On Wednesday 1 April 1998, I caught the latter half of the CBS serialized drama Michael Hayes, and was astonished to find mention being made of the "OSI" which I assumed was the Office of Special Investigations � the US Justice Department's Nazi-hunting arm.

Hopes Raised and Dashed

Following my first hearing mention of the OSI, I expected to see that this fictional drama was portraying some of the real characteristics of the OSI � that it was created in response to Jewish pressure, remained under Jewish control, worked closely with the KGB and relied heavily on KGB-supplied evidence, and had been guilty of a string of miscarriages of justice which had disrupted, and sometimes utterly destroyed, the lives of a string of innocent victims, among these being two that are documented on the Ukrainian Archive site: Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk.

As the OSI had indeed been responsible for some startling outrages, it could indeed provide material for a dramatic crime show, and I thought it remarkable that the revelations concerning OSI outrages had diffused throughout our society to such an extent that they had finally come to the attention of television writers and producers, and were now being disseminated to the public.  Maybe CBS was not so bad after all � they could bungle rather badly, as they had in their 23 October 1994 broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, but in the end, they could be seen to have no commitment to bungling, but rather were capable of acknowledging some hard truths as well, and capable of allowing these hard truths to emerge, perhaps as news, but perhaps also through the medium of entertainment.

However, the above is not what I saw on CBS, but only what I momentarily dared to hope upon hearing mention of the OSI.  I quickly discovered, though, that my hopes were groundless.  The view of the OSI that CBS was proposing in the Michael Hayes episode was not at all the one that had flashed through my mind, but was quite the opposite.  The view CBS was proposing was that the OSI was riddled with Nazis � and not just Nazi sympathizers, but hard-core Nazis left over from Hitler's Third Reich.  And not only was the OSI so riddled, but the CIA was even more.

The Nazis Killed Kennedy

And this is where the new theory of the Kennedy assassination comes in.  Kennedy, you see, at some point learned that the CIA had some 5,000 hard-core Nazis on its payroll, and demanded that they be fired.  Big mistake for Kennedy.  You don't mess with the Nazi control of American society � not even if you're the President of the United States.  If you do, they kill you.  The CIA killed Kennedy because he was foolish enough to demand that the CIA fire its Nazis.

In other words, what CBS was telling the American people is that the Nazis did not really lose the Second World War, they merely moved, lock stock and barrel, across the Atlantic and took over the United States.  Maybe "moved" would not be the impression that CBS wanted to create � maybe "metastasized" would be closer to what they had in mind.

Cui Bono?

And what might be the implications of such a broadcast?  Well, if I were gullible enough to believe it � or even to believe that there might be some substance to it � and if I were Jewish, then I would be inclined to feel that the United States was an unsafe place for me to live.  And if the US was unsafe, then what place was safe?  Surely, if one credits this broadcast, then the only safe place for Jews would be Israel where at least it could reasonably be expected that Hitler-era Nazis were not running the government.

So perhaps what we are seeing here again is the manifestation of the urgent need of the State for Israel to attract as many immigrants as possible.  It does so on the one hand by attempting to incite anti-Semitism, and on the other hand by attempting to terrify Jews into stampeding to Israel.  It attempts to achieve similar ends in its instigation of East European war crimes prosecutions in both Canada and the US.  And in the Michael Hayes episode, we see that it may be attempting to do so in fiction by portraying a world filled with, and controlled by, Nazis.

Other Jewish needs perhaps are being satisfied at the same time.  Contributions to Simon Wiesenthal and to satellite organizations that bear his name likely increase with the frequency of such broadcasts.  As Jewish anxiety rises, so does Jewish cohesion.  The destruction of Judaism through assimilation is fought by the inflaming of Jewish insecurity.

Perversion of History

I found this CBS show disheartening.  It served not to offer harmless entertainment; rather, it taught history, politics, a view of the world, the workings of the American government � and yet all this instruction was twisted and perverted.  The distortion did not amount to a little exaggeration, or a misplaced emphasis � rather, it was of Orwellian proportions in its reversal of reality, where black became white, where the OSI which in reality is controlled directly by Jews and indirectly by the KGB was portrayed as an OSI whose good work was thwarted, perhaps even controlled, by Nazis.  It was Kafkaesque.

Many television viewers may be unequipped to resist the images being painted for them on their screens, and with repetition may come to believe those images trustingly.  With enough repetition, some television viewers may come to believe those same images fanatically, so fanatically as to call for the jailing of anybody who dares to paint any contrasting image.  The minds of a generation of television viewers are possibly being bent to the service of powers that they are unaware of.

Banality of Evil

There is one more thing that stuck in my mind.  It is the CBS denial of the banality of evil.  By the banality of evil, I mean the view that the Hitlers and Himmlers and Eichmanns of our time differ from the average man � differ from ourselves � not so very greatly.  They differ chiefly not in character or personality, but rather in being trapped in historical circumstances which force them to act as they do, such that any of a number of people plucked at random from among us and placed in those same circumstances would be forced to act in the same way.  According to the banality of evil hypothesis, then, the preponderance of butchers of the Third Reich were before the war unexceptional store clerks who loved their wives and children and were kind to their dogs, and after the war returned to their unexceptional jobs and to loving their wives and their children and to caring for their dogs.  That is what I mean by the banality of evil.

The CBS denial of the banality of evil was to portray a Nazi who would rather kill than eat or sleep.  The one OSI Nazi that was featured was not only an assassin, but an assassin to whom snuffing out a human life held as much significance as stepping on an ant.  He boasted of killing little children, old men, cripples.  He killed a Jew with a violin because he didn't like his music.  His admission was not offered in any spirit of contrition, but rather with impatience at the possibility that there might be people who didn't enjoy killing as much as he did.  He was clearly of a different order of being than your corner grocer.  The banality of evil hypothesis was roundly disconfirmed in this CBS broadcast.

Now although I do not doubt that such demented people exist, and although I do not doubt that the Nazis had an over-representation of such people in their ranks, I am appalled at a teaching of history (and that is what this broadcast was doing) that explains an evil movement by recourse to images of such demented individuals.  My view is that the strength of the Nazis came predominantly from the masses of unexceptional grocery clerks who were misled into acting the way they did the way most people would have been if placed in their shoes, and that the strength of the Nazis came almost not at all from the infinitesimal minority of slobbering sadists.  The one virtue of the CBS broadcast was that it reinforced sentiments of revulsion against evil in general, and against Nazism in particular; but the very grave defect of the CBS broadcast was that it misled its viewers as to the source from which that evil sprang and could spring again, and thus to leave them unprepared to defend themselves from it should it attempt to re-emerge.

"Office" or "Organization"?