Find BBW Hookups Now
Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
Find BBW Hookups Now
| Blogs > starlayer > My Blog |
Weimar America: Four Major Ways We're Following In Germany's Fascist Footsteps
|
Weimar America: Four Major Ways We're Following In Germany's Fascist Footsteps What happens when a mature industrial nation turns its back on democracy and lets its right-wing elite destroy the middle class? We've seen this movie before. You really have to wonder what’s going through the minds of Republican party leaders these days. What would possess a group of elected officials to sink to the depths Republicans have since last year’s election? Sure, they put forth a horrible presidential candidate who suffered a humiliating loss at the polls, but they still maintained most of their power in the House of Representatives and filibuster capabilities in the Senate (thanks, Harry Reid). But instead of using that power to work on bipartisan (excuse my language, I know that’s a dirty word) legislation which would benefit the country they claim to love, they’ve decided to start a mass exodus from reality into a bizarre pseudo-existence. If you’re a registered Republican or a conservative who usually votes for Republicans, you should be truly concerned for the sanity and future of your elected officials and your party as a whole. You might not know it or even agree with my statement due to Fox News overload on your brain, but take a deep breath and give this some thought. Your party has echoed a chorus of Benghazi conspiracies for the past several months, culminating in a supposed bombshell email leak to ABC News which “exposed” administration officials as being concerned only with how they’d look to the public. This, of course, turned out to be fabricated garbage which was fed to ABC by Republicanswho maliciously edited the original emails (which have since been released to the public by the White House). So your whole Benghazi conspiracy which has been pushed nonstop for months, turned out to be so full of crap that Republicans felt they needed to fabricate emails to make their case. If you’re a conservative, you should be disgusted and calling for investigations into that. So the Benghazi tragedy was spun into political theater by Republicans who had nothing, could find nothing, and ended up having to fabricate “evidence” just to try to make President Obama and the administration look bad. Did they not think the administration still had access to the actual emails? Did they not think the truth would come out? Was one or two days of, “See, I told you he was the boogeyman!” really worth being exposed for the frauds they are? You genuinely should be questioning the sanity of these people who’ve been pushing this nonsense — and the really scary thing is, most of them still are pushing it, even after being exposed. Now you have them trying desperately to weave new “scandals” in and make them all seem even more serious. The IRS was diligent in reviewing the tax-free status of Tea Party groups — it’s all Obama’s fault! Funny how these same people seem to have no problem with the Citizen’s United decision and the millions of dollars in shadow money flowing into political campaigns. Where’s the outrage against that coming from the right? Oh, I know where it is — it’s directed toward people like George Soros who are known to give to liberal organizations and Democratic campaigns, while they’re perfectly fine with the Koch brothers giving far more to conservative “nonprofits” like Americans for Prosperity. Just look at the last election cycle for proof. Sure, George Soros funneled in a few million, but he was vastly outspent by Charles and David Koch. Even the unknown third Koch brother, William, came close to outspending Soros in a completely legal attempt to buy the election. Give me a break. Do you honestly expect the average American to care about the IRS being more diligent with your so-called “nonprofits,” when you’ve been unmitigated in your hypocrisy when it comes to political nonprofits and shadow money in politics? The IRS is an easy “boogeyman” to attack, but you’re playing with fire either way because we’re not buying the outrage. Now the AP records seizure does deserve to be scrutinized, in my opinion, as it poses some real questions as to why the Justice Department couldn’t have handled it more appropriately. But let’s not forget that it was Republicans in the Senate who blocked the shield law which may have prevented it from being legal in the first place, when they filibustered the legislation back in 2008. Golly, Republicans filibustering common sense legislation — who would’ve guessed it? Then of course we have the utterly ridiculous outrage over “Umbrella-gate,” which quite frankly is so pathetic you’d think it came from The Onion’s vault of stories that didn’t quite make the cut. This epitomizes what it’s like when a political party literally has nothing left to attack — their minds have become so deluded from years of fabricated outrage and lies about the President that they’ve completely gone off the deep end. It’s actually gone from being comical to just plain sad how far gone some of these people have become. You see, the American voting public isn’t buying into this pseudo-outrage, as shown in President Obama’s latest Gallup job approval poll. He hasn’t gone down in approval as the GOP has been ramping up their outrage over the past week — he’s actually gone up 3% and back above 50% overall. Let me clue Republicans in on something, since they obviously either don’t understand it or don’t want to admit it — most of your constituents care about real issues, not fake outrage. Constantly feeding the scandal jukebox quarter after quarter isn’t going to force us to enjoy your tunes, it only serves to accelerate the process of blocking them out as white noise. Especially when you’re shamelessly disregarding your own hypocrisy, or even worse, blatantly making things up and trying to pass them off as fact. Republicans are brazenly sabotaging their own party, and if I were a conservative voter (perish the thought) I would be genuinely outraged. When they’re not busy wasting time and taxpayer money holding symbolic votes to repeal Obamacare, they’ve been busy monotonously beating the scandal drum nonstop in the hopes that it will suddenly resonate with a tired public who’s sick of hearing it. Meanwhile, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have seen their approval ratings either stay steady or go up significantly. At this rate, Republicans are in danger of not only losing the House in 2014, but not even having a chance at the presidency in 2016. It’s a long way off and pure speculation, but one thing is for certain — Republicans seem completely content with scripting their own demise. And that is the true “scandal” which should be headlining Fox News. July 5, 2012 | What happens when a nation that was once an economic powerhouse turns its back on democracy and on its middle class, as wealthy right-wingers wage austerity campaigns and enable extremist politics? It may sound like America in 2012. But it was also Germany in 1932. Most Americans have never heard of the Weimar Republic, Germany's democratic interlude between World War I and World War II. Those who have usually see it as a prologue to the horrors of Nazi Germany, an unstable transition between imperialism and fascism. In this view, Hitler's rise to power is treated as an inevitable outcome of the Great Depression, rather than the result of a decision by right-wing politicians to make him chancellor in early 1933. Historians reject teleological approaches to studying the past. No outcome is inevitable, even if some are more likely than others. Rather than looking for predictable outcomes, we ought to be looking to the past to understand how systems operate, especially liberal capitalist democracies. In that sense, Weimar Germany holds many useful lessons for contemporary Americans. In particular, there are four major points of similarity between Weimar Germany and Weimar America worth examining. 1. Austerity. Today's German leaders preach the virtues of austerity. They justify their opposition to the inflationary, growth-creating policies that Europe desperately needs by pointing to the hyperinflation that occurred in 1923, and became one of the most enduring memories of the Weimar Republic. Yet the austerity policies enacted after the onset of the Depression produced the worst of Germany's economic crisis, while also destabilizing the country's politics. Cuts to wages, benefits and public programs dramatically worsened unemployment, hunger and suffering. So far, austerity in America has largely taken place at the state and local levels. However, the federal government is now working on undemocratic national austerity plans, in the form of so-called "trigger cuts" slated to take effect at the end of 2012. In addition, there's the Bowles-Simpson austerity plan to slash Medicare and Social Security benefits along with a host of other public programs; and the Ryan Budget, a blueprint for widespread federal austerity should the Republicans win control of the Congress and the White House in November. 2. Attacks on democracy. Austerity was deeply unpopular with the German public. The Reichstag, Germany's legislature, initially rejected austerity measures in 1930. As a result, right-wing Chancellor Heinrich Brüning implemented his austerity measures by using a provision in the Weimar constitution enabling him to rule by decree. More notoriously, Hitler was selected as Chancellor despite his party never having won an election -- the ultimate slap at democracy. Both these events took place amidst a larger backdrop of anti-democratic attitudes rampant in the Weimar era. Monarchists, fascists and large businesses all resented the left-leaning politics of a newly democratic Germany, and supported politicians and intellectuals who pledged to return control to a more authoritarian government. Democracy is far older in the United States today than it was in Germany during the early 1930s. But that doesn't mean that democracy is actually respected in practice today; it only means that attacks on it can't be as overt as they were in Weimar Germany. From the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling to Republican voter ID laws to austerity proposals that bypass the normal legislative processes (remember the Super commission?), American democracy is under similar direct threats now. 3. Enabling of extremists. Well before Hitler was made chancellor in 1933, leading conservatives and business leaders had concluded that their interests would be better served by something other than the democratic system established in 1919. During the 1920s, they actively supported parties that promoted anti-democratic ideologies, from monarchism to authoritarianism. Nazis were just one of the many extremist groups that they supported during the Weimar era. In fact, initially, many on the German right had attempted to exclude the Nazis from their efforts; and as chancellor, Brüning had tried to marginalize the Nazi party. However, his successor, the right-wing Franz von Papen, believed he could control Hitler and needed the support of the Nazi members of the Reichstag. Conservative German leaders ultimately decided their hunger for power was more important than keeping extremists at bay -- and their support finally gave the Nazi Party control of the country. Most Tea Party activists aren't Nazis. But with roots in the 20th-century radical right, the Tea Party's attack on the public sector, on labor unions, on democratic practices, and on people who aren't white mark them as the extremist wing of American politics; and they bear many of the hallmarks that characterize fascist movements around the world. In recent years, Republican leaders have been enabling these extremists in a successful bid to reclaim political power lost to Democrats in 2006 and 2008. We don't yet know where this enabling is going to lead the country, but it's hard to imagine it will be anywhere good. 4. Right-wing and corporate dominance. One of the the most prominent German media moguls in the 1920s was Alfred Hugenberg, owner of 53 newspapers that reached over a majority of German readers. The chairman of the right-wing German National People's Party, Hugenberg promoted Adolf Hitler by providing favorable coverage of him from the mid-1920s onward. Major German corporations such as Krupp, IG Farben and others spent money in the 1920s and early 1930s to support the rise of right-wing political parties, including the Nazis, as part of a strategy to undermine democracy and labor unions. Even if Hitler had never taken power, that strategy had already achieved significant returns on their substantial investment. Here in the United States, one only needs to look at Charles and David Koch, Fox News and other right-wing funders and their media outlets to see the analogy. By funding right-wing politicians who promote austerity, undermine democracy and support extremism, they are active agents in the creation of Weimar America, the rebirth of Nazism .... Siege Hail!! |
Become a member to create a blog
