Fourth Reich Archaeology – Details, episodes & analysis

This week marks the fifth installment of our ongoing Geopolitik series. More so than any of our other excavations, we’ve been proceeding with Geopolitik as if it were an actual archeological dig. Recall that we began with a surface level survey on the field of geopolitics itself, tracing the pseudoscience back to its roots in the British Empire, its passage through the Third Reich, and its handoff from the Nazis to the American empire. We went on to examine the geopolitical goals of the Trump administration in Europe, in Latin America, and here at home, always paying attention to the inadequate and ultimately collaborationist alternative on offer from the Democratic party. We then explored the lifeblood that powers the expansion and progression of the Fourth Reich–the successive series of genocides that the United States has been responsible for since before this place was even a country. Last week, we discussed the use of genocidal ideology to get away with this genocidal project, drawing on white supremacist myths of racial superiority and the dehumanization of any group of people that got in the way. 

In this episode we dig through yet another level of substrate, and unearth the foundation on which ideology rests–culture and identity. In modern society, culture and identity are developed, cultivated, and largely manipulated by media (movies, tv, music, books). And in the 21st century, media can be best understood as spectacle. We turn to the work of the legendary Marxist theorist, Guy Debord, and his foundational work “Society of the Spectacle.” 

We’ve referenced Debord’s work in prior episodes and we often talk about spectacle during our excavations, but never have we dug into Debord like we do in this one. As if it were written yesterday, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle so accurately describes the current state of affairs where spectacle serves as both the result and the justification of the existing mode of production. It exists to keep working class folks alienated, numb, and incapable of doing anything other than consume. In a late stage free market democracy like ours, converting citizens into passive consumers would not be possible were it not for spectacle. 

Buckle up because this one has another cover by Don. As always, we are so thankful for our listening audience. If you’re able, please consider throwing us some dollars on Patreon to help keep our engines running: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology 

You can read Society of the Spectacle here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

And Comments on the Society of the Spectacle here: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Debord_Guy_Comments_on_the_Society_of_the_Spectacle_1990.pdf

We're back this week with the fourth installment of our ongoing Geopolitik series. Picking up where we left off, we continue our exploration into the normalization of genocide in the Fourth Reich. Despite the fact that genocide is reviled as one of (if not THE) worst crime against humanity, as we discussed in Part 3 it is hard to remember a time when the United States was not involved in genocidal violence in its relentless quest for global hegemony and imperial domination. 

This time, we approach the subject through the lens of ideology—specifically, white supremacist and Nazi ideology—and examine the dialectical relationship between genocidal tendencies in American foreign policy and the resurgence of white supremacist ideology within American society. Beginning well before the United States officially became a country, it has always relied on racialized violence in pursuit of economic exploitation, territorial expansion, and eventually the expansion of markets in which to plunder natural resources and discipline masses of workers. 

We begin our excavation by examining the recent backlash to “DEI” initiatives. We point the finger at the hypocritical weaponization of “anti-racism” discourse to shift the blame for racial inequality and strife away from the economic system and its beneficiaries and onto the subjective beliefs and behaviors of the working class. We then trace how this paradigm teed up the opportunity for the political right to use anti-DEI and anti-woke rhetoric as a trojan horse for laundering Nazi-aligned beliefs into the mainstream. With Trump and his allies practically begging to kick off a constitutional crisis and claim even more dictatorial powers, the danger of this rising tide of American Nazism cannot be overstated.

From there, we take a historical turn to analyze the white nationalist immigration policies emerging from the Trump administration, tracing their roots back to the inception of U.S. border policy—which, unsurprisingly, was grounded in deeply entrenched racist attitudes toward Mexicans and other immigrants of color. So pervasive is the Trump administration’s ideological commitment to white supremacy that it has shown a willingness to turn against its own, including judges appointed during Trump’s first term, to push its agenda forward.

Throughout our discussion, as always, we bring you our analysis using the one-of-a-kind Fourth Reich Archaeology lens, and once again this episode features some original music from our co-host, Don. 

The outro song was produced by friend of the pod Compost Ghoul: https://soundcloud.com/compost-ghoul

We remain deeply grateful to our listening audience for your continued encouragement and support. If you’re able, please consider donating to help sustain this project: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

Join us this week in the first installment of what will be a periodic series focused on current events within our Reich, and the historical precedents in Reichs past.  We’re calling it “Fourth Reich Geopolitik.” 

After a little catch-up on some of the latest expressions of fascism in American politics, we go back to basics and wipe off our patented Fourth Reich lenses.  Recall that when we say “Fourth Reich,” what we refer to is a regime with the same capacity for cruelty and destruction as the high watermark of those qualities: the Third Reich.  To put a finer point on it, our modern US-led global capitalist world order–with the Trump administration at the helm–represents a continuation of the Nazi quest for world domination and the consolidation of capital that dates back to well before the industrial revolution.  We illustrate this continuity by a quick recounting of the “science” of Geopolitics, from the British Lord Halford Mackinder to the Nazi Karl Haushofer, to Haushofer’s American Jesuit acolyte, Edmund A. Walsh, the namesake of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

With our lenses polished, we turn to the real focus of this episode: making sense of the latest developments in the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policy. 

As to foreign policy, we look at the war in Ukraine and see the imperial maneuvering of US foreign police reduced to tabloid-level spectacle.  While some might see Trump “sidling up to dictators” or “abandoning our allies,” we see him pulling a reverse-Nixon: Rather than opening up to China to push back on Russia’s global influence, the Trump team is teaming up with Russia to help it knock down the dominoes on the way to Beijing.

We then turn inward, looking at domestic policy, and dissect how it is exactly that the Republican party went from the country club party of rich old white men to counting among its ranks the young tech crowd.  For this, we need not look further than Elon Musk.  With Musk, Trump gets not only a jester with a devout silicon valley following but also a vehicle to the growing concern his voter base has with fraud and corruption.  But while Trump and Musk claim they have a mandate from the people to hack away at the federal government to eliminate fraud and waste, their cuts reveal that they are focused largely on agencies–like the Dept. of Education and the CFPB–that have been on Donald Trump’s shit list since the early days of his campaign. We also look at the rhetorical ruse of the Populist Front of the Republican Party led by the likes of Steve Bannon, dissecting their ability to speak several truths only to lull people into a false sense of security and bait-and-switch into fascist eugenics.

We try to maintain a positive attitude throughout it all, though admittedly, it is getting harder with every day. The time is nigh to make moves and organize strategically to build power, and if we are to make any progress in the right direction, we need to unfetter ourselves from the corrupt genocidal Democrat Party. 

Dig in and enjoy! And if you like what you are hearing please drop us a line, give us some support on Patreon, and spread the word! 

Fourth Reich Archaeology email: fourthreichpod@gmail.com

Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

It's Fourth Reich Archaeology's first interview, and it's with the great Clancy-hunter himself, Matt Farwell. Matt and Don grab their shovels and break a little ground on Propaganda. We talk about super-spook Frank Wisner, into whose life and archives Matt has been plunging, and the way Wisner played the press like a "Mighty Wurlitzer" before losing his mind, first figuratively, then literally. We connect the dots from CIA to the media, the newspapers, and the major publishing houses, and - of course - tracing it all back to the Nazis and Perfidious Albion. Continuity strikes again.

Don takes a detour to Paris 1919 (with a little John Cale, of course) to recount the tale of Three Young Fellas - John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen, and a publicist named Edward Bernays - who lucked out on front-row seats to the peace conference that set the stage for war (yay, markets!). That British voice you hear is Adam Curtis, in "Century of the Self" - speaking of limited hangouts...

And Matt brings us forward in time, to that glorious period about which Dr. Strangelove is truly a documentary, giving us an aural tour of the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, and its midcentury Führerbunker  built to house Congress in the event of a nuclear blast or other Continuity-of-Government type situation.

Follow Matt Farwell @HuntClancy

Subscribe at https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com/

Buy book at https://www.amazon.com/American-Cipher-Bergdahl-Tragedy-Afghanistan/dp/0735221049

Enjoy!!

UNLOCKED: We promised to release this, our first piece of paywalled content, for free as soon as our wonderful listeners got the first episode of THE WARREN COMMISSION DECIDED over 1,000 streams. You all pulled through in record time, so we hope you enjoy this little spooky story about Lee Harvey Oswald's attempted defection to the Soviet Union on Halloween, 1959. The consular officials who witnessed his performance said it looked rehearsed, like a man reciting memorized lines. But who wrote the script? It's short, sweet, and mysterious. We hope you like it!

Songs:

The Phantom of the Opera

Vladimir Vysotsky - Koni Priveredivye (Fastidious Horses)

Timothy Cleary - Mission Critical

Michael Jackson - Stranger in Moscow

Timothy Cleary - Gremlin

Sting - Russians

This week we bring you another current events episode because, frankly, there is just too much insanity going on right now to stay silent.  As with the last episode on current events, we take a good hard look at the sad state of affairs at home and abroad under the Trump administration, while reserving plenty of ire and disgust for the Democrats as well. You’ll recall that we primarily focused on the European Theater in our previous episode. This time, we look at the developments happening in the Americas.

And while the developments are new, the story's contours are familiar.  First, you have the goons at ICE targeting individuals based on their political views. Over the last few days and weeks, we’ve witnessed activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, and Radha Alawieh being targeted by the Fourth Reich Gestapo simply because they decided to exercise their constitutional right to free speech and speak up against genocide. As our listeners know full well, silencing dissent literally by disappearing dissenters is a tried and true tactic of fascism. 

We then turn to the Trump administration’s plan to deport hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan nationals (for now) to El Salvador, where they will languish in concentration camps, out of reach from lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders, as they await removal proceedings by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. And, as far as we can tell, the strategy of deporting the undesirables is not going to end with the Venezuelans.  Trump’s lap dog “lil” Marco Rubio has even been in talks with El Salvador’s President Bukele to work out a plan to send undesirable U.S. citizens to serve their criminal sentences in Salvadoran black site jails. 

The rotten cherry on top of this putrid cake is that, in the past few weeks, the Trump administration has also targeted several prominent law firms in retaliation for their political involvement in the 2016 election and beyond.  Through executive orders, Trump has barred federal agencies from working with these law firms, revoked any security clearances that the firms' lawyers might have had, and even restricted their access to certain federal buildings.  If that sounds familiar, it should, as it is precisely the kind of thing that Adolf Hitler did back in the day. It’s the purge and intimidation of the nonconforming elements of the bourgeois elite to unify the ruling class behind the criminal state, in preparation to crush into submission the working classes when crisis inevitably hits.

We give a brief preview of the economy and the ingredients for a crash stewing on the boiler, and draw just a couple of the seemingly innumerable parallels to previous fascist apex moments before bringing it all back home to what this podcast is all about: calling out both parties in the sorry spectacle that passes for a democracy, exposing the historical roots of their mutual fecklessness and self-interested cruelty, and urging our listeners to join us in building - albeit from a whisper - the foundations for a new political formation built on truth, justice, and love. 

In sum, the Fourth Reich alarm bells are ringing. These are scary times. So sit back, try to relax (we know that is a tall order these days), and be sure to put on that PPE—this dig is another one that qualifies for hazard pay.

This episode picks up right where the last one left off. We’re digging up the Dallas/Fort Worth area in summer 1962, just as 22 year-old Lee and 20 year-old Marina Oswald make their return to the United States from Minsk, USSR, where Lee had spent the last three years. We cover the somewhat competing narratives around how the Oswalds were first introduced to the de Mohrenschildts and settle on our preferred interpretation. Without giving away too many spoilers, each link in the chain binding the Oswalds to the White Russians is dipped in oil and monitored under the watchful eye of the CIA. It’s really the same “general dynamic” (pun intended) that prevailed in the scene we’ve been setting over the last two episodes.

We go on to deepen our illustration of the White Russian Milieu, doing our best not to get bogged down in all those consonant-heavy Cyrillic names while still hitting the key points we’ll need to know once we get back to the Warren Commission - and to Albert Jenner’s interrogation of the de Mohrenschildts - in the next and final installment of this content cluster. In that spirit, we zoom in on General Dynamics and its employees who were connected to de Mohrenschildt and the other White Russians. Wouldn’t you know it, those same threads also lead to the FBI, the Mafia, the oil industry (obviously), and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas Democratic political machine.

We move the narrative forward in time, covering the brief but meaningful period the de Mohrenschildts and Oswalds’ friendship lasted: July 1962 - April 1963. In that span, we cover the “hand-off” of the Oswalds to the Paines, and do a brief overview of their spooked-up background, and we also touch on the incident at Easter when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt catches a chance glimpse of a rifle in the Oswalds’ Dallas closet. 

We consider and discuss the ways in which the innocent surface-level narratives around some of the seemingly deep events going on at this time conceal the sub-rosa activities of the deceitful, enigmatic actors on the stage. You won’t want to miss it!

Patreon: www.Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

Further reading: Bill Simpich’s series on the “Oswald Legend” - https://aarclibrary.org/bill-simpich-the-twelve-who-built-the-oswald-legend/

Russ Baker on George de Mohrenschildt: https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/bush-and-the-jfk-hit-part-5-the-mysterious-mr-de-mohrenschildt/

The Warren Commission Decided is back, baby! This week, our dig into General Dynamics consiglieri, and Warren Commission senior counsel, Bert Jenner, leads us to a magnificent pocket of Fourth Reich geologic accumulation. Remember, Jenner and his junior counsel, Jim Liebeler, were in charge of the chapter of the Warren Report focused on profiling Oswald and his network in Dallas.  That chapter would ultimately be perhaps THE focal point of the report, and a disproportionate amount of time and testimony was dedicated to Oswald's background and social milieu. And it gave the Jenner/Liebeler dynamic duo the rare opportunity to face some of the heaviest hitting witnesses of all.  One of those witnesses–and the person whose testimony takes up more pages of the Report than any other witness–was George de Mohrenschildt. 

George de Mohrenschildt had a life emblematic of the power that could be gained by serving faithfully as a Reichsman. His story intersects with the Texas oil industry, the military-industrial complex, and the spooked-up anti-communist White Russian community in North Texas (people keen to undermine and destroy the Soviet Union).  It should surprise no one that Bert Jenner’s chief client, General Dynamics, was well represented in de Mohrenschildt’s network.  This gave Jenner every reason to steer his nearly 3 days of interrogations with de Mohrenschildt away from the seedy and spooked-up underbelly of this world where business and crime collide. 

To have an accurate understanding of what it meant for Jenner (the man who made his nut representing General Dynamics) to lead the investigation into de Mohrenschildt (the man who made his nut representing the spooked-up oil industry leaders in North Texas), one must first understand the de Mohrenschildt family.  We spend part of this episode providing a brief origin story for Ol’ Georgie.  The son of a Russian oilman, de Mohrenschildt came of age in the European “anti-communist” (read: Nazi) scene in the 1930s and finally made his way to the United States in 1938. When he got here, he leveraged his family relationships to cultivate both his Nazi and CIA affinities.  He started out by doing a stint as a documentary filmmaker with his cousin’s film company, Film Facts. He even filmed a movie about Polish resistance to the Soviets (ahem).  After Nazism went out of vogue in the U.S., de Mohrenschildt set his sights on the oil business in North Texas. 

It is here that de Mohrenschildt immersed himself into “the colony”—the community of anti-Soviet Russians living in the Dallas metropolitan area. In 1962, the colony welcomed 22-year-old ex-defector Lee Harvey Oswald and his 20-year-old wife Marina among its ranks. 

This one has lots of hidden gems and artifacts, and given the scope and breadth of the subject matter, it is going to be another multi parter. Enjoy this one, and STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO!!!!!

Don reads Palestinian Political Prisoner Mahmoud Khalil's Letter from ICE Detention.

Like Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, this powerful message should shake the United States to its core. Will Americans take seriously the values on which their country was purportedly founded? We are not optimistic, but here's hoping. If this moment doesn't do it, nothing will...

Read the letter here: https://inthesetimes.com/article/mahmoud-khalil-letter-from-a-palestinian-political-prisoner-in-louisiana

Free Mahmoud Khalil NOW!!!!

This episode marks the beginning of the end of our exposition on the boots on the ground on the Warren Commission - the staff lawyers. One of the most persuasive anti-conspiracy lines deployed against Warren Commission critics is, “how could all of those staffers on the Commission really be in on a coverup? They’re independent-minded guys with no political bag to carry!” Building on the work we did with Specter and others, this episode digs deep for a solid answer to that line of argument, and we zero in on probably the single most important lawyer on the whole staff, Albert E. Jenner, Jr. He’s another guy who, like Arlen Specter (and pretty much everyone else for that matter), came into the Commission with great ambition, contributed materially to bolstering the Commission’s reputation after the fact, and were rewarded for their loyalty to the lie.

Jenner was the senior staff lawyer in charge of the portion of the Commission’s investigation and report focused on profiling Lee Harvey Oswald.  We’ve picked Jenner because of his area of expertise on the Commission plus the fact that he has all the biomarkers of a tried-and-true Reichsman.  Jenner is a Chicago trial lawyer. A rainmaker. A lawyer’s lawyer. His most telling connection to the American Empire is his extremely close relationship with Chicago industrialist and financier Henry Crown, who rose to prominence as the controlling shareholder of the arms manufacturing giant General Dynamics.  You see, the Yale law trained Jenner was consiglieri to the Crown family—and lead outside counsel for General Dynamics—at the flashpoint in the 20th century when airpower became THE decisive factor in warfare, giving rise to the era of massive military contracts.

Well wouldn’t you know that a decisive moment in the history of aeronautic defense contracting was in the making right at the time of JFK’s assassination that put Jenner at the center of the action?  In the months leading up to Kennedy’s death, the administration was laser focused on achieving military superiority over the Soviet Union by harnessing the awesome power of long-range supersonic jets.  Enter General Dynamics.  With the advice and counsel of Jenner, General Dynamics won a record-breaking $7 billion government contract to build the next generation of flying death machines, the Tactical Fighter Experimental, or TFX. This episode spirals into deep and dark territory involving bribery, silk-topper lawyers with Pynchonesque names (ahem, “Roswell Gilpatrick”), synchornicities, and of course, plenty of Family History.

Keep your Fourth Reich field guide handy for this one, as there are many familiar artifacts we will encounter and identify.