Congress
George Bush toured the Holocaust memorial in Israel yesterday, and through tears, came up with a telling formulation about what his predecessor, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, should have done to stop the horror at the German concentration camps:
It is impossible to imagine any other politician whose grandfather had profited from Nazi slave labor who could tour a Holocaust memorial with the media in tow and not be hounded for a comment on his grandfather’s role in the horror.
President George W. Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said.
Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial today calling it a “sobering reminder” that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.
Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.
“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.
At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.
“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, the saying goes, then every solution will look like a nail. Thus, in Bush’s primitive brain, the best way to have stopped the horror at the camps would have been to bomb the hell out of them.
Mainly, though, it’s hard to get past the cognitive dissonance of reading an honest, human utterance from Bush’s mouth that was not crafted by the White House political shop and focus-grouped in Paramus to ensure ambiguity.
It also reminds us of the unique kid-glove treatment George W. Bush receives from the media. It is impossible to imagine any other politician whose grandfather had profited from Nazi slave labor who could tour a Holocaust memorial with the media in tow and not be hounded for a comment on his grandfather’s role in the horror.
First the history: Before the war, the Hitler regime’s mistreatment of Jews — particularly the government’s policy of ethnically cleansing Jews out of mixed neighborhoods into Jewish-only ghettos — may have seemed less outrageous in the racially segregated America of the late 1930s than it does today. The same goes for conscripting Jews into forced labor. In 1942, just four years after the Germans began sending Jews to labor camps, the U.S. government sent thousands of Japanese-American citizens into camps in the west, for example.
While the American public had no idea about the mass killings until after the camps were liberated in 1945, the debate continues even now among historians about the extent of FDR’s knowledge of the genocide while it was underway. He died in April that year, just four months after Auschwitz was captured.
In the scheme of things, however, the martyrdom of the Jews, Gypsies and gay people in the camps has had a positive effect on European and German society, for the entirety of civilization, because the fact that the camps were intact at the war’s end provided irrefutable evidence of the genocide.
For example, after the war, the Allied commanders forced rank and file German citizens, who claimed not to have known that their government was gassing 6 million people literally under their noses, to tour the camps to see with their own eyes the horror wrought in their names (and with their tax dollars) — and to witness the inevitable result of the bigotry ingrained in their culture. Forcing the Germans to accept the horrible truth about Nazism contributed to bringing an end to Germany’s decades of aggression against its neighbors, once and for all.
What has been all but forgotten, however, is the role of Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather, who was in business with the Nazis even after the U.S. entered the war in late 1941:
George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
We will never know if George Bush gave any thought to his grandfather’s role in the creation of the Nazi camps while he toured a memorial to the horror they produced. One of his biggest flaws is his instinctive reflex to deflect responsibility for his own failings, so it is unlikely he’d see any connection between himself, the family fortune that paved his way to power and the portion of it that came from profits from his grandfather’s business dealings with Hitler’s government.
That would hit him a little too close to home.
Topics: Congress
What Bush suggested, bombing Auschwitz, would have been convenient and terribly cruel. First, it would have been convenient because it would have destroyed evidence of what happened there. Second, it would have killed countless innocent prisoners. Was Bush talking tongue-in-cheek? Or didn’t he know that a military decision NOT to bomb may have been made because many innocent lives would have been lost? I seem to recall a documentary that recounted a decision by Ike not to bomb Auschwitz for precisely that reason.
With the Bush bastards one suspects that their tears are crocodile, and their hearts are cold. As a psychopath, it is understandable that the Bush monster would be insensitive as to why the allies would NOT have wanted to bomb Auschwitz.
To follow up, a little research:
United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a key intelligence officer for the Air Force in Europe in World War II in an oral history interview in 1985 was incredulous that anyone would even suggest that Allied forces bomb Auschwitz. “I am perfectly confident,” he said, “that General Spaatz [the USAF Commander in Europe] would have resisted any proposal that we kill the Jewish inmates in order to put Auschwitz out of operation. It is not easy to think that a rational person would have made such a recommendation.”
1. Sure bush would’ve bombed Auschwitz. That’s his answer for poor, repressed, tortured peoples.
2. He was crying because he was thinking of his presidency. Perfect for tears on cue.
Shrub needs a bomb up his arse!
The person who wrote this artical is trying to make a name for himself………. forget it, you are a bitter fool.
Hell, why doesn’t he just go ahead and bomb the place NOW? I mean, the fact that the Germans stopped exterminating Jews 60 years ago only means they could start back again at any time. Don’t tell me Bush is going soft.
We were right not to bomb the camps, to save lives, but there is no reason not to bomb the train tracks, which delivered people to those camps. Nowhere else were tracks left unbombed, in most of the war zones of the world, nor were most of the other smokestacks left unbombed, except those in the “camps”.
But, it is wrong to hold Mr. Bush responsible for the actions of his grandfather. Americans don’t do that.
He has enough quilt of his own.
His crying may have been because he was walking around a memorial to the victims of a mad man and his followers in war crimes. And he is afraid of the fact that his belief that he would go down in history as the greatest President has gone. No possiblity that that was ever going to be.
He is going down in history as one of the most criminal, one of the most hated man in history, to sit in the White House. (worldwide and in the US). He was crying out of the lose of his dream. Maybe even fear.
He wanted to outdo his father in everything and the only good thing he has done is to make his father look better than he was.
I think he has a degenerative brain disorder not that he was ever 100% or it’s the evil disguised as stupidity …
Can You say Katrina & New Orleans…
Wow, here is a big suprise, Bush whats to bomb something…give me a fucking break. I’m glad i didn’t vote for this guy ever. This year i’m voting for Dr. Ron Paul
Didn’t CLInTon had watery eyes too???
Ok now I see it
Shouldn’t we bomb Bush on his first term???
As a Canadian man living in Vancouver ( and who has also lived stateside in San Diego), I can assure you that the candlelight & charitable response in this city following 9/11 was astonishing. I was filled with pride.Then came Dubya’s alienation of humanity , along with the denigration of science, & officially supported slander against an entire segment of humanity ( gays). It will be a very long time before the global damage done by ‘Door number 1′is
repaired.As for his tour of Auschwitz , it is also ironic that msny of his most devoted supporters have a history of some of the most virulent anti-Semitism in US history.
I can’t imagine anyone ever touring a Holocaust museum and not having tears in their eyes. I can imagine someone leaving Ron Brown’s funeral laughing and joking with tears in his eyes. Indeed, I actually saw that. Regarding Bush’s remark about bombing Auschwitz, I can also imagine I might have said the same thing in the heat of emotion. If Eisenhower decided against it, it can only stand to reason the idea was considered. With regard to Bush’s grandfather having been on the Board of a company doing business in Germany before the war, I can imagine that might apply to a lot of grandfathers. Has anyone checked to see if former Klansman, Senator Byrd, had any family business dealings with the Nazis. It does seem a little more than likely since Hitler would have fit right in with Byrd’s KKK buddies. Did “Chappaquidick Man’s” daddy have any dealings with the Reich? Had their been an easy buck to be made, I imagine he might have been there. You guys are really grabbing at straws. Bush’s “Granddaddy”?? Give me a break!
[...] The second reason, is the mental conditioning the American public, and a good part of the Western world, has gone through. The joke of a simplified politically correct, as written by the winners, system of historical education aside, we’ve also been programmed via scores of Hollywood movies depicting the Holocaust; one-dimensional evil Germans and equally one-dimensional happenstance poor Jews. {*1} The third is collective guilt instilled by Western education for allowing it to happen, or not doing enough to stop it. [...]
ya bomb bush he sucks
HITLER WAS A BAD MAN, BECAUSE HE DIDN’T KILL ALL THE JEWS. IF HE NEW THEN WHAT WE NOW KNOW,HE IS A VERY INTELLIGENT MAN, I CAN’T IMAGINE HOW THEY COULD HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THE JEWS THEN. IT’S AMAZING.WHAT IS KNOWN NOW ABOUT THE JEWS AND HE TOOK ACTION, THEY NOT ONLY TOOK OVER ALL THE HOSPITALS,(AS DOCTORS)BUT THEY TOOK OVER THE MEDIA, AND ALL THE CONTROLLING JOBS. HITLER WAS RIGHT. GOD BLESS HITLER. THANK YOU JOE THE ITALIAN STALLION.
With respect to Joe the italian stallion, you are no stallion, you are a simple horse, with the mind of an Arab horse and the intelligence of a monkey.