WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILED: THE WARNINGS OF HISTORY

WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILED: THE WARNINGS OF HISTORY

By Thom Hartmann Thom Hartmann's Newsletter for
March 17, 2003

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 t he 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 1930's, 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 1980's, and is the author
of over a dozen books, including "Unequal
Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight."

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