[Peace-discuss] History lesson

[Morton K.Brussel]

Published on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

When Democracy Failed - 2005
The Warnings of History

by Thom Hartmann

  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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