Democracy
When
Democracy Failed: The Warnings
By Thom
Hartmann
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed
in the
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
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
It took a few months, and intense
international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he
personally met with the leader of the
In a speech responding to critics of
the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we
fell on
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
A year later, to the week, Hitler
invaded
As we conclude this review of
history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.
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
To the extent that our Constitution
is still intact, the choice is again ours.
Thom Hartmann 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.