June 23, 2011 By Reg Little
CONJURING HITLER

How Britain and America Made the Third Reich
By Guido Giacomo Preparato, Published by Pluto Press
336 pages, paperback

Conjuring Hitler is a commanding rewrite of many of the central mythologies of the 20th century. By Guido Giacomo Preparato, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Washington, it offers sweeping evidence that commanding figures opposed to Anglo-American interests in the 20th century, Lenin as well as Hitler, were the carefully crafted products of British political machinations.

These appear to have been inspired by the basic need to master the Eurasian landmass in order to maintain Britain’s naval-power based global order – a challenge identified by the British geographer, Halford Mackinder.

Were this reviewer not familiar with William Engdahl’s A Century of a War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and The Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century, many of the constructions in Conjuring Hitler may have seemed to demand too substantial a suspension of disbelief.

Considered together, however, these works all tend to confirm the central thesis of Conjuring Hitler, namely the fundamentally conspiratorial quality of Anglo-American political authority. This, of course, is a theme with substantial contemporary relevance, particularly when evaluating the morass of small wars in which the United States has become entangled.

While arguing powerfully and persuasively that the United Kingdom achieved much of what it set to do with Adolf Hitler, Preparato remarks only in passing, in conclusion, on the ultimately self-defeating nature of these stratagems. After all, World War II effectively stripped the United Kingdom of the remains of its Empire and subordinated it to the United States.

Equally, the United States has followed the model, using “terrorism” to give some legitimacy to wars of choice, only to find itself unable to win them even as these engagements drive it into bankruptcy.

Engdahl and Preparato almost seem to be the originators of a new genre of history – the re-evaluation of the success, grandeur, folly and failure of Anglo-American Empire. The beginning of Preparato’s brief concluding chapter reads:

“The elimination of the German menace of 1900 cost Britain dearly: her empire, her military and economic strength. Yet the English speaking idea, the imperial creed and the cultivation of the oligarchic bent were all traits that she bequeathed upon her natural, insular heir: they live on in the American establishment. Britain’s was a conscious decision; she knew the risks involved.

“The present geopolitical policy of the United States is a direct and wholly consistent continuation of the old imperial strategy of Britain. It is that unmistakable cocktail of aggression, subversion and mass murder waged at the vital nodes of the landmass from Palestine and Central Asia to the gates of China, in Taiwan and Korea, that seeks to undermine any movement towards a confederation of nations capable of turning the continental base into a Eurasian league of socio-political co-operation and defense (against Anglo-American assault).

“It took two world conflicts to destroy the German threat. World War I was a conventional siege in which the British Empire sacrificed roughly 1 million men – the first bloodletting that shook the establishment to its foundations. In the second round, which was necessary given that World War I had in fact left the Fatherland unscathed, no such effusion would have been tolerable – Britain would sacrifice 400,000 soldiers in World War II. So deception was deployed on a major scale to trip the Nazi into the inescapable war on two fronts.”

The measure of British success might be identified by the fact that the Soviet Union sacrificed 20 million and Germany 3.5 million civilians.

Elsewhere in his conclusion, Preparato writes:

“Besides, the Bolsheviks owed virtually everything to the West: the deposition of the Czar, the timing of Rasputin’s death, the political void after Kerensky, the slush funds – German and otherwise, the double crossing of the Whites, capital equipment, giant investments, military know-how…”

And:

“…..if all the foregoing is true, then it is just to lay direct responsibility for incubating Nazism and planning World War II, and indirect responsibility for the holocaust of the Jews, at the door of the Anglo-American establishment.”

This review cannot give an adequate summary of the volume of evidence that Preparato marshals in support of these conclusions. His somewhat flourishing style of writing can be both incisive and mysterious but overall it is difficult not to feel that he has advanced a convincing case that commands both respect and condemnation of British policy making.

In the process of dissecting the policies and personalities of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Preparato gives a fascinating insight into the role of key figures at the heart of the financial “grid” that dictated most important developments on the continent.

Again, his writing seems to have relevance to contemporary financial interactions, except that there no longer seems to be any central figures in the West who exude comparable authority and competence.

Of course, the 1920s and 1930s included periods of considerable financial and economic distress, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that these were often, like the rise of Hitler, the consequence of conscious and deliberate policies.

Preparato can seem to attribute to the British a little too much control over the process of events. He succeeds, nevertheless, in demonstrating that much of the commonly accepted demonic image of Hitler is the product of the victor’s propaganda. This totally obscures the manner in which the Nazis were continuously duped by those from a much richer culture of political intrigue.

The importance of Preparato’s (and Engdahl’s) work rests in the manner in which they are revising long unquestioned truths. They are proposing a narrative that could become increasingly popular as the international constructs put in place after the end of World War II become the object of increasing stress, criticism and re-evaluation. This includes the whole United Nations institutional framework.

It may, however, first become apparent within the European Union, where the economic strength of Germany is increasingly required to rescue many weak and dependent partners, all shepherded willy-nilly into the Western alliance – or the so-called “international community.”

Having been encouraged to re-examine the past geopolitical machinations of the Anglo-American world, could Germany discover that Eurasia offers it more opportunities than the Atlantic world to which it was subordinated in 1945?

– Reviewed by Reg Little in New Dawn 127

http://www.newdawnreviews.com/conspiracies-and-cover-ups/conjuring-hitler-how-britain-and-america-made-the-third-reich/