	id AA00557; Thu, 24 Nov 94 15:09:10 CST
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 98


              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2  Num. 98
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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ADJUNCT TO:
Observations on America's 216th Birthday
 
Dave Emory describing the situation in Nazi Germany in the early 
1930s, and his reading selections from *They Thought They Were 
Free* by Milton Mayer, brought to mind a part of the book *You 
Can't Go Home Again*. *You Can't Go Home Again* was authored by 
Thomas Wolfe (again, not to be confused with a subsequent 
American author commonly known as Tom Wolfe). The section which 
follows, while technically "fiction", is based on Wolfe's own 
experiences during a prolonged visit he made to Nazi Germany in 
1936.
 
 +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +
 
[From Chapter 38, "The Dark Messiah"]
 
George had not been in Germany since 1928 and the early months of 
1929, when he had had to spend weeks of slow convalescence in a 
Munich hospital after a fight in a beer hall. Before that foolish 
episode, he had stayed for a while in a little town in the Black 
Forest, and he remembered that there had been great excitement 
because an election was being held. The state of politics was 
chaotic, with a bewildering number of parties, and the Communists 
polled a surprisingly large vote. People were disturbed and 
anxious, and there seemed to be a sense of impending calamity in 
the air.
 
This time, things were different. Germany had changed.
 
Ever since 1933, when the change occurred, George had read, first 
with amazement, shock, and doubt, then with despair and a leaden 
sinking of the heart, all the newspaper accounts of what was 
going on in Germany. He found it hard to believe some of the 
reports. Of course, there were irresponsible extremists in 
Germany as elsewhere, and in times of crisis no doubt they got 
out of hand, but he thought he knew Germany and the German 
people, and on the whole he was inclined to feel that the true 
state of affairs had been exaggerated and that things simply 
could not be as bad as they were pictured.
 
And now, on the train from Paris, where he had stopped off for 
five weeks, he met some Germans who gave him reassurance. They 
said there was no longer any confusion or chaos in politics and 
government, and no longer any fear among the people, because 
everyone was so happy. This was what George wanted desperately to 
believe, and he was prepared to be happy too...
 
[...]
 
>From the beginning of their relationship, and straight through to 
the end, Else refused to discuss with George anything even 
remotely connected with the Nazi regime. That was a closed 
subject between them. But others were not so discrete. The first 
weeks passed, and George began to hear some ugly things. From 
time to time, at parties, dinners, and the like, when George 
would speak of his enthusiasm for Germany and the German people, 
various friends that he had made would, if they had had enough to 
drink, take him aside afterwards and, after looking around 
cautiously, lean toward him with an air of great secrecy and 
whisper:
 
"But have you heard...? And have you heard...?"
 
He did not see any of the ugly things they whispered about. He 
did not see anyone beaten. He did not see anyone imprisoned, or 
put to death. He did not see any men in concentration camps. He 
did not see openly anywhere the physical manifestations of a 
brutal and compulsive force.
 
True, there were men in brown uniforms everywhere, and men in 
black uniforms, and men in uniforms of olive green, and 
everywhere in the streets there was the solid smack of booted 
feet, the blare of brass, the tootling of fifes, and the poignant 
sight of young faces shaded under iron helmets, with folded arms 
and ramrod backs, precisely seated in great army lorries. But all 
of this had become so mixed in with his joy over his own success, 
his feeling for Else, and the genial temper of the people making 
holiday, as he had seen it and known it so many pleasant times 
before, that even if it did not now seem good, it did not seem 
sinister or bad.
 
Then something happened. It didn't happen suddenly. It just 
happened as a cloud gathers, as fog settles, as rain begins to 
fall.
 
A man George had met was planning to give a party for him and 
asked him if he wanted to ask any of his friends. George 
mentioned one. His host was silent for a moment; he looked 
embarrassed; then he said that the person George had named had 
formerly been the editorial head of a publication that had been 
suppressed, and that one of the people who had been instrumental 
in its suppression had been invited to the party, so would George 
mind -- ?
 
George named another, an old friend named Franz Heilig whom he 
had first met in Munich years before, and who now lived in 
Berlin, and of whom he was very fond. Again the anxious pause, 
the embarrassment, the halting objections. This person was -- was 
-- well, George's host said he knew about this person and knew he 
did not go to parties -- he would not come if he were invited -- 
so would George mind -- ?
 
George next spoke the name of Else von Kohler, and the response 
to this suggestion was of the same kind. How long had he known 
this woman? Where, and under what circumstances, had he met her? 
George tried to reassure his host on all these scores. He told 
the man he need have no fear of any sort about Else. His host was 
instant, swift, in his apologies: oh, by no means -- he was sure 
the lady was eminently all right -- only, nowadays -- with a 
mixed gathering -- he had tried to pick a group of people whom 
George had met and who all knew one another -- he had thought it 
would be much more pleasant that way -- strangers at a party were 
often shy, constrained, and formal -- Frau von Kohler would not 
know anybody there -- so would George mind -- ?
 
Not long after this baffling experience a friend came to see him. 
"In a few days," his friend said, "you will receive a phone call 
from a certain person. He will try to meet you, to talk to you. 
Have nothing to do with this man."
 
George laughed. His friend was a sober-minded German, rather on 
the dull and heavy side, and his face was so absurdly serious as 
he spoke that George thought he was trying to play some lumbering 
joke upon him. He wanted to know who this mysterious personage 
might be who was so anxious to make his acquaintance.
 
To George's amazement and incredulity, his friend named a high 
official in the government.
 
But why, George asked, should this man want to meet him? And why, 
if he did, should he be afraid of him?
 
At first his friend would not answer. Finally, he muttered 
circumspectly:
 
"Listen to me. Stay away from the man. I tell you for your own 
good." He paused, not knowing how to say it; then: "You have 
heard of Captain Roehm? You know about him? You know what 
happened to him?" George nodded. "Well," his friend went on in a 
troubled voice, "there were others who were not shot in the 
purge. This man I speak of is one of the bad ones. We have a name 
for him -- it is 'The Prince of Darkness.'"
 
George did not know what to make of all this. He tried to puzzle 
it out but could not, so at last he dismissed it from his mind. 
But within a few days the official whom his friend had named did 
telephone, and did ask to meet him. George offered some excuse 
and avoided seeing the man, but the episode was most peculiar and 
unsettling.
 
Both of these baffling experiences contained elements of comedy 
and melodrama, but those were the superficial aspects. George 
began to realize now the tragedy that lay behind such things. 
There was nothing political in any of it. The roots of it were 
much more sinister and deep and evil than politics or even racial 
prejudice could be. For the first time in his life he had come 
upon something full of horror that he had never known before -- 
something that made all the swift violence and passion of 
America, the gangster compacts, the sudden killings, the 
harshness and corruption that infested portions of American 
business and public life, seem innocent beside it. What George 
began to see was a picture of a great people who had been 
psychically wounded and were now desperately ill with some dread 
malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he now realized, 
that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It 
was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all 
human relations. The pressures of a constant and infamous 
compulsion had silenced this whole people into a sweltering and 
malignant secrecy until they had become spiritually septic with 
the distillations of their own self-poisons, for which now there 
was no medicine or release.
 
[...]
 
So the weeks, the months, the summer passed, and everywhere about 
him George saw the evidences of this dissolution, this shipwreck 
of a great spirit. The poisonous emanations of suppression, 
persecution, and fear permeated the air like miasmic and 
pestilential vapors, tainting, sickening, and blighting the lives 
of everyone he met. It was a plague of the spirit -- invisible, 
but unmistakable as death. Little by little it sank in on him 
through all the golden singing of that summer, until at last he 
felt it, breathed it, lived it, and knew it for the thing it was.
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."
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