Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMust read new book: The Reichstag Warning
The Reichstag WarningTimothy Snyder
Aspiring tyrants have learned that acts of terrorreal or fake, provoked or accidentalcan provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.
On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. There will be no mercy now, he exulted. Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.
The next day, at Hitlers advice and urging, the German president issued a decree for the protection of the people and the state. It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to preventative detention by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an enabling act that allowed Hitler to rule by decree.
After 1933, the Nazi regime made use of a supposed threat of terrorism against Germans from an imaginary international Jewish conspiracy. After five years of repressing Jews, in 1938 the German state began to deport them. On October 27 of that year, the German police arrested about 17,000 Jews from Poland and deported them across the Polish border. A young man named Herschel Grynszpan, sent to Paris by his parents, received a desperate postcard from his sister after his family was forced across the Polish border. He bought a gun, went to the German embassy, and shot a German diplomat. He called this an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people. Nazi propagandists presented it as evidence of an international Jewish conspiracy preparing a terror campaign against the entire German people. Josef Goebbels used it as the pretext to organize the events we remember as Kristallnacht, a massive national pogrom of Jews that left hundreds dead.
ADVERTISING
The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises on some favorable emergency. What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.
New York Review of Books.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/26/reichstag-fire-manipulating-terror-to-end-democracy/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20War%20Guge%20Reichstag&utm_content=NYR%20War%20Guge%20Reichstag+CID_0964e874b8d6dff50ac402e293febfc7&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The%20Reichstag%20Warning
InfoView thread info, including edit history
TrashPut this thread in your Trash Can (My DU » Trash Can)
BookmarkAdd this thread to your Bookmarks (My DU » Bookmarks)
6 replies, 1657 views
ShareGet links to this post and/or share on social media
AlertAlert this post for a rule violation
PowersThere are no powers you can use on this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
ReplyReply to this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
Rec (21)
ReplyReply to this post
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Must read new book: The Reichstag Warning (Original Post)
hedda_foil
Feb 2017
OP
pangaia
(24,324 posts)1. Hey..it is now Feb 27 est
Tiggeroshii
(11,088 posts)3. This article might make you feel better
That same series of events truly is not likely to happen here, at least not in the same way for a variety of different reasons.
https://www.quora.com/Can-Donald-Trump-do-to-America-what-Adolf-Hitler-did-to-Germany
I say this with deep hesitancy and cautious optimism, of course...
pangaia
(24,324 posts)6. The writer of this article is, in my opinion,
extremely literal, simplistic and extraordinarily naive.
burrowowl
(17,606 posts)4. K&R!!!!!!
C Moon
(12,188 posts)5. And with internet fingerprints, it would be easier than ever to round up the "subversives."