IT WAS ME – Bystanders To Fascism…Again

PHOTO: Hulton Archive / Getty Images

On February 27, 1933, Adolph Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Four weeks later the Reichstag 
Fire destroyed the parliament building in Berlin, and Hitler used the incident to claim a communist plot, prompting an emergency decree suspending civil liberties, freedom of 
the press and privacy rights. 

That’s how it started. Soon every aspect of daily life was 
to come under totalitarian control: mobility, association, information, expression… 

A scant decade later the Third Reich had gained control 
of most of Europe and was well into executing the “Final Solution,” first stripping citizenship from millions of Germans it deemed undesirable and then slaughtering them.

                 

One of the most haunting questions in history remains: How could the German public not have noticed what was happening to their country in that decade-long buildup to the Holocaust?

PHOTO: USHMM

         How can so many of the rest of us...
         still be questioning our own instincts?

ADOLPH WHO?
The United States of America, long the envy of the world for its democratic principles, now sits 
in the same place Germany was during that infamous decade. Like those German citizens, Americans now face the same question: How can millions of us staunchly support a man who 
so clearly espouses the same malevolence, the same fascist principles that drove Hitler?

PHOTO: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

More importantly, how can so many of the rest of us—those of us who may feel uneasy about this tyrant, but aren’t quite sure he’s so bad—still be questioning our own instincts about him and his regime. Perhaps wondering if we shouldn’t be respecting, if not the man, at least the office of the presidency. Still willing to wait and see what happens.

THEY’RE HE-E-RE!
Well, my friends, I hate to burst your little bubble of faith, propriety or whatever you want to call your reluctance. It’s no longer a question of whether the USA might be leaning a bit too far to the right. We’re well past that tipping point where those Germans started wondering about Hitler, but realized it was too late.

Here’s the brutal truth, folks: the United States of America—right now—is no longer the Demo-
cracy with which most of us have been blessed our entire lives. For which so many millions of our ancestors have fought and died defending. We are—right now—a full-out fascist dictatorship.

How can I say that? Here’s a list of the key historical descriptors of fascism, along with notes on how each applies to the USA—right now:

Fascist leaders and their regimes:

• Undermine confidence in democratic institutions: constitutional frameworks, free elections, judicial independence, human rights and public trust. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Demand loyalty, first of party members and public officials, eventually of citizens. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Incite an “us vs. them” mentality, turning citizens against one another and stirring anger and fear of a common enemy—minorities and immigrants are common targets. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Co-opt unifying symbols like the national flag and religious icons—the cross and Bible for example—and flaunt them as their own. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
  
  

  

  PHOTO: Patrick Semansky / AP

  
  
• Expand the military to: 1. Enforce a “My country first” foreign policy, and 2. Suppress domestic dissent. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Coerce supporters to trade individual freedoms for servitude of ruling party’s demands. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.

• Glorify themselves (especially the leader): claiming credit for everything good, naming institutions for themselves, promoting their likeness or “brand.”  BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
  
  

  

  PHOTO: Washington Post

  
  
• Discredit and suppress legitimate news media and stoke cynicism about conventional definitions of truth itself. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Replace higher education and science with self-serving, state-controlled institutions. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.
• Normalize vengeance, cruelty and violence. BEING DONE NOW IN THE USA.

WHO WAS IT?
So, if you still have any doubt whatsoever about the intentions of Donald Trump and the traitors who work for and enable him, you’re in infamously good company. 

To your descendants, to your compatriots, to everyone in coming generations who asks, as those Germans did in the 1930s, “Who could have been so blind, so callous, so treasonous to allow this to happen?” 

This time, the shameful, inescapable answer will be: It was me. 

PHOTO: iStockPhoto