Monday, August 16, 2004

6 comments:

Sheryl said...

I like the flag that's a bar code.

8/16/2004 08:51:00 PM
Sheryl said...

I see your point. At the same time, I have heard arguements that wealthy american industrialists helped fund the Nazis grab for power in Germany to start with.

I'm no historian, so I can't really defend that position. However, considering what all we have been seeing in Iraq with Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and all the various oil companies, I wouldn't negate the arguement without researching it thoroughly.

8/17/2004 10:57:00 PM
J.R. Boyd said...

That history is interesting. The State Department approved of fascism in Europe as a welcome alternative to communism (precisely the reason we reinstalled many former Nazis to power--they knew how to control and suppress popular movements, which we feared might lean towards socialism). As an economic system, fascism preserved private control over management and production, with government guaranteeing the flow of material goods, not unlike our present American system, in fact, which is based on large corporate conglomerates and massive state-intervention on their behalf. Needless to say, the US is a business-run society; our foreign policy reflects this in our well-documented history of being friendly with nations that open themselves up for investment (e.g., communist china) vs. nations that refuse (e.g., communist cuba). In the case of Germany--and I'm not intimately familiar with the details, so this will be an educated guess--I suspect the American business community had no interest in war with the Germans, since many American corporations did business with them well into the war, perhaps even after we had troops in Europe. (I think Coke changed it's product line to Fanta in Germany to keep that market.)

8/18/2004 12:50:00 AM
Anonymous said...

J's correct. We did indeed have business interests in Germany. Part of the Republican's isolationism was based on that.
Interesting fact: The Nazis, though they didn't come into power until 1932, were the first country to recover from the Great Depression.

8/18/2004 01:48:00 AM
Sheryl said...

Isn't it amazing to think that this country gets called isolationist sometimes?

8/18/2004 06:05:00 PM
Sheryl said...

As usual, I am sweet and innocent. ;-)

My initial impulse was to revisit the bar code idea. The consensus seemed to be that American consumerism had indeed subsidized the nazis.

But then I thought, "no, behave yourself, Sheryl!" So I tried to say something conciliatory. I guess it was too far out of character to be believable....Oh well. :-)

8/18/2004 10:07:00 PM

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