Image courtesy of Recuerdos de Pandora under CC BY-SA 2.0.
The similarities between America at the turn of the Century and Germany in the 1930s are stunning, frightening, and unprecedented. They offer an apodictic history lesson of perils, present and future.
The American press and media have for several decades been lap dogs of the pernicious policies and apparent totalitarian intentions of our government. In spite of heavy Jewish control of our newspapers, television, and movies and the genocide suffered by their near relatives, the owners of these public voices have consistently failed to warn us of the dangers that lie ahead.
Like America, Germany, before the rise of the Nazi
government, was a democratic republic, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg was President, and Adolph Hitler was a boisterous politician with some disreputable associates and a gift for oratory.
In the March 1932 presidential election Hitler ran second to von Hindenburg with a mere 30.1 percent of the vote. However, there were two other minor candidates and von Hindenburg’s 49.6 percent set up a mandated run-off. The run-off gave Hindenburg 53 percent and Hitler 36.8 percent.
The National Socialist Party (Nazi) did better in the ensuing congressional election garnering 230 Reichstag seats out of a possible 608. The 230 seats made it Germany’s largest political party and granted Hitler new political clout. On July 27th, 1932, four days before the election, Hitler attracted some 60 thousand listeners in Brandenburg and Potsdam and 220 thousand 120 thousand inside and 100 thousand outside) at Grunewald Stadium in Berlin.
By November 1932, gridlocks in the Reichstag forced new elections; the Nazis lost seats but remained the largest political party. Hitler asked von Hindenburg to appoint him Chancellor. Hindenburg refused. Franz von Papen whom Hindenburg had appointed Chancellor in June of 1932 was a farcical individual and under his leadership the Reichstag remained in chaos and deadlock. In an effort to remedy the situation von Hindenburg appointed army General Kurt von Schleicher who, unable to gain a majority coalition, resigned after 57 days.
On January 10th, 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor.
The following month in February, 1933, a fire at the Reichstag building resulted in the arrest of a Dutch Communist name Marinus van der Lubbe and an blustery assertion by the new Chancellor and his associates that Communist terrorists had begun the revolution and were planning to burn buildings, museums, mansions, and industrial plants. It was shrilly proclaimed that women and children might be murdered, private property endangered and the health and welfare of the peaceful population put at risk.
Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to issue a decree “For the Protection of the People and the State”. The decree suspended constitutional guarantees of civil liberties by calling for “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraph and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits prescribed.”
Two weeks after the Reichstag fire on March 23, 1933, Hitler went to the Reichstag and secured an overwhelming vote to suspend the Constitution freeing him to be dictator of Germany.
The existing judicial system with its independent judges was quickly replaced with controllable courts overseen by trustworthy party members whose job it was to protect and enforce the new regime
Hitler had made no secret of his hatred for Jews and in 1935 the Nuremberg laws were enacted legalizing anti-Semitism.
The most frightening corollary between Hitler’s Germany and Bush’s America involves the reactions of the citizens. Bernard Weiner in a review of German author Sebastian Haffner’s book, “Defying Hitler” records the following in regard to the German people: “Given their built-in weakness and their willingness to swallow the most outrageous Big Lies emanating from the propaganda ministry and the media, most Germans were fruit waiting to be plucked by the Nazi harvesters. ‘They still fall for anything. After all that, I do not see that one can blame the majority of Germans who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was the work of the Communists. [The Parliament burned down and a convenient Communist arsonist was fingered, which the Nazis used as the excuse to unleash police-state tactics against all opponents.] What one can blame them for, and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character clearly for the first time during the Nazi period, is that this settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution; as though it followed as a necessary consequence.’” Sebastian Haffner lived in German under the Nazi regime “Defying Hitler”, published in 2000, is a post humus publication found in his files following his death at the age of 91.
America is rife with similarities to Nazi Germany. The Reichstag fire was allowed to go forward and loudly blamed on Communist terrorist-conspirators in order to frighten the people into accepting suspension of the Constitution in much the same way the 9/11 episode has been used to override much of our own Constitution. Devvy Kidd has written a review of a new book by Michael Ruppert entitled “Crossing the Rubicon” that documents suspected government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy.
Hitler received some support for all classes of Germans but his largest voting block was among rural Protestant Christians. The situation in America is some different but the present regime has been able to gain the backing of large numbers of Protestant Evangelical Christians. In reviewing a new book by Daniel J. Flynn entitled “Moronic Intellectuals” Thomas DiLorenzo writes “Carefully surveying many of Strauss’s writings, Flynn notes that although he was an atheist and “scoffed at the idea of God,” he nevertheless thought that appeals to religion could be helpful in duping naïve Christians, especially, into going along with his interventionist foreign policy agenda. It seems to have worked, since ‘evangelical Christians’ are among the most bloodthirsty warmongers in American society today.”
There is an interesting parallel between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and America’s denigration of the Arabs. Again, it is not exactly the same but Israeli and American hatred of Islam and willingness to see Arab men, women, and children killed in an illegal war bears a considerable resemblance to the general anti-Semitic sentiments in 1930s Germany.
Another familiar excuse for membership in an aberrant political party was that it might allow reform of the Nazi Party. This mindset was prominent among intellectuals. How many thousands of American citizens and political hacks maintain membership in the Republican Party with the vain intention of returning it to Conservative Constitutionalism?
Though real anti-Semitism is rare in America there is a direct corollary concerning the success and affluence of Jews and their equal success and affluence in 1930s Germany. In Germany Jews were resented and Lutheran Protestants had the vehement anti-Semitic writings of Martin Luther to re-enforce their sentiments.
The misgivings that hung on as the Nazi regime came to power, the lose of personal freedom, the police state restrictions, murder, and genocide began to be offset by victories on the battlefield, by order in the economy, and realization that most Germans who conformed and did not resist were allowed to live orderly lives without government interference.
Those who were involved in the regime itself – the magistrates, the law enforcement officials, and the soldiers were intent on their own careers and conformed to the orders they were given. The massacres that occurred in Nazi Germany and on a much smaller scale in America at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in April, 1993, were not carried our by crazed or mentally unbalanced individuals; the murders were committed by normal citizens acting as comrades with the approval of the governments that employed them.
On a CD entitled “The Rebirth of Tyranny in America” Attorney Gerry Spence talks about the rank dishonesty and misuse of power in the FBI’s conduct of the Randy Weaver case. Spence is a superb trial lawyer and his rendition is spellbinding. During the trial, FBI agents manipulated evidence, made false statements, and were proven to have used criminal procedures all in an effort to convict an innocent man. When the criminal behavior was specified the FBI agents involved received perfunctory punishments; one of the key men received a promotion.
Government operatives who committed crimes against those they are paid to serve are freed and rewarded while innocent citizens who pay for their service are illegally hounded, persecuted and killed with impunity. Spence calls it tyranny and it is but a short hop from the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
There was heavy pragmatic support for policies that German citizens knew in their hearts were evil. As in America, the propriety of the programs was judged by consequences. German society was predominantly secular and the propensity of human reason to equate virtue with success clouded thought. Citizens, unwilling to accept and face reality, began to live in a dream world. Americans are similarly afflicted. Christians are lawless and willing to forgo freedom and place their trust in a dishonest secular government living with the dream that it is the will of God prior to the end times. Intellectuals and the secular cadre that conduct the everyday business in America are without an immutable legal structure and hampered by the limited capacity of human reason. Their pragmatic approach allows ever increasing barbarism as a means to their ends. It was the same in Germany. The wholesale murder of the helpless did not begin immediately .Priortothe1940s it was brutality,injustice,and an occasional murder. But as tyranny matured it became wholesale murder and genocide. Americans are willing to allow our government to murder over eighty men, women, and children at Waco and condone the passing of a freedom robbing Patriots Act, written and waiting to be passed when citizens and legislators were stampeded by fear. Such precedents provide a dire prescience.
Americans have become used to illegal searches and freedom robbing law enforcement. The airports subject every passenger to personal indignities and our police officers regularly stop innocent citizens and demand their acquiescence which if not given will result in brutal incapacitation, handcuffs, and a jail cell. The death of a police officer is treated as more important than the death of one of the citizens they are hired to serve. Vindictive brutality is common.
Hitler was intent on creating a German Empire by conquest while America has created an empire by stealth. The Nazis in Germany were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent citizens. Although their conquest was overt it went on for an extended period before the wrath of other nations set them against it. America’s conquest has been more subtle and to this point substantial opposition has been confined to the overt invasion of Iraq. Human casualties have already accumulated but if the present course continues, and it appears nothing will prevent it, they will increase to massive proportions.
Most disturbing is the lack of a moral compass in our plan for world hegemony. Rumsfeld and the Straussian based Neo-Con cabal who fashion our foreign policies make their decisions with consequential pragmatism. Human lives mean little. Former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was quoted as stating that our policies in Iraq were worth the deaths of half a million children. This humanistic, callous disregard for life is identical to the thought that pervaded Hitler’s Third Reich!
Many of us who have spent the time to understand what is happening in America and who write about it have found ourselves isolated and scorned by family and often by friends. Dissent in times of despotic peril is not popular. Citizens want to trust their government and therein lies much of the problem. Our Founders were wise in regard to government; they distrusted it and made every attempt to curtail its growth. This wisdom is gone and has been replaced with an inordinate dependence. It is a dysfunctional relationship in which the head has become the foot.
The heroes of history are often oddities to their contemporaries. Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation has written a review of “The White Rose” entitled a “Lesson In Dissent”. The White Rose is the story of a group of young academics who sacrificed their lives to resist the evils of Hitler’s Germany. Robert Scholl was the father of brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, both involved in the movement, he despised Hitler and though his children had joined the Hitler youth and might have had him arrested he was able to convince them of the evil that was progressing and they in turn were the impetus that began a pamphlet resistance. It is a touching story of bravery and self sacrifice, a real life story of “give me freedom or give me death”.
However, the resistance was not organized. The Scholls and their brave little group acted with no outside support. Most Protestant ministers offered little resistance. More Catholics ended up in the concentration camps than Protestants. The general population was submissive and many were supportive. America has an almost identical pattern!
As we approach the presidential election we need to understand that it makes no difference which of the two political parties wins the election the slide into tyranny will continue unabated. The powers that promote it have firm control of the majority of our elected officials including our Presidents.
Fighting the monster is a lonely venture with frustration certain and martyrdom possible.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”