Book Review: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State

And To Think We Saw It Coming

by John Kendall Hawkins

The thing is, we could see it coming, and did nothing, again.  Greg Palast reckons Trump stole the election again -- the same way he did before, boldly instructing officials to find him votes.  Way DJ sees it, we owe him that term that Biden sat in for him in the Oval, and he means to reintroduce multi-terms; it could be forever, if his Afrikaner sidekick can add cloning to his repertoire of world-changing technologies. We knew that Musk stank, but liberally dabbed his civet's ass Chanel on our rosy pulse points anyway. And VP Vance in Munich rattling the beer hall element like a putschy provocateur -- well, we were many who clasped our democratic hearts and wrung our anguished hands when he was chosen to succeed DJ as prez, should the latter somehow take one for the Project 2025 team. And RFK is now in charge of HHS and SSA and now I'm worried I'll lose my bennies for once referring to the Son Of as Froggy. Damn, we in trouble.

And we know it.  We ain't no solutions. We can only draw comparisons to the most evil passages of the past.  Stalin.  Mussolini.  Art School DropOut Moustache (Nein, Nein, Nein, they screamed at his derivative roses.) Now all the pundits and weigher-inners are doing just that: pacing for us, lamenting our collective demise, dusting off the rhetoric of righteousness. Some of my faves are losing their grip, so that I don't have to.  Seymour Hersh is crying out, Have they no shame?  Chris Hedges relieves us of the notion that we are now dealing with an oligarchy by strutting it right the heck out: We in a kleptocratic Mafia shituation and all the roosters have come home to crow, or something, and horses heads in beds abound. (a**holes abound, come to think of it.) Ralph Nader says, evenly, that "[Trump] is afraid of the stock market collapsing."  Bankers are woozy and heady at the same time.

We saw it all coming. Nukes, Climate Catastrophe, Democracy's Demise. Chomsky warned us for years and all he heard back was whines from the fringe Left about his failure to admit that it was an Inside Job; warned us about the Big Three incessantly; a Big Three referencing the Doomsday Clock people who were citing their reasons for the clock being so close to Midnight (closer and closer with each Trump inauguration). Trump, the pandemic president, twice impeached, seemingly glided to victory, and all Joe Biden could do, after the electoral catastrophe was assured and in the bank, was tell us he would have won, essentially giving a anti-DEI speech, blaming Kamala's blackness. We could see it all coming.

"Never again!" was the rallying cry after 1945, yet never again is now global. How did we get here? That's the principal question that David Hughes, a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Lincoln, unpacks and reconstructs in his new book, Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State. Hughes holds doctorates in German Studies from Duke University and International Relations from Oxford Brookes University. His research focuses on psychological warfare, 9/11, COVID-19, the deep state, technocracy, global class relations, and resurgent totalitarianism.

Hughes argues that the project to denazify the world at the end of WWII was never completed, and that, instead, some of the evil men responsible for the holocaust and other atrocities were encouraged to continue, in secret cabals, with their nefarious work. They were absorbed in large part, says Hughes, by the CIA, and the evil genius that propelled their infamy found its way into new pathways of power and into the 'mission' of new technologies, including the Internet. Operation Paperclip, for instance, saw more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians allowed into the US with expedited migration status. These matters are known and based in fact.

There is a seemingly endless fascination with the Nazis.  Clearly, the phenomenon they represented deeply affected our collective unconsciousness.  Killing them has featured in films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Inglorious Basterds, and has more recently been the subject of two American streaming series, Hunters (think Inglorious Basterds hunting Nazis in contemporary America) and The Plot Against America, Philip Roth's alternate history that depicts what might have happened had the Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh run for (as he was urged to do) and won the presidency. (See my review of these series, "America's Penis Envy of the Nazis.") Even in Britain, the streaming series Slow Horses (starring Gary Oldman) shocks the viewer with its revelation of a Nazi in the midst. How dare they?!

But for Hughes it is not all mere grim entertainment.  He argues that elements of the Deep State in America have worked with some of these brains and have over time developed a plan for global totalitarianism that involves the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Complex - today most often referred to as the Deep State. Or the Deep Dark State.

Hughes's propositions may have struck one as extreme, perhaps crazed. They lied to us about 9/11, he writes. Nuts. Or is it? "9/11" led to the ready to roll-out never-ending War on Terror (for terror never sleeps). National Security can easily mean national insecurity. One thinks of the Reichstag fire that the Juden Noam Chomsky vuz too cowardly to acknowledge happened vright here in America. Like Kissinger said of Chile's electorate, Some matters are too important to be decided by democracy. Something like that.  And I believe that MIT intentionally vuz mocking Noam in the end when they placed him in a new building designed by Frank Gehry that looked like an Insider had punched it right in the snotlocker.

He notes how the Internet frees minds, but then IC corporate partner Google was caught secretly helping the Chinese increase its totalitarian hold by developing Dragonfly for them. Like Frank Church once said, If they turn that stuff on us, Oy Veh! Nowhere to run. Algorithms designed to conveniently feed our desires, also provide data for the dossiers on each of us that Ed Snowden told us the government holds, ready to use. In the recent documentary, The Social Dilemma, social media wonks discussed how the system had become a mechanism for mass control. One former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris, even wonders aloud to his techie colleagues, Are we crazy?

Even more crazy-seeming is the claim that there wasn't necessarily any actual Covid-19 pandemic. This is hard to take in, as presented to the reader.  Hard, but not implausible enough to laugh away. DARPA was working with Vanderbilt University and Canadian company Abcellera in the year before the pandemic in a 'wargame' exercise called P3 that was switched over to the real deal when Covid serendipitously arrived on US soil (see my report). Windfall profits came from vaccines not fully vetted and whose liability was eliminated by the use of the Emergency Authorization.  Vaccines that would ordinarily take years to develop and test were foisted on a public that essentially had no say in getting vaccinated. Still, this outrageous behavior seems different from the Hughes suggestion that the Covid-19 virus spread was a kind of false flag cover for something else. On the other hand, just why did Biden pardon Tony Fauci when he hasn't even been charged with anything more than helping to contract with a Chinese virology firm from which the wee beastie escaped?

Propaganda. Hughes uses a very effective quotation from Hitler's Mein Kampf, where the Fuhrer discusses the nature and value of lies -- Big and Small. Das Volk, "in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods." Das Volk will not believe the Big Lie, says Hughes, explaining Hitler; they just refuse to accept the evil involved.  Those who spread their freedom wings and fly too close to the sun of Truth will get shot down by "cancellation" faster than a monarch butterfly in the backyard of Nazi child holding a magnifying glass (Ja?), and being labelled conspiracy-theorists, says Hughes. And yet all the unbelievable stuff is going down.

Ed Snowden wrote in his 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, about how each of us has a dossier that's been assembled by the Deep State and which can be used against us at any time of their choosing, He referred to his having to work with intelligence community agents who thought they "knew better" than the democratic populace and acted in their schemes accordingly, acting on world events without permission. In the memoir, Snowden even bravely presents a chapter, LOVEINT, where he confesses to being part of an office dog pack that spent much of their work time stalking their love interests and sharing naked photos and videos. He details much greater acts of criminality and breaches of others' boundaries in the must-read memoir. 

But in Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State. Hughes goes beyond Ed Snowden in describing a world that in its dark intentions has potentially unspeakably evil consequences for humankind, including euthanasia, eugenics, state murder, and always deceit in purpose propelled by a complicit media and by the irresistible lure of propaganda. The book has eight chapters: Echoes of the Third Reich; Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler; the Postwar Era; the Deep State; Intelligence Crime; Where It Leads; and, Resistance. This is a straightforward chronology and account.

Many astute readers will be aware already of the oft-cited connection between the Nazis and their American sympathizers, especially in the banking industry. It's the connective tissue that Hughes plots out that makes for an intriguing and instructive read. In his chapter, US Government Complicity, Hughes cites historian Charles Higham's summary observation from his book, Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of th Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1938:

ITT was allowed to continue its relations with the Axis and Japan until 1945 [ . . . ] No attempt was made to prevent Ford from retaining its interests for the Germans in Occupied France, nor were the Chase Bank or the Morgan Bank expressly forbidden to keep open their branches in occupied Paris. 

These are all familiar suspects by now.  ITT was crucial to the downfall of Allende in Chile on 9/11/1973.  Money doesn't talk, it swears, says the Poet, and he should know.

Hughes also reminds one of terms and origins derived from the Nazis that we Americans have incorporated into our own torture regimens.  For instance, he writes of cultural homogenization, "Gleichschaltung is about synchronizing 'virtually all areas of life' and achieving 'ideological coordination and uniformity in politics, culture, and private communication.'" And of a sister term he writes, "The flip-side of Gleichschaltung is Ausschaltung-- switching off." Think 'cancelled'. This leakage of terminology is also reminiscent of Enhanced Interrogation, also a term of Nazi origin.

The book reminds me of the quote attributed to Karl Rove, G W Bush's dirty tricks master.  He is said to be the unnamed source told in a NYT report about the new world order:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-- judiciously, as you will-- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' (NYT Magazine, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush." October 17, 2004).

This is not that far beyond the zany rhetoric of Project 2025 or PNAC. Manifestos for Madmen and their hunchbacked bell ringers. Quasimodos gangbanging Dorothy's Toto. Arf.

Hughes spends considerable time detailing the shenanigans and machinations of the Deep State (formerly known as Ike's MIC). The Press has tried hard to link allusions to this shadow governance as a form of conspiracy theory (as if the MSM didn;t qualify for their own).  But Hughes reminds us of what it entails:

The deep state amounts to a high-level conspiracy between key elements of Wall Street, intelligence and other government agencies, the military-industrial complex, the police, multinational corporations, think tanks, foundations, the media, and academia.

This is echoed in a PBS Bill Moyers program a few years back, in which Moyers talks with Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, in a session called, The Deep State: Hiding in Plain Sight. The two point to "unelected officials" who remain in power no matter whose administration is operating, Democrats or Republicans.  Ed Snowden said as much in his 2019 memoir -- that he and his co-workers and their bosses essentially operated as a parallel rogue element that acted like "they knew better" than the plebs. Again, we have known about all this stuff for a long time, but where revolution is called for we have instead allowed the "conversation" to be an academic exercise or one controlled by hidden persuaders.

Hughes wants us to believe that the unbelievable is happening and to act to stop it. In Where It Leads, Hughes, recalling the worst atrocities of the Nazis, paints a future where New World Order eugenics, CRISPRS and exotic medical experimentation, and the arrest and torture of dissidents is commonplace -- indeed, one can imagine the use of brain-computer interfaces to lock dissenters into their own private Abu Ghraibs or Gitmos, ChatGPT databases filled with their personal record coming at them all day long (see my piece, "The Rise of Big Mind and Nano-Totalitarianism"). 

What can we do? In his chapter, Resistance, Hughes essentially implores readers to connect with each other and to find the courage to fight back, to resist.  He writes,

As the truth increasingly comes to light, and class consciousness develops, massive public resistance to technocratic agendas is to be expected. That resistance will not be organized by a political Left that no longer exists in an oppositional sense, but will, rather, assume the form of a decentralized mass rejection of all aspects of technocracy.

This is optimistic, I think, but perhaps a good starting point. Another favorite read of mine, the late Lewis Lapham, is heading a response, in the current Lapham's Quarterly. to the Trump phenomenon and its implicit consequences for our species. He tells us, as if by way of an AI-assisted seance, that we must keep on keeping on. In a piece titled, "What Survives the Wreck of Empires," he tells us: 

Our technologies produce wonder-working weapons and information systems, but they don't know at whom or at what they point the digital enhancements. Unless we find words with which to place them in the protective custody of the humanities-- languages that hold a common store of human value and therefore the hope of a future fit for human beings-- we surely will succeed in murdering ourselves with our shiny new windup toys.

Sobering, but hopeful still. It's been a long journey since the Garden. We must keep walking.

Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State is short on practical solutions, with "off-gridding" being his principal one, but it is also a challenging and worthy read. And a further reminder of the grim prospects ahead for the human race.