[Mb-civic] When Democracy Failed - 2005

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

When Democracy Failed - 2005
The Warnings of History
This weekend - February 27th - is the 72nd anniversary, but the 
corporate media most likely won't cover it. The generation that 
experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a 
few of us dare hear their ghosts. 
It started when the government, in the midst of an 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. Some, like Sefton 
Delmer - a London Daily Express reporter on the scene - say they 
certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.) 
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 implicitly racial 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 out 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 
news reporters 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. 
He also reached out to the churches, declaring that the nation had 
clear Christian roots, that any nation that didn't openly support 
religion was morally bankrupt, and that his administration would 
openly and proudly provide both moral and financial support to 
initiatives based on faith to provide social services. 
In this, he was reaching back to his own embrace of Christianity, 
which he noted in an April 12, 1922 speech: 
    "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior 
    as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, 
    surrounded only by a few followers ... was greatest not as a 
    sufferer but as a fighter. 
    "In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read 
    through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose 
    in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the 
    Temple the brood of vipers and adders... 
    "As a Christian ... I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and 
    justice..." 
When he later survived an assassination attempt, he said, "Now I 
am completely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller 
earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let 
me reach my goal." 
Many government functions started with prayer. Every school day 
started with prayer and every child heard the wonders of Christianity 
and - especially - the Ten Commandments in school. The leader 
even ended many of his speeches with a prayer, as he did in a 
February 20, 1938 speech before Parliament: 
    "In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in 
    the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing 
    to our work and our action, to our judgment and our 
    resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and 
    from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the 
    straight path which His Providence has ordained for the 
    German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to 
    do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any 
    violence, before any danger."
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, his corruption of religious leaders, 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. 
Rather than the government being run by multiple parties in a 
pluralistic, democratic fashion, one single party sought total control. 
Emulating a technique also used by Stalin, but as ancient as Rome, 
the Party used the power of its influence on the government to take 
over all government functions, hand out government favors, and 
reward Party contributors with government positions and contracts. 
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. You were either with us, or you were with the terrorists. 
It was a simplistic perspective, but that was what would work, he 
was told by his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels: "The most 
brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one 
fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine 
itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." 
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. 
Another technique was to "manufacture news," through the use of 
paid shills posing as reporters, seducing real reporters with 
promises of access to the leader in exchange for favorable 
coverage, and thinly veiled threats to those who exposed his lies. As 
his Propaganda Minister said, "It is the absolute right of the State to 
supervise the formation of public opinion." 
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. 
In the months after that, he claimed that Poland had weapons of 
mass destruction (poison gas) and was supporting terrorists against 
Germany. Those who doubted that Poland represented a threat 
were shouted down or branded as ignorant. Elections were rigged, 
run by party hacks. Only loyal Party members were given passes for 
admission to public events with the leader, so there would never be 
a single newsreel of a heckler, and no doubt in the minds of the 
people that the leader enjoyed vast support. 
And his support did grow, as Propaganda Minister Goebbels' dictum 
bore fruit: 
    "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will 
    eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only 
    for such time as the State can shield the people from the 
    political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It 
    thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its 
    powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of 
    the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy 
    of the State."
Within a few months Poland, too, was invaded in a "defensive, pre-
emptive" action. 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, 2005, is the 72nd 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 religion and war as tools to keep power: "fas-cism 
(fâsh'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, bust up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity through 
government debt and continual and ever-expanding war spending. 
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 (www.thomhartmann.com) lived and worked in 
Germany during the 1980s, is the Project Censored Award-winning, 
best-selling author of over a dozen books, and is the host of a 
nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio program. This 
article, in slightly altered form, was first published in 2003 by 
CommonDreams.org and is now also a chapter in Thom's book 
What Would Jefferson Do?, published in 2004 by Random 
House/Harmony.



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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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