The Nazi Mudology

EMOTIONS VS. FACTS
Posted January 17, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org

By: Ted Lang

Recent presidential campaign mudslinging splattered emotional mud not only upon candidates, political parties, and their campaign-proclaimed objectives, but upon the truth as well.  Why is it hateful to merely make comparisons to historical fact?  The events referred to involve an anti-Bush movement seeking to unseat him from the presidency by comparing his administration to the tactics of Germany’s pre-World War II Nazi Party.

It isn’t relevant as to precisely what was said in order to disparage or denigrate Bush and his new neoconservative Republican PNAC Party.  Neither is it relevant to evaluate what was offered as a defense by the Bush administration.  What is relevant is true relevancy itself!

William L. Shirer, the world-renowned author of that great, monumental and best-selling volume, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, has amply demonstrated his astonishing journalistic analytical and evaluative skills.  He gained his gifted insight and historical perspective while serving as a correspondent in Germany, before, during and after World War II.  His superior assessment as to the rise and fall of the Reich are extremely relevant to the socio-political environment in America today.  And our economic problems are quickly morphing into the economic environment in Germany during the 1930’s as well.  Considering the great need to avoid the George Santyana nightmare of reliving the past, wouldn’t it be prudent to examine some of these comparable issues without the mud?

Employing the tired cliché of hindsight being twenty-twenty, nowhere is it more under utilized than in posing the question: If Adolf Hitler was such an atrocious monster that turned on his own people as well as on every nation in the world, why didn’t the German people see this coming?  Why didn’t the German people recognize the evil and do something about it?

Clearly, the most obvious answer is that he appealed to their emotions.  He pointed out the obvious: Not a shot was fired in Germany, not a bomb was dropped on German soil, and there was no havoc and destruction throughout the land.  Germany lost World War I by “an arrangement,” an arrangement that involved “Jewish” [Zionist] bankers, which brought America into the war that Germany had just about almost won, and produced the Balfour Declaration by which Britain guaranteed “Dear Lord Rothschild” the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The rape of Germany, the humiliation, the monumental “war reparations,” and the recognition of “Jewish” [Zionist] involvement, provided the fodder necessary to allow Hitler the advantage of rallying the German citizenry behind him, as he led them against the Jews, the British, the French, and that most-hated Versailles Treaty.  Dictators always rally their soon-to-be enslaved supporters by the raised double-edged sword of righting injustices and invoking aggressive patriotism.  It is easy to understand why the German people not only failed to recognize the threat of Hitler, but fully supported him as well.

Shirer points out the dilemma of the German workingman, so long plagued by the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, the crushing inflation, and the misery of unemployment.  He writes: “Though it is perhaps unwise to generalize about such things, this writer’s own impression of the workingman in Berlin and in the Ruhr was that while he was somewhat cynical about the promises of the regime, he had no more hankering for revolt than anyone else in the Third Reich.  Unorganized as he was and lacking leadership, what could he do?”

That paragraph that follows is most telling.  Shirer continues, “But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germany was, without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurance he would keep it.  An observer who had known something about his precarious predicament during the Republic could understand why he did not seem to be desperately concerned with the loss of political freedom and even of his trade unions as long as he was employed full-time.  In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he [the workingman] said, by the freedom to starve.  In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class, probably the most skillful and industrious and disciplined in the Western world.  It was a backing given not to his half-baked ideology or to his evil intentions, as such, but to what counted the most: the production of goods for war.”  It is often said that during elections, “Americans vote with their wallets.”  So did the Germans.

What could be more half-baked than a “war on terrorism?”  What could be more evil than 530 flag-draped caskets?  What could be more evil than killing ten thousand plus innocent Iraqis and their families?  What could be more evil than blaming Saddam and Iraq for 9-11?  What could be more evil than the lies of a reserved foreign policy, no nation-building, and compassionate conservatism replaced by the reality of unilaterally abandoning nuclear proliferation treaties, appointing oneself emperor and judge of international nuclear weaponry, and master race over the entire world as its police force?

And where was the German middle-class during the rise of Hitler and his Nazis?  Shirer explains: “No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler.  The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.  At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote.  But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger, which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.  The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!”

And to ensure he made the necessary point, later in Shirer’s book, he again points out: “After five and a half years of National Socialism it was evident to the few Germans who opposed Hitler that only the Army possessed the physical strength to overthrow him.  To workers, the middle and upper classes, even if they had wanted to, had no means of doing it.  They had no organization outside of the Nazi party groups and they were, of course, unarmed.”

And although there is an organized opposition to Bush, that opposition belongs to the same secret “Skull and Bones” society.  And Democrats and Republicans seem to be on similar tracks and have similar agendas.  So where is the real opposition?  And when will the real issues surface in this presidential campaign?

Just as was the case with the Bush administration wrongfully taking US to war with Iraq, Hitler wrongfully took the German people and the whole world to war on September 1, 1939 when he invaded Poland.  Why did Germany invade Poland?  Hitler wanted “a corridor” allowing free access through Poland and the Polish city of Danzig.  Hitler placed claims upon Poland citing “captive” German citizens in residence in that city.  Hitler cited Polish aggression.  That was the politically correct term at the time; today, it’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

Shirer describes his outrage at the German corporate media of the day: “In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels’ expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people.  For six years, since the Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of the free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world.  For a time the Swiss German-language newspapers from Zurich and Basel could be purchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presented objective news.  But in recent years their sale in the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies.  For Germans who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a handful of persons.”

Shirer notes, “‘How completely isolated a world the German people live in,’ I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939.  ‘A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it.’  I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers.  They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet.  I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland…here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained… What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland, which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion….”

All that is needed to bring the above entry in Shirer’s diary from 1939 forward to the present is to simply substitute the United States for Germany, and Iraq for Poland.  All we need to do to bring Shirer’s observation concerning the government controlled press to the present is to consider how today’s corporate media is assisting the Bush administration to shift public focus from lies and deceit to initiate an unjust war to “intelligence failings.”  All we need to do is to reflect upon all the worthless panels, investigations and commissions, gobbling up millions of taxpayer dollars and accomplishing nothing but one cover-up after another.

Using Nazism to disparage a presidential candidate is indeed a new and uncharacteristic low.  But making legitimate comparisons and presenting relevant analogies is not only warranted, but is now taking on also a matter of urgency as to the survivability of our nation.  The USA Patriot Act I and II, congressional modification of which, Washington insider and attorney general John Ashcroft continues to block, is a very real threat to our freedoms and our entire Bill of Rights.   The Patriot Act cuts a wide swath in all our basic freedoms, blocking the freedom of speech and the press that allows dissent, that allows assembly and allows organized protest.  And this lends itself precisely to Shirer’s frequently repeated lament: The people weren’t organized, and had no power to protest.

It’s time for challenger John Kerry, as well as our media, to start holding the Bush administration accountable for its unbelievably numerous transgressions.  We the people don’t care about the operations and philosophy of the CIA.  We don’t care about George Bush’s National Guard pay stubs.  We don’t care about John Kerry’s possible sex misadventures and escapades.  And we don’t care about a boob hanging out at the Super Bowl.  We care about the boob hanging out at the White House, the guy that swore to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms, and who should have acted to prevent 9-11.  

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© Copyright THEODORE E. LANG 2/15/04 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political analyst and a freelance writer.