The World At War: A New Germany

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party...

We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself...

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases.

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution."

Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the US, The Danger of American Fascism

Feed your anger with fear and pride. Make the deal with the devil if you will. The time for thinking and compromise is over, the time for action is here, they will say.

But remember. The madness will serve none but itself, and its appetite for pain and misery is insatiable. After it devours your so-called enemies, it will come for you.

Chris Hedges: The Careerists and the Banality of Evil - The Sickness Unto Death

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

The consciousless functionary guided by expediency is the very image of the regulatory and banking bureaucrat of today, from Tim Geithner to Gary Gensler to Ben Bernanke, and further, almost every member of the governments of the Western World. Expedient amorality is de rigeur these days among the entitled class of power brokers who serve the system, which in their minds is themselves, as a privileged, ruling class.

And it is that very dryness of human empathy, the lack of vigor in moral conviction, the willingness to accept great crimes and injustices as the unfortunate but "necessary outcomes" required by The System, that makes all the difference between a Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Barack H. Obama, between a living human being and a whited sepulchre full of dead men's bones.

After a time it becomes so easy to day, 'I am sorry madam, but the system requires that your child must die.' And so the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

This is not capitalism.  Capitalism does not demand that we destroy human lives for the sake of maximizing profits using any and all means which that end justifies.  The Market is not an end to itself. The Market is not God.  This is beyond capitalism.  This is tyranny.  It is a pernicious form of selfishness and self-indulgence, a privileged arrogance.

To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, 'The modern economist is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior justification for selfishness.'

And this is not a choice between poverty for the sake of truth and a very comfortable living, but the overwhelming need for a fabulous, ostentatious wealth and power that seems to have become the god of  this generation.   And it is a sickness, a sickness unto death.

TruthDig
The Careerists
By Chris Hedges
Jul 23, 2012

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.

Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.

David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”

Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.

In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:

“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream..."

Read the rest here.

Choose your loyalty wisely, because you may be spending a very long time with what you serve. And even if it is not a conscious choice of the moment, what you do, or do not, determines to whom you belong.

"Know you not, that to whom you yield yourselves as servants to obey, his servants you are; whether of a corruption unto death, or of a righteousness unto life?"

It is not surprising that people sell themselves so badly, but rather that they also do it so cheaply.

In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky

"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky


"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.

In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.

It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work. It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war.

The abstention from the solution of human problems by brute force is the task today as it was then.

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956

In memory of Carl von Ossietzky, an investigative journalist and editor of Die Weltbühne who died in hospital in Gestapo custody after being held in various prisons and concentration camps.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. The award was controversial because von Ossietzky had been imprisoned for revealing the illegal steps the German government had been taking to rearm militarily.

There are those who believe that no matter what a country may do, it is the duty of its citizens to obey their laws without objection. And there are those who hold the primacy of natural law and private conscience and moral duty to resist evil even when it has been declared by a temporal authority to be legal.



Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg, the son of Carl Ignatius von Ossietzky (1848–1891), a Protestant from Upper Silesia, and Rosalie (née Pratzka), a devout Catholic and Social Democrat. His father worked as a stenographer in the office of a lawyer and senator, but died when Carl was two years old.

During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 – 1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began. Even then, Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in 'protective custody' in Spandau prison. Ossietzky underestimated the speed with which the Nazis would go about ridding the country of unwanted political opponents. He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg, among other camps.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross. Burkhardt described Ossietzky as “a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.” Ossietzky said,

“Tell my friends that I have come to the end, soon it will be over and that is good. I hear my wife tried to visit me. I only wanted peace.”

Ossietzky's international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. Despite intimidation and protests directed against the Norwegian government, the Nazis had been unable to prevent this, but they now refused to release him so that he could travel to Oslo to receive the prize.

In an act of civil disobedience, after Hermann Göring, then Minister of the Interior for Prussia and head of the police, prompted him to decline the prize, Ossietzky issued a note from the hospital saying that he disagreed with the authorities who had stated that by accepting the prize he would cast himself outside the deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (community of German people).

'After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples. As a recipient of the prize, I will do my best to encourage this understanding and as a German I will always bear in mind Germany's justifiable interests in Europe.'

The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces. The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power" and that "lasting peace between peoples and nations can only be achieved by respecting the existing laws".

Ossietzky's Nobel Prize was not allowed to be mentioned in the German press, and a government decree forbade German citizens from accepting future Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Peace Prize money was sent to Germany where it was stolen by Ossietzky's Nazi 'defense attorney.'

In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the massive public relations campaign surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German 'economic miracle.'

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their "Man of the Year."

In November of that year, the Reich entered a new phase of their oppression of dissent and undesirables and those to be cast outside the community of the German people, such as the mentally ill, the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, and trade unionists, with Kristallnacht.

In 1991, the University of Oldenburg was renamed Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in his honor. This could be seen as a political statement, as Ossietzky's case was being decided upon by the German courts at the time. In 1992 the Federal Court of Justice upheld his 1931 conviction.

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

Martin Luther King

Remember.

"I visited the Esterwegen camp a first time at a re-union of Ossietzky's old friends at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. We all went to the old concentration campsite,  now a memorial park,  and Chancellor Willy Brandt spoke to us and former inmates. Many came from the Netherlands since Dutchmen were imprisoned. Esterwegen and Oldenburg are close to the Dutch border.

We learned then that Esterwegen had no gas chambers because the stench and smoke would have disturbed the Oldenburg citizens. On my second visit to Esterwegen in 1990 I found a small memorial museum on the old camp grounds and the curator told me that most inmates were German and Dutch socialists, communists and intellectuals."

Carl von Ossietzky: The Peace Hero In the Concentration Camp by Kurt Singer

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Remembering

More tiresome histrionics from LavaGirl and the money masters today.

When their positions finally implode, perhaps they will make pretty sparks in the night sky for the children. And then they will be gone, their gifts and talents not only wasted, but their names blackened shamefully, and forgotten as if written in ashes.

Silver is carving out a massive triangle pattern on the weekly chart.

Gold is a little more guarded here, but the next week or so should give it a clearer voice.

Below I remember those who are worth remembering, and forget those who have been weighed, and are found wanting.

On 22 February 1943, Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by executioner Johann Reichhart in Munich's Stadelheim Prison only a few hours later, at 17:00 hrs. The execution was supervised by Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials, in later describing the scene, emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. Her last words were:

"How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to offer themselves up individually for a righteous cause?

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go."

The White Rose
Fourth Leaflet
Munich, 1942

We will not be silent.

"...It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes. Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers. Yet Hitler feeds those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death with lies.

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air..."

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

"God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment. And it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still, and know, that I'm God.'"

Martin Luther King, It's A Dark Day In Our Nation, 30 April 1967

The Garden of Beasts: Die Nacht der Langen Messer - The Night of the Long Knives

I have finished reading The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and I now understand why it is such a popular book of non-fiction.

It is remarkably well-researched, with an impressive set of footnotes based on original sources from diverse places. They are worth reading in themselves as they contain little delights and vignettes. The book provides deep insight into some of the minds of eyewitnesses grappling with the events of the day.

In part because of the source materials, the book spends what one might feel is an inordinate amount of time showing things from the perspective of Ambassador Dodd's daughter, the femme fatale Martha, and her many flirtations and affairs with the prominent of that city, including the head of the Gestapo and an NKVD agent from the Soviet embassy. She is not a particularly sympathetic character, being such an obviously shallow, albeit well-connected, narcissist.   Even these episodes are well written enough to be interesting if one enjoys that sort of background perspective and romantic intrigue.  And it is entertaining to read about the involvement of great literary names like Carl Sandburg and Thorton Wilder,  amongst others.  There is nothing in fame and recognition that deters personal folly.

Ambassador William E. Dodd himself is a frustrating figure, the southern born history professor from the University of Chicago who stumbles into the hornet's nest while looking for a sinecure. He comes across as petty and ineffective, carelessly anti-semitic in the manner of those times, and certainly no hero. And yet in the end he 'does the right thing' and looks good, and quite prescient, in comparison with his fellows. We might make some allowances to the need for a diplomat to be discreet while in office, and to manage perception for the support of official policy.

But it does bring home that point so many miss, that even while great events grind slowly along, ordinary and even extraordinary lives with all their petty preoccupations and diversions go on, the sun still shines, and people marry and are given in marriage, until the moment that, however slowly and in stages it may happen, the door finally closes.   .

I gained a new understanding of how some of the earlier events in the post-Weimar government progressed, and how the rise of the Nazi party unfolded, slowly, with more, but unfortunately ineffective, opposition than we might have believed, at least from 1932 to 1935. And so it was very worthwhile. No one should have been caught by surprise if they had their eyes open.

In particular I finally understand the 'Night of the Long Knives' as more than a passing intramural event as it is depicted so often in documentaries which compress the great sweep of history into an hour or two, and too often crush out the real significance, the many human undercurrents amidst ordinary preoccupations and foibles that comprise great events.

The 'Night of the Long Knives' was the first overtly extra-legal action in the Nazi rise to power. And this might be a lesson for us today as we interpret contemporary events and the perversion of mere legality without regard to morality, tradition, or honor. It was a clear sign of things to come, for those who had a mind to see it.

The book ends with the recall of Ambassador Dodd to Washington, replaced with one of the crony members of 'The Pretty Good Club.' Dachau is full of political prisoners, Jews are being individually terrorized and denied basic human rights, the infirm and defective are being sterilized and murdered, and all political and public information has been brought into conformity with the Nazis through their program of Gleischaltung. 

The real dark night of the soul and Kristallnacht lay in the future, having been born and emboldened by the continuing appeasement in the face of each worsening outrage against all convention and social norms. The Americans could overlook the progression of abuses against others as long as the Hitler regime 'would do business with them.'  It is the fatal weakness of realpolitik, its cumulative moral hazards, writ large. 

It is interesting to contrast the complacency of the career diplomats,  at that time most often Americans of privilege, and their preoccupation with obtaining full payment of the German bonds for their wealthy domestic constituents and the banks, with the agony of the German people as they slowly sunk into the abyss.  The lone voices that were raised in protest were suppressed, ridiculed, marginalized, and ignored even in America.  

This is a fine example of serial policy error in the service of privilege and the status quo. To many amoral minds, including especially the capitalists of the free world, Hitler's rise to power was just another business opportunity, and the plight of his victims a crisis not to be wasted, a source of great profit. And not all those who benefited were censured and punished. Some families rose to greater prominence and power, even in America, on a pile of European corpses.

In Germany the hopes of liberals and moderate conservatives alike fell before the uncompromising obsession for power and unrelenting fanaticism of a minority of some of the most banal and oddest people ever to take power in a major developed nation.   Not one of them could have risen by individual merit, but they did have a talent in exploiting other people's fears and weaknesses, and the sharp and unwavering focus of the sociopaths and psychopaths, that seems to bewilder and beguile the more diffused nature of the average person.

I was struck in fact that the great failure that was made by so many was the assumption that as the leader of a great and educated nation, Hitler was rational, and would eventually make the most rational decisions. So they believed his many assertions of his peaceful intents, and good wishes, even as he turned Europe into an abattoir. Like the efficient market hypothesis, people were blinded to reality by a theory about the natural goodness and rationality of politicians.

The dichotomy is never so apparent as in contrasting the leaders of the movement with their own Aryan ideals: the club footed Goebbels, Himmler the chicken farmer, the sybaritic Göring, the weak minded and superstitious Hess, and the boorish fanatic Hitler.  And the ordinary people made jokes about it, until even humour was crushed under the jackboot, choked out as fear and greed became pervasive.  Through an astute combination of terror, propaganda, and the perversion of the law, an entire people were persuaded to sleepwalk into the abyss.

The author includes, almost as throwaways, some interesting insights into the German character and its mutation under the Nazis.  In particular I was struck by his description of them doting on their dogs and their horses, and the national laws forbidding cruelty to animals, so that the horses, as Dodd the Virginia gentleman farmer observed, were among the fattest and best kept he had ever seen.  And in the end of it all, during the Russian assault that leveled the area around the Tiergarten and the Reichstag, a stray shell struck the stables, and the horses stampeded down the ruined avenues, in flames.

As long as the personal interests of the status quo of the wealthy and powerful were served, those in positions of responsibility said and did nothing, until it was too late even for them.

"What most occupied the attention of the State Department [in 1934] was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts [of the wealthy career diplomats and career politicians], Hull's red pencils, and mounting frustration with [Ambassador] Dodd to press America's case [for full payment of the sovereign German debt]...

In Berlin, Dodd was unmoved. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake...

Through his first year in Germany [1933], Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest...

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the [Hitler] regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger...

For Dodd, a diplomat by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was appalling. He was a scholar and a Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd's friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner or tea, had been shot dead.

Hitler's purge [June 30, 1934] would become known as 'The Night of the Long Knives,' and in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement...

This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false...

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour...In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime... 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence...I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"

Erik Larson, The Garden of Beasts

The Will to Power and Its Followers in the Socially Immature

"I am afraid we may have, in the near future, friendly fascism. And I do not use the term lightly. I grew up under fascism, in Franco’s Spain, and if nothing else, I recognize fascism when I see it. And we are seeing a growing fascism with a working-class base in the U.S. This is why we cannot afford to see Obama fail. But his staff and advisors are doing a remarkable job to achieve this. Ideologues such as chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel (who, when a congressman, was the most highly funded by Wall Street) and his brother, Ezekiel Emanuel (who did indeed write that old people should have a lower priority for health care spending) are leading the country along a wrong path."

Vincente Navarro, Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Vincent Navarro writes an amazingly insightful political analysis of health care reform and the Obama Adminstration. This is as we would expect, since Navarro, is an M.D., Ph.D., and professor of Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services.

But then he goes on to end his essay with this remarkably bad prescription.

"Given this reality, it seems to me that the role of the left is to initiate a program of social political agitation and rebellion (I applaud the health professionals who disrupted the meetings of the Senate Finance Committee), following the tactics of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It is wrong to expect and hope that the Obama administration will change. Without pressure and agitation, not much will be done."

The Will to Power has a bewitching siren call. It offers simple solutions to complex problems. It provokes the cycle of problem - reaction - solution, and the eye for an eye approach that 'makes the whole world blind.'

"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority." James A. C. Brown

And yet, like most dark powers, it decimates and destroys who pick up the sword, and lays waste to them, their country, and their children.

This is the lesson of history, the abyss of madness into which a great leader can bring a nation once it loses its sense of proportion, that people in their passionate desire for power often forget.

The Plot to Overthrow FDR - The History Channel

The beginnings of the Great Depression, and the conflicts that tested the Republic to its foundations, and the commitment to freedom around the world.


Video Documentary The History Channel

The Plot to Overthrow FDR



The American Liberty League


Responses to the Great Depression 1929-1939