Bruce Gagnon exposes hundreds of thousands of Nazis, right here in America:

"What I do mean," says Cook, "is that if you follow the trail of Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited by America at the end of the second world war, the unfortunate corollary is that by taking on the science, you take on - unwittingly - some of the ideology...What do you lose along the way?"

Could this be what former President Dwight Eisenhower was talking about just a few years later when in 1961 he warned the American people to "beware" of the power of the military industrial complex? Could Eisenhower's prophetic warning been that an ideological contamination had come from America's embracing of the Nazi operatives?

The woman who called me tonight recently wrote a letter to the editor telling her community the story about the Nazi's creating the U.S. space program. The responses called her crazy. Even her own son, a local fire fighter, was outraged with her over the letter and told her that she should support George W. Bush or not talk politics to him ever again. She called me to ask for more evidence which I gladly will provide her.

So, since I work for a defense contractor, on space-program-related projects, that makes me a Nazi too? Who knew?

Hugh Hewitt made a good point in this regard during last night's commute. In regard to Sen. Byrd comparing Republican Senators wishing to amend the voting rules regarding "advice and consent" on judicial appointments to Hitler, Hewitt observed that any time someone brings up Hitler or the Nazis in a debate, they have immediately gone over the line. This may just appear to be a paraphrase of Godwin's Law, but there is a normative element that the usual interpretation of Godwin admits -- bringing in the Nazis shouldn't just mean that the discussion has reached a point of diminishing returns, it should mean the discussin is over. Accusing one's opponents of being Nazis should not be acceptable in polite discourse. Period.

I'm well aware of Operation Paperclip, and the Nazi pasts of several important figures in American space exploration. One can argue whether their participation in the Nazi regime was a matter of individual choice, and what their individual moral culpability might have been for the atrocities attributed to the V2/A4 project...fine. But to make a blanket assertion that the influence of these hundred or so men somehow imparts Nazi proclivities on everyone in the U.S. defense and space industries even today is both absurd and insulting.

Posted by T.L. James on March 2, 2005 07:18 AM