From another list - this one struck me......... (Part 1)
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Published on Sunday, March 16, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
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 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.