by Bob Fitrakis Published on Wednesday, September 1, 2004 by the Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)
President Bush told Texas evangelist James Robinson that "I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen . . . I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
With 49.3% of New York City residents in a recent Zogby poll believing that some people in our government knew of the 911 attack in advance and allowed it to happen, the President as right-wing evangelical prophet is under siege in his Madison Square Garden bunker. Convention watchers should take careful note of the theocratic nationalist rhetoric at the Republican convention this week.
When was the last time a Western nation had a leader so obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side?
If you answered Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're correct. Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a barbaric pagan or Godless totalitarian, like Stalin.
Both Bush and Hitler believe that they were chosen by God to lead their nations. With Hitler boldly proclaiming, before launching his doctrine of preventive war against all of Europe, that "I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany."
"I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker," Hitler said.
Hitler stated in February 1940, "But there is something else I believe, and that is that there is a God. . . . And this God again has blessed our efforts during the past 13 years." After the Iraqi invasion, Bush announced, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did . . . ." Neither the similarity between Hitler and Bush's religious rhetoric nor the fact that the current President's grandfather was called "Hitler's Angel" by the New York Tribune for his financing of the Fuher's rise to power is lost on Europeans.
Pat Robertson called Bush "a prophet" and Ralph Reed claimed, after the 9/11 attack, God picked the President because "he knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way." Hitler told the German people in March 1936, "Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell, fell as scarcely any other people heretofore. In this deep misery we again learn to pray. . . . The mercy of the Lord slowly returns to us again. And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that he may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God."
At the beginning of Hitler's crusade on April 12, 1922, he spelled out his version of the warmongering Jesus: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." Randall Balmer in The Nation, noted that "Bush's God is the eye-for-an- eye God of the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, the God of vengeance and retribution."
As Bush has invoked the cross of Jesus to simultaneously attack the Islamic and Arab world, Hitler also saw the value of exalting the cross while waging endless war: "To be sure, our Christian Cross should be the most exalted symbol of the struggle against the Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevik spirit.
Like Bush-ites, Hitler was fond of invoking the Ten Commandments as the foundation of Nazi Germany: "The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there's no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul."
But if you ever wondered where Bush got his idea for so-called "faith-based initiatives" you need only consult Hitler's January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag. The Fuhrer begins, "Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so-called democracy is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion."
Hitler goes on to document how much "public monies derived from taxation through the organs of the State have been placed at the disposal of both churches [Protestant and Catholic]." Hitler gave nearly 1.8 billion Reichsmarks between 1933-1938 directly to the Christian churches. In 1938 alone, he bragged that the Nazis gave half a billion Reichsmarks from the national government and an additional 92 million Reichsmarks from the Nazi-controlled German states and parish associations.
Hitler made the intent of his faith-based initiative clear when he noted, "With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty. . . . the little sects, which receive only a few hundred thousand marks, are devoted to us body and soul."
Bush's assertion that "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job" brings to mind God as a dull-witted, cognitively-impaired nationalist unable to utter a simple declarative sentence who spends his time preaching "blessed are the warmongers and profit-makers."
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press ( http://freepress.org [F6 note -- current direct link http://www.freepress.org/index2.php ] ), a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace.
On October 17, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This new law gives Bush power similar to that of Stalin or Hitler, and grants agencies within the executive branch powers similar to those of the KGB or Gestapo.
Bush justifies this act by claiming he needs it to fight the “war on terror,” but a number of critics, including former counterterrorism officials, have said the administration has greatly exaggerated the threat and used illogical methods to combat terrorism. (Examples are listed below.)
Except for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, few television news reporters have bothered to mention that the Military Commissions Act has changed the U.S. justice system and our approach to human rights. As Olbermann said of the new law on his October 17 Countdown program, the new act “does away with habeas corpus, the right of suspected terrorists or anybody else to know why they have been imprisoned.”
Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Constitutional Law Professor, was Olbermann’s guest. Olbermann asked him, “Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?”
Turley responded, “It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president . . . People have no idea how significant this is. What really a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values.”
Although we have a free press, rather than follow Olbermann’s good example, most television news reporters have responded to this nullification of America’s fundamental principles by avoiding the subject. News networks, which voluntarily relinquish their right and duty to challenge government officials function more as the Soviet Union’s Pravda or Hitler’s Nazi press program than as a genuinely free press.
Just as the mainstream media failed to adequately question the Bush administration’s many shifting rationales for invading Iraq in the lead-up to the war, they’re now failing to challenge Bush’s logic and motives as he justifies eviscerating the Constitution in the name of his ever-expanding “war on terror.” How realistic is this so-called war, and is the Bush administration conducting it effectively?
Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone. He interviewed nearly a dozen former high-ranking counterterrorism officials about Bush’s approach to the war on terrorism. In his article, “The Phony War,” (Rolling Stone, 9/21/06) Dreyfuss says these officials conclude:
The war on terror is bogus. Terrorism shouldn’t be treated as if it were a nation to be battled with the military, but should instead be fought with police work and intelligence agencies.
Terrorism is not an enemy, but a method. Even if the United States were to wipe out every terrorist cell in the world today, terrorism would be back tomorrow.
Bush lacks a clear understanding of the nature of the “enemy” and has no real strategy for dealing with it.
The Bush administration confuses the issue by grouping “Al Qaeda” with everything from Iraq’s resistance movement to states such as Syria and Iran.
Today, there’s virtually no real “Al Qaeda threat” to Americans.
Bush’s policies have spawned a new generation of “amateur terrorists,” but there are few of them, and they’re not likely to pose a major threat to the U.S.
Though Bush has said he will fight his “war” until every last terrorist is eliminated, terrorism can never be defeated, merely “contained and reduced.” Dreyfuss says, “In the short term, the cops and spies can continue to do their best to watch for terrorist threats as they emerge, and occasionally, as in London, they will succeed. But they are the first to admit that stopping a plot before it can unfold involved, more than anything, plain dumb luck.”
Not only has the Bush administration falsely characterized and exaggerated the threat of terrorism; they have gone out of their way to mislead the public by claiming credit for preventing attacks. Dreyfuss points out that although Bush has claimed we’ve fended off 10 terrorist plots since 9/11, “on closer examination all 10 are either bogus or were to take place overseas.”
Dreyfuss also notes that although, in 2002, the Bush administration leaked to the press that Al Qaeda had 5,000 “sleepers” in the U.S., there were, in fact, none. (Or, as Dreyfuss says, not a single one has been found.) If the administration believes the facts bolster their case for a war on terrorism, why do they find it necessary to leak false information?
The administration has done little to secure U.S. borders, ports, airports and nuclear facilities. What could logically explain their inattention to these vulnerabilities if they believe a terrorist threat here is likely? Bush has said he’ll do anything it takes in order to protect the American people. Why hasn’t he secured our nuclear facilities?
Exaggerating the terrorist threat does give the Bush team an excuse to seize more power for the Executive and shred the Constitution. In an article for Foreign Affairs (September/October 2006), political science professor John Mueller supports Dreyfuss’s view that the war on terrorism is bogus.
Mueller points out that not only have there been no terrorist incidents here in the past five years, but there were none in the five years before 9/11. Mueller asks: “If it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could be so easily exploited?”
He also bolsters Dreyfuss’s conclusion that the Bush administration can’t take credit for the fact that we haven’t been attacked again. He says that “the government’s protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched.”
Mueller addresses Bush’s irrational argument that we’re “fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here.” He points out that terrorists with Al Qaeda sympathies have managed to carry out attacks in a variety of countries (Egypt, Jordan Turkey, the United Kingdom), not merely in Iraq.
He adds that a reasonable explanation for the fact that no terrorists have attacked since 9/11 is that the terrorist threat “has been massively exaggerated.” He notes that “it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteorite.”
Although Bush’s justification for the war on terror has been illogical and deceptive, the administration has used it as an excuse to abuse the U.S. military in Iraq, tear down our system of government at home and seize power on his own behalf. As Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann on his October 17 program, with the signing of the Military Commissions Act, “Congress just gave the president despotic powers . . . I think people are fooling themselves if they believe that the courts will once again stop this president from taking -- overtaking -- almost absolute power.”
Bush’s many power grabs and refusal to submit to usual constitutional checks and balances indicates he prefers monarchy or dictatorship to the government set up by America's founders. The framers of our Constitution provided checks on tyranny by writing into law separation of powers, granting the legislative and judicial branches of government the ability to curb abuses by the executive. Today, the Congress has abdicated its constitutional obligation and serves only as a rubber stamp for the despotic president, and to date, the courts have done much the same.
Can George W. Bush be trusted with absolute power? Here are some things he has done with his unchecked power:
Stolen two presidential elections.
Exaggerated and falsely characterized the terrorist threat.
Misled the country into war with Iraq.
Urged the U.S. intelligence agencies to fix the intelligence around the Iraq war policy (as confirmed by the Downing Street Memo and other sources) in order to mislead the Congress and public into supporting war with Iraq.
Abused human rights by promoting the use of torture and setting up virtual gulags.
Suspended habeas corpus for some.
Tried to silence political opposition by pronouncing them “weak on terrorism” or somehow “with the terrorists,” and
Placed himself above the law by issuing more legislation-challenging signing statements (around 800) than all of his predecessors put together. Bush’s unnecessary invasion of Iraq alone has cost nearly 3,000 American lives. An October 11 article by Greg Mitchell in Editor & Publisher says that a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “suggests that more than 600,000 Iraqis have met a violent or otherwise war-related end since the U.S. arrived in March 2003.”
The Bush administration’s policies have not only resulted in high death counts, but also in widespread, out of control torture. A September 22 Christian Science Monitor report says:
“The United Nation’s special investigator on torture said Thursday that torture may now be worse in Iraq than it was during the regime of deposed leader Saddam Hussein. The Associated Press reports that Manfred Nowak, who was making a brief to the United Nations Human Rights Council about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, said the torture situation in Iraq was ‘totally out of hand.’”
The CS Monitor mentions the fact that the recent compromise between the Bush White House and dissident Republicans (including Senator John McCain) allows torture to continue. The article quotes a Washington Post piece:
“The bad news is Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects . . . It’s hard to credit the statement by [McCain] yesterday that ‘there’s no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.’ In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress’s tacit assent.”
Congress has given Bush a blank check as he’s bulldozed toward an imperial presidency. We have the outward forms of democratic institutions such as Congress and a so-called free press. However, the people currently managing those institutions behave as if they’re being forced to serve a totalitarian dictator.
A perfect example of this surrender to Bush’s virtual despotism is Congress’s and the mainstream media’s compliance regarding Bush’s Military Commissions Act. While Keith Olbermann and Jonathan Turley see the extreme danger posed by Bush’s authoritarian moves, Congress has done little to challenge Bush, and, overall, the press is eerily silent.
In The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer said the Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, ordered editors not to publish (among other things) anything which “tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich or offends the honor and dignity of Germany.” According to Shirer, Max Amman, Hitler’s top sergeant during the war and head of the Nazi Party’s publishing firm and financial head of its press, said that after the Nazis seized power in 1933, it was “a true statement to say that the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all the press which was in opposition to the party.”
The U.S. mainstream press doesn’t have to be coerced by a government Press Law to avoid publicly opposing Bush’s most egregious policies. Television news networks, in particular, have voluntarily held back serious scrutiny. They have not only failed to discuss the recent Military Commissions Act at length, but in the run-up to the Iraq war, liberal talk show host Phil Donahue and comedian Bill Maher were fired for challenging the White House spin about Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.
Shirer also describes the ease with which the German Reichstag gave Hitler the power to change the nature of Germany’s parliamentary democracy. He writes:
“One by one, Germany’s most powerful institutions now began to surrender to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly, out of existence . . . It cannot be said they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats -- those who were not in jail or in exile -- voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy.”
Shirer concludes: “The one-party totalitarian state had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.”
The U.S. Congress, like the German Reichstag, has abdicated its democratic responsibilities by granting Bush an inordinate amount of power -- “with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance.” The U.S. press has abandoned its role as democracy’s watchdog by failing to question this development. Both of these institutions have failed the American people.
Considering Bush is using the war on terror to justify seizing undue power, both Congress and the media should question his reasoning and offer opposition. Just as they didn’t effectively challenge the administration’s shifting excuses for attacking Iraq, these institutions haven’t scrutinized Bush’s claims about the need for the Military Commissions Act and the apparently endless war on terrorism.
Among things Congress and the media should challenge is George W. Bush’s false claim that the United States does not torture. In an article published at the CommonDreams.org site, journalist Molly Ivins reports that in one case of death from torture by Americans, the military at first said the prisoner’s death was caused by a heart attack. Ivins adds that the coroner later said the heart attack occurred after the prisoner “had been beaten so often on his legs that they had ‘basically been pulpified.’”
She adds that the Bush administration’s officially sanctioning torture “throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems necessary -- these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.” Ivins isn’t inclined to hyperbole, yet she says of Americans’ passive acceptance of this new law: “Do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.”
As Jonathan Turley said on Olbermann’s program, “I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush. But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, ‘Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law?’ There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps; there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.”
Future generations will wonder why the U.S. Congress and mainstream press helped Bush build up an imperial presidency and eliminate constitutional protections. If they’re able to sort through the administration’s fallacies and lies and clearly see what went wrong with America during this time, they’ll wonder why there were so few Molly Ivinses, Keith Olbermanns and Jonathan Turleys.
Coming generations will also ask why by comparison there were so many who failed to notice the obvious holes in Bush’s logic and why so many turned a blind eye to his numerous false assertions and cruel policies. They’ll wonder why so many supported, whether by direct action or by silence, the Bush administration’s changing the fundamental nature of the democratic Republic we were given by America’s founders, based on the flimsy excuse of fighting a war on terrorism -- a “war” Bush defines falsely and fights ineffectively.
Generations to come might ask why this president who lied so often, about Iraq and other critical matters, was ever entrusted with enough power to damage this country’s founding principles and wage endless, unprovoked war on other nations. If Congress and the media would ask these questions now, they might prevent Bush from doing further harm. This might save many lives, prevent much unnecessary suffering and possibly steer this country out of its present darkness.
President Bush, seen here at the White House Monday, has signed an executive order that in effect increases his control over guidelines the government issues regarding health, safety, privacy and other issues. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR Published: January 30, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.
This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.
The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
In an interview on Monday, Jeffrey A. Rosen, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said, “This is a classic good-government measure that will make federal agencies more open and accountable.”
Business groups welcomed the executive order, saying it had the potential to reduce what they saw as the burden of federal regulations. This burden is of great concern to many groups, including small businesses, that have given strong political and financial backing to Mr. Bush.
Consumer, labor and environmental groups denounced the executive order, saying it gave too much control to the White House and would hinder agencies’ efforts to protect the public.
Typically, agencies issue regulations under authority granted to them in laws enacted by Congress. In many cases, the statute does not say precisely what agencies should do, giving them considerable latitude in interpreting the law and developing regulations.
The directive issued by Mr. Bush says that, in deciding whether to issue regulations, federal agencies must identify “the specific market failure” or problem that justifies government intervention.
Besides placing political appointees in charge of rule making, Mr. Bush said agencies must give the White House an opportunity to review “any significant guidance documents” before they are issued.
The Office of Management and Budget already has an elaborate process for the review of proposed rules. But in recent years, many agencies have circumvented this process by issuing guidance documents, which explain how they will enforce federal laws and contractual requirements.
Peter L. Strauss, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the executive order “achieves a major increase in White House control over domestic government.”
“Having lost control of Congress,” Mr. Strauss said, “the president is doing what he can to increase his control of the executive branch.”
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said: “The executive order allows the political staff at the White House to dictate decisions on health and safety issues, even if the government’s own impartial experts disagree. This is a terrible way to govern, but great news for special interests.”
Business groups hailed the initiative.
“This is the most serious attempt by any chief executive to get control over the regulatory process, which spews out thousands of regulations a year,” said William L. Kovacs, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. “Because of the executive order, regulations will be less onerous and more reasonable. Federal officials will have to pay more attention to the costs imposed on business, state and local governments, and society.”
Under the executive order, each federal agency must estimate “the combined aggregate costs and benefits of all its regulations” each year. Until now, agencies often tallied the costs and the benefits of major rules one by one, without measuring the cumulative effects.
Gary D. Bass, executive director of O.M.B. Watch, a liberal-leaning consumer group that monitors the Office of Management and Budget, criticized Mr. Bush’s order, saying, “It will result in more delay and more White House control over the day-to-day work of federal agencies.”
“By requiring agencies to show a ‘market failure,’ ” Dr. Bass said, “President Bush has created another hurdle for agencies to clear before they can issue rules protecting public health and safety.”
Wesley P. Warren, program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who worked at the White House for seven years under President Bill Clinton, said, “The executive order is a backdoor attempt to prevent E.P.A. from being able to enforce environmental safeguards that keep cancer-causing chemicals and other pollutants out of the air and water.”
Business groups have complained about the proliferation of guidance documents. David W. Beier, a senior vice president of Amgen, the biotechnology company, said Medicare officials had issued such documents “with little or no public input.”
Hugh M. O’Neill, a vice president of the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, said guidance documents sometimes undermined or negated the effects of formal regulations.
In theory, guidance documents do not have the force of law. But the White House said the documents needed closer scrutiny because they “can have coercive effects” and “can impose significant costs” on the public. Many guidance documents are made available to regulated industries but not to the public.
Paul R. Noe, who worked on regulatory policy at the White House from 2001 to 2006, said such aberrations would soon end. “In the past, guidance documents were often issued in the dark,” Mr. Noe said. “The executive order will ensure they are issued in the sunshine, with more opportunity for public comment.”
Under the new White House policy, any guidance document expected to have an economic effect of $100 million a year or more must be posted on the Internet, and agencies must invite public comment, except in emergencies in which the White House grants an exemption.
The White House told agencies that in writing guidance documents, they could not impose new legal obligations on anyone and could not use “mandatory language such as ‘shall,’ ‘must,’ ‘required’ or ‘requirement.’ ”
The executive order was issued as White House aides were preparing for a battle over the nomination of Susan E. Dudley to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
President Bush first nominated Ms. Dudley last August. The nomination died in the Senate, under a barrage of criticism from environmental and consumer groups, which said she had been hostile to government regulation. Mr. Bush nominated her again on Jan. 9.
With Democrats in control, the Senate appears unlikely to confirm Ms. Dudley. But under the Constitution, the president could appoint her while the Senate is in recess, allowing her to serve through next year.
Some of Ms. Dudley’s views are reflected in the executive order. In a primer on regulation written in 2005, while she was at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Northern Virginia, Ms. Dudley said that government regulation was generally not warranted “in the absence of a significant market failure.”
She did not return calls seeking comment on Monday.
[F6 comment -- beyond simply being patently unconstitutional (yet another instance of the executive unilaterally [effectively] amending/repealing laws validly passed and signed, for starters), this is yet another bit of pure fascism (or as Mussolini termed it, 'corporatism') -- yet again plain as day and right out on the open]
Putin Cites Third Reich in Veiled Criticism of U.S.
President Vladimir V. Putin obliquely compared the foreign policy of the United States to the Third Reich in a speech on Wednesday commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Misha Japaridze/Associated Press
By ANDREW E. KRAMER Published: May 9, 2007
MOSCOW, May 9 — President Vladimir V. Putin obliquely compared the foreign policy of the United States to the Third Reich in a speech on Wednesday commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, apparently in an escalation of anti-American talk within the Russian government.
The comments were the latest in a series of sharply worded Russian criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States — on Iraq, missile defense, NATO expansion and, more broadly, United States unilateralism in foreign affairs.
Many Russians say the sharper edge reflects a frustration that Russia’s views, in particular opposition to NATO expansion, have been ignored in the West. Outside of Russia, however, many detected in the new tone a return to cold-war-style antagonism, emboldened by petroleum wealth.
Mr. Putin’s analogy was a small part of a larger speech, otherwise unambiguously congratulating Russian veterans of World War II, known here as the Great Patriotic War. Mr. Putin spoke from a podium in front of Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square before troops mustered for a military parade.
Mr. Putin called Victory Day a holiday of “huge moral importance and unifying power” for Russia, and went on to enumerate the lessons of that conflict for the world today.
“We do not have the right to forget the causes of any war, which must be sought in the mistakes and errors of peacetime,” Mr. Putin said.
“Moreover, in our time, these threats are not diminishing,” he said. “They are only transforming, changing their appearance. In these new threats, as during the time of the Third Reich, are the same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.”
The Kremlin press service declined to clarify the statement, saying Mr. Putin’s spokesman was unavailable because of the holiday.
Sergei A. Markov, director of the Institute of Political Studies, who works closely with the Kremlin, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Putin was referring to the United States and NATO. Mr. Markov said the comments should be interpreted in the context of a wider, philosophical discussion of the lessons of World War II. The speech also praised the role of the allies of the Soviet Union in defeating Germany.
“He intended to talk about the United States, but not only,” Mr. Markov said in reference to the sentence mentioning the Third Reich. “The speech said that the Second World War teaches lessons that can be applied in today’s world.”
The United States, Mr. Putin has maintained, is seeking to establish a unipolar world to replace the bipolar balance of power of the cold war era.
In a speech in Munich on Feb. 10, he characterized the United States as “One single center of power: One single center of force. One single center of decision-making. This is the world of one master, one sovereign.”
The victory in World War II, achieved at the cost of roughly 27 million Soviet citizens, still echoes loudly in the politics of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Russia’s relations with the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Putin criticized Estonia, also indirectly, for recently relocating a monument to the Red Army in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, along with the remains of unknown soldiers buried there. Mr. Putin warned that desecrating war memorials was “sowing discord and new distrust between states and people.” The remarks were a nod to the protests in Russia and Estonia after the relocation of the Bronze Soldier memorial from the city center to a military cemetery.
In his Victory Day speech last May, Mr. Putin brushed on similar themes of the lessons of the war. Then, he spoke of the need to stem “racial enmity, extremism and xenophobia” in a possible reference to rising ethnic tensions inside Russia.
Victory Day has evolved into the principal political holiday in Russia, replacing the Soviet-era Nov. 7 celebration, Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. That holiday was canceled under Mr. Putin and replaced with the Day of Accord, observing a 1612 uprising against Poland, celebrated on Nov. 4.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (emphasis added)
They Thought They Were Free, By Milton Mayer (1955)
Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month Review November 7, 2005
"They Thought They Were Free" is an intensely personal book for me. Although I was born after Hitler was five years dead, the horrible dance between fascism and democracy has fascinated me since childhood. And, through a series of odd coincidences, my adult life has been heavily intertwined with those of both Nazis and the victims of Hitler's Nazis.
Throughout my life, I've had several close friends who lost family members in the Holocaust. I've spent a lot of time in Israel, sobbed at Yad Vashem [ http://www.yadvashem.org/ ], and my wife Louise and I played a role in two of our closest friends, Hal and Shelley Cohen, starting Orr Shalom [ http://www.orr-shalom.org.il/ ], which is now one of the largest Jewish programs for abused children in Israel. Before I learned English as a baby I was speaking Yiddish, learned from our Holocaust-survivor neighbors in Detroit who cared for me when my parents worked, and so can today recite both Hebrew prayers and speak German with accents and inflections more characteristic of a first than a second language.
On the other side of the coin, this Sunday morning I'm having breakfast with an old and dear friend, Armin Lehmann. At the age of sixteen, Armin was the Hitler Youth courier who handed to Adolf Hitler the papers that caused Hitler to commit suicide two days later. Armin was there when the suicide happened. He was there when Josef and Magda Goebbels poisoned their six children and then committed suicide. He watched it all. If you see the movie "Downfall [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RCPUC/ref=nosim/thomhartmann/ ]," you'll see a teenage actor depicting my friend Armin.
Armin and I first met in 1984 when we were paired up by a marketing/training company to lecture in Amsterdam (and, later, many other cities) to teach advertising, marketing, and communications for American Express and KLM. I had no idea he had been Hitler's last courier, or that he would later write a book about it titled In Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer's Last Days [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592285783/ ]. We were friends for 15 years before he told me of his experiences. Armin is now a tireless campaigner for world peace [ http://www.arminlehmannforpeace.com/ ].
Armin's revelation to me about his past came when an old friend of mine and I set out to write a book about the religion -- the cult -- of the Nazis. Scott and I traveled all across Europe, interviewing people from Dr. Wilfried Daim [ http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.d/d016470.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dwilfried%2Bdaim%2Bder%2Bmann%2Bder%2Bhitler%2Bdie%2Bideen%2Bgab%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DDVXA,DVXA:2005-21,DVXA:en ], the author of the ground-breaking book "Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab [ http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3320016806/ ]" ("The Man Who Gave Hitler The Idea") about Georg Lanz von Liebenfels [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%c3%b6rg_Lanz_von_Liebenfels ], to the hereditary ruler of one of Europe's smaller constitutional monarchies who shared shocking but background-only stories with us. We snuck into and photographed the altar in an old castle where Hitler initiated his inner circle, still kept pristine but largely unknown in Germany, near an SS cemetery where every week fresh-cut flowers appear and the tombstones are regularly polished to a high gloss. We infiltrated a meeting of aging SS members, complete with black candles and wreaths hung from the ceiling, near Wewelsburg, a city in Germany that Hitler intended to turn into his Vatican for his Thousand Years of Peace. On our way into the meeting, we passed a house decorated with ancient runes and human skulls. When discovered, we fled fearing for our lives. (Scott and I ended up not finishing the book after several unsettling and threatening experiences. I decided it would be less dangerous and more productive to investigate and write a book about the Kennedy assassination [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786714417/ref=nosim/thomhartmann/ ].)
Years before that (1978), I'd met a former Nazi who so impressed me with his commitment to peace and his deep spirituality (much learned from his Hasidic mentor, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust) that I wrote a book about him titled "The Prophet's Way [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0892811986/ ]." (It's also available in German [ http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/392863271X/ ].) In the years I lived in Germany (1986/87), I met and got to know at least two-dozen elderly Germans who hated Hitler, who loved Hitler, and every shade in between.
I preface this review of Milton Mayer's book with all this personal and historical/reference information by way of hopefully establishing enough credibility in your mind to make a simple statement:
It could happen here, too.
This was also Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Nazis. An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant reporter, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 Nazis. This book is, in large part, his story of that experience. Intertwined through it -- written in 1955 -- are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans -- us, today.
Mayer opens the book by noting that he was prepared to hate the Nazis he would meet. But, he wrote, he discovered they were just as human as the rest of us:
I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten [Nazi] friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before [in the 1930s]. I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine.
He writes about how if he were to die tonight, at least he could look back on some good he had done. But his Nazi friends would never be able to die in peace, knowing the evil they had participated in, if even by acts of omission, could never be wiped clean. And he dreaded that Americans would ever feel the same for the acts we may one day commit as a nation.
Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.
If I - and my countrymen - ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.
One of his closing chapters, "Peoria Uber Alles," is so poignant and prescient that were Mayer still alive today I doubt he could read it out loud without his voice breaking. It's the story of how what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria, Illinois, particularly if the city were to become isolationistic and suffered some sort of natural or man-made disaster or attack that threw its people into the warm but deadly embrace of authoritarianism.
The [Peorian] individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, it's first function the preservation of all its members. Every normal personality of the day becomes an 'authoritarian personality.' A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 percent or so of the population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.
Among Mayer's stories are some of the most telling aspects of how the Nazis came to take over Germany (and much of Europe). I first quoted them a year ago in a Common Dreams article linked from BuzzFlash titled The Myth of National Victimhood [ http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1220-20.htm ]. I noted that Mayer told how one of his friends said:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....
As a friend of Mayer's noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
In this conversation, Mayer's friend suggests that he wasn't making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but simply pointing out an undisputable reality. This, he suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.
"Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. ...
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God." ...
Mayer's friend pointed out the terrible challenge faced then by average Germans, and today by peoples across the world, as governments are taken over by authoritarian, corporatist -- fascist -- regimes.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?" Mayer's friend asked rhetorically. And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, he had to candidly answer: "Frankly, I do not know."
This was the great problem that Mayer's Nazis and so many in their day faced.
As Mayer's Nazi friend noted, "I do not see, even now [how we could have stopped it]. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?"
Former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen tells me that he was ordered to always have at least two conservatives on the Donahue show whenever one liberal appeared, "and three conservatives to Michael Moore."
Hundreds of hours a day of right-wing programming pour out of radio stations nationwide, and conservative extremists are the most common "guests" and "experts" on network news and weekend political TV shows.
The 2004 election may have been stolen with massive nationwide fraud -- the statistics in New Mexico, Ohio, and Florida are truly startling -- and Alliance for Democracy lawyer Cliff Arnebeck has filed a lawsuit [ http://joeorgren.com/MossvBush1.pdf ] against Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al, suggesting that Kerry actually won Ohio. The story was only covered in any depth by C-SPAN [ rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04_wj120204_arnebeck.rm ].
The possibility that the election of 2002 was also stolen -- particularly in Georgia, where Max Cleland losing his seat to Saxby Chambliss gave Republicans control of the Senate -- has never been seriously investigated. There is no paper trail from that election, as it was entirely done on paperless voting machines.
And when a consortium of news organizations recounted the Florida 2000 vote and it was found that Al Gore actually won the entire state -- and thus the presidency -- no matter what standard was used to count the ballots, the corporate news organizations of America buried the story (although the New York Times and Washington Post at least did report it).
Our Attorney General calls the Geneva Conventions "quaint"; our Secretary of Defense stands accused of ordering torture; our President and Vice President knowingly lie to us and the world in order to lead an election-year preemptive war; and Congress passes the PATRIOT Act without reading it -- eerily like the German Parliament [ http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-08.htm ] passed the Enabling Acts after the Reichstag was burned.
So how to counter it?
As Mayer so movingly narrates, the experience of 20th century Europe demonstrates that those abusing power must be confronted with equally vigorous power.
In the 1930s, Germans who believed in republican democracy were overwhelmed before they realized how completely their civil liberties and national institutions had been seized.
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
---
A few weeks ago, someone on alt.activism asked who said these words and what had happened to him. First, the version above is taken from an article on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of WW II that appeared in TIME Magazine, Aug 28, 1989. There are many versions of this poem floating around... by no means is this the authorative one. Similarly, the author of the poem is often not mentioned. On one level, that is not important. Indeed, Martin Niemoller was an outspoken advocate for accepting the burden of collective guilt for WW II as a means of atonement for the suffering that the German nation (through the Nazis) had caused before and during WW II.
On the other hand, I think that something is missed if one doesn’t understand that the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”
Niemoller was tainted. He had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model... for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32]
But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod, which produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.
From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistantly trashed everything the Nazis stood for. At one point he declared that it was impossible to “point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to.” [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict]
He rejected the Nazi distortion of “Positive Christianity” (postulating the ‘special virtue’ of the German people), as opposed to “Negative Chistianity” which held that all people regardless of race were guilty of sin and in need of repentance. An excerpt from a sermon of his printed in TIME Magazine [Feb 21, 1938, pg 25-27]:
“I cannot help saying quite harshly and bluntly that the Jewish people came to grief and disgrace because of its own ‘Positive Christianity!’ It [the Jewish people] bears a curse throughout the history of the world because it was ready to approve of its Messiah just as long and as far as it thought it could gain some advantage for its own plans and its own aims for Him, His words and His deeds. It bears a curse, because it rejected Him and resisted Him to the death when it became clear that Jesus of Nazareth would not cease calling [the Jews] to repentance and faith, despite their insistence that they were free, strong and proud men and belonged to a pure-blooded, race-concious nation!
“‘Positive Christianity,’ which the Jewish people wanted, clashed with ‘Negative Christianity’ as jesus himself represented it!... Friends, can we risk going with our nation without forgiveness of sins, without that so-called ‘Negative Christianity’ which, when all is said and done, clings in repentence and faith to Jesus as the Savior of sinners? I cannot and you cannot and our nation cannot! ‘Come let us return to the Lord!’”
And in a celebrated manifesto, produced and smuggled out of the country in classic Charter-77 style, and reprinted in the foreign press just prior to the 1936 Olympics, he along with 9 other pastors wrote to Hitler:
“Our people are trying to break the bond set by God. That is human conceit rising against God. In this connection we must warn the Führer, that the adoration frequently bestowed on him is only due to God. Some years ago the Führer objected to having his picture placed on Protestant altars. Today his thoughts are used as a basis not only for political decisions but also for morality and law. He himself is surrounded with the dignity of a priest and even of an intermediary between God and man... We ask that liberty be given to our people to go their way in the future under the sign of the Cross of Christ, in order that our grandsons may not curse their elders on the ground that their elders left them a state on earth that closed to them the Kingdom of God.” [from TIME Magazine July 27, 1936]
---
Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. [from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]
---
After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know... He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from the Encyclopedia Britannica].
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