By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – March 07, 2007
As I noted in this space last week, I have frequently
written about the lessons we opponents of Georgitism and their inexorable drive
towards overthrowing US Constitutional democracy and establishing a theocratic
fascist state in its stead can learn from the historical experience of previous
fascist states, especially that of Nazi Germany. (Once again, to make
sure that readers know what I mean when I use the term “fascism,” and that I am
not simply throwing it around as an epithet, I append my short definition of it
at the end of the column.) This column is part 2 of this essay on lessons
that the US fascists could learn as well, that is if they want to
succeed. Not that I want them to succeed, mind you, but at the rate they
are going, they need all the help they can get.
There are a number of explanations that historians have
offered over time for the initial success of Hitler and the German Nazi Party
in taking power and then keeping it from the day they did so, Jan. 30, 1933,
well on into the Second World War. As I noted last week, some historians
have attempted to provide a unitary one, that is, THE reason for Nazi
success. I, and many other historians, do not hold to that view.
For a complex event like the conversion of a major capitalist country with a
very well-developed industrial base and a well-educated population of
67,000,000 into the second major fascist power in history (Italy was the first
major one, although Hungary is considered to have been the very first, from
1919), it seems to me that one cannot rely on one cause to explain it
all.
Reviewing the major components of the causal set, not
necessarily in order of importance, first, the Nazi Party was extremely
well-organized and highly disciplined. It was also extremely
well-financed, both from domestic sources and foreign ones as well.
Second, the Nazis had several private armies at their disposal. A third factor
was Hitler’s force of personality, his messianic vision for Germany, and his
personal charisma. The final major factor previously cited was of course
the Nazis’ rampant anti-Semitism. It was a principal part of the ideology
of the Nazi Party, one of its major propaganda weapons. At one level or
another, it had a major impact in attracting and keeping popular support.
Previously, anti-Semitism has been considered mainly a
psychological tool, a powerful one to be sure. Now there is a new book,
from Germany, that shows how it was major economic one too.
Reviewed in The New York Times Book Review on February 18,
2006, by Dagmar Herzog, is the English translation of Goetz Aly’s “Hitler’s
Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racist War, and the Welfare State.” As I noted,
with a good deal of original research, Prof. Aly shows how both the
preservation and expansion of major aspects of the traditional German welfare
state and the use of property stolen from Jews, first in the home country and
then abroad in the conquered ones, were major factors in the success of the
Nazi’s in getting the German people to go along with their ride to hell.
For example, it happened that Germany was the first country
in the world to establish a form of national health insurance, under the
Prussian Empire in the 1880s. Hitler maintained and expanded it, for all
“true” Germans. Hitler also maintained the other major components of the
German social insurance system, from old-age pensions to sickness insurance for
work days lost to illness. The world’s first anti-smoking campaign was
started by Hitler when German epidemiologists became the first in the world to
become convinced of the connection between cigarette smoking and lung
disease. Hitler actually raised taxes on the wealthy and the large corporations
to help pay for the services provided. While he wiped out the trade
unions for political reasons (the major ones had belonged either to the
Socialist or the Communist Party), he did manage to get/force employers to
provide reasonable wages and a good standard of living for their
employees. And then, as the persecution of the Jews took hold and spread,
especially after the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Prof. Goetz shows,
apparently convincingly, that it was stolen Jewish property that more and more
funded the standard of living that many Germans achieved during pre-war period
and even into the early years of the war until Allied bombing began to take its
toll.
Now let us look briefly at the policies being followed by
George “The Decider” Bush, Dick “Who Cares What the Constitution Says, Let’s
have a Unitary Executive” Cheney, John “Torture is Fine, just as long as I get
to decide who is tortured” Yoo, and Alberto “the Geneva Conventions are quaint
so I’ll just unilaterally change them even though they are part of the
Constitution, and that goes for any other part I don’t like” Gonzales.
Expanding social insurance programs? Hardly. They are totally
against any kind of national health insurance and want to trash Social Security
n the bargain. Maintaining high wages? Hardly. Their policies
have totally opened the doors to the export of American capital to low wage
countries, driving down American ones. Raising taxes on high incomes and
corporate profits (which in Nazi Germany presumably kept the gap between the
rich and everyone else at some reasonable level)? Hardly. Just the
reverse. And they don’t have that domestic source for plunder, at least
not yet. They are plundering the economies of numerous foreign countries,
and they are trying to get their hands on as much oil as they can, but it is
not quite the same thing as “The War Against the Jews,” as Lucy Davidowicz
famously termed it.
On the other hand, like the Nazis, our fascists are
furiously promoting permanent war. In the armed forces, they are training
cadres of brutal prison guards and experts in torture; they are trashing the US
Constitutional protections for personal rights and liberties. They do
advocate thought control on such matters as belief as to when life begins,
backed by the force of the criminal law. There are very busy creating and
expanding their domestic spying network. They are developing their
private army, from the “private security companies” working in such disparate
places as Iraq and New Orleans. So the terror/repression wing of the Nazi
machine is under development.
The PMoP does work very well for them. They are
working hard on homophobia (and after all, the Nazis went after the gays, in
1934, before they went after the Jews with a vengeance in 1935) and who knows
to what heights they can take it. So they have or have in development
some of the sticks the Nazis had. What they don’t have is any of the
carrots the Nazis used to win such wide-spread support that they had from the
German people once they had gotten rid of the Socialist and Communist
leadership and made the Jews “non-Germans.” And of course, they hardly
have a charismatic leader, although dear old Rudy might just fill that bill if
he can get past all of his negatives.
Further, the Nazis were in essence driven to unleash the
Holocaust upon the Jews of Europe and other ethnic minorities and “inferior”
peoples like certain Slavs by the infernal internal logic of their virulent
version of anti-Semitism and “Aryan” racial superiority. If the “inferior
races” were A) so inferior and B) so damaging to the social, economic, and
political security of the “German Nation,” then it became quite obvious that
they had to be eliminated. (Obvious to people like Hitler, Reinhard
Heydrich, the first director of the Final Solution, and Adolf Eichmann, that
is. Josef Goebbels, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing
and that it was it was evil.) So, Georgites, be careful what you wish
for.
In our time, the myths of “Islamic Jihadism,” of
“Pan-Islamic terrorism,” of the “al Qaeda-inspired Caliphate,” of
“Islamofascism,” of a “Muslim-Christian War to the Death,” are being promoted
both inside and outside of the Georgite Administration. Major attempts
are being made to develop and promote a broad-based Isalmophobia among the
American people. The message of just how damaging to the social,
economic, and political security of the “American Nation” is beginning to be
promoted by people as highly placed on the Right as Newt Gingrich (who talks
openly about “World War III” against the [mythic] “Islamofascists,” lasting for
50 years, no less). There is no certainty at all that this somewhat
inchoate coolection of politico-ethnic mythology will ever grow into the
dominant feature of future Georgite ideology that anti-Semitism was for the
Nazis. But it could.
A final word of warning for the American fascist. It
could be said that one reason the German Nazis lost the war in the manner that
they did, complete destruction of their nation and of themselves as a political
force, was the virulence of their anti-Semitism that drove them to come to the
Final Solution adopted at Wannsee on Jan. 20, 1942. From that point
onwards the Nazis devoted significant resources to murdering Jews and other
ethnic minorities, resources that they took from their conventional war
effort. It is well known, for example, that from 1943 onwards major
railway capacity was diverted from moving men and supplies to the Eastern Front
to moving Jews and others to their deaths in the Eastern Death Camps.
Further, when the Germans were retreating before the onslaught of the Red Army
in 1944 they actually devoted major transport resources to moving Jews out of
the camps back to Germany, so that they could kill them there.
And so, US fascists, I suggest that you read Prof. Aly’s
book. For you there is much to learn there. As there is too for us
who want to make sure that indeed it never happens here.