Who Invented The American Military-Industrial Complex?

This is a link to an article published in the Mail on Sunday by Adam Lebor.

It's well worth a read, as it describes how, right up till the middle of 1942, after America had entered the second world war, the giant German combine of  chemical and heavy industrial companies, I.G. Farben, was using an American subsidiary, GAF, to not only procure supplies for the Nazi war effort from America, but was also profiting from America's own rearmament programme and had many South American front companies to route exports through and launder money. It also built and controlled a network of pro-Nazi American politicians, businessmen and officials with which to influence US Government policy in Hitler's favour.

After the war, America recruited thousands of Nazi "scientists" through Operation Paperclip, and it seems quite probable that although the pro-Nazi political network had been cowed into silence between 1942 and 1945, it was able to help those thousands of Nazis to secure not just well-paid jobs throughout American industry, but also helped them achieve positions of influence, which would have restored the fortunes of the network as a whole.

If he did but know it at the time (and possibly he did), when President Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex, he was not only warning against a similiar process to that by which the I.G. Farben combine effectively designed and determined German policy for both World Wars: he was effectively warning against the same entity, in that what turned America's industry and its military into a politically active and manipulative "complex", was the network of influence set up in the thirties through Farben's GAF subsidiary.

Mr Lebor's article is incomplete in so far as it only explores the post-war importance of I.G. Farben and GAF in terms of the West German economy, when given that it had been the communist side which inherited the Gestapo and Abhwer archives in 1945, East Germany and the Stasi were at least as well placed to exploit the network which the Nazis had created. Although I.G. Farben does not trade, it does still exist as an asset-holding entity, despite what Mr Lebor has assumed, and a lot of the remaining assets consist of property and land holdings in what used to be East Germany. 

If the Stasi had control of the sort of political manipulation machine which the Nazis created in 1930s America, then the results in the present day might look, disturbingly, quite a lot like the present day.

For in the present day, it is possible for an American company to contaminate 60 million acres of American farmland with superweeds (ie: eight times the total amount of arable land in England) without very many Americans being alarmed, because the mainstream news media dare not bring the matter to their attention. The media has a right under the first Amendment to tell Americans what is happening, and that in fact is a duty because it is essential to the proper working of democracy and the US Constitution. But everyone who works in the media fears what would happen to them if they ever exercised that right and performed their duty on this kind of story, and that is Hitler's legacy to the American people, pure and simple.

And Americans should consider David Cameron's attempts to muzzle the British Press on behalf of the pressure group "**cked Off" in the following light: if the Daily Mail and other British papers are gagged, no-one is going to tell the American people the things they need to know which their own press is too frightened to speak out about.