The Reichstag fire in Berlin in February of 1933 is considered the moment when the Nazi party took complete control of Germany. Kristallnacht was the day the German government showed what happens to anyone they determined was an enemy of the state.
Follow below the fold to see how that applies to us and our nation.
Please note the added disclaimer at the top befor reading the main text.
Yes, before I go on I just broke Goodwin's law, and with good reason.
Added disclaimer-----
Many commenters have called me to task that Kyrstallnacht was all about the violence against people and physical property, and that invalidates any comparison. In reality what we know about the bail out plan will be brutal to small investors, and businesses in general, and if you believe the mortgage crisis was planned, there has been massive brutality against homeowners.
It was also noted that the people who lost their mentions in the S&L debacle and Enron, et al, were mostly people who lost everything including their ability to pay for adequate health care, living conditions or even food.
my comparison was in no way intended to suggest that the current thugs rise to the great evil of Hitler, or to diminish the suffering of those in Germany that died.
On the other had, this economic "junta" has already resorted to violence on a scale and brutality never before tolerated and seldom seen in this nation. And the nature of a fascist regime has been to become more brutal as it consolidates it's power. We also have at least one private corporate run army that is legally exempt from most laws. Stitch all of this together and I will agree that my comparison to those terrible days is very strongly stated, but I still see it as valid as illustration of the means these people could be capable of to meet their ends.
No George bush is not Hitler, nor do I think he aspires to be. It was always known American fascism would be as unique as the German version was.
First, a history lesson in how the German's did it, and then a comparison of the American version.
In 1933 Hitler had pushed for massive reforms to allow bypassing elections and claiming extraordinary powers for members of the government. This included the dreaded SS being given police powers on the 22nd of that month.
They went on the attack against enemies of the state, namely "communists.".
Within the week, a lone individual who claimed to be a communist was looking for a government building to burn down to start his revolution against capitalism.
The exact unfolding of events is unknown, and I don't believe the Nazis actually planted this individual, but they certainly helped him archive his objective.
The Reich stag, or the seat of German Parliament was burned to the ground on February 27th 1933. While the fire was still blazing Göring who was Minister of the Interior for Prussia, the province of Germany where Berlin is located, Scream baseless charges that the fire was a massive communist plot.
Quoting for a history of the events
After viewing the damage, an emergency meeting of government leaders was held. When told of the arrest of the Communist arsonist, Van der Lubbe, Hitler became deliberately enraged.
"The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!"
Hitler left the fire scene and went straight to the offices of his newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, to oversee its coverage of the fire. He stayed up all night with Goebbels putting together a paper full of tales of a Communist plot to violently seize power in Berlin.
At a cabinet meeting held later in the morning, February 28, Chancellor Hitler demanded an emergency decree to overcome the crisis. He met little resistance from his largely non-Nazi cabinet. That evening, Hitler and Papen went to Hindenburg and the befuddled old man signed the decree "for the Protection of the people and the State."
The Emergency Decree stated: "Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."
The history place: the rise of Hitler
A very similar event was Kristallnacht in 1938. This event was completely planed and executed by a "mob" who attacked Jews in massive numbers in a night that is the epitome of an orgy of violence.
The "mob" which was claimed to be a spontaneously formed reaction to events was in reality a carefully orchestrated event to justify even more emergency powers.
...
Three days later, on November 12, Hermann Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):
'Gentlemen! Today's meeting is of a decisive nature,' Goering announced. 'I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.'
'Since the problem is mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle it shall have to be tackled. Because, gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don't harm the Jew but me, who is the final authority for coordinating the German economy. `If today a Jewish shop is destroyed, if goods are thrown into the street, the insurance companies will pay for the damages; and, furthermore, consumer goods belonging to the people are destroyed. If in the future, demonstrations which are necessary occur, then, I pray, that they be directed so as not to hurt us.
'Because it's insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse, then have a German insurance company make good the loss. And the goods which I need desperately, whole bales of clothing and whatnot, are being burned. And I miss them everywhere. I may as well burn the raw materials before they arrive.
'I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of today's meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit them to me.'
It was decided at the meeting that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a "fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of Vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers. (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).
Kristallnacht
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Finally, how all of this relates to us.
We have had 30 years of tax policies that seemed irrationally, to be designed to force a complete meltdown of the economy. It was always believed that the people pushing for these policies had not thought them through but only wanted to reward greed.
Now suddenly, during the very week that the system starts to collapse a piece of legislation that was at the very least was months if not YEARS in the writing, magically appears, seemingly from whole cloth at the last moment.
No one has read even a small portion of it, but what has been published is a clear manifesto to provide powers to the treasury that can only be described as a Coup d'état
A coup d’état (pronounced kuːdeɪˈtɑː AHD: [ko͞o"dā tä]), often simply called a coup, is the sudden overthrow of a government by a part of the state establishment — usually the military — to replace the branch of the stricken government, either with another civil government or with a military government.
The coup d’état succeeds if its opponents fail to thwart the usurpers, allowing them to consolidate their positions, obtain the surrender of the overthrown government or acquiescence of the populace and the surviving armed forces, and thus claim legitimacy. Coups d’état typically use the power of the existing government for the takeover. As Edward Luttwak remarks in Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook: A coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. In this sense, the use of either military or another organized force is not the defining feature of a coup d'état.
from Wikipedia: entry for Coup d'état
This is not a military takeover, nor with the resulting fascist state be militant to the extent that the Nazis were. WE WILL NOT BECOME A NAZI STATE. We will however become a fascist state either when this election is called off, of a few months later when congress is thanked for their time and told to go home. Or the appearance of a Democratic shell may be retained to provide a fig leaf, but this crowd does not seem either that sophisticated or concerned about appearances.
If you think I am alarmist, you are welcome to believe that, but you need to explain a deliberately engineered financial crisis, and a "panic driven" bill that ends all government authority over the agency that is to be tasked with solving that crisis.