IrishHand
04-15-2003, 04:14 PM
I thought this article was thoroughly fascinating. I've alluded to a number of the topics and historical comparisons in the past (as have a number of others on this forum and elsewhere), and true to form, been branded anti-American or unpatiortic (I try to forget what I do for a living when I read those comments, although they always make me laugh regardless). Frankly, I don't really care what the pro-war crowd thinks about it, since we've already established that they think history is largely irrelevant (which explains in large part why they repeat the same mistakes over and over again). I am, however, curious about the reactions of folks like Chris, Clarkmeister (if he can make it through it /forums/images/icons/wink.gif) and even brad.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History
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 thenation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he
verified it was he 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 errorist. 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 withoutspecific 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 theterrorist 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 theycannot 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History
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 thenation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he
verified it was he 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 errorist. 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 withoutspecific 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 theterrorist 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 theycannot 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.