-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 26, 2007 12:33:11 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Over the Cliff at a Snail's Pace
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
On April 25, 2007, Thom Hartmann read from this book on his
nationally syndicated Air America radio program. He mentioned that
it had been one of his BuzzFlash "Independent Thinker" book
reviews, which it had been on November 7, 2005.
Hartmann's reading of passages so eerily foreshadowing the actions
of the Bush government over the past few years in consolidating a
shadow government with absolute authority stirred us enough to
repost the review as his May, 2007, commentary.
If you haven't read "They Thought They Were Free," we hightly
suggest that you do.
http://www.buzzflash.com/hartmann/05/11/har05011.html
"They Thought They Were Free" is an intensely personal book for me.
Although I was born after Hitler was five years dead, the horrible
dance between fascism and democracy has fascinated me since
childhood. And, through a series of odd coincidences, my adult life
has been heavily intertwined with those of both Nazis and the
victims of Hitler's Nazis.
Throughout my life, I've had several close friends who lost family
members in the Holocaust. I've spent a lot of time in Israel,
sobbed at Yad Vashem, and my wife Louise and I played a role in two
of our closest friends, Hal and Shelley Cohen, starting Orr Shalom,
which is now one of the largest Jewish programs for abused children
in Israel. Before I learned English as a baby I was speaking
Yiddish, learned from our Holocaust-survivor neighbors in Detroit
who cared for me when my parents worked, and so can today recite
both Hebrew prayers and speak German with accents and inflections
more characteristic of a first than a second language.
On the other side of the coin, this Sunday morning I'm having
breakfast with an old and dear friend, Armin Lehmann. At the age of
sixteen, Armin was the Hitler Youth courier who handed to Adolf
Hitler the papers that caused Hitler to commit suicide two days
later. Armin was there when the suicide happened. He was there when
Josef and Magda Goebbels poisoned their six children and then
committed suicide. He watched it all. If you see the movie
"Downfall," you'll see a teenage actor depicting my friend Armin.
Armin and I first met in 1984 when we were paired up by a marketing/
training company to lecture in Amsterdam (and, later, many other
cities) to teach advertising, marketing, and communications for
American Express and KLM. I had no idea he had been Hitler's last
courier, or that he would later write a book about it titled In
Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer's
Last Days. We were friends for 15 years before he told me of his
experiences. Armin is now a tireless campaigner for world peace.
Armin's revelation to me about his past came when an old friend of
mine and I set out to write a book about the religion -- the cult
-- of the Nazis. Scott and I traveled all across Europe,
interviewing people from Dr. Wilfried Daim, the author of the
ground-breaking book "Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab" ("The Man
Who Gave Hitler The Idea") about Georg Lanz von Liebenfels, to the
hereditary ruler of one of Europe's smaller constitutional
monarchies who shared shocking but background-only stories with us.
We snuck into and photographed the altar in an old castle where
Hitler initiated his inner circle, still kept pristine but largely
unknown in Germany, near an SS cemetery where every week fresh-cut
flowers appear and the tombstones are regularly polished to a high
gloss. We infiltrated a meeting of aging SS members, complete with
black candles and wreaths hung from the ceiling, near Wewelsburg, a
city in Germany that Hitler intended to turn into his Vatican for
his Thousand Years of Peace. On our way into the meeting, we passed
a house decorated with ancient runes and human skulls. When
discovered, we fled fearing for our lives. (Scott and I ended up
not finishing the book after several unsettling and threatening
experiences. I decided it would be less dangerous and more
productive to investigate and write a book about the Kennedy
assassination.)
Years before that (1978), I'd met a former Nazi who so impressed me
with his commitment to peace and his deep spirituality (much
learned from his Hasidic mentor, a Polish Jew who survived the
Holocaust) that I wrote a book about him titled "The Prophet's
Way." (It's also available in German.) In the years I lived in
Germany (1986/87), I met and got to know at least two-dozen elderly
Germans who hated Hitler, who loved Hitler, and every shade in
between.
I preface this review of Milton Mayer's book with all this personal
and historical/reference information by way of hopefully
establishing enough credibility in your mind to make a simple
statement:
It could happen here, too.
This was also Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination,
after he got to know real Nazis. An American Jew of German
ancestry, and a brilliant reporter, Mayer went to Germany 7 years
after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 Nazis. This book is, in large
part, his story of that experience. Intertwined through it --
written in 1955 -- are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future
generations of Americans -- us, today.
Mayer opens the book by noting that he was prepared to hate the
Nazis he would meet. But, he wrote, he discovered they were just as
human as the rest of us:
I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or
walked with one or another of my ten [Nazi] friends, I was overcome
by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper
reporting in Chicago years before [in the 1930s]. I liked Al
Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her
better than I treated mine.
He writes about how if he were to die tonight, at least he could
look back on some good he had done. But his Nazi friends would
never be able to die in peace, knowing the evil they had
participated in, if even by acts of omission, could never be wiped
clean.
And he dreaded that Americans would ever feel the same for the acts
we may one day commit as a nation.
Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by
attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop
and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure
of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it;
they got it; and they liked it.
I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it
might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality
and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I
met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain
conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might,
under certain conditions, be I.
If I - and my countrymen - ever succumbed to that concatenation of
conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no
army would be able to protect us from harm.
One of his closing chapters, "Peoria Uber Alles," is so poignant
and prescient that were Mayer still alive today I doubt he could
read it out loud without his voice breaking. It's the story of how
what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria,
Illinois, particularly if the city were to become isolationistic
and suffered some sort of natural or man-made disaster or attack
that threw its people into the warm but deadly embrace of
authoritarianism.
The [Peorian] individual surrenders his individuality without a
murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his
individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his
individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial
community, the tribe, re-emerges, it's first function the
preservation of all its members. Every normal personality of the
day becomes an 'authoritarian personality.' A few recalcitrants
have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for
neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched
or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the
liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the criminal
gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 percent or so of the
population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at
first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.
Among Mayer's stories are some of the most telling aspects of how
the Nazis came to take over Germany (and much of Europe). I first
quoted them a year ago in a Common Dreams article linked from
BuzzFlash titled The Myth of National Victimhood. I noted that
Mayer told how one of his friends said:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,
little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving
decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation
was so complicated that the government had to act on information
which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even
if the people could understand it, it could not be released because
of national security....
As a friend of Mayer's noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the
gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised
(perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure
or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social
purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so
occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion
underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and
remoter. ...
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.
In this conversation, Mayer's friend suggests that he wasn't making
an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but simply
pointing out an undisputable reality. This, he suggests, is how
fascism will always take over a nation.
"Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like
me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the
Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after
all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they
attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still,
he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools,
the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but
still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was
a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or
how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is
worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next
and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion,
thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you
in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk,
alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why
not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not
just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also
genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing
as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general
community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly
sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans
against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany,
outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the
university community, in your own community, you speak privately to
your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do
they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or
'You're an alarmist.'
"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. ...
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or
thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty.
If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately
after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would
have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the
Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers
on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't
the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little
steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not
to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B,
and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step
C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible
of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has
grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy,
hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at
once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and
changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your
nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The
forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the
shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the
cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed
because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the
forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and
the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when
everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a
system which rules without responsibility even to God." ...
Mayer's friend pointed out the terrible challenge faced then by
average Germans, and today by peoples across the world, as
governments are taken over by authoritarian, corporatist -- fascist
-- regimes.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly
educated ordinary men?" Mayer's friend asked rhetorically. And,
without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered
fascistic regime to refer to, he had to candidly answer: "Frankly,
I do not know."
This was the great problem that Mayer's Nazis and so many in their
day faced.
As Mayer's Nazi friend noted, "I do not see, even now [how we could
have stopped it]. 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?"
And here we are.
Sinclair Broadcast Group runs right-wing editorials on its stations
over public airways with no pretense of balance.
Former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen tells me that he was ordered to
always have at least two conservatives on the Donahue show whenever
one liberal appeared, "and three conservatives to Michael Moore."
Hundreds of hours a day of right-wing programming pour out of radio
stations nationwide, and conservative extremists are the most
common "guests" and "experts" on network news and weekend political
TV shows.
The 2004 election may have been stolen with massive nationwide
fraud -- the statistics in New Mexico, Ohio, and Florida are truly
startling -- and Alliance for Democracy lawyer Cliff Arnebeck has
filed a lawsuit against Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al, suggesting that
Kerry actually won Ohio. The story was only covered in any depth by
C-SPAN.
The possibility that the election of 2002 was also stolen --
particularly in Georgia, where Max Cleland losing his seat to Saxby
Chambliss gave Republicans control of the Senate -- has never been
seriously investigated. There is no paper trail from that election,
as it was entirely done on paperless voting machines.
And when a consortium of news organizations recounted the Florida
2000 vote and it was found that Al Gore actually won the entire
state -- and thus the presidency -- no matter what standard was
used to count the ballots, the corporate news organizations of
America buried the story (although the New York Times and
Washington Post at least did report it).
Our Attorney General calls the Geneva Conventions "quaint"; our
Secretary of Defense stands accused of ordering torture; our
President and Vice President knowingly lie to us and the world in
order to lead an election-year preemptive war; and Congress passes
the PATRIOT Act without reading it -- eerily like the German
Parliament passed the Enabling Acts after the Reichstag was burned.
So how to counter it?
As Mayer so movingly narrates, the experience of 20th century
Europe demonstrates that those abusing power must be confronted
with equally vigorous power.
In the 1930s, Germans who believed in republican democracy were
overwhelmed before they realized how completely their civil
liberties and national institutions had been seized.
We must not allow it to happen in our nation. Read "They Thought
They Were Free" and awaken as many as you can.
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