Earlier in the program Thom interviewed Jonathan Steele, the senior foreign correspondent and in-house columnist on international affairs for the London Guardian and author of Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq. (Transcript).
Then he went on a long rant about occupations, how culture is killing us, and death cults like the emperor worship of Hirohito, Nazism, and the Republican Party as led by George W. Bush. America is waking up.
Thom Hartmann's Rant about Occupations and Cults, 29 May 2008
Earlier in the program Thom interviewed Jonathan Steele, the senior foreign correspondent and in-house columnist on international affairs for the London Guardian and author of Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq. (Transcript)
I want to just address this, the larger issue here of what Jonathan Steele was talking about. Jonathan Steele in his book, and great interview and what a brave man -- a real reporter as compared to somebody who says, "oh, well, the White House doesn't like our questions, I guess we won't ask tough questions anymore; we wouldn't want to lose access, right?" Here's a guy who's been over to Iraq eight times, he got kidnapped.
But he he pointed out, and I've heard this very often and I didn't want to get into it with him on the air, and I'm guessing he would have agreed with me, there just wasn't time in the interview. But I want to share this with you because this is such an important point. Whenever anybody talks about the occupation of Germany and Japan being successful, there is an elephant in the room that nobody talks about.
And maybe half the people I know who are very thoughtful and insightful people don't get this, and maybe it's because I wrote a book about the impact of culture on everything else. "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" is basically a book about how our culture is killing us; not our technology, not our politics, not, you know, and that we have to fix things at the level of our culture.
But consider. Adolf Hitler created, or bought into, or became part of a cult. It was a death cult. The Nazi party was a cult. It was a religious cult. They were going to bring about a thousand years of peace. In Wewelsburg they were building a Vatican; a Nazi Vatican, not a, it had nothing to do with the Catholic Church. I've been there. They had, there was going to be the shape of a spear. It was based on the Spear of Longinus, the Spear of Destiny, the spear that supposedly pierced the side of Jesus, that's in the museum in Austria, in Vienna, the Habsburg museum. That when Hitler, when he did the Anschluss, the first thing he did when he went into Vienna was he went to that museum and he took that spear because he believed, as did Napoleon, who lost the spear just before he was defeated, he believed that whoever owned that spear would control all of Europe and ultimately all of the world. He thought it was a talisman.
This was a cult. The Nazi party was a death cult. In Wewelsburg Scott Berg and I went over there; we were writing a book about the religion and the Nazis and ultimately we never finished the book, but we did a heck of a lot of research for this thing on the ground and we talked to a lot of old Nazis, a lot of active Nazis. In Wewelsburg there's one of the largest SS cemeteries to this day, well or at least to the day, the time that we were there. The last time I was there was like six years ago when, or maybe seven years ago when we were working on this book.
All these Nazi, all these SS tombstones are polished perfectly, every day there's fresh flowers on them. We walked in on a black candle ceremony with a whole bunch of guys in their eighties. We passed a house with skulls embedded around the door and Runic writing on it. We broke into the castle, you can't get in it. Part of it is a youth hostel but the keep, this circular 3, 4 story keep. It's like, well that's the word that they use. We broke into it, because you're not supposed to be there. And inside was this flame, eternal flame in the center and there were twelve positions around where the Nazi leaders were initiated and where their ashes would be buried. Nazism was a cult; a death cult.
Similarly, Tojo and Hirohito were running a cult of worship of the emperor; that he was the direct descendant of the God who came from the sun. And therefore Japanese were willing to fly planes into aircraft carriers, the kamikaze, and everybody loved and respected them because it was a cult. When we defeated Germany and Japan it was not a military defeat. I mean, it was, but the thing that allowed us to have a successful occupation was that we defeated the cult in both cases. The people of Germany and the people of Japan, when the people of Japan realized that the emperor was not divine, when he essentially said that, and the people of Germany realized that Hitler was not the messiah that they literally thought he was. And I'm telling you, I talked to a lot of Nazis. When they realized that he was not the messiah and he was not going to bring about a thousand years of peace, which was the slogan of the Third Reich; it was all about peace. When those two cults were shattered, the control, the mind control that those two cult leaders, Tojo, Hirohito in Japan and Hitler and his buddies in Germany, had over the people was broken. And when the people woke out of their cult they were willing to cooperate with us.
...
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won't be afraid
No I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me...
Stand By Me, John Lennon.
See, that's a really key point. Stand by me. I mean, here, if the reason why the Japanese and the Germans embraced people like my father who was part of the Japanese occupation. He went over there with the first Japanese occupation forces. He joined the army as the war was ending, not knowing that the war was going to end. I mean, you know, he turned seventeen and said, 'OK, that's it, I'm out of here' and he joined the army to go off and fight the good war. And the war ended and they sent him to Japan just as the occupation was beginning and he spent two years there and that was, you know, that was his time in the army, was in Japan with the occupation forces. And nobody ever shot at him. People treated very nicely. There were very pleased that he was there. Why? And not just him; all the soldiers, right across the board.
Why? In part because we were helping them rebuild their country. We weren't bringing in Halliburton and Bechtel and we weren't bringing in foreign labor. We weren't bringing in the people from the Philippines or from Thailand or from, you know, other nearby countries who might work cheaper than the Japanese to rebuild Japan. And we weren't seeing it as, and we weren't reinventing it in a neo conservative nightmare fashion.
But the bigger thing with both Japan and Germany, the reason why no American soldiers died in the relatively brief occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, is because in losing those wars, the citizens of those countries awakened from the cult that they had become members of; a death cult that had seized the entire country; the cult of Nazism and the cult of emperor worship in Japan, these toxic death cults. And the people when they realized the truth, the truth literally set them free and they said, "Oh, we were wrong".
I'm telling you I have talked with 70, 80, 90 year-old Germans, now this is over the last thirty years it's been since the mid seventies that I've been spending a lot, and I used to do business in the 1970s in Japan. I've talked with Japanese about this is well. In fact, one of my, a dear friend of mine, we've stayed at his home, he and his wife and their children, their home outside of Tokyo, a whole long story. But in any case, I have some very close friends who are Japanese and many good friends who are Germans. And my friend who's Japanese is not old enough; he's my age so he was born after the war. But I've interviewed people in both countries who were alive during the war and were gung ho for it, who, when the war was over and they realized what their side had done, when the Japanese realized about the Rape of Nanking, when the Japanese realized what was being done in their name, when the Germans realized what they had, what they were doing in Auschwitz and right across the board. I mean, when they, when the horrors of these cults were revealed to them, the Japanese and the Germans said, "Oh my god".
And we said to them, "we will help you rebuild your society in a civil and secular fashion", because both of these countries were being run by religious cults. The Nazis were a religion. It was gussied up as Christianity. Bishop Mueller was it initiated as the official Reich's bishop of the Church, of the of the Lutheran Church of, the official Church of the Reich by Hitler. He had the good graces to commit suicide within a week of the end of the war.
But this, these were religious cults and the people woke up. And I tell you this and I share this with you because, and the reason why it's so important that we understand this, that we as a people in America, particularly those of us who are in a position to talk with others about these, about this war, about this occupation of Iraq, about the entire foreign policy, about the entire world view of the Republican Party and the Bush Administration,
is that the same thing that happened at the end of World War II in Germany and Japan where the people realized that they had been defeated and they realized that their leaders had lied to them and they realized that their leaders were mad men and cult leaders, that same thing is happening right now in the United States of America and in Great Britain, particularly in the United States of America.
Just let that sink in.
We're realizing that a cult that has used religion as its front, this cult called the modern Republican Party, look at the logo, go to GOP.gov or GOP.org. Go to their web site, look at the stars on the elephant; just like Hitler inverted the swastika, the Republicans' turned the stars on the elephant upside down. It's not the American star. It's not the star you see on our flag. It's a five pointed star that's upside down on the Republican elephant.
It is that the modern Republican Party has become a death cult. It is led by a man, George W. Bush, who believes that the best way to cure anything, any social ill, is by killing people. He was proud of the fact that in Texas he put to death more people than any other governor in the entire 230 plus year history of the United States. He put to death children. He put to death mentally retarded people. He put to death a woman who had repented of her sins and begged for, not freedom, just life in prison, Karla Faye Tucker, and then he made fun of her after he killed her. Laughing with Tucker Carlson about how, you know, what a hoot it was to put her to death. Tucker Carlson to this day still talks about about how George Bush gave him the creeps in that interview as Bush rubbed his hands together and said, "Please, governor, don't kill me", making fun of the voice of Karla Faye Tucker.
It's a cult. The Republican Party is a cult. It is a cult driven by belief and now the next guy who wants to lead it, John McCain, tried to bring along the religious guys. He's not so much the religious nut but he knew that he needed them because if you're going to have a cult, you've got to have religion associated with it if it's really going to grab the minds of the people. But John McCain is every bit as much about the death cult as George W. Bush.
John McCain complains that Barack Obama has not served his country in uniform. I submit to you, John McCain has served his country in uniform too much. This is no slam on the military or the people in the military. But our constitution was put together for a civilian to be in control of our government. The president of the United States is supposed to be a civilian.
And while I would suggest you Dwight Eisenhower was a great president who served our country, and Grant arguably was a mediocre president who had been a general, maybe even a bad president; it depends on how you want to define his presidency; there's so many different ways to look at, his memoirs are breathtaking, but that's not how he governed. He had the most corrupt administration of the nineteenth century. Grant's administration, General Grant's, Ulysses S Grant's administration was so corrupt that when he went to the Republic, his own Republican Party, and asked to run for a third term, they told him no. It wasn't until Reagan came along that more corrupt officials have been indicted and prosecuted than since the Grant administration, as I recall.
But in any case, what we have, what I am suggesting is that McCain, you know, three generations of military, that he has gone beyond the ideals of the military in the United States. It has become, in his mind, a sort of a cult, and there are elements within our military who are trying to convert our military into a cult. They're doing it at the Air Force Academy in Colorado where they're promoting, you know, Christian, gung ho right wing evangelical Christianity, which many Christians would say, seriously, is not a Christianity that Jesus would would recognize at all.
I remember my mentor, a German, Herr Müller who was in Hitler's army, I remember my mentor saying to me, "you know, if Jesus came back to Earth, what Church would he join?" And I said, "I don't know". And he said, "none". There are none of them that he would recognize.
But anyhow, so we're having an awakening right now in the United States. This is a turning moment.
And it's precisely what Jonathan Steele was talking about. He used that word, that unusable word, "defeat"; that unspeakable word. Defeat. He's saying, we have already been defeated and it is sinking into Americans we have lost, if you want to use those, the language of winning and losing. If we think we have a war it's an unwinnable war. We have lost. We're, and it's time for us to say, "okay, you know, we won the war, we're losing the occupation, were getting out". But it is it is the awakening. So much blood. So much death. So much loss. The average American family spending a couple of thousand, best guess 5,000 dollars a year
is being editing your tax bill or is being borrowed in your name simply to pay for this war and occupation.
This death cult that has been running our government, Americans are waking up from it, and that's why John McCain is not going to be president in 2009, because Americans have woken up, and he hasn't.
Transcribed by Sue Nethercott.
