Notes from an American gulag

(Historically speaking of Gulags, aka Concentration Camps, aka Death Camps)
Hinge factor….. 27 February 1933
Who burned the Reichstag?
A communist? A nationalist? A socialist? A christian? A muslim?
A communist was quickly arrested, accused, condemned and hung. No coverup necessary.
Four weeks earlier under the urgent propaganda of a communist threat, senile President Paul von Hindenburg handed the office of chancellor over to a man who would nearly destroy Europe in less than 12 years.
As the brown shirts marched around in circles all night celebrating their victory, the aged WWI general and former leader of the defunct Republic, suffering from dementia and watching from his balcony, turned and remarked: ”I didn’t know we had captured so many Russian prisoners.”
To accomplish this coup, the Nazis passed The Reichstag Fire Decree and The Enabling Act , making Adolph Hitler, who was once quoted as saying: “Power is the ultimate law.” –into a totalitarian dictator.
I’ve always felt that major historic events often hang on such bizarre hinge factors that are strange but true. Sometimes it is the most unlikely alignment of events that ultimately make the most disastrous difference.
Of course, Nazis were suspected of having started the fire and logically they had the most to gain from it, so probability suggests that is a fact. Shrewd manipulation of evolving political landscapes can often bring the desired results and for better or worse, the history of atrophied Republics tends to repeat itself. Though the Reichstag under Nazi control continued to meet in the Kroll Opera House, the Reichstag building itself was not reconstructed until the 1990’s.
America is facing a similar propaganda induced crisis today. As in 1933, lies have been spread in order to seize and wield power and more lies are being told for the purpose of holding on to it. Can we really believe that the Congress of the United States, who have for years been bought and paid for by their mega rich donors, will be passing any legislation that benefits anybody but themselves and those “high net worth individuals”?
It matters very little who wins a presidential election anymore. Corruption is widespread in both political parties. Loyalty to Constitution and constituency have been replaced by partisan extremism and demagoguery. Much like the ancient Roman senate, our lawmakers are out of touch with their populace and seem to believe that the ”American People” are the rich individual donors and corporate lobbyists they hear from on a daily basis. The collective, mostly complacent, electorate are spurned, unless it is time for them to vote and even then, promises made before elections are not promises kept afterward.
Moreover, there is a malicious supremacist overtone that permeates legislative discussions of the poorer “lower class” Americans. The “War on Poverty” of the Johnson years, has been replaced with an actual “War on the Poor”.
Welfare and “entitlements” have been “Trumped-up” and propagandized as the reason our country is in debt and cannot afford to fix its infrastructure or health care system, when the truth is, Congress long ago squandered that money that was levied through payroll taxation to pay for protracted wars, exorbitant defense budgets, pork-barrel domestic projects, raises for themselves and tax cuts for the rich. The fund that Ronald Reagan promised in 1983 to “make permanent”, no longer provides a long term benefit to the now aged individuals who made those contributions in good faith. It is now being defined by a chainsaw wielding, Nazi saluting billionaire as a “ponzi scheme”.
For decades corporations and bankers have moved businesses and money offshore to evade taxes and turn bigger profits—despite all the current propaganda, those jobs are not coming back. Technology has long been replacing people in the workplace. There is no longer any long term job security, especially for young people just starting out. Corporate CEO’s make mega millions in salaries and bonuses, while former workers draw what little “welfare” is available to them as they look for a new job, in a country teetering on further economic collapse.
Monetary collapse had already occurred in Germany when Hitler and the National Socialists took power. In the years prior, a wheelbarrow full of Deutsch-Marks would not buy a loaf of bread. Corruption and cronyism was everywhere in government and business, as it is now. The shared wealth principles of communism had become more appealing and were loudly being voiced by many of the starving German people. Hitler took advantage of this disruption and fear by renewing their pre-WWI sense of nationalism and combining the term socialism with it, to counter what he portrayed as the communist menace.
And so it was that the Reichstag burned, and with it the praetorian Wiemar Republic. While an entire people, under the spell of a cult of personality, followed a man they believed to be their savior, who took them down a path of destruction–leaving them in 1945, amid a hellish landscape they could never have imagined, staring at the smoldering Reichstag rubble of 1933.
Beware the hinge factors. Remember, Rise, Resist!