interesting parallels

[pynchonoid]

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. [...]


continues:
<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-08.htm>

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