A Self-Hating German's Musings

On November 29, I wrote:

If Germany is very happy with Obama (and it is indeed), it has nothing to do with "too much of [America's] traditional nationhood". It is because Germans either sense or recognize this man's deeply anti-American outlook and effect, and, of course, a deeply ingrained envy of that very traditional nationhood and America's right to enjoy it unselfconsciously.

I hadn't read John Rosenthal's entry at Pajamas Media "German Publishing’s Man in the White House - Obama's ties to Bertelsmann are a massive conflict of interest yet to be fully disclosed" dating November 21, then.

Rosenthal informs us that the

...publicly funded Franco-German “cultural” channel Arte did not waste any time celebrating the dawn of a new era in transatlantic relations. This is the same Arte, incidentally, whose earlier contributions to transatlantic understanding have included a report accusing American soldiers of beheading Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War and a portrayal of President George W. Bush with devil’s horns and fangs. On the day after the election of Barack Obama to succeed the outgoing demon-president, the channel broadcast a 70-minute-long special, live from Washington, with the highly imaginative title “A Black Man in the White House” [Un Noir à la maison blanche]. (To their credit, the editors at Arte-Germany chose to abjure the racist impulses of their French counterparts and titled the show instead “Obama: A New Wind in the White House” [Frischer Wind im Weissen Haus].) The guests on the program included Annette Heuser, the executive director of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s new Washington, DC, office. The influential German foundation set up shop in DC just this past spring, presumably in anticipation of the impending “change.” Host Daniel Leconte revealed that the foundation had even helpfully prepared “a little aide, a little white book” for the incoming president on how to conduct his relations with Europe. He was careful to interject that the “white book” had been prepared for both candidates

to continue:

In any case, Bertelsmann can be sure that Mr. Obama will read its “little aide, its little white book” very carefully. For — as Ms. Heuser failed to disclose and as was not mentioned either in an op-ed on Obama that she published in the Washington Post in July — the Bertelsmann Corporation happens to be the president-elect’s principal source of income. It was Bertelsmann, namely, that agreed to pay Obama a reported $1.9 million in advances for a three-book deal that the then-senator-elect signed with its fully owned American subsidiary, the Random House publishing group, in December 2004. And who knows? The real amount of the deal might well be more than the reported amount. After all, it was only in April of this year that we discovered that a reported $10 million book deal signed by former President Bill Clinton with Bertelsmann/Random House in 2001 had in fact been worth $15 million. (See my earlier PJM report on “Bill Clinton’s German Paymasters.”)

Rosenthal suggests that, in the interest of transparency,

...Obama should surely now release the full details of his contractual relationship with the Bertelsmann Corporation. After all, if one is to judge by his recent tax returns, even as president, he will be paid far more by Bertelsmann than by the American taxpayers. For him to be taking advice from the Bertelsmann Foundation suggests conflict of interest on a magnitude that has perhaps never before been seen in the history of the American presidency.

As one of the commentators put it: And that from the guy who is unable or unwilling to even reveal his birth certificate.

To my great relief, John Rosenthal then does exactly that what has earned me the epithet of a self-hating German when Americans would SO much prefer to listen to "good patriots" and "reliable allies", and exposes the transatlantic relationship as the lead ball it is:

It might be considered irrelevant today that Bertelsmann massively collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II. (For more on this, see “Bill Clinton’s German Paymasters.”) But it is surely not irrelevant that when German researcher Hersch Fischler first brought this fact to light, the family proposed to have the matter further investigated by one Dirk Bavendamm. Bavendamm is the family’s “in-house” historian, having written no fewer than three commissioned histories of the Mohn family and the Bertelsmann Corporation. As so happens, he is also an open revisionist, who calls World War II “Roosevelt’s War” and suggests — à la contemporary 9/11 conspiracy theorists writing on George W. Bush — that Franklin Delano Roosevelt intentionally permitted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to occur. Bavendamm has even written a book on the subject with the curious title Roosevelt’s War 1937-45 and the Puzzle of Pearl Harbor [Roosevelts Krieg 1937 -- 45 und das Rätsel von Pearl Harbor]. “With the events of December 7-8, 1941 [i.e., the attack on Pearl Harbor], Roosevelt … had achieved his most important aims,” Bavendamm has written in an essay on the subject [German link], “America’s entry into the War occurred with the enthusiastic consent of the overwhelming majority of the American people — … Roosevelt had finally convinced them that it was their sacred duty, guns in hand to defend freedom, democracy, and prosperity around the world.” (For more on Bavendamm, see Hersch Fischler and John Friedman’s “Bertelsmann’s Revisionist” here.)

The theory that the Pearl Harbor attack was a set-up is, incidentally, standard neo-Nazi fare. Interestingly enough, in his infamous “God Damn America!” sermon, Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright invokes precisely this theory as apparently well-established fact: “The government lied about Pearl Harbor too,” he says. “They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Governments lie.”

Gudrun Eussner offers additional information in the comment section:

For those of you reading German here an article about The Bertelsmann Stiftung and its activities in Islamization of our society. Here you find an article from their site in English: “Muslims in Germany are very religious”. Watch the photo, please, to get an idea how they are thinking about Muslim women: two young ladies with headscarfs.

And thus the circle closes with this self-hating German's musings on Obama's involvement with Islam.