We're vulnerable when we're democratic, but it's still better.

[mqbush]

In 1933, Adolf Hitler used a suspicious arson attack on the
Reichstag building as an excuse to declare a war on terrorism
and its Middle Eastern sponsors (Jews, this time).  To aid
this war on terror, Hitler, knowing that normal people object
to war, suspended the constitutional rights of the people, so
that anyone could be jailed indefinitely without charges. 
This was to be accomplished through a consolidated police
force (the SS) following Hitler’s laws, not the people’s laws,
in defense of the (newly minted term) “Homeland,” (to
intensify ethnocentricity), or “Fatherland,” (to substitute an
authoritarian and powerful term for the soft and nurturing
“Motherland.”)

Thom Hartmann, in SCREWED, wrote that “the ravages of the
Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. 
Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very
different courses to bring their nations back to power and
prosperity.

Germany’s response was to merge corporations into government”
(just like Mussolini’s fascism), ”creating unequal protection
for working citizens, privatizing much of the commons, and
creating an illusion of prosperity through continuous and
ever-expanding war. America’s response was to pass
minimum-wage laws, increase taxes on corporations and the
wealthiest individuals, establish Social Security….”

This boosting of the middle class, aided by the Bretton Woods
agreements, created the golden age of American industry and
unprecedented prosperity.  After General Douglas MacArthur
stayed behind to help set up a new government and economy in
Japan, his worker protection principles turned this small
nation into a world-class economy.  Germany’s new constitution
contained Trumanesque ideas, and West Germany’s outstanding
recovery from the ravages of depression and war can’t be
dismissed.

Sinclair Lewis wrote IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE in 1935.  In it, a
conservative southern politician campaigns for president on a
platform of family values, the flag, patriotism, the usual
themes used by charlatans everywhere.  He uses a radio
commentator to convince the electorate that advocates of open
democracy and social justice are un-American.  When this guy
is elected, he opens a detention center for the
under-appreciative, a la Guantanamo Bay, and signs laws making
it illegal to criticize the president.  His intent is to
establish, once and for all, a corporate state, as Mussolini
was trying to do at the time.

It doesn’t seem to matter that today’s corporatists are doing
exactly what Hitler and Mussolini did, exactly what was
spelled out in Lewis’ hortatory novel.  We let a Bush
presidency happen as though the world just began yesterday and
we haven’t seen this all before.  It doesn’t seem to matter
that every economy that empowers fascist practices is a
painful disaster, socially and financially, while every
economy that empowers a middle class thrives.  We let
sociopathic greedheads get away with nothing less than the
gutting of America’s economy for the exclusive profit of a
miniscule elite.  It doesn’t seem to matter that someone
already pointed out that we can’t just say IT CAN’T HAPPEN
HERE and we will be safe.  It already is happening here, but,
like a dinosaur, we are slow to realize that we’re mortally
wounded.

Hartmann says that “from ants to gorillas, democracy is the
norm among animals.  Just like with indigenous human societies
– which have had hundreds of thousands of years of trial and
error to work out the best way to live – democracy is the norm
among animals, and (other than for the Darwinian purpose of
finding the best mate) hierarchy/kingdom is the rarity….The
Framers of the Constitution were heavily influenced and
inspired by the democracy they saw all around them.  Much of
the U.S. Constitution is based on the Iroquois
Confederacy….The concept of ‘chief’is one that Europeans
brought with them to America….Throughout the history of what
WE call civilization, an unrestrained economy and the idea of
hierarchical social organization has always produced a small
ruling elite and a large number of nearly impoverished
workers.”

If we want to have a democratic society, we need to identify
and contain the perverse and bizarre who betray the human race
for mere profit, those who would consign your mother and your
grandson and Pavarotti and Louis Armstrong, cathedrals and
sonnets and puzzles and wonder to the stinking fascist
crematoria, after all the mouths that once spoke love and sang
songs are broken open for the gold fillings, after meathooks
rip open the bodies of the gentle, the passionate, the wise,
for tidbits of profit.  The disease that turns a giggling
child into a genocidal monster has no treatment; it can only
be contained.  A thousand generations of humans have tried to
work out a secure containment procedure, called laws.  The
diseased always knock down society’s laws and force their own
laws on us through brazen fiat.  We have to keep propping up
our laws that help protect humanity.  Democratic herds of
buffalo were wiped out by lone, perverted riflemen.  But laws
then protected the remaining buffalo, allowing them to thrive
again.  If society’s laws were the law of all the lands, there
would be no wars (no citizenry asks its government to go to
war); prisons would hold the monsters instead of the poor (and
without monsters, there would be no need for war);  all the
wealth and energy of nations would be used for construction,
not destruction, and civilization would blossom.  Now and
then, one of those with foaming gangrene where a soul once
was, will, in his madness, kill of some of his own people. 
But we cannot, in pursuit of perfect safety, become a bunch of
obscene Rambos with no life but to kill and die.  We can do
better. 

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. An excellent post, and a good read.

Welcome to DU!

[AX10]

2. K/R