You may also be interested in this website's NEWS
& VIEWS page, and LINKS to
sites on related topics - see the CHANGING THE WORLD section.
WHEN
DEMOCRACY FAILED: THE WARNINGS OF HISTORY
By
Thom Hartmann. See end re copyright/reposting. Posted April 7,
2003.
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the
United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the
Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February
27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in
demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide
economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A
foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings,
but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The
intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would
eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue
elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most
recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest
levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who
claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority
vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers
he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man
who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect
to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and
internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his
political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and
often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats,
foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and
media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an
occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls
and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although
he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his
response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most
prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who
had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in
history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building,
surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling
with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from
God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its
ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the
Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their
religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was
built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous
terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was
everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window
display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's
now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of
combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it -
that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and
habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones;
suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and
without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes
without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and
State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil
libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the
national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then,
the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police
agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they
hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal
police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious
persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the
first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were
largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and
thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings.
Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many -
quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's
batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out
of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was
taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his
tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent
orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the
suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word
into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his
countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began
to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the
introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous
propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts
swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was
sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were
simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only
ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human
rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's
of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement
with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any
international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best
interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus
withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and
then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden
of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the
people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were
rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of
the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New
Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle
that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them
fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader
determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the
nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated
administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the
nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry
and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various
troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new
national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating
the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and
investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of
this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave
it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the
terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at
our disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their
nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by
now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office
began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about
suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of
some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio
stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and
celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and
the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by
corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone
wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance,
bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into
high government positions. A flood of government money poured into
corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry
terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars
overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire
media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation,
particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle
Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one
corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the
first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more
would follow. Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack,
voices of dissent again arose within and without the government.
Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the
White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out
against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to
direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own
government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and
the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being
held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media -
he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small,
limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the
suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with
the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was
tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they
were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a
press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of
the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the
right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe -
at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine
only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like
Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate and
lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the
leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the
military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the
nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike
doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria
in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so
often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and
replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German
corporations began to take over Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said,
"Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with
brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I
have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my
people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met
me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants
have we come, but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the
advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the
press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism
and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to
ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd
succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of
war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one
commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his
advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics
of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning
him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was
suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the
patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform.
It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit
wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the
"intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was
successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of
opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release
of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't
enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out
war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles
within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against
liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism
that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but
threatening the middle class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the
nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in
the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's first
experiment with democracy.
As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.
February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist
Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament
(Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to
legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his
successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German
blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the
history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time
magazine's "Man Of The Year."
Most Americans remember his office for the security of the
homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel,
simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.
We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly
violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while
generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable
"shock and awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors
of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense
University Press.
Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary
(Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of
government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close
alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using
war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism (fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically
through the merging of state and business leadership, together with
belligerent nationalism."
Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to
remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the
United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt
chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and
prosperity.
Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations
and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the
commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and
create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding
war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class,
enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations,
increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created
Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs
to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant
forests.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.
Thom Hartmann lived and worked in
Germany during the 1980s, and is the author of over a dozen books,
including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight."
This article is
copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
Page
updated 19.11.04
BACK TO TOP
My address from 30.04.12 is 14 Holly Bank Grove, York YO24 4EA, U.K.
contact me on: 01904 621510
info@paulboizot.co.uk
This website is best viewed at a screen resolution of 800 x 600
pixels - at 640 x 480 everything will look bigger,
at 1024 x 768 you may need a magnifying glass. I have tested
it on Opera 7.11, Netscape 6.2 and Internet Explorer 6. It may
not display properly in older browsers that do not support CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) - it will lack text formatting,
background colours, etc.