When I read Mother Jones’s exposure of the Koch Brothers secret conclave — as Mother Jones put it — of powerfully rich right wing donors to the Kochs’ assortment of political “non-profits,” I thought immediately of the Wannsee Conference.
In January 1942, SS-Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, summoned a small group of Nazi colleagues to a pretty suburban villa in Wannsee (see photograph in the above link). The purpose of this secret meeting was to plan the Final Solution, i.e., cleansing the world of the Jewish race.
The BBC made a very good movie about the chillingly calm conference starring Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann. (You can order it from Netflix.)
Many names on the Wannsee attendance list are not that well known today and perhaps were not even that well known then. But they were functionaries whom Heydrich highly regarded as administrators of the Final Solution. (The term, “Final Solution,” is exquisite, isn’t it? Elegant, weightless, nearly abstract and without a breath of monstrous violence.)
I have been astounded at how Koch-like billionaires such as Tom Perkins, Sam Zell, et al have gathered unto their bosoms Nazi imagery such as Kristellnacht to claim that they have become victims of our persecution. (Perkins even says that rich people should get more votes than the rest of us, because they pay more in taxes. Talk about buying democracy!) So let’s sling the accusations right back at ’em.
The Koch Brothers — whose purpose, as far as I’m concerned, is cleansing the world of democracy, unless the demos is exclusively their cohort — have recreated the Wannsee Conference by summoning, in deep secrecy, like-minded people whose riches gives them immense power in effecting their own Final Solution.
There must be a law: do not trust groups of powerful people who insist on keeping their meetings secret.
That’s about all I have to say. In future random posts, I’ll be digging out the names of the Kochs’ Neu Wannsee attendees and attaching those names to companies and products we can boycott.
It may seem like a tiny rebellion (I mean, I’ve already put my Do Not Buy label on Quilted Northern toilet paper) but there are a trillion of us consumers and less than fifty Neu Wannseeites.
Let’s see how it goes.