Are we inching toward Germany circa 1933?

[struggle4progress]

By Jack Jamison

YOU'VE probably heard about the videotapes disguised as actual news film that several governmental agencies have been sending to television station. In these tapes government emp-loyees play the part of news reporters who are apparently reporting actual news.
Naturally, this is nothing more than government propaganda. Most of you, however, assumed once this was exposed, the government would stop sending out these phony videotapes. Wrong!

The Lowdown newsletter reports "At least 20 federal agencies are aggressively pushing government-produced-and-distributed 'news' segments on hundreds of local television stations." And surprise, these tapes laud the president and his programs.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has ruled that using tax dollars "to proselytize, deceive and distort in order to influence the public amounts to government sponsored propaganda, which is illegal."

Now here's an update. The Justice Department has issued a legal opinion that declares GAO opinions are not binding on the White House, and that a memo has been sent to all agencies "telling them to ignore the GAO findings and merrily keep on propagandizing," according to Jim Hightower. <snip>

http://www.paradisepost.com/Stories/0,1413,292~30286~2893151,00.html

[bennywhale]

1. Why is there not a serious uprising in America. Britains got its problems

but this would simply be impossible for the government to do. The media acquiesence to this is the real problem, it would be the media in Britain who would stop this, by refusing to run the tapes and then reporting that they had been offered.

Why is the country not bothered about this. I know DUers are but i get the distinct impression much of America doesn't give a shit. You are obviously not Germany 1930s but you are sliding towards something very nasty.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. It's already here.

n/t

[Karenina]

9. You're soaking in it.

:D

[Jersey Ginny]

4. If this were a democratic admin, it would be front page news

everywhere and the top TV story. I just keep hoping that the little inroads Air America and other Radio broadcasts as well as the internet, will make a difference. TV new and much of the print news is dead.

[catzies]

3. Inching? I thought we were sprinting toward Germany circa 1933

n/t

[AlamoDemoc]

5. Alas, I am afraid we are already there.....the question is:

What can be done? What should be done?

[punpirate]

6. Well, if one is going by historical analogies...

... we're well past 1933.

If the events of 9/11 were Hitler's Reichstag Fire (which he used to seize the Chancellery and issue emergency orders giving him virtual control of the government), then where have we gone from there?

Hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hitler began, by 1935 or 1936, putting thousands of Jews and dissidents in jail and eventually in concentration camps (well, Shrub beat him by a few years on that with his round-ups of Muslims around the world).

By the fall of 1939, Hitler had amassed enough power to invade Poland, on the pretext of Poland attacking Germany (some accounts say that began by a few German soldiers dressed in Polish uniform, running across the border, then shooting at a German radio station and running back).

Any bets on Dubya's Poland?

[Demeter]

7. Iran or Syria

depending on which one is actually the weaker sister.

[sintax]

8. And you are an alarmist-" They thought they were free"

America has always had fascistic leanings and depending on which economic and/or color group you are/have been in these 'leanings' have been the normal operating procedures for quite some time in the good ole US of A. In fact from the start.

Excellent Post struggle4progress




This from Milton Mayer's classic "They Thought They Were Free":
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There  was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting.  It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.  I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you.  Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had.  There was no need to.  Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful.  Who wants to think?

"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.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?  Frankly, I do not know.  I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice  - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end."  But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings.  One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?  Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have.  And everyone counts on that might.

<snip>

"And you are an alarmist.  You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it.  These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?  On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.  You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.




http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html