- 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.
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