History Forum / General / British History / February 2006

http://www.democraticunderground.com/crisis/06/049_bw.html

Slicing Away Liberty: 1933 Germany, 2006 America

February 21, 2005

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

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What happened in Germany in the 1920s and '30s can teach us much about
how a nation in a few years can lose its freedom in incremental slices
as a result of a drumbeat of never-ceasing propaganda,

strong-arm tactics, government snooping and harassment,

manufactured fear of "the other,"

and wars begun abroad with the accompanying rally-'round-the-flag
patriotism.

In America of the 1980s and '90s, it was extremists on the far-right
fringes who believed the country was moving toward "black helicopter"
authoritarian rule in Washington, and often blamed big-government
liberal Democrats.

Now, as a result of just four-plus years of the Bush Administration
(supposedly anti-big government, conservative Republicans), huge
segments of American society, including those in the mainstream middle,
wonder what has happened to our democratic republic, our civil
liberties, our time-honored system of government.

THE ENABLING MANTRA OF 9/11

The Busheviks defend the Administration's harsh, sweeping actions as
necessary in a "time of war."

The U.S. was attacked by forces representing fanatical Islam, this
reasoning goes, and the old rules and systems simply don't apply
anymore - they are old-fashioned, "quaint."

Instead, we are expected to inculcate the "everything-changed-on-9/11"
mantra, the effect of which is to excuse and justify all.

Defense of the fatherland comes first and foremost, trumping all other
considerations, including the Constitution, checks-and-balances in the
three branches of government, separation of powers, the Geneva
Conventions, international law, etc. etc.

(The Busheviks refuse to believe that one can be muscular in going
after terrorists and do so within the law and with proper respect for
the Bill of Rights and Constitutional protections of due process.)

Not only do the Busheviks pay no attention to recent history, but they
seem to have forgotten how our very nation came into existence and why:
our Founding Fathers rebelled against a despotic British monarch, one
who ran roughshod over their rights and privacy and religious beliefs.

Learning that hard lesson, they established a system of government that
scattered power so that no person or party or religion could easily
reinstate authoritarian rule.

Politicians and citizens would have to compromise and cooperate in
order to get anything done.

It's a slow, cumbersome system (democracy, said Churchill, is the worst
form of government ever invented, except for all the others), but the
system they devised served this nation well for more than two
centuries, making American government a model for much of the rest of
the world.

And now, using the fear of terrorism as justification for all their
actions, the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rumsfeld crew within just a few years
have moved America closer to a militarist, one-party state, led by a
ruler in whom virtually all power is vested.

In '30s Germany, this was called the Fuhrer Principe, the principle of
blind obedience to the wise, all-powerful Supreme Leader.

We've seen other such examples in Stalin's Soviet Union, Kim's North
Korea, Mao's China, Saddam's Iraq, etc.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND LOTS OF UGLY

To the Busheviks, there is pure Evil and pure Good, and because we
Americans are pure Good, especially blessed by God, we can do anything
in the service of fulfilling God's plan, which only we understand.

If you're not with us, you're against us; get on board or get out of
the way.

And so, under Bush/Cheney, we've become an America that has codified
torture in official state policy,

that admits it went into a war under false premises but continues to
keep our targeted troops there anyway,

that spies on its citizens without court orders,

that is willing to out a covert CIA agent (one who was probing the
extent of Iran's nuclear program) for reasons of political retaliation,

that "disappears" American citizens into military jails and doesn't
permit them any contact with the outside world,

that flies suspects in its care to secret prisons abroad and "renders"
others to countries that use even more extreme torture measures,

that passes laws permitting police agents to "sneak and peek" into
citizens' homes, phone records, computer databases, library requests,
e-mails and medical records without permission or even informing those
whose privacy had been violated,

that neuters the Congress by saying it will listen to "suggestions" but
that the ultimate decisions are to be made by the Chief Executive, that
emasculates the political opposition in Congress by cutting them out of
the key decision-making processes,

that declares the president has the right to violate the law whenever
he so chooses and Congress and the courts have no role to play in
reining in that power-grab,

that is eager to keep America on a permanent war footing since it's
engaged in a never-ending battle against a tactic (terrorism), and on
and on.

Even though much of the above transpired in secret and is only now
being revealed, not all of this desecration of the American ideal
happened overnight.

As in Germany in the 1930s, the extremists placed in charge of the
government said one thing in public and did another in private, slowly
slicing away at rights of the citizenry, to avoid triggering a popular
uprising.

THE SLICING MACHINE

In the beginning of their rule, the Nazis would announce restrictive
policies aimed at marginalized citizens (the mentally handicapped, for
example), and if no great uproar of objection came from any power
centers such as the churches or physicians or political leaders, the
Nazis would proceed to the next slice aimed, say, at Communists, or
homosexuals or Jews or Gypsies.

All of these moves were carefully couched in terms of saving the
national security of the Reich or purifying the country of
"non-productive" or "destructive/dangerous" elements in society.

The Nazi propaganda machine was clever, intense and all-pervasive,
using the Big Lie technique masterfully - endlessly repeating its
falsehoods until the drummed-upon populace came to accept them as
truth.

Many ordinary "good Germans" and moral arbiters went along with these
violations of civil rights and liberties either because they inwardly
agreed with the propagandists or because they were afraid to disagree
in public.

Those few leaders in academia, the church and the press who
courageously or even tentatively demurred or asked too many questions
tended to be punished - demoted, fired, their honors revoked, etc. -
and so more and more citizens got the message to "watch what you say."

The Nazi juggernaut pushed on, widening its list of what was forbidden,
issuing harsher and harsher edicts.

Hitler, leader of the rabidly right-wing Nazi party, was installed as
chancellor in 1933, even though his party was not in the majority, in
the hope that he could bring some order and stability to a society
still reeling from the horrendous economic/social Great Depression that
had devastated the country during the '20s and early-'30s.

Given the reins of power, Hitler felt free to unleash policies that
most citizens earlier had rejected as way too extreme.

He had written about them in his book Mein Kampf, but many thought he
would modify his demented views once he was inside the establishment
corridors.

The "Enabling Act" that gave Hitler full control of the organs of power
in Germany was passed in 1933, following the burning of the German
Reichstag (Parliament), an arson that was blamed on Communist
"terrorists." Hitler "temporarily" suspended civil liberties during
this "national emergency," which of course never ended.

Hitler lied to the Reichstag about his true intentions in order to
obtain approval of the Enabling Act.

Shortly after its passage, Hitler began rounding up tens of thousands
of political enemies and sending them to concentration camps.

Democracy was dead in Hitler's Germany.

The corporate titans, seeing that there might be profit to be gained
from Nazi economic and military policies, supported Hitler's rise and
rule; those who had objections to what he was doing thought they could
tame his passions through their immense influence.

But slowly, and then quickly, the Nazis took over one institution after
another, until total control was in their hands.

To stamp out any hint of dissent, all citizens were to spy on each
other - "each one of us the Gestapo of the others," to use Sebastian
Haffner's scary phrase - and the security forces arrested and tortured
at will.

(To learn more from Haffner's contemporaneous account, see Germany in
1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism).

Arming itself to the teeth, Hitler's military forces carried out
lighting-quick wars of conquest ("Blitzkrieg") on weaker nations and
the fascist German empire spread over Europe and, in alliance with
Japan, in Asia as well.

More than forty million human beings would die in the resulting World
War II.

His arrogant belief in his own military intuition and infallibility led
to his downfall, as, against all common sense and advice, he invaded
the Soviet Union and wound up in a military quagmire of the worst sort.

PARALLELS IN OUR OWN AGE

Again, what follows here is not to allege one-for-one comparisons to
Nazism, but to note certain parallel events and tactics that require
special consideration if we are to avoid imitating disastrous history
even more fully.

In our time, a Leader (who, we later learned, probably lost the
election) was installed in 2000 by a far-right majority faction of the
Supreme Court.

The Hard Right had been laying plans for a restoration of Republican
rule after Clinton won re-election; first they made sure Clinton would
be unable to concentrate on his political agenda by constant iterations
of supposed scandals that, as various probes demonstrated, revealed no
illegality.

When Clinton handed the Republicans an opening by engaging in a sexual
dalliance in the White House, they engineered an impeachment and trial
by the Senate;

it didn't really matter that Clinton was not convicted, as the
requisite damage had been done, with a side benefit - his Vice
President and presumable successor was tainted by being close to
Clinton and thus weakened politically.

The point of all this is that the Hard Right restoration forces were
planning for a Bush administration far in advance of the actual 2000
election.

There was no one person's Mein Kampf, but other writings laid out in
stark terms what this neo-conservative cabal had in mind for the
country's foreign/military policy should they return to power,
especially in the reports of The Project for The New American Century:
"pre-emptive" wars of conquest, permitting no rivals for influence,
control of energy sources, etc.

(See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer," where PNAC
lays out the sole-Superpower strategy for achieving "benevolent
hegemony" around the globe.)

Some of that planning included an invasion of Iraq.

Even though Cheney still won't reveal what executives made up his
secret energy task-force, we do know that at least part of that panel's
meetings involved the question of Iraq, with discussion and a map of
which companies might get exploration blocks after Saddam was removed
from power.

Further, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed how astonished
he was that at the first meetings of the Bush Cabinet in early-2001,
much time was spent on the need to invade Iraq.

The terror attacks of 9/11/2001 served as the equivalent of the
"Reichstag Fire" - or, seen another way, as a "new Pearl Harbor", the
phrase lifted from a 2000 PNAC document.

The Bush Administration's "enabling act" came in several key bills
passed by Congress:

the unread and barely-debated Patriot Act, which gave virtually
unlimited police powers to the government in rooting out "terrorism,"
and the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), written so
broadly as to give the Supreme Leader authority to take whatever
unspecified actions he considered to be necessary against those
responsible for 9/11.

Attorney General Gonzales recently claimed that the AUMF, in
conjunction with Article 2 of the Constitution, permits Bush to
authorize both the torture of prisoners and spying on American
citizens, without the need to seek any court warrants, thus over-riding
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that states in no uncertain
terms that all such eavesdropping requires court permission.

REINING IN DISSENTERS AND THE INTERNET

Even though the mainstream, corporate-owned media by and large does the
bidding of the Bush Administration, ignoring and playing down bad news
and hyping the Administration's spin points, full control of the mass
media is still not complete - even with the Bush Administration
spending $1.6 billion tax dollars last year on its own public-relations
spin.

The few insurgent media outlets and reporters, and the unruly analysts
on the internet, are still to be dealt with.

(FEMA has contracted with Halliburton and others to build several
hundred detention camps around the country, ostensibly to house illegal
immigrants but easily convertible for malcontents of one sort or
another. See Maureen Farrell's "Detention Camp Jitters").

Likewise, the Judiciary. Bush & Co. have placed nearly two hundred of
its Hard Right jurists on the federal appeals courts, and got its new
Federalist Society justices onto the Supreme Court - presumably tipping
the balance in favor of more rightwing decisions - but more work needs
to be done to lock down total control of the Judiciary.

The democratic institutions that possibly could still backfire on them
are approaching terminal weakening:

the Republican-controlled Congress has become a rubber-stamp appendage
of Karl Rove's political office;

the Democrats are essentially marginalized with no real power except to
whine and complain and embarrass.

Plus, election votes are counted by the same GOP-friendly corporations
that controlled (and appear to have manipulated) the vote-tabulations
in 2002 and 2004, that manufacture the computer-voting machines, and
that own the secret, proprietary software.

The one dangerous element that cannot be fully controlled are the human
beings who are the public face of the Hard Right elite.

Bush is a simpleton who often says more than he should, giving away the
game;

Cheney is a callous Rasputin whose penchant for secrecy as he runs the
government constantly gets the group into hot water;

Rumsfeld is a media-savvy incompetent whose fingerprints are all over
the Iraq disaster and the torture scandal;

Rove, a brilliant dirty-pool tactician (it is reported that his
grandfather was an active Nazi Party supporter in Germany), is likely
to be indicted in the Plamegate scandal.

Others Administration heavies, such as Condoleezza Rice and Alberto
Gonzales are little more than toadies for the big boys.

So, let's see:

a Supreme Leader who has taken his country into blitzkrieg ("shock and
awe") attacks on foreign nations, bogging down in an ill-advised
invasion quagmire in Iraq;

who has forsaken civil rights and liberties in the name of defense of
the fatherland;

who has destroyed or rendered toothless his nominal opposition;

who has wrapped himself in the flag and questioned the patriotism of
those who raise questions about his policies;

who has engaged in a Big Lie propaganda strategy to move his agenda;

who has demonized internal enemies;

who violates the law to get what he wants and claims that he serves a
higher power in doing so;

who controls (or whose agents control) the voting process; and so on.

What's scary is that it didn't take much verbal stretching to see the
parallels, even admitting that life in Bush's U.S.A., however
comparable in many areas, can scarcely be equated to life in Hitler's
Germany.

Even so, history has presented its warnings to us.

Will we understand and act in time to return our country to a more
moderate balancing point, thus making us better protected in terms of
national security?

It's up to each of us.

This bungling Bush crew seems to have a reverse Midas touch; virtually
everything they touch turns not to gold but to foul-smelling waste
matter.

They are so out of touch with the American mainstream that they've
brought their own poll numbers down into the 30s, and key Republicans
in self-defense are racing to separate themselves from Bush before the
November elections.

Bush & Co. may be reckless bumblers, endangering America's national
security and economy and environment, but they still wield the levers
of power and they're not about to give them up;

indeed, it appears they are willing to take us all with them as they
fall.

That's our challenge, to get rid of them as quickly as possible - by
agitating for impeachment hearings now, or moving for impeachment and a
Senate trial after taking back the House in November - and return
America from its current dark cave and out into the bright light of
hope and civility and reality-based governance.

_________________________________________________________

Harry
(see all of Harry Hope's excellent posts as they break, put this link
in your browser, use it, this is a search on google groups, on the
author Harry Hope sorted by date... nothing fancy):
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=&start=0&scoring=d&enc_author=-nIhFBQAAACtBOUG
AhN9cSve8yYdFJBuOPANdqfI6prRsqjc7uCt1A&