Many liberal Americans, including myself and most DUers, believe that our country is well on the road to tyranny, or already there in many respects. All of my life I have felt a great need to understand the WHY behind important events in my life – which is undoubtedly one reason that I have been so interested in history and psychology. One reason for this need of mine is that I believe that an understanding of causes is of great help in the search for solutions. Thus I have spent much time thinking about why our country, which once served as a beacon of freedom and democracy to much of the world, is now headed rapidly in the opposite direction. In doing this I have come up with many partial answers. It is because we “elected”
George Bush president – and Ronald Reagan before him. It is because of the
role of money in politics. It is because of
election fraud. It is because of our country’s
corrupt news media. Unquestionably all of those factors are important, and certainly there is no single reason for the predicament in which we now find ourselves.
But it has also occurred to me that racism has played a major factor in this. In considering the role of racism on our current road to tyranny I believe that it is instructive to compare our situation to the road to tyranny taken by Nazi Germany under Hitler (which has long been an obsession of mine, perhaps partly because of my Jewish ancestry), because I believe that there are many important parallels there. The parallels with Nazi Germany can be viewed as five overlapping categories: 1) Inciting event(s); 2) Progression of racism; 3) Progressive elimination of rights of minorities; 4) Consolidation of power; 5) Catastrophe.
Inciting eventsIn Nazi Germany there were a number of inciting events, starting with the defeat of Germany in World War I, which led to harsh reprisals and a terrible economy by the early 1930s, including very high unemployment and inflation.
But a more direct inciting event on the road to tyranny was the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany. The Nazis blamed the fire on the Communists, though it is now widely believed to have been planned and carried out by the Nazis themselves, as a pretext for consolidating their power. In any case, the event was unquestionably instrumental in providing the excuse for the initial efforts towards consolidation of Nazi power. In the United States the initial event is even more clear cut. The attacks of September 11th, 2001, on the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon provided the rationalization for the Bush administration to declare a “War on Terror”, which has provided the excuse for the bulk of its subsequent actions.
Progression of racismHitler had long harbored a great hatred of Jews, and Germany also had a long history of anti-Semitism, though prior to the ascension of Hitler it had been relatively quiescent for some time. Hitler was a very skilled orator, and shortly after coming to power his rabid anti-Semitism and oratorical skills became instrumental in stirring up and intensifying latent feelings of anti-Semitism among Germans. The United States has also had a long history of racism, especially against dark skinned people, manifested by its aggressive wars against the Indians and its enslavement of Africans. The Civil Rights movement in the United States, beginning in the 1960s, met with a good deal of success, manifested by the passage of a great deal of important Civil Rights legislation in addition to the fact that the overt expression of racism in the U.S. became almost politically suicidal, at least outside of the South. Nevertheless, racism continued to smolder in the United States, manifested by such things as displaying of the Confederate flag, widespread imprisonment of dark skinned peoples for such things as drug use, and voter suppression. In all of these cases, however, politicians would usually feel the need to claim some non-racist reasons for their respective actions.
Such was the case when our country was attacked on September 11th, 2001, purportedly by 19 Muslims flying hijacked airplanes. Because racism was then (and is now still) considered “politically incorrect”, the Bush administration could not have
overtly appealed to racist sentiments among Americans even if it had wanted to. In any event, there was no need for them to make
overt racist appeals. Simply by repeatedly referring to “terrorists”, it is widely understood by the Bush administration’s intended audience that they are talking about Muslims of Middle Eastern descent and dark skin. Thus, the combination of repeated references to “terror” and the stirring up of racist feelings is quite sufficient to strike fear into the hearts of many an American.
Progressive elimination of minority rightsThe elimination of Jewish rights in Nazi Germany took place piece by piece, from the Nazi sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933 to the Nuremburg race laws of 1935, which deprived Jews of their citizenship, to the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938, where 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and almost a hundred Jews killed, followed shortly afterwards by gradually escalating genocide.
The important point to understand about all this is that it happened because the German people allowed it to happen. They saw themselves as fundamentally different from the Jews, rather than as sharing a common bond of humanity with them. Consequently, what happened to the Jews was not of concern to most Germans. Superficially, the treatment of Muslims by the U.S. government today seems very different. Few mainstream American politicians would dare to adopt an openly racist stance against Muslims or other people of Middle Eastern descent. Sure, they stir up the population with words like “Islamo-Fascism”, which are meant to incite racist feelings. But at the same time they claim to recognize that there are also many good Muslims.
Our laws and practices, barbaric as they are, with our indefinite detention of suspected “terrorists” without charges, and the deplorable living conditions that we subject them to, including repeated torture, are not specifically and openly directed at Muslims or any other minority group. Rather, our laws and practices are directed solely against “enemy combatants” or “terrorists”. Not only are most Americans not very concerned about this, but a sizable minority is positively glad that their government is doing these things, since they have been led to believe that these actions serve to protect them.
So on the surface, racism has nothing to do with this – we are simply fighting a war and bringing terrorists to justice. Yet for those Americans who support our government in these actions or who are unconcerned about them, racism must be playing the same role in causing them to be unconcerned as it did in causing most Germans to be unconcerned with the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany. They note that the “terrorists” are Muslims, and that gives them the sense that everything is ok and their government is working hard to protect them. They are either blissfully unaware of the fact that
only a small minority of the so-called terrorists have even been charged with a crime, or they don’t see anything wrong with that. And the same thing can be said about our torturing of these people.
Racism also explains why George Bush was able to bamboozle Americans so easily with a
pack of lies to get them to see Iraqis as equivalent to the culprits who attacked our country. As he
has said many times, we didn’t ask
THEM to come here and attack us. And as
Trent Lott has said, they all look the same – so how can we be expected to tell the difference between the good ones and the terrorists.
This situation is where Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, “
First They Came for the Communists”, is so prescient. The sentiments expressed in that poem are supposed to serve as a warning against allowing another Holocaust to take place. On the one hand it should serve as a reminder of the common bond of humanity that we share with all the people of the world. But for those whose racist attitudes prevent them from seeing that common bond, it should at least serve to lessen their complacency by reminding them that they could very well be next in line. In other words, they need to understand that a government that repeatedly demonstrates its contempt for human rights with respect to a minority ethnic group would also likely be capable of perpetrating atrocities against other Americans as well, if doing so is thought to be necessary in order to achieve their ends. But alas, perhaps their racism prevents them from understanding that point as well.
Consolidation of powerDictators often use a mixture of fear and racism to consolidate their powers. Indeed, the two are highly correlated, as Hitler led the German people to believe that Jews and Communists were dangerous enemies of Germany, and many Americans today believe that Muslims are dangerous enemies of their country.
Hitler assumed emergency powers in Germany the day after the Reichstag fire, and within a month Parliament passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers in Germany. In June of 1934 the Nazis conducted a violent purge of potential political opponents in the SA. And in August of that year Hitler was declared Fuhrer. Shortly following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States the
PATRIOT Act, which set the stage for warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, indefinite detention without charges of terrorist suspects, the deterioration of our First Amendment rights, and military tribunals, was passed by Congress. The recently passed
Terror Detainee bill solidifies much of the PATRIOT Act and expands it to allow George Bush to define torture, to brand as “enemy combatants” (and therefore without Constitutional protection) anyone suspected of supporting hostilities against the United States (including peaceful protest?), and prohibits suspects from seeing the evidence that brands them as an “enemy combatant”. Without question a large part of the reason that Americans have allowed this bill to pass is that either they are ignorant of it or they believe that it doesn’t apply to them.
But whom the bill will apply to remains to be seen. In November of 1933 the Nazis enacted an innocently titled “Law against Habitual and Dangerous Criminals”, which allowed the homeless and the unemployed to be sent to concentration camps. Anyone who believes that George Bush and Dick Cheney won’t try to use their new found powers against their political opponents hasn’t been paying very close attention.
The relationship of all this to racism can be seen by a quick look at members of Congress who voted for the bill. Racism has always been much stronger in the South than elsewhere in the United States, since it was long needed to justify the legal slavery of Africans. Senators from the eleven southern states that fought against the Union in the American Civil War, plus the two border states of Kentucky and Missouri,
voted for the bill by a 25-1 margin, whereas the remaining Senators voted for it only by a 40-33 margin.
CatastropheBeyond their treatment of the Jews and other “undesirables”, Nazi intentions should have been evident to all as they built up their military, annexed Austria in March 1938, occupied the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in October of that year, and seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. The world finally reacted when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. The resulting World War II was the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world to date, claiming the lives of about 30 million civilians and 25 million soldiers, not including the 6 million Jews and others who lost their lives in the German concentration camps. But as bad as it was, it would have been far worse had the Nazis prevailed in the war. As of this time, the catastrophe perpetrated by the Bush administration pales in comparison with the consequences of World War II. Besides the
ruined lives of a few hundred or thousand Muslims and the continuing destruction of the U.S. Constitution, the war in Iraq has claimed the lives of close to
three thousand American soldiers and
tens of thousands of Iraqis.
But if the Neoconservatives in the Bush administration get their way, the damage will be far worse before they’re through. The civil war in Iraq is just getting started, Bush is intent on perpetrating a war against Iran, and the plans of the neoconservative members of
PNAC are so at odds with the peace objectives of the rest of the civilized world that one should take very seriously the possibility that World War III is just around the corner and will equal or exceed the catastrophic damages caused by World War II.
ConclusionsRacism, along with similar irrational hatreds of our fellow human beings who practice different customs or religions or who are “different” in any number of ways, has long been one of the greatest scourges of world civilization. Some reasons for racism are fear and unfamiliarity of the unknown and an egotistical desire to feel superior to other people. Our government would serve its people much better by acting to combat the evils of racism instead of fighting against such things as birth control, gay marriage, stem cell research and the teaching of evolution in schools.
Following World War II and the Nazi Holocaust the world and many of its leaders promised that it would never let such atrocities happen again. But in order to prevent such things from happening we must learn the central lessons of history. The central lesson of the Holocaust is captured by Niemoller’s poem better than anything else I have seen. Its central message is that a government or group of people who repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for human rights with respect to ANY group of people is also probably capable of perpetrating atrocities against any other group of people as well, if doing so is thought by them to be necessary in order to achieve their ends. Starting a war that helps no one but themselves is nothing to them. The destruction of a country means little to them. The deaths of millions of people means little to them.
Most people still don’t understand that. When their leaders tell them that it is necessary to destroy other people in order to protect them they accept that rather than see it as the terrible threat that it is. They fail to understand the central lessons of the Holocaust. And we will all be doomed to repeat the experiences of the Holocaust until we finally learn those lessons.
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