Memory and forgetting

It's Sunday mailbag time ...

A reader named mycateatsfood dropped me a line about the Hutton Gibson interview, and enclosed with it these thoughts:

And, here I was, innocently thinking that Hutton Gibson was some kind of run-of-the-mill 'traditional Catholic' who is a little 'skeptical' about the Holocaust. When I read the interview, I saw that there's obviously more to it than that. For a supposedly religious person, he has little respect for the most basic of the Ten Commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill, considering his comment about our Fed chairman.

I'm afraid that over the years we're losing our population of World War II vets and people who remember newsreels from 1933-1945. We're losing our immunity to what was rightfully denoted as enemy propaganda back in 1939. Fortunately for me, my parents were rather old when I was born (40) and both were involved in a minor way in WWII. My parents were acquainted with refugee scientists from Europe.

I'm a centrist politically, and although people like Patrick Buchanan don't really bother me (I'm more conservative than you are), I am quite concerned about what I'm seeing with the current administration and with people like Hutton Gibson making extremist statements like this in public ahead of his son's now-major movie release.

The world would be very different if the people in power were the descendants of various WWII generals, rather than the descendents of enemy collaborators (George Herbert Walker and Prescott Sheldon Bush). I'm running into too many well-known public figures who have Nazi fathers (Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite his contributions to the ADL) and Mel Gibson, whose father's interview tips his hand. And, I'm not running into enough public figures whose fathers and grandfathers have a record of honorable leadership and service in WWII. And, there are many such people in the U.S.

I can tell that 'something is going on' when so many of these families have faded into obscurity while the families of collaborationists are in the elite.

I can see the 75+ -year old historical connections between the old elite that was militating against entry into WWII during 1938-1941 and the present-day elite. From the financial ties with Germany during the buildup to WWII, it's obvious that there was a little more than just isolationism happening then. Among present day elites active during the early 1940s, Henry Ford and IBM (ref.) were heavily tied into Germany and the Bushes were loaning Thyssen money. Now I can see why Roosevelt aged so much during the 7 years from 1938-1945 -- he faced tremendous enemy sympathies from the elite in this country.

Of course, I agree wholly with his assessment. For more on this facet of history, see "Bush, the Nazis and America" and my post on the America First Committee.