(no subject)
By Thom Hartmann
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 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 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.