Rise of the Fourth Reich

One should retitle this book “A popular version of some of Joseph Farrell’s conclusions without the rigor and discipline of Joseph Farrell’s scholarship.”   Jim Marrs’ thesis is sound and not new:  an elite group has controlled Western politics and economics for the past 100 years.   This group is connected to or synonymous with the Anglo-American banking establishment.   Their modus operandi consists in playing different political and national factions against one another.
(note:  These are not all my thoughts on this book.  There are a lot of other musings about Marrs I have, but I won’t say them here because I am tired and the book isn’t that good and you should read Joseph Farrell instead.)
Strengths of the Book

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fourth-Reich-ebook/dp/B0018QUCWQ/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Marrs has a very good section on the rise of Hitler and what happened behind the scenes in WWII.  Marrs relies heavily on Joseph Farrell’s research, and this part of the book is strong because of that (the second half is notoriously weak).  Marrs makes the interesting suggestion that the Nazis actually detonated an atomic bomb in Russia (and he gives the reasons why the Allies and Stalin would have covered this up.  I agree with him ).  Marrs highlights the various banking clans that funded and aided the Nazis both before the war and after the war.  Marrs has an intriguing chapter on Otto Scorzeny and the lost Cathar treasure.
Criticisms of the Book

Did Marrs’ thesis shift?   (I am open to correction on this one.)  Marrs’ main thesis is that the Nazi elite weren’t eradicated in WWII and/or Nuremberg, but rather made it to South America via the Vatican “ratline” (and Marrs is to be commended for pointing that out).  Further, he points out that these same elites eventually influenced American society and policy, and I suppose there is some truth in that.   On the other hand, it seemed that his earlier thesis is that an international cabal in London/New York financed first Lenin, and then when the Russians got too dangerous, financed Hitler to fight the Commies off.   Fair enough; I buy that.   What I don’t get is the connection between the international elite who created Hitler and the international elite’s relationship to present-day America.   Hitler’s crew is bad, to be sure, but it seems the more nefarious power is the group that made Hitler possible.  Marrs seems to forget about that.
The scholarship and research methods are about as bad as one can get.  Note:  I am not contesting the majority of Marrs’ facts.   I think for the most part he is correct on what he reports.  The problem is he does not cite his sources!  At all.   Yes, he does have a “sources” page at the back, including page numbers of books, but I don’t know to which arguments in what chapter he is referring.   True, I could double-check and make some intuitions, but the burden should not be on the reader for that.  That’s just simple clicking “insert endnote” in MS Word.    This is a half-assed junior high bibliography.  Even the joke of a research method known as APA is more respectable than this.
His New Age Conspiracies Get the Best of him.

While I am intrigued by the possibility that the Cathar’ treasure was taken from the Temple of Solomon, and that this treasure represented in some way an advanced form of “paleo-physics” (again, I am fairly open-minded here), Marrs did not elaborate on what was probably the most interesting point of his book.   Had he used real scholarship and evaluated the sources in a detailed, logical fashion, he could have shed much light on a fairly unresearched topic.  Instead, he mentioned it in passing and the book he “referenced” in the back was one of the New Age Gnostic pamphlets on Jesus being one of the dragon children ala David Icke!     I officially stopped taking Marrs seriously at this point.
He offers no real plan of action.  Towards the end of the book Marrs (rightly) points out that all political candidates are funded by the same people and eventually advance some form of the same cause.    There is really no way to stop them.  He makes vague appeals to the Constitution and has an interesting idea to “vote with your shopping cart” (buy local), but no detailed plan of action on how to stop the Fourth Reich.   To be fair, I won’t fault him too much on this point because given the structure of today’s republican government, there is no way to stop the moneyed elite.  America is down for the count (though resurrections are certainly possible).
The Second half of the book doesn’t say anything new.  I enjoyed the first part of the book.   The second part, unfortunately, felt like a collation of all the various rightwing and leftwing blogs attacking the government.   I agreed with most of the points, but it did not tell me anything new.
Marrs’ Logical Fallacies.  Marrs seemed to make the argument:  The Nazis did x.  George W. Bush’s administration does x.  Ergo, Bush is a Nazi.  He may well be a Nazi, and his grandfather certainly funded the Nazi party, but the above argument is an example of the fallacy “correlation equals causation.”
Misses other possible conclusions.  On one hand, it is not fair to criticize an author for not saying one’s own personal conclusion or hobby-horse, so this really is not a fault of Marrs’.  It is fairly obvious that Jews own most of the media, the lobbies, and the banks.   (Btw, that is not anti-semitic.  That is simply looking at the last names of the CEOs!).     Since that is the case, how does that square with Marrs’ claim (which I also believe to be correct) that the Nazis also control much of the media and banks?   Both claims are fairly true, but most people don’t accuse Nazis and Jews of being on the same side!
Conclusion

Don’t get the book.   Marrs has several radio interviews where he explains this in better detail (and the radio interviews are worth downloading.  Marrs is a gifted and enjoyable speaker.  He has a unique way of connecting to his audience).  If one wants to pursue further research in this area, read Joseph Farrell’s The Nazi International, Daniel Estulin’s The Story of the Bilderbergers, and Farrell’s Babylon’s Banksters.   Farrell is a gifted writer and employs easily-followable footnotes and is an actual scholar.  Estulin has a more focused look on the Bilderbergers and doesn’t get distracted from his thesis.