Biden’s Reichstag Fire

Joe Biden has chosen the autocrat’s tactic of marginalization of large segments of the American population; an action which can be the first step in a tragic spiral of violence and destruction.

I’ve always detested people who make facile comparisons of anything that goes on in the U.S. to the manifold horrors of Nazi Germany. The freedoms and privileges we’ve enjoyed in this extraordinary nation made even the worst problems we’ve experienced pale in comparison to the brutality and death perpetrated by the Third Reich. To my mind, drawing parallels between them is a cheap, insulting, and wholly illegitimate way of gaining quick attention.

However, the MAGA+FASCIST= JANUARY 6th phony equation now emanating from Joe Biden and his party -- even going to the obscene length of enlisting the recent solemn remembrance of the 9/11 nightmare -- oblige me to ask the reader’s indulgence while I tread upon my own rule.

The Dems comparisons of January 6th to 9/11 would be merely preposterous if it were not so morally disgusting; their strained attempts to make the D.C. riot of January 6, 2021 and the resulting trespasses upon the Capitol building into a seminal, earth-shaking event require them to take mendacity to new depths.

In fact, there is an historical event that’s somewhat closer to the mark, but it’s one that every Democrat would be loath to recognize: for purely naked political purposes Biden and many Democrats are trying to make January 6th into some poor facsimile of the Reichstag Fire.

“The number of prisoners in 1933–1934 is difficult to determine; historian Jane Caplan estimated it at 50,000, with arrests perhaps exceeding 100,000. Eighty percent of prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany and ten percent members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Many prisoners were released in late 1933, and after a Christmas amnesty, there were only a few dozen camps left.”

“Believing Nazi Germany to be imperiled by internal enemies, Himmler called for a war against the ‘organized elements of sub-humanity’, including communists, socialists, Jews, Freemasons, and criminals. Himmler won Hitler’s backing and was appointed Chief of German Police on 17 June 1936. Of the six SS camps operational as of mid-1936, only two (Dachau and Lichtenburg) still existed by 1938. In the place of the camps that closed down, Eicke opened new camps at Sachsenhausen (September 1936) and Buchenwald (July 1937). Unlike earlier camps, the newly opened camps were purpose-built, isolated from the population and the rule of law, enabling the SS to exert absolute power. Prisoners, who previously wore civilian clothes, were forced to wear uniforms with Nazi concentration camp badges. The number of prisoners began to rise again, from 4,761 on 1 November 1936 to 7,750 by the end of 1937.”

“By the end of June 1938, the prisoner population had expanded threefold in the previous six months, to 24,000 prisoners. The increase was fueled by arrests of those considered habitual criminals or asocials. According to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the ‘criminal’ prisoners at concentration camps needed to be isolated from society because they had committed offenses of a sexual or violent nature. In fact, most of the criminal prisoners were working-class men who had resorted to petty theft to support their families. Nazi raids of perceived asocials, including the arrest of 10,000 people in June 1938, targeted homeless people and the mentally ill, as well as the unemployed. Although the Nazis had previously targeted social outsiders, the influx of new prisoners meant that political prisoners became a minority.”

“Political prisoners were also arrested in larger numbers, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and German émigrés who returned home. Czech and Austrian anti-Nazis were arrested after the annexation of their countries in 1938 and 1939. Jews were also increasingly targeted, with 2,000 Viennese Jews arrested after the Nazi annexation. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, 26,000 Jewish men were deported to concentration camps following mass arrests, overwhelming the capacity of the system. These prisoners were subject to unprecedented abuse leading to hundreds of deaths—more people died at Dachau in the four months after Kristallnacht than in the previous five years. Most of the Jewish prisoners were soon released, often after promising to emigrate.”

“...Auschwitz (June 1940), which initially operated as a concentration camp for Polish resistance activists”

“In April 1941, the high command of the SS ordered the murder of ill and exhausted prisoners who could no longer work (especially those deemed racially inferior). Victims were selected by camp personnel or traveling doctors, and were removed from the camps to be murdered in euthanasia centers.”

“Beginning in August 1941, selected Soviet prisoners of war were killed within the concentration camps, usually within a few days of their arrival. By mid-1942, when the operation finished, at least 34,000 Soviet prisoners had been murdered. At Auschwitz, the SS used Zyklon B to kill Soviet prisoners in improvised gas chambers.”

“During the second half of the war, Auschwitz swelled in size—fueled by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews—and became the center of the camp system. It was the deadliest concentration camp and Jews sent there faced a virtual death sentence even if they were not immediately killed, as most were.”

“During the height of the Holocaust from 1941 to 1943, the Jewish population of the concentration camps was low. Extermination camps for the mass murder of Jews—Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were set up outside the concentration camp system. The existing IKL camps Auschwitz and Majdanek gained additional function as extermination camps.”

“In addition to the registered prisoners who died, a million Jews were gassed upon arriving in Auschwitz; including these victims, the total death toll is estimated at 1.8 to more than two million. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps

“The Wannsee Conference ... was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered.”

“By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries.”

“On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring gave written authorization to SS-Obergruppenführer (Senior Group Leader) Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for a ‘total solution of the Jewish question’ in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, including nearly three million in Ukraine.

“In addition to eliminating Jews, the Nazis also planned to reduce the population of the conquered territories by 30 million people through starvation in an action called the Hunger Plan devised by Herbert Backe.”

“According to the historian Timothy Snyder, ‘4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) were starved’ by the Nazis (and the Nazi-controlled Wehrmacht) in 1941–1944 as a result of Backe’s plan.”

“At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union had already been underway for some months. Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Einsatzgruppen were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941, Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute Comintern officials, ranking members of the Communist Party, extremist and radical Communist Party members, people’s commissars, and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute ‘other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)’. He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged. On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. By August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed. The initial plan was to implement Generalplan Ost after the conquest of the Soviet Union. European Jews would be deported to occupied parts of Russia, where they would be worked to death in road-building projects.”

“Estonia is listed as Judenfrei (free of Jews), since the 4,500 Jews who remained in Estonia after the German occupation had been exterminated by the end of 1941.”

“Heydrich opened the conference with an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. He said that between 1933 and October 1941, 537,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had emigrated. This information was taken from a briefing paper prepared for him the previous week by Eichmann.

“Heydrich reported that there were approximately eleven million Jews in the whole of Europe, of whom half were in countries not under German control. He explained that since further Jewish emigration had been prohibited by Himmler, a new solution would take its place: ‘evacuating’ Jews to the east. This would be a temporary solution, a step towards the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

“The hatred is clear. I can hardly wait to see what comes next.”

Do your absolute best to remain at peace. Any civil war will be very bloody.

“Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.

“The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and murders carried out in the Kansas Territory and neighboring Missouri by pro-slavery ‘border ruffians’ and anti-slavery ‘free-staters’. According to Kansapedia of the Kansas Historical Society, there were 56 documented political killings during the period, and the total may be as high as 200. It has been called a Tragic Prelude, or an overture, to the American Civil War which immediately followed it.”

“The conflict was fought politically as well as between civilians, where it eventually degenerated into brutal gang violence and paramilitary guerrilla warfare.”

“immigrants supporting both sides of the slavery question arrived in the Kansas Territory to establish residency and gain the right to vote. Among the first settlers of Kansas were citizens of slave states, especially Missouri, many of whom strongly supported Southern ideologies and emigrated to Kansas specifically to assist the expansion of slavery. Pro-slavery immigrants settled towns, including Leavenworth and Atchison. The administration of President Franklin Pierce appointed territorial officials in Kansas aligned with its own pro-slavery views and, heeding rumors that the frontier was being overwhelmed by Northerners, thousands of non-resident slavery proponents soon entered Kansas with the goal of influencing local politics. Pro-slavery factions thereby captured many early territorial elections, often by fraud and intimidation. In November 1854, thousands of armed pro-slavery men known as ‘Border Ruffians’ or ‘Southern Yankees’, mostly from Missouri, poured into the Kansas Territory and swayed the vote in the election for a non-voting delegate to Congress in favor of pro-slavery Democratic candidate John Wilkins Whitfield. The following year, a congressional committee investigating the election reported that 1,729 fraudulent votes were cast compared to 1,114 legal votes. In one location, only 20 of the 604 voters were residents of the Kansas Territory; in another, 35 were residents and 226 non-residents.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas

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