I *used* to wonder how Germany got to the point that Hitler could do so much harm

[Horse with no Name]

I don't wonder anymore.

We see it everyday.

It is "us vs. them". Sometimes the "us" is Democrats, sometimes the "us" is workers, sometimes the "us" is citizens, etc.


BUT the consistency is that the "them" is ALWAYS the monied class. And make no mistake, that DOES include our government--there is a small fistful of exceptions--but it is getting smaller each election cycle as more and more money from the elite are allowed to influence the election cycle. Money which comes DIRECTLY out of our pocket and into the pockets of the government VIA the tax breaks for the wealthy.

I don't ask anymore "can this happen here?"...I simply ask...when.

[Drale]

1. The people in Germany where more desperate

there was no push back against Hitler and the Nazi's like there currently is and will continue to be here.

[matt819]

12. Really, you see pushback?

The protest in Madison? Maybe. But it won't be sustained, and it won't be repeated elsewhere. And as long as there's no leadership from the left, the beat down will continue. So, sure, the polls show decreased support for republicans in Wisconsin, but I'll make you a bet. If an election were held tomorrow, the republicans would win, because, yes, people really are that stupid.

[Drale]

14. Ok negative nancy

This is why nothing ever gets done, because everyone says o nothings going to get done lets just give up. If there was an election tomorrow republicans would get destroyed because no union will ever back a republican ever again.

[ellenfl]

18. peter king is making sure no Muslim will either.

i would also bet that your average lower and middle class parent watching their kids get the short end of the stick will not vote repub next time.

ellen fl

[Proud Liberal Dem]

31. What about Indiana?

Our Democratic lawmakers walked out in protest to kill the Republican initiated "right-to-work" legislation, as well as some other radical initiatives and there have been protests here at the State capitol. Walker's "victory" will almost certainly end up being a pyrrhic victory for him and the outrage generated by the whole situation should help build some momentum for the recall effort against Walker and other Republican legislators that's been initiated there. There's also 2012 and the momentum that has been generated may help sweep the Republicans out of power in the legislatures of Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, etc. This particular battle might have been lost but the "war" isn't over. Keep the faith.

[OutNow]

15. Lots of push back against Hitler

While Hitler's street fighters came from the ranks of the unemployed ex-army and small businesses that were crushed by runaway inflation, the Communists and unionists and, to a smaller degree, the Socialists fought back in the streets - bloody battles back and forth while the weak Wiemar Republic police mostly looked on. I'm not talking about peaceful demonstrations with signs and words, I'm talking about swords and pistols and rifles. If you really think what happened in Madison this week is as bad as it can get, watch out. It can, and may, as we slide towards fasicsm, get much worse. Even by the strandards of US Labor history, it has been much worse. The rich, often with the aid of the state and sometimes without it, have been beating and killing and jailing and starving and blacklisting the working people of this country for hundreds of years. One interesting note from the current struggle - both sides have mentioned the collective bargaining agreement in Wisconsin and a 50 year period of labor peace. The peace is now over, but you should consider what the situation was before 50 years ago.

Yes, let's fight back. We have no choice.

[PDJane]

2. It is a personal opinion

That the US is a police state, or well on the way to being so.

[FiveGoodMen]

3. Emmanuel Goldstein lives!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein

If you don't have a convenient enemy, just create one.

[RKP5637]

4. We have so many, each day the GOP invents another. It's hard to keep

track of which person, group or country we are currently supposed to hate and/or fear.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

7. They have big corporations who hire people to think up these things

[Bandit]

32. One thing they do not waver on though is their hatred for Liberals.

We are a threat to them because we advocate for fairness. That is not the American way. It wasn't through fairness that the billionaires got to be so. Republicans are ruthless and it is their prime value.. Anyone that opposes that is an enemy.

[kctim]

35. You are a threat to them

because your idea of fairness differs from their idea of fairness.
You see each other as enemies because that is easier than respecting the right of others to hold differing beliefs.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. I stopped asking that question in 2002, with the USPA

I read it... blood ran cold... been fighting ever since.

[Warpy]

6. People stopped asking that question when Stupid got rigged in

After that, everybody knew.

[lovuian]

8. I apologized to my relatives in Germany because I understand

how Hitler took over the country

we are having the same thing done here

the playbook is identical ...

I'm thinking that Muslims Union workers Democrats will be the ones wearing the star on our papers

[FiveGoodMen]

9. And yet, when some of us tried to warn of the similarities

we got god-damned, motherfucking Godwin thrown in our faces.

Those who can't talk about history are also condemned to repeat it.

[truebrit71]

29. +1000

n/t

[glinda]

33. My grandmother told me how they created hatred of Jews in Poland. First they had

opened their arms to Jews so they could work and have a life, then the Poles, when they needed work, were convinced they were taken advantage of by the Jews, then they began to hate the Jews. Some of them anyways. Some died alongside them in chambers.
Just a regular propaganda hate-fest.

[Curmudgeoness]

10. Hitler didn't look like such a bad guy at first.

He instilled a patriotic fervor in the people. He promised prosperity. And by the time he showed his dark side, it was too late. Let's not let it happen here.

[FiveGoodMen]

13. "He instilled a patriotic fervor in the people"

One of the worst acts a human can commit is to drive large numbers of his fellows to the last refuge of a scoundrel.

[steve2470]

11. When DU gets shut down, *then* we'll be allowed to call it fascist.

Hopefully we'll never see that day.

[MedleyMisty]

17. Not when nearly everything they do is fascist, though?

I'm reading a book titled Everyday Life in the Third Reich right now. The Nazis treated workers the same way our corporate government does - including busting the unions and driving down wages and increasing work hours and all that. And hey - aren't we having hearings about radical Muslims right now? I saw a YouTube video of a group of Tea Partiers shouting hate to a group of Muslim children. And I think the prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib would not say we were the most humane of people.

The Germans did not go to sleep in a nice fluffy democracy and wake up in 1944, full on fascist with death camps. It happened gradually, and if we can't call it out now, when all the signs are so clearly pointing to it, how are we supposed to stop it from getting to that point? Admitting the problem is half the battle.

[sabrina 1]

22. People in Germany had the same attitude when they felt

as one historian who was there, put it 'uncomfortable about some of the things that were happening' but, he said, 'things weren't so bad so we set aside those feelings'. If only they had acted on those 'uncomfortable feelings'!

'It happened incrementally' he said. Just as it's happening here.

Either we wait as they did, until it's too late, or we deal with the 'uncofortable feelings' while we still can.

[PATRICK]

24. "Uncomfortable feelings"

Strange that a whole of people I know had those feelings in the Bush Fraud years. What we also had was a lot of informed factual and historical debate essentially about the appropriateness of the Hitler analogy. Well, it was a lot more than an analogy with even some names(like Bush) having the taint of collaboration with Nazis(putting it kindly even so). And it was a lot more than Hitler who was the product of larger corporate forces anointing monsters to mirror their dark goals, a plague that can be traced to the roots of elitist human evil for power and greed through the ages. Bush proved you don't need a skill set with the kind of unity that kind of evil provides. You just sit back and push buttons like the innocent consumer does a TV remote.

Howard Dean was recently quoted as eerily accurate about the eventual 100% failure of the public school system under the NCLB fraud. Under Arne it is now 82%. Prophetic? it was easy. The facts were easy. The intent was easy. The collaboration of witless decent people was too easy. Everything proposed by win win witless RW extremists is easy to see as it runs unopposed down the greased tracks of our elite owned systems. Only having the "leadership" Dems continuing to try to make this work(arguably the most insane attitude of all) has made fish in the barrel seem hard to hit.

Move over Germans. The shame of the American nation sticking its grinning head into a disposal unit is vastly more inexcusable, more varied and absent just about any organized faction that would create violence or extreme confrontation of any sort, presumably for the simple reason we have had it good enough for long enough to be socially lobotomized to reality. The reality being that actual people responsible for the threat to humanity are the same people with the same club rules and initiation rites, the same corporations and money vaults from which apex the whole of human life is crushed under its own silly, unsustainable pyramid scam.

Watching, angrily WWII films of people being crushed by Nazis I imagined fighting and killing the SOB's in the underground, little understanding the vital role of corporate leaders in enabling human scum to run roughshod over all that it good, true and holy. My father, decades ago told me a lot about those open secrets(ones that media slides off to the side on then forgets)of corporate uber committees locally bringing in German "soldiers" to settle farmlands and turn the rural area red and rich around the rising fortunes of the urban worker class. Later, more particularly, it was revealed that Nazis were working for the government in such a way that "pragmatic" jerks in the leadership were dangerously conned to profound and idiotic divisions. Some who worked and funded the already death camp financed Bush family elections showed clearly what the intent was of not so gullible realists for who human misery, hate and despair was so much pocket change for the toll booths of privilege- and domination.

Now I am much older, much less frisky about violence, especially when the first results are ever somewhat powerless and ignorant schmucks trying to cut through the ranks of even more ignorant but better armed schmucks with never a prospect at reaching those corporate jets who will live to fight another day. Too much morality? Too much knowledge? Too much isolation from the huddled masses yearning to be not bothered? Here I am. And there they are, all the tools and fools and ghouls causing the deaths of millions every year and dooming the destiny of most if not all human on this planet. If Homeland Security came at night for my neighbors would it be an act of bravery just to rubberneck, raise verbal confrontation etc. to the same awesomely incremental level of protesting absolute power?

Well, I do belong to an underground here of sorts, who can't even agree that the useful tools who would obviously(and you have to know it somewhere in the depths of rationalizations) be swept into humiliating career oblivion and shame by a an uprising against injustice are not doing anything but dampening the absolute need for (hah) a change a rational, passionate human can believe in. Maybe, as in the movies, the only thing to do is make an outcry and die until enough people die to make the fortune 666 back off- for a while.

[MadMaddie]

16. I believe History is a valuable tool to show us what could

happen in the future.

Anytime this topic is brought up people wave their hands and say ohhhhh we can't talk about it. Naomi Klein detailed in her book how 3rd world countries were destroyed by the same people that are trying to destroy us.....and only a few people paid attention.

This attack on the middle class was planned and they feel emboldened.....We need to stop it.

[RKP5637]

20. Exactly, it's all part of a plan and well planned. I have no idea where it's

stopping, but it is dangerous and evil. It's the same pattern, same type of people, similar agendas, just the names, geographies and calendars have changed. And all this in a dumbed down country.

[sabrina 1]

19. Said exactly the same thing recently in a comment.

It's no longer the mystery it used to be to me how Germany happened.

[Horse with no Name]

21. It's sobering, isn't it? n/t

[BigBearJohn]

23. Well said and thanks for writing it.

[opihimoimoi]

25. Its amazing to review German History 1920 to 1945...how a very smart people got tied up with

a very dumb man..

He was good at speechifying, gestures, timing, verbage, etc

but dumb as rocks when it came to war

He violated Sun Tzu principle of Soverigns not interferring with Generals....

Hitler...i suspect did not play chess...

[Jamastiene]

26. I feel the same way.

I used to ask my aunt how people allowed that to happen and she always told me it could happen anywhere, because people fall for too easily. I never believed it could happen here. I was wrong.

K&R

[MadHound]

27. We've been seeing it for awhile now,

I remember talking with several Germans who suffered under Hitler, and back in the late eighties, early nineties they were stating how the US was reminding them more and more of pre-war Germany.

[rucky]

28. Keeping a close eye on Michigan

future home of the full-frontal Fascist clampdown.

[Ghost of Tom Joad]

30. Don't forget German exceptionalism

something we hear about all the time from the right wing about American exceptional-ism. I think Hitler told the Germans they were exceptional and Jews, Gypsies, gays and all the others were ruining the gene pool and must be eliminated.

[glinda]

34. Weltanschauungen

[slackmaster]

36. About 60% of the European ancestors of European-Americans were German

In my case it's nearly 100%.

You can run away from oppression, but you can't leave every trace of your culture or group psyche behind.

[Zorra]

37. I believe that the majority of american conservatives would gas me

in a New York minute if given the circumstances, opportunity, and orders to do so.

It wasn't liberals out murdering Jewish folks in Germany, it wasn't liberals burning heretics and witches during the Inquisition and during other periods of violent craziness, it wasn't liberals out there on the Crusades, it wasn't liberals in those hoods lynching black folks. It's not liberals that attacked the WTC on 9/11, it was conservative fundamentlist Muslim nutjobs

It's always conservatives that commit these atrocities. It is the nature of the conservative beast, no matter what religion or era or geographical region they are of or from, that drives them to hate and kill when they have enough power and a powerful insane leader to idolize and take their marching orders from.

Even after the War, many conservatives quietly believed that Hitler did the right thing.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative" John Stuart Mill

[MadMaddie]

45. Well said!

The Peter King fiasco is a perfect example of withchunts even though FBI records prove that there have been more Right Wing terrorist attacks on Americans on American soil.....King focuses on Muslims...

[unblock]

38. some won't see ANY hitler parallels unless and until they actually start killing jews.

but of course, they're smart enough to avoid swastikas (for the most part) and square mustaches and all they are careful to stick a "judeo-" in front of their christian bigotry.

they could implement the EXACT same policies in terms of the government's relationships with corporations, the rights of workers, the rights of parties, freedoms of speech, search, assembly, speedy trials, due process, and on and on. and many here would never note it.

denial is a powerful thing. and greed and fear are powerful enforcers of denial. and republicans are masters at stoking all of that. as was hitler....

[Prophet 451]

39. It's never been too hard to understand

All it's ever taken is a mixture of desperation, feeling victimised (which is entirely different from being victimised), a convienient scapegoat, a little myth-making... It's not too hard to do. Democracy, fairness, these have never been natural conditions and so, they must always be fought for. The biggest mistake of Americans was to assume it couldn't happen to them.

[BrklynLiberal]

40. "They Thought They were Free"

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"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 not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

<snip>

"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.

<snip>

Much more thought provoking writing at the link

[steve2470]

44. excellent post, thanks nt

[XanaDUer]

41. The Treaty of Versailles

has a good explanation of events that led up to Hitler being elected in 1933.

[JuniperLea]

42. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the books...

The warmongers and hatemongers and moneychangers have fleeced us all and are framing the situation in such a way to make us battle over mere crumbs.

[defendandprotect]

43. +1000%

There is only one way the right wing can rise and that's via political violence --

that was true in Germany/Hitler and it's true here in America where we've had more

than 50+ years of out in the open right wing political violence --

stolen elections, of course --

and rw lies played over and again in 24/7 propaganda