and deploy it in accordance with strict efficiency criteria. Such an "Institute for Economic Renewal," as he called it, would help channel western aid and monitor its efficient use. Such an  Institute could play a constructive role in economic reform. Similar institutions could be established for other countries. Herrhausen engineered the acquisition of the UK merchant bank Morgan Grenfell to bring Anglo-Saxon banking know-how into Deutsche Bank.  His plans to bring one of the British executives onto the DB executive board, however, were thwarted, and after his assassination Morgan Grenfell was more or less ruined, the top talent jumped ship. 

Deutsche Bank's downfall actually began in 1998 with the purchase of Bankers Trust (BT) in New York. BT had a freewheeling trading culture and was constantly pushing the envelope with new derivative products that had questionable risk profiles.  BT traders were caught on tape bragging about how they were able to pull the wool over the eyes of their customers. Deutsche Bank's fate was sealed when Josef Ackermann became chief executive.  Ackermann's stated goal was to achieve a 25% return on equity, which only pushed the bank's traders into riskier - and illegal (LIBOR fixing) - activities.  Deutsche Bank - along with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Citibank and a host of other banking culprits - played a key role in the 2008 global financial meltdown.  It is still paying out $Billions in penalties and faces more years of litigation for its predatory practices.

Deutsche Bank is not expected to turn a profit until 2018.  Alfred Herrhausen must be turning in his grave to see the once proud-institution just a shadow of what it once was.

Putin's Right Flank in Germany

Recently I made an attempt to identify important groups or individuals in Germany who comprise Putin's Fifth Column, a constellation that spans the far Right to the far Left. The challenge is keeping track of the growing number of nützliche Idioten in Germany.  It is easier to keep tabs on the Left:  one only need monitor the activities of Die Linke (the Left Party) or follow Junge Welt and NachDenkSeiten.  But the Far-Right is much more difficult, since it is much larger and much more fragmented.  That said, the Kremlin has shrewdly targeted the Far-Right with its propaganda through its principal media outlet RT Deutsch (Russia Today): 

"Even before the invasion of Crimea led to increased tension between Russia and the West, RT was pursuing a very distinct anti-Western, anti-American and anti- democratic narrative. In 2010, Sonia Scherr of the Southern Poverty Law Center,< an American NGO, was already describing RT as reporting “with boosterish zeal on conspiracy theories popular in the resurgent ‘Patriot’ movement, whose adherents typically advocate extreme anti-government doctrines”. RT had been regularly giving exposure to fringe figures who promoted conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks being “an inside job” as well as Barack Obama being born abroad and the US being a “tool of the New World Order”.

In Germany, the Kremlin's most "useful idiot" on the Right has been Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of the magazine Zuerst!

"RT first involved Ochsenreiter, alternately introduced as a “political analyst”, “German<journalist” and “Syria expert”, in 2013 to provide his opinion on “the German government [selling] the privacy of German citizens to the US government” and the US government and CIA’s alleged involvement in the “Syria conflict” which he called a “proxy war”. In March 2014  Ochsenreiter illegally travelled to Russia-occupied Crimea to “observe” the “referendum”, and,on 21 April, he denied the Russian occupation of Crimea in an interview for the Voice of Russia despite the fact that Putin had himself already admitted the deployment of Russian troops in this Ukrainian republic on 17 April."

2014 saw a surge in Ochsenreiter’s comments for RT. In numerous interviews, he expounded his views on the situation in Ukraine from a pro-Kremlin perspective and even went so far as to declare that Ukraine had ceased to exist: “The Ukrainian state, what we saw now on the map, when we put the map on the table, is not existing anymore; it is a failed state, an empty entity, which is in the west governed by a putsch gang of people who were imposed by the West, by NATO, as well as the European Union.”

Vladimir Putin can look with satisfaction at the success of his propaganda initiatives in Germany.  Broad swaths of both the Left and Right profess their loyalty to the Kremlin.  And Putin remains a favorite figure at the weekly Pegida marches.

 

 

Holding a mirror up to the neo-Nazis

Fantastic video by Carolin Kebekus.

Humor is the best weapon against the neo-Nazi madness.

 "Wie blöd du bist"  ("How dumb you are!") 

 

 

Du marschierst in einer Reih', mit dem Nazi-Allerlei

Willst 'ne gute Deutsche sein, randalierst vorm Flüchtlingsheim

Dabei siehst du scheiße aus, du hebst den Arm und lässt es raus

Vom Wutbürger zum Faschist, zu mehr hast du's nicht gebracht

Du wirst verlacht, kannst du versteh'n

Ich schäm' mich!

Für all deine Fahnen und deine Narben

Hinter der Mauer, ja in Dresden

Lass dir mal sagen, nein lass mich dir sagen:

Weißt du denn gar nicht, wie blöd du bist?"

America-Hating Professor Werner Rügemer Teaching American History at University of Cologne

Last May I wrote about the "historian" Dr.Werner Rügemer and his distorted view of the United States. Dr. Rügemer was a long-time member of the DKP (German Communist Party - the West German counterpart of the Stalinist SED in the former GDR) and he uses his excellent understanding of Leninist Dialectics to analyze the evil-doings of the United States. The man is obsessed with the America.  It is bad enough that he blabbers about wild conspiracy theories in a public forum, but I found this on his Web site:  

Lehrveranstaltungen an der Universität zu Köln    Wintersemester 2015/16, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät, mittwochs, Raum 402:
Entstehung und Strukturen einer Supermacht – Beispiel USA

So Dr.Rügemer actually has a faculty position at the University of Cologne where he can present his distortions and conspiracy theories to college students.  He is a German version of Ward Churchill.  

Among "Professor" Rügemer's "theories":

• World War One was started by the United States and financed by "Wall Street Bankers";
• The United States dictated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles;
• US oil companies prolonged World War II by supplying oil to Hitler's Luftwaffe;
• American corporations benefited from Nazi slave labor;
• The post-war Marshall Plan, which sparked Germany's Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) was a CIA plot to subjugate Germany;
• The US government colluded with German car manufacturers to build assembly plants in the US in order to weaken German trade unions.

In other words, Werner Rügemer is a historical revisionist who blames the United States for the catastrophe of the Third Reich.  The German Volk were only victims of America's imperial ambitions.

These "theories" are too preposterous to address here.  Fortunately, the blogger Kai Ruhsert has written a point-by-point analysis and refutation of Dr.Rügemer's distortions of American history. So why does the University of Cologne allow him to continue teaching?

Werner Rügemer is a frequent guest of the Holocaust denier and 9/11 Truther Ken Jebsen on Jebsen's video channel KenFM.  Rügemer famously described the state of Israel as a "test lab for killing techniques"  (Versuchslabor für Tötungstechnologie").

Switzerland: Rechtsrutsch in "the country of dwarfs"

Switzerland held its election yesterday and, as predicted, the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) scored a major victory, completing the nation's Rechtsrutsch ("slide to the right"). How did they achieve this?  By whipping up fear of "foreigners":

During the election campaign, the SVP rallied against Swiss reforms to deal with asylum seekers, even though in Europe's current migrant crisis Switzerland is having to handle far fewer migrants than some other nations such as Germany.

With slogans like "Stay free!" the SVP has also played to fears that Switzerland may head towards EU membership, while also producing tongue-in-cheek YouTube music videos in a bid to appeal to younger voters.

The other day the Swiss writer Lukas Bärfuss had a terrific rant in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about his homeland that put the noses of a few of his fellow Swiss citizens out of joint.  I have only read one novel by Lukas Bärfuss - Hundert Tage - about the Rwandan genocide and thought it was quite good (see my review).  Here is an excerpt from his FAZ piece Die Schweiz ist des Wahnsinns ("Switzerland Has Gone Mad"):  

Vertrauen kann ein Schweizer Bürger heute eigentlich nur noch auf die Justiz. Allerdings nicht auf die schweizerische, sondern auf die amerikanische. Sie sorgt regelmäßig dafür, dass die Eidgenossenschaft den Kontakt zu den zivilisatorischen Nationen nicht ganz verliert. Ohne die Staatsanwälte aus Übersee hätten die Banken das Gold der ermordeten Juden bis heute nicht zurückbezahlt. Die internationalen Steuerhinterzieher würden sich immer noch auf das Bankgeheimnis verlassen können. Und korrupte Sportfunktionäre könnten weiterhin unbehelligt von Zürich aus die Jugend der Welt an den Mammon verkaufen. ....Ein Volk von Zwergen will man hierzulande sein und bleiben

("Today Swiss citizens can only put their trust in the justice systems.  But in the American system, not the Swiss justice. The American system makes sure that the Swiss nation doesn't completely lose contact with civilized nations. If it weren't for the prosecutors overseas the banks never would have repaid the gold stolen from murdered Jews. International tax-evaders would still be relying on the bank secrecy laws. And the corrupt sports officials would be still be using Zurich as the venue for selling out the world;s youth to the God of Mammon ... We are destined to remain a nation of dwarfs.")

The election results yesterday only confirm Lukas Bärfuss' worst fears....

Attack on Mayoral Candidate Henriette Reker: Open Season on German Politicians and Journalists

 

I just learned that Henriette Reker, candidate for mayor of Cologne, was stabbed and critically wounded while campaigning in downtown Cologne.  The attacker is said to be a 44-year old man who was unhappy with Chancellor Angela Merkel's policies concerning refugees from the Middle East.  He apparently shouted ""Merkel, Reker, Flüchtlingsschwemme," as he attacked Frau Reker with a machete.  He later told the police: " "Ich musste es tun. Ich schütze euch alle" ("I had to do it. I'm protecting all of you.").

This is very sad - the election in Cologne was to be held tomorrow.  People ask: how can this happen in Germany?  The "Pegida-virus" has been spreading west from Saxony to the Rhine. 

Here is the scene from Dresden just this week:

A growing segment of the German population is unnerved by the influx of foreigners - Fremden - into the country, and are looking around for scapegoats to blame: political leaders, journalists, the CIA, Jews, etc.  Things will only get uglier....

My thoughts and prayers are with Henriette Reker and the other members of her entourage who were stabbed.

One tiny bit of consolation: at least the neo-Nazi attacker did not have a Glock - as he no doubt would have, if it had happened in the US.

Ron Paul to deliver keynote address at anti-American hate fest in Berlin

The "magazine for a sovereign Germany" COMPACT has organized a conference taking place on October 24, 2015 in Berlin.  The conference is devoted to ending American "occupation" of Germany.  As stated on the conference Web site: 

Die USA haben auf allen Kontinenten eine Kolonial-Diktatur errichtet. Wir werden ausgespäht, abgehört, überwacht. Die Zensoren des Imperiums beherrschen unsere Medien. Google, Facebook und Apple kontrollieren unsere geheimsten Gedanken. Virtuelle Fußabdrücke, die wir hinterlassen, sind wie Blutspuren, denen die NSA-Spürhunde nachschnüffeln. Begonnen hat der Feldzug der angelsächsischen Raubtierkapitalisten jedoch schon vor hundert Jahren. Mit der Gründung der amerikanischen Notenbank Federal Reserve durch die mächtigsten privaten Finanzhaie entstand ein Papiergeld-Moloch, der sich nur durch beständige Vertilgung stofflicher Werte am Leben erhält. Ein Land, das diese Werte nicht freiwillig ausliefert, wird mit Krieg überzogen.

("The US has established a colonial dictatorship on all continents. We are being spied on and monitored. The empire's censors control our media. Google, Facebook and Apple control our most secret thoughts. Virtual footprints are like blood stains for the NSA bloodhounds. The brutal campaign of the the Anglo-Saxon predator capitalists started already one hundred years ago.  The most powerful financial sharks created a giant paper-money monster with the Federal Reserve banks which survives only by the constant destruction of anything of material substances. Any nation that does not submit voluntarily to this program is taken to war.")

The highlight of the conference is a live video address by former Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul .  Dr. Paul has distinguished himself in the past as an isolationist and critic of the American monetary system.  He has maintained ties with neo-Nazi and white supremacists groups in the US and met with the leader of the far-right nationalist group Front National Marine Le Pen.  See my post Ron Paul and the Neo-Fascists. 

The organizer of the conference and publisher of COMPACT is Jürgen Elsässer, who is widely-known in Germany as a leading 9/11 Truther and Putin fanatic. Elsässer is also seen as the leader of the German Querfront movement (literally "Cross Front Movement"), an unholy alliance of neo-Nazis, racists, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and Putin loyalists united in their hatred of NATO, the United States and Israel.  A perfect audience for Dr. Paul!

Ben Carson and the Myth of Nazi Gun Control

Dr. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for US President, has made a number of outrageous comments, which, under normal circumstances would immediately disqualify him for the office. For Dr. Carson, America today is Weimar Germany, and President Obama is leading the nation to a new Third Reich.  As the Washington Post recently pointed out, the good doctor is the biggest fan of Nazi metaphors in politics. This week, in response to an other mass shooting on a college campus, Dr. Carson resurrected on of the more persistent myths embraced by right-wing Republicans - namely, that Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of Jews “would have been greatly diminished” if German citizens had not been disarmed by the Nazi regime. It has always been an article of faith among American gun fetishists that "the first thing Hitler did was round up all the guns."

The myth of Nazi gun control was exploded already in 2004 by Bernard E. Harcourt in his article On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (pdf warning) published in the Journal of the University of Chicago Law School.  It turns out, as Harcourt documents, that the Nazis relaxed many of the gun ownership restrictions that were put in place during the Weimar Republic (as required under the Versailles Treaty). And one could argue that the Nazi Party might not have successfully seized power if gun laws had been strictly enforced during the Weimar Republic, since Hitler had few problems procuring illegal weapons for his paramilitary troops such as the SA. 

It is true that after the Novemberpogrom of 1938 the Nazi regime expressly forbade Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other "undesirables" from owning any weapons (Waffengesetz von 1938), but it is not clear at all that this had any significant effect on the persecution of Jews. And it is patently absurd to point to this as the cause of the Holocaust.  The Jews that were detained and then deported after 1938 tended to be older and less-well off; most Jews with any resources left Germany much earlier.  The deportation took place with the open or tacit approval and complicity of the vast majority of Germans; any act of armed resistance would have been completely futile.   In any case, most of the Jews who perished in in the Nazi death camps were non-Germans and not subject to the Waffengesetz. 

This table shows that comparatively few German Jews were murdered by the Nazis compared with Jews in Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union:

	Pre-war Jewish Population	Estimated Murdered
Austria	185,000	50,000
Belgium	66,000	25,000
Bohemia/Moravia	118,000	78,000
Bulgaria	50,000	0
Denmark	8,000	60
Estonia	4,500	2,000
Finland	2,000	7
France	350,000	77,000
Germany	565,000	142,000
Greece	75,000	65,000
Hungary	825,000	550,000
Italy	44,500	7,500
Latvia	91,500	70,000
Lithuania	168,000	140,000
Luxembourg	3,500	1,000
Netherlands	140,000	100,000
Norway	1,700	762
Poland	3,300,000	3,000,000
Romania	609,000	270,000
Slovakia	89,000	71,000
Soviet Union	3,020,000	1,000,000
Yugoslavia	78,000	60,000
Total:	9,793,700	5,709,329

But don't expect Ben Carson to retract his statement or apologize for his astounding ignorance concerning the Holocaust. And don't expect any rational discussion of history to change the Gun Control = Holocaust hysteria.  There is a segment of white males in America who fantasize about using their AR-15 military assault rifles to mow down Obama's gay Muslim storm-troopers who will be coming to a neighborhood near you to take your guns. 

Annals of German Anti-Americanism: The Great CIA-AIDS Conspiracy of the 1980s

One of the more pernicious conspiracy theories prevalent in Germany was the charge that the American CIA "invented" the AIDS virus as a new weapon for biological warfare.  Given the pervasive anti-Americanism among the far-left and far-right in Germany this is one of many conspiracies that lives on even today. 

In fact, the CIA-AIDS conspiracy theory was engineered as a collaborative project of the KGB and the East German Stasi.  Two historians, Douglas Selvage and Christopher Nehring, have done extensive research into both the Russian and the Stasi archives and have written a very thorough and interesting book -Die AIDS-Verschwörung ("The AIDS Conspiracy") which can be accessed in pdf format here.

The authors document how the KGB and Stasi disinformation campaigned used the "scientific" research of a retired East German bio-physicist - Dr. Jakob Segal - to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the theory that the CIA created the AIDS virus. 

Dr. Segal postulated that the AIDS virus was synthesized by combining parts of two distantly related retroviruses: VISNA and HTLV-1. An excerpt of the Segal report is as follows:

"It is very easy using genetic technologies to unite two parts of completely independent viruses… but who would be interested in doing this? The military, of course… In 1977 a special top security lab… was set up…at the Pentagon’s central biological laboratory. One year after that… the first cases of AIDS occurred in the US, in New York City. How it occurred precisely at this moment and how the virus managed to get out of the secret, hush-hush laboratory is quite easy to understand. Everyone knows that prisoners are used for military experiments in the U.S. They are promised their freedom if they come out of the experiment alive."

The theory was preposterous and was completely discredited by the medical community, but it fit the narrative of the time - as it does again today among conspiracy theorists in Germany: something as evil as the AIDS virus had to be "made in America" (see Albrecht Müller: Der Tod kommt aus Amerika).

None of this would matter if the "information" about the CIA-AIDS theory was just confined to conspiracy nuts on the left and right.  But the Stasi had much more ambitious plans:  they financed an hour-long "documentary" - AIDS - Die Afrikalegende - which was broadcast 3 times on West German television, bringing the conspiracy into the German mainstream.  It was one of the Stasi's greatest propaganda triumphs. 

The program is available in its entirety on YouTube: