Guido Preparata's website

[Lauren Johnson]

The English-language "Afterword" to the German edition of Conjuring Hitler:

http://www.guidopreparata.com/chpg/Afterword.pdf


Begining on page 12 of his "Afterword" to the German edition of his book,
Dr. Preparata describes the battle over his book and academic career,
after his book was published in 2005.

He was promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in 2007,
but left in 2008. He had begun teaching there in 2000.

Adele

I emailed him thanking him for his work. He cordially replied. He has now moved back to Rome. I obviously invited him to join DPF.

[Adele Edisen]

Lauren.

He's no longer in Vancouver, Canada, the last place mentioned in his Bio on his website?

It would be wonderful to have him on DPF.

Adele

[Phil Dragoo]

I emailed thanks and an invitation with links.

What a window through myth to reality.

[Lauren Johnson]

Lauren.

He's no longer in Vancouver, Canada, the last place mentioned in his Bio on his website?

It would be wonderful to have him on DPF.

Adele

No, he's in Rome with wife and kids. I don't know what he is doing, but he is no longer adjunct teaching in B.C. Actually, I seriously doubt he would join us at DPF for any number of reasons, but that is just my speculation. Our email exchange was about as brief as one can be.

[Phil Dragoo]

Dear Mr Dragoo,

Many, many thanks for your message and very kind words. I would love the join the discussion. Given the really intensive schedule that awaits me here in Rome before my new teaching assignment, I believe I might not have the time to check in continually and participate in the online exchange properly. Which, of course, is not *at all* to say, arrogantly, 'thank you but I am so very busy...'; I do want to interact with everyone on the forum, but the best way at this stage would be for me to discuss individual themes via email, and possibly )if he so wishes) have my interlocutor post the excerpt on the site. In the meantime, for the sake of fueling the debate, I forward to you and your colleagues this recent interview I did with for Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Econ...0Dj03.html
And for everything else I remain at everyone's disposal: I will be responding, within my limits, to whatever you & your colleagues wish to discuss.
Again thank you and all the best
Keep in touch
ggp

www.guidopreparata.com
http://guidopreparata.net
http://theideologyoftyranny.com/

[Charles Drago]

Bravo, Phil.

[Phil Dragoo]

In the meantime, for the sake of fueling the debate, I forward to you and your colleagues this recent interview I did with for Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Econ...0Dj03.html

Phil's note: Guido Giacomo Preparata's five-page interview with Asian Times' Lars Schall is titled Business as Usual Behind the Slaughter.

I enjoyed the fast pace and frank immediacy. In particular I had to have these pull quotes:

BEGIN EXCERPTS:


GP: All is religion. All history is a reflection of the battle that spiritual forces wage against one another on other planes. It is not economics - and least of all the survival instinct (whatever that is) - that drives history, but the quest for power, and power in its elaborate institutional manifestations is a form of (psychical) space that utterly transcends the relationship of production and distribution, let alone the basic dynamics of the wolf pack, or the more elaborate political economy of the beehive.


GP: They make it appear so, but it's a deception. The English power elite is a monolithic bastion: fissuring in currents and seemingly antagonistic blocs to adapt to the shifting exigencies of any power game is a tactical device older than prostitution itself.

GP: It tells us that even the most extreme of so-called conspiracy theorists are still three layers short of the truth on the actual nature of power game. It seems a suggestion of George Orwell's perennial war, with business as usual behind the slaughter. It is as if the theatrics of the Cold War had been launched already in the final stages of World War II, at a the time when the Hitlerites were notoriously finished (after Stalingrad) and dying of a slow but certain death, and the final phases of the fight were steered to accomplish other kinds of consolidations in view of the stage that was being set up vis-a-vis the grand, mangy circus of the USSR. The mere fact that all the big players were meeting in Bretton Woods in 1944 - that is, when the conflict was not even concluded (!) - to design the financial architecture of the Pax Anglo-Americana is revealing in this regard.

~~~

GP: Schroeders happened to be 1) one of the oldest banking houses in London handling Anglo-German high-level financial relationships, and one of the few privileged institutes that, possibly because of this role, 2) had direct, institutional access to the directorate of the Bank of England. As for Brown Brothers Harriman (in whose London subsidiary Norman had indeed begun his banking career), I don't quite recall what brought it deep into the financing tangle of the Nazis, possibly its strong ties to the City.

As mentioned, it was through one of its outfits that Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of the 41st and 43rd presidents of the US, conveyed money to Hitler via Rudolf Hess, if I remember correctly. This he did not in the name of some kind of "fascist affinity", as some Leftists have foolishly contended of late, but as (a small) part of the greater design of propping up the Nazis the better to raze Germany to the ground in the forthcoming conflict - conflict for which the Germans had been well supplied by the Americans, under British politico-financial direction, thanks to the Dawes investment boom of 1924-1929.

~~~

There is no doubt in my mind that the Cold War was a colossal pretense orchestrated by the US in collusion with Russia to divide between themselves the planet (the Chinese unknown aside) while allowing the allocation / composition of local conflicts by proxy. As said earlier, the beginnings with Bolshevism are still enveloped in deep mystery, but the entire era is one giant cookie jar of mystery murders, from Korea to the attempt on the life of John Paul II, by way of the Bay of Pigs, JFK, terrorism, Watergate, Vietnam and Cambodia, the Middle Eastern wars, etc. In the context of what I have come to designate as the "Cold Game", it also seems as though Britain entirely vanishes, but she is there, and her steps must be re-traced if one is to understand this essential third act of the 20th century power-play.

In short, it appears that from 1946 to the late 60s, we are in an Orwellian setting of carefully orchestrated perennial war. The reliance on the USSR seems to falter in the early 70s as, more importantly, American leadership itself is severely damaged by the failure in Vietnam and the subsequent suspension of Bretton Woods in 1971. The role and legacy of Richard Nixon are in this regard crucial, as is his demise through Watergate. There follows the uncertain quinquennium of 1974-1979 - a period, as said, of absolutely central significance - during which the forefathers of globalism - the Democrats of the Trilateral Commission - attempt in vain to salvage the situation by attempting to create the global order in the cumbersome presence of a moribund Soviet empire. They will fail; it will be Ronald Reagan's neo-con hawks, instead, that would rise to resolve the Cold Game by pulling the plug on the USSR (1981-1991).

Now, if one is able to arrange all this into one coherent narrative, then and only then will we be able to move on and provide a serious analysis of what has been happening since 9/11 (terrorism, geopolitics etc). Few things to me are as irritating as the academic complaisance that glosses over that era affirming that it was a genuine spiritual conflict between East and West, and that all has been perfectly understood. There was no spiritual conflict and precious little has been understood.

~~~

Be that as it may, it is not enough and whatever is being done is too timid, constricted as it unfortunately is by the pedigree of most "rebels", ie economists who have formed themselves on a varying brew of neo-classical, Chicago, Keynesian economics, and to a minor degree, old-school British political economy (which includes Marxian porridge, in my view). All of which is to say, again, that, foundationally, they, like myself and all those who were cursed enough to have several economics degrees, have no understanding of economics whatsoever. It is, again, a detox process, which starts with doubt and catch-up, night-reading; it's like reassembling the brain after they have attempted to turn it into pulp/mush during the most formative years of one's intellectual development.

END EXCERPTS

I found each gem of note, worthy of comment, but more worthy of thought.

I will frame a question and submit it to Mr. Preparata and post his reply.

[Magda Hassan]

I found each gem of note, worthy of comment, but more worthy of thought.

I will frame a question and submit it to Mr. Preparata and post his reply.

Indeed they are Phil! I look forward to your questions and Mr Preparata's answers with great interest.

[Jan Klimkowski]

To the gems above, and the entire interview is exceptional, I will simply add....

The Phony War:

LS: When Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, would it have been possible for France and England to end the war within a few weeks or months if they would have attacked Germany at its western borders?

GP: Military historians have to answer this question. My understanding is that they certainly could have done so, but that is an imaginary "if"; because if Hitler had known that the Allies would have certainly intervened from the outset, as the various defense (and bogus) pacts they had underwritten commanded them to do, he would have never struck. So ...

LS: Even though the Soviet Union also violated the integrity of the territory of Poland, France and England did not declare war towards the Soviet Union. Why not?

GP: Because these were all rehearsed moves to get the Germans eventually involved on two fronts. For three years, the Allies let the Western border sleep, why? The big "why" of World War II ... and the carnage they allowed to happen in those three years (1941-1944) ... Nobody likes to broach that topic, for obvious reason - patriotic delicacy, noblesse oblige ...

LS: To talk in terms of chess: was the "castling" between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill in May 1940 a real change of British policy?

GP: They make it appear so, but it's a deception. The English power elite is a monolithic bastion: fissuring in currents and seemingly antagonistic blocs to adapt to the shifting exigencies of any power game is a tactical device older than prostitution itself.

LS: What was actually the reason for Hitler to begin "Operation Barbarossa"?

GP: He acted as though he thought he had an agreement with Britain: Eurasia to Germany, the seven seas and the rest of the world to Britain. It is indeed mind-boggling how Germany's General Staff could have fallen for such a gargantuan deceit. In principle, Anglo-America, which is a maritime imperial league (buttressed by missile and air power), will fight tooth and nail to keep Eurasia sundered until, that is, it finds a way to own it entirely itself ...

It's about Power, not Economics:

GP: French economist Alain Cotta explained the euro set-up very well in a recent book (Sortir de l'Euro ou mourir a petit feu, Plon, 2011). The euro is as un-European as could be: it is evidently the brainchild of Anglo-American interests. The intent, as ever, is to constrict Europe financially so as to render it politically incapable of striking out on its own, and eventually asserting itself once more as the chief continental rival.

The idea of the euro is as follows: first, assign the lead to Germany as chief partner / banker / accomplice of the plan, chief economic force of the Union, and chief exporter; then let all the other weaker players (PIGs, Spain, Italy), who produce virtually nothing, indebt themselves vis-a-vis Germany and Anglo-American banks, which, in turn, make good money from the yield on these eurobonds (the debt spiral). Concomitantly, any kind of manufacturing / artisanal potential on the part of Europe's minor partners is systematically wrecked and incapacitated by the flood of Chinese imports (China: the other key accomplice in this triangular crippling of Europe), which are themselves crafted by laborers slaving for wages that are less than a tenth of the West's.
Thus Europe, partly through Anglo-America's strategic savvy and mostly through her own despairing fecklessness, is perennially fettered, constipated, anemic, moribund. That Greece would have been the first link to snap was known far and wide ever since this dismal show was launched 10 years ago. Funny to see how, for the past year or so, The Economist has been shrieking hysterically over the euro crisis, depicting in apocalyptic brushstrokes the prospects of its eventual collapse: funny, and revealing, to see British interests wailing so loudly, they, who are not even members of the euro. Eh bien, justement.

The lobotomization of America:

What we have in the US, instead, is a system governed by an ever-more oligarchically diseased, and outwardly aggressive, bureau-technocracy, which, internally, presides over a gradual privatization of public functions, a sweeping commercialization of all spiritual endeavors (higher learning and the arts), and a virtual monopolization (corporatization) of all economic activity. The combined impact of this insectifying / privatizing / monopolizing devolution has so indentured and enfeebled the nation's middle-class as to have transformed American society into a pervasively barbarized termitary with the highest crime, brutality, and incarceration rates of the post-industrialized world.

One of the prominent cultural (viz devotional) derivatives of such a disquieting process is a now ominous and televised worship of violence in all its forms - eg, from the grotesque realm of wrestling and the downright savagery of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to slasher/dismemberment horror (the Saw saga), an avalanche of porn of the most degrading forms channeled inter alia by GM and AT&T, and the glorification of industrialized holocaust as well as a crass pulp-mythologizing of ancient Sparta or Imperial Rome cut for semi -illiterate audiences. In its main outlines, America's present socio-economic and cultural model is to be analyzed in depth so as to prevent its adoption by, and diffusion to, the rest of the world.

[Lauren Johnson]

The English power elite is a monolithic bastion: fissuring in currents and seemingly antagonistic blocs to adapt to the shifting exigencies of any power game is a tactical device older than prostitution itself.

Monolithic bastion. I note that he did not say Anglo-American, but he seems to extend his argument to say The Plan belongs to this center of power. This way of thinking has been challenged many times at DPF.