As always, when the comparisons to our current governmental regime and the Nazi rulers of Germany are made, the end result of Nazi brutality – millions of dead in concentration camps – is thrown as the trump card to immediately invoke Godwin’s Law.
What is missed is that the strength of the comparison lies in the methodology, not the end result.
In February of 1933, just weeks after Adolph Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag – the parliamentary seat of the German government – was burned. The fire was immediately blamed on the communists, the early twentieth century boogey-man in the eyes of the growing Nazi party.
In the months and years following the fire, the German government enacted laws eliminating individual rights and freedoms in the name of national security and extremist nationalism. An extremist nationalism that became the nightmare of Nazi Germany.
Three quarters of a century later, there are some who believe that the fire was set by the Nazis, to be used as a rallying point to forward their goals to eliminate any shred of democratic process in the German government.
In September of 2001, on a clear Tuesday morning, millions of Americans began their day as they would have any normal workday. The normalcy of that morning was shattered as workers sat in cubicals listening to news reports about planes and Manhattan, as those on the West coast cleared cobwebs from their eyes to scenes of horror on their morning newscasts.
In the shadows of that morning, those attacks, came the light of American unity, Americans stopping to appreciate what it meant to be an American, stopping to appreciate their neighbors, their colleagues, their families. In the shadows of that morning, grew the greater shadow of our current American nightmare.
At a time when Americans were united, when the world was on our side, our leaders instead saw a burning German parliament in the deaths of thousands. In the name of fighting a faceless terror, our government enacted the USA Patriot Act, an abomination of bill that passed in the name of “patriotism”, while skull fucking the corpses of Franklin, Jefferson and Lincoln.
Our government saw the opportunity in our national “Reichstag” to invade a sovereign land in the name of “fighting them there, so as not to fight them here”, instead, lining the coffers of Halliburton and the like, instead, creating more boogey men to terrorize n electorate into extending the rule of an idiot king.
And now, after five years of fighting and dying, after five years of growing national debt, after five years of American soldiers dying physically and mentally for nothing, they have hammered the final nail into the coffin of our American democracy.
Our government, in the name of fighting terror and an unnamable “evil”, has effectively suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a fundamental right of American democracy, which is not to be suspended “unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”, as per our Constitution.
And yet, here we are, in October of 2006, at a time in human development when we should know better, with this fundamental right no gone. I know of no “rebellion” or “invasion” currently active on our nation’s soil – although the time for rebellion may be fast approaching. Is the “public safety” currently at risk? We have been told for five years to be afraid, so many would answer “yes”. But, what are we to be afraid of? The faceless radical Muslin come to blow up our children and subvert our nation? I, personally, more worry about whether the driver on the road behind me has had too many drinks. I worry more whether our economy will make it more and more difficult for my young children to some day attend college. But, I never wonder or worry about that “radical Muslim” who wants to kill me and mine, the boogey man our government and the compliant media wants me, and us, to fear.
So, now, I sit in my home, typing these words from no one but myself, knowing now that my government could knock down my door, drag me away and “disappear” me, without me having the ability to defend myself in the court system, without me having that fundamental right to do so, that right that has been stolen in the night in the name of fear, terror and fascism.
And that is how our government and that of 1930s Germany are similar, the erosion of the rights of the individual in the name of preserving the “safety of the masses”. Much has changed since the 1930s, and the levels of human suffering perpetrated by the Nazis are essentially impossible now, with the eyes of the world open like never before. And yet, we hear that more than half of one million souls have been lost in the war in Iraq, a war showing no signs of abating.
Our only hope lies in our votes, to be cast in less than two dozen days, our only chance to stop them now before it is too late, before we have to explain to our children why their world is devoid of light, why the American nightmare became the ongoing reality.
Peace,
D.
