Photo, above: Captain America is an American fictional character, a superhero who appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) Marvel Comics' 1940s predecessor, Timely Comics, and was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He wears a costume that bears an American flag motif, and is armed with an indestructible, boomerang-like shield that can both be thrown as a weapon and used to defend against others' weapons.  An intentionally patriotic creation who was often depicted fighting the Axis powers of World War II, Captain America was Timely Comics' most popular character during the 1940s wartime period.  See Hour 2, Block D, America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History, by John Loftus.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy by Seth Cropsey (1 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy by Seth Cropsey (2 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: Nathalie Angier, in re: blue

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: Amped (Vintage Contemporaries) by Daniel H. Wilson

Hour Two

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago (1 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago (2 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 2, Block C:  Tom Zeller, in re: green

Photo, below: John Loftus, the attorney, author, and pre-eminent researcher of US governmental complicity with unsavory political groups.  

John Joseph Loftus (February 12, 1950) is an American author, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. He is president of The Intelligence Summit and, although not Jewish, a president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. He also serves on the Board of Advisors to Public Information Research. Loftus is the author and co-author of several controversial books on Nazis, espionage, and similar topics, including The Belarus Secret (1982), Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (1992), The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (1994), Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks (1998), America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress, by blocking Congressional investigations into famous American families who funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists (2010). Although Loftus' first book, The Belarus Secret, is nonfiction, it was adapted into a TV film, Kojak: The Belarus File (1985), with Telly Savalas.

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History by John Loftus.    America's Nazi Secret is not what you'd call extremely reader-friendly material. Sometimes it feels like a chore to read it. But wow--does it ever provide powerful insight into the "deep politics" of US policy.  Born of the Boston Irish, John Loftus never imagined that he would end up tracking down Byelorussian Nazi collaborators living in the US. And he certainly could not have conceived of doing so with a passion that would continue decades past his departure from the federal government.  After serving as an Army Intelligence officer and graduating law school, in 1977 Loftus had gotten a job with the Justice Department. He saw an internal posting for a position with the Office of Special Investigations (charged with prosecuting and deporting Nazi war criminals from the United States), and thought it would be a good career move. Only later did he become obsessed with his mission.

In 1979, Loftus was assigned to head the "Belarus Project," which he says was "ostensibly a comprehensive review of American and German files pertaining to the Holocaust in Byelorussia, or Belarus as the Nazis called it. Privately, my secret assignment...was to find out who was responsible for sabotaging the postwar investigations of Nazi bankers at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg."  In essence, Loftus found that, in contravention of official US policy, figures and sections within his own agency (the Justice Department), as well as the State Department and the intelligence apparatus, had knowingly falsified records so as to bring some of the worst butchers of World War II to the US. The goal was to enlist them and their associates in anti-Soviet espionage. But once the records of these individuals were cleaned up and they were allowed to stay, they provided what would turn out to be largely useless intelligence, and in many cases they or their own east-bloc spy networks were discovered to have been massively penetrated by the Soviets.  Loftus goes down into the darkest basements of the US government, where one branch is snookering the next, where operations are being subverted by their own members, and individuals, under orders, cover up for . . .  [more]  . . . Especially horrific and therefore powerful are his accounts of the atrocities ordered or carried out by individuals who ended up quietly living their lives out in small towns in New Jersey and the Midwest.  . . .  [more]

 

Hour Three

Photo, below: A mosaic floor from Pompeii depicting Alexander's Battle of the Hydaspes River.  While Cyrus the Great (558-530 BC) built the first universal empire, stretching from Greece to the Indus River - the famous Persian Achaemenid Dynasty - by about 380 BC the Persian hold on Indian regions had slackened and many small local kingdoms arose.  In 327 BC, Alexander the Great overran the Persian Empire and located small political entities within these territories. The next year, Alexander is said to have fought a difficult battle against the Indian monarch Porus near the modern Jhelum River. This is disputed by some historians, who claim that Porus was an unknown character who ruled a tiny kingdom; that Alexander fought poorly and barely managed a truce. However, in that battle he did lose his beloved horse, Bucephalus.

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 3, Block A:  Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee (1 of 4)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee (2 of 4)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee (3 of 4)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 3, Block D: Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee (4 of 4)

 

Hour Four

Photo, below: Despite having easily overcome the entire mixed-race populations of the Middle East, Alexander publicly declared himself to be in favor of racial integration. He ordered that all his generals take wives from the conquered peoples. Alexander himself took as a wife a Persian princess of mixed race.  He also started dressing like the peoples he had conquered, and in 324 BC at a city called Susa he personally officiated at an arranged mass wedding of nine thousand of his senior army officers to Middle Eastern wives—the famous “marriage of East and West” meant to symbolize the new racial unity he was hoping to create.  See: Hour 4, Blocks A & B, Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman. 

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman (1 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 4, Block B: Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman (2 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 4, Block C: Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy by Seth Cropsey (1 of 2)

Sunday 29 September 2013 / Hour 4, Block D: Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy by Seth Cropsey (2 of 2)

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Music

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