David A. Hughes is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Lincoln (UK). He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Oxford University and holds doctorates in German Studies from Duke University and International Relations from Oxford Brookes University. His research focuses on psychological warfare, 9/11, COVID-19, the deep state, technocracy, global class relations, and resurgent totalitarianism.
His new book: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State, was published on June 4. In it he elaborates on what he sees as a global plan by transnational elites to establish a technocratic totalitarian system of control that supersedes liberal democracy. We recently met by Zoom and discussed this bleak picture, what caused it, and what can be done to stop it.
John Hawkins: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State. What a depressing title. The more so when you think that the connection might have some truth. It reads like the premise of that hit TV series, Blacklist, where rogue element “Red” helps an FBI elite unit capture deep state criminals they didn’t even know existed. Is it that bad?
David A. Hughes: I’ve not seen the TV series Blacklist. But Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State is a work of academic scholarship that’s trying to make sense of the very significant shifts in global political economy since 2020. And what the book does is to identify continuities from the Nazi era via what I call the transnational deep state, which has been carefully incubated for many decades since the end of World War II, through to the present. I try to make the case that in some ways, the Nazis weren’t defeated in 1945, and that some of the worst elements have persisted undercover ever since then, carefully coordinating and scheming their plan of attack against the rest of humanity. And that what burst onto the scene in 2020 was essentially the fruition of decades of planning this attack. So, in order to make sense of what’s going on, we have to look to the underlying class relations, and we have to understand the history of this deep state and its Nazi origins.
Hawkins: Why isn’t that what the MSM would call a conspiracy theory? When you bring in the connection to the Nazis it seems like we’re moving toward Raiders of the Lost Ark territory.
Hughes: I mean, conspiracy, of course, is a propaganda term. It was weaponized by the CIA in the 1960s to try and discredit doubters of the official version of events regarding the JFK assassination. Unfortunately, it’s been a very successful propaganda term for many decades, and it’s often still sufficient to close down discussion and debate. But for those of us who have even a slight understanding of how this works, we shouldn’t be deterred by the use of such terms. It’s precisely because this transnational deep state has sought to remain hidden and, in the shadows, and has used deception to cover its tracks that much of what we know about it has only started to emerge in relatively recent times. So, to give just one example, Operation Gladio, which was part of a NATO European-wide network, only came to light in 1990. There’s quite a lot that we are still uncovering, but I think particularly in the era of citizen journalism, independent media and so on, some significant advances have been made, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years regarding this material.
Hawkins. These issues seem to be largely of American concern. Why would it be advantageous or credible to an American reader for a Brit to weigh in on America’s affairs of state? Some people have the same question for the anti-imperial leaks and journalism of Julian Assange.
Hughes: The focus of the book is the United States, because obviously the United States became the dominant actor in world affairs after 1945. But actually, the deep state is a transnational entity. It may even be a global entity by this point. So, the issues that we’re dealing with here affect everybody. This isn’t just a book for Americans. This is a book for everybody. So, I don’t think it’s strange for a Brit to be writing about this. And much of the problem goes back to this country as well — MI5 and MI6 and Chatham House and a whole range of British organizations. But it spans worldwide now. And that explains why the response in 2020 to the alleged Covid “pandemic” was so similar in so many countries, and that’s how it was possible to achieve such a high level of coordination transnationally, because all governments are fundamentally captured by the deep state, and now it’s really ramping up its operations in the bid to build a global scientific dictatorship.
Hawkins: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State illustrates how totalitarianism does not spring into existence fully formed. How does it originate?
Hughes: It’s built gradually over time. You can’t just dismantle liberal democracy and have a fully-fledged totalitarian state overnight. So, one of the things I try to do in this book is to go back and learn the lessons of Nazi Germany. The worst horrors of Nazi Germany, for example, the Holocaust, the war of annihilation in the East, the medical experimentation and all of that, didn’t take place until the final years of the Third Reich. However, there was a long period from 1933 to, say, the beginning of the war or 1941, perhaps, a period of at least six, seven, eight years where this totalitarian state was being built in multiple ways. Incrementally, through new laws that were passed. And through the use of hate propaganda to discriminate against certain groups. And when you read the academic literature on Nazi Germany there was a gradual historical trajectory from 1933 to the worst horrors of the Nazi regime.
What I’m arguing in the book is that we are seeing something very similar since 2020, in terms of the kinds of measures that are being put into place, the kinds of policies that are being passed, and indeed the reemergence of some of the some of the quite dark elements from Nazi Germany. It is the attempt of the transnational ruling class to dismantle liberal democracy and replace it with a novel form of totalitarianism that goes by the name of technocracy. And we should be extremely worried.
Hawkins: Your book opens with the chapter, The Emergence of Global Totalitarianism. Can you provide an overview of that roll-out and, where, say, the Internet fits in?
Hughes: We’re already seeing multiple signs. I draw a whole raft of continuities, particularly in chapter two of the book. If we begin with the emergency legislation that was passed in March 2020, I argue that there’s much in common there with, for example, the Enabling Act and other legislation that was passed in Germany in 1933.
We’re seeing military grade propaganda used against the public, particularly during Covid 19. Now. that’s not supposed to happen in in liberal democracies.
In Nazi Germany, they introduced what were called health passes. It doesn’t require a huge leap of the imagination to see the continuities between that and the so-called vaccine passports that are being rolled out. There are many, many continuities and similarities.
We’ve seen the re-emergence of euthanasia since 2020, particularly in the Canadian MAID program. But also, for example, in this country in the use of midazolam. All of this is ultimately pushing in the direction of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called biopower. And what that is, is direct control over human bodies. One of the reasons that euthanasia was important in Nazi Germany was that it essentially established that the state has a form of direct control over human bodies. In Nazi Germany, of course, it began small, but then over time, the program grew worse and worse. And it was in many ways a precursor for the genocide, which came later. So, there’s nothing innocent about the signs of euthanasia returning in Western countries. It’s deliberate. It’s part of a biopolitical paradigm. It bodes very badly.
Hawkins: In your book you discuss the failures of the postwar years, especially the failure to denazify. In America, it was even worse than that, as Operation Paperclip allowed some Nazis to escape Nuremberg justice and get hired by the US government. Recently, American TV has featured two series based on the theme of The Nazis in our Midst, Hunters (Amazon) and The Plot Against America (HBO). The former featured a band of postwar Jews in America hunting down Nazis, and the other, Philip Roth’s alternate history for America had Nazi sympathizer Charle Lindbergh successfully ascending to the presidency. Why are we still worried about such dark forces emerging from the Deep State and Dark Net in the postmodern happy relativist 21st century?
Hughes: I’ve not seen the two series in question, but it is very interesting question. The point of my book is that it has enormous relevance to what is taking place today, and why we should still be concerned about these Nazi elements, which have been incubated over the course of decades, and, as far as I can tell, the transnational deep state has successfully managed to infiltrate virtually all governments. It has control over the professions, and it is steering the course of world history at this moment in a very dark direction. And one of the key ways in which it works is through deception. It lies about everything. It uses propaganda to cover its tracks. Reality becomes steadily inverted, so it’s important to know what the historical record is and to be able to see the truth of what’s going on. So perhaps in that respect, my book might be an antidote to some of the propaganda that indoctrinates the public.
Hawkins: Your use of a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to open your book was quite startling. Most of us on the left would rather get caught with “male gaze” pornography than with being seen reading Mein Kampf. Yet his take on the Big Lie and its derivation from the Little Lies was actually quite informative. Can you say more?
Hughes: Yeah, well, it’s shocking, but, this is one of the key concepts in Mein Kampf: The Big Lie. It comes straight from Hitler and Goebbels. Most people can conceive of telling lies on a relatively small scale, but they just can’t conceive of lies being told on such a gigantic scale by so many major actors. So, you know, a couple of obvious examples. Anyone who’s looked into the events of 9/11, seriously, will understand very quickly that we were told big lies about 9/11, that that event was fundamentally not what it was sold to the public as. I laid this argument out in my previous book, “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy, wherein I argued that the “global pandemic” in 2020 was another big lie. There’s no credible scientific evidence for the existence of a rapidly spreading, deadly global pathogen. This was, by and large, a media driven propaganda operation as part of psychological warfare. Now, you know, this is a big claim, and I take a long time and many pages of detailed evidence to argue for it. But for most people. It’s just prima facie implausible. “What do you mean? They couldn’t possibly have just made it up.” Well, actually, they did. And that’s all they do is lie. Everything is premised on lies. So, we’re not just dealing with a kind of fraudulent science. The whole thing was just a grand deception. And when you realize that, you start to see that we’re looking at military operations here because a key element of military operations has always involved deception. So, in my work, that’s one of the things that I’m trying to convey and educate people about is just the sheer scale of it. And it is frightening.
Hawkins: Can you explain more about the two terms you use in tour book, Gleichschaltung and Ausschaltung?
Hughes: These are two concepts going back to Nazi Germany. Gleichschaltung doesn’t have a literal word-for-word translation. But a good stab at a translation would be the production of ideological conformity. So essentially, at a key level, everybody has to think the same. In terms of Nazi ideology, this had to do with getting behind ideas about the Aryan race and so on. But, so long as it wasn’t challenging the official state narratives, you were free to think and do essentially whatever you liked. So, there’s still a relative degree of freedom within that. But there are certain things which you must not question. Now, we’re seeing this increasingly today, with official state narratives, be it 9/11, be it Western propaganda regarding Syria, and especially now with Covid, where all of the censorship kicked in and is becoming increasingly draconian now, moving into the realm of legislation with, for example, the Online Safety Act in this country, which can potentially be used to shut down content online. So, what we see is that, one profession after the next, after the next, after the next, bent the knee in 2020 and went along with the official version of everything. And what this led to was a real civilizational crisis, in my opinion, whereby academics refused to challenge it, and thereby were not telling the truth and were not thinking critically. Doctors forsook the principle of medical ethics — first do no harm and informed consent. The media ceased to challenge power at all and just became a propaganda instrument. The political left abandoned the working class. The churches abandoned Christian principles and caring for the sick and lepers, etc., and closed their doors. I mean, it was quite extraordinary. And it’s extremely powerful because when so many people are doing so, it becomes really hard to go against it. The Asch conformity experiments, were a simple way of understanding this phenomenon. Even when there’s just a few people, and everybody else apart from you is saying one thing, even if you think it’s wrong publicly, you’ll still go along with them. It’s a very powerful way of conditioning social opinion and behavior.
Hawkins: When we think of propaganda and its study, two names come up: Noam Chomsky and Edward Bernays. The latter was related to Sigmund Freud. One assumes that Bernays was influenced by Freud’s generally pessimistic observations about human psychology and influenced Bernays’s psychoanalytical understanding of propaganda. How do we survive it? Can we resist? How so? Would withdrawing our consent be enough?
Hughes: I think that you can trace this line from Freud through Bernays, who was the master of propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s. Brilliant usage of it for marketing purposes — for example, to sell pianos and cigarettes and many other things. When you consider what kind of techniques they are employing today based on, for example, behavioral psychology, which is now very big in government and which can potentially be embedded through smart devices, as well as conventional televisions and radio and so on, the potential for controlling human thought and the human mind is absolutely enormous.
And in a sense, that’s why the only rational response, in my opinion, is to stop watching TV, stop watching the news, stop watching Netflix and all of these other things, because they’re not there to entertain. They’re there to shape how you think.
(Featured Image: “File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-1002-500, Besuch von Hitler und Goebbels bei der UFA retouched.jpg” by Unknown is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.)
