Here We Go... Again?

January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He accomplished this by dividing the population, intimidating the public with political terrorism (using the Sturmabteilung, the “Brownshirts”), blaming every problem and misery (even a worldwide depression) on the administration in power (Weimar), and scapegoating Jews for the ills of Germany society.

Hitler made lots of promises to the German people to gain the trust of a small majority of the voting public. He held subsequent elections, but violent intimidation and fraud played prominent roles in each one. His Ministry of Propaganda took over all media and pushed only the narratives the Party wanted the public to believe. He exploited a tragedy, the Reichstag fire (which the Nazis may have started), to institute an “Enabling Act” which superseded all civil liberties and laws and undercut the power of the Reichstag to pass and enact laws.

Having used the Enabling Act to make the Reichstag irrelevant, Hitler ruled by decree. Through decree, he imprisoned those who posed a “threat” to national security. He stripped his favorite scapegoats, the Jews, of their rights. Under Hitler, the State took over and controlled where citizens worked, their wages, and their jobs. The State-controlled who citizens could associate with. The State-controlled who could marry whom. The State-controlled what lives were worth allowing continuing. The State-controlled the information the citizens could have access to.

State spending went wild. The nation was pouring money into its military because Hitler had a specific agenda of conquest. He led through an ideology of power, force, threat, and hate. Very quickly, Germany was facing a financial crisis. Hitler placated the public with free education, health care, and vacations.

The following quotation is from a book which explores the parallels between modern America and pre-WW2 Germany:

“The American people may oppose the nation’s present course, but by themselves the people cannot change it. They may oppose the taxes and the bureaucrats, but these are merely consequences, which cannot be significantly cut back so long as their source is untouched. The people may curse ‘big government’ in general – but to no avail if the pressure groups among them, following the logic of a mixed economy, continue to be fruitful and to multiply. The people may ‘swing to the right,’ but it is futile, if the leaders of the right are swinging to their own… brand of statism. The country may throw the rascals out, but it means nothing if the next administration is made of neo-rascals from the other party…”

“As government controls and the power of political pull have soared, many Americans have come to feel – some reluctantly, others righteously – that survival requires identification with a group, which can serve as one’s refuge in an uncertain world, one’s protector from the other groups, and one’s lobbyist in Washington. The easiest group to form or to join is one defined by race…”

“This is the emergence in the United States of the most primitive form of collectivism, the form endemic to backward cultures (and to controlled economies): tribal racism. Racism is what takes over anywhere – wherever the knowledge of the nature and possibilities of man, man the individual, has not yet been grasped, or is being battered into oblivion.”

Leonard Peikoff, THE OMINOUS PARALLELS - The End of Freedom in America, 1982

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