[Mb-civic] When Democracy Failed - 2005

[Cheeseburger]

Re:  When Democracy Failed - 2005



Yeah, what that guy said.

If you haven't read this, please, read it.  If you have read it and have a
bad memory, please, read it again, and print it out and put it up on your
refrigerator, over your TV, and on your bathroom mirror, (want to "Promote
Democracy" in some inexpensive casual way, give a copy to all your
neighbors) so you don't forget what you are actually living through
inbetween Budweiser commercials.

Uncanny.

Same game plan, just a few decades later, different flag, and they're not
speaking German.

Other than that, if you can point out the differences, I will kiss your *ss
here in public on Civic.

Not much appears to have changed, except they now have all kinds of
interesting new Technology that can fry your body with "Flash Gordon rays"
or literally put thoughts into your skull (I'm sure that other than the
hand-held ones, we, among others, have already had numerous satellites in
the sky working night and day with such Freedom Machines, for quite some
time now), and the ruthlessness of the spirit that they salivatingly breed
and follow today appears even more destructive than way back then, if at all
ludicrously possible, it simply just has not yet Fully bloomed and come to
Complete fruition, yet.

It's so very unbelievable which most likely remains one reason huge volumes
of people are still sitting around saying "Don't worry, everything will get
better, we're on the right track...".

Delusional bullsh*t.

The new Goebbels *very* hard at work indeed.

Kind of ironic, again, that Bush's grandfather, again, was sitting in a nice
cushy office and was brought up on Federal charges for selling weapons to,
laundering money for, and sleeping with the enemy, Adolph Hitler himself and
his always available Nazis, during World War II, and making a fortune from
doing it, as people like my father were out there getting their arms legs
and faces blown off, getting killed, and coming back in body bags.

Ain't it...

Even more ironic, almost, that after all that horrible "World War II Stuff",
here we are, again, Full Circle, and that people at The Top of things like
Israel are so in on all this as well that if Uncle Sam rolls over in bed and
sneezes, Israel farts next to them under the covers.

And England is of course where..?  Well, certainly not dodging buzzbombs
from Hitler this time.  It appears they All saw the same ad for Goebbel's
mail order Propaganda kit, and all ordered it at the same time.  Cheaper by
the dozen, apparently.


Don't like bad dreams..?  Don't like nightmares..?

Oops.  Too late.  And, too bad.

Time to wake up, you're living one right now.

Whether you're sleepwalking or not.




Cheeseburger

- "It's not so much that I mind doing this new Goose Step dance, it's just
that now and then I miss being able to shake my b*tt like I could when I did
The Twist..."



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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.


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

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