“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” – George Orwell, 1984
Hermann Göring, creator of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, hosted a secret meeting at his home in Berlin on February 20, 1933. In attendance were over 20 of Germany’s top businessmen. Hitler addressed the group, all members of the German Herrenklub (Gentlemen’s Club), and told them that, with their financial support, he would guarantee that their assets would be protected. Together these industrialists contributed two million Reichmarks to fund Hitler’s successful campaign to pass the Enabling Act in the Reichstag, giving Hitler dictatorial powers. These lions of industry were not necessarily Nazi ideologues. In fact, many thought that they had a useful idiot in Hitler. But their greed made them the enablers that built the Nazi Party. And with their campaign contributions, they became accomplices in a criminal regime that emerged as the most sadistic in human history.
The question Americans have asked themselves for the last 74 years is whether it can happen here. Here in America, where our separation of powers and our regulatory regimes were conceived to be bulwarks against this type of coup. Of course, it can. It is happening right here and right now.
We have been observing the gradual attrition of our constitutionally mandated separation of powers for decades. But the death blow arrived with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling of 2010 where money became speech. The smugness of Mitt Romney’s, “Corporations are people, my friend” was the long-awaited Republican victory lap that reminded us who was now going to be in charge of America. This was the moment when the Camel’s Nose of Republican doublespeak pushed open the “big tent” of American democracy and let Donald Trump in to burn our house down. It deliberately introduced bribery and extortion into our governing apparatus. It permitted the Koch Brothers to bust open the dam that prevented the buying of legislators and judiciaries at the state and federal levels of government. It vanquished the notion of checks and balances by permitting perverse incentives to define our laws, their interpretation, and how they will be executed. Perverse incentives are what today’s Republican Party stands for; it’s the only thing the Republican Party stands for.
Since 2000, the president and chairman of the Citizens United Organization has been David Bossie. He briefly stepped aside in 2016 to be the Deputy Campaign Manager for Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Citizens United produces film documentaries and other disinformation intended to be hit jobs on leading democrats and liberal issues. Bossie introduced Steve Bannon to Trump in 2011 and is a longtime friend of both Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. In May of 2019, Bossie was accused by the IRS of defrauding political donors by funneling their donations to himself through consultants and the sales of his books. He’s a regular on Fox News, Donald Trump’s propaganda wing that specializes in the “doublespeak” so presciently depicted by George Orwell in his dystopian novel, “1984”.
While Trump’s coterie of demi-villains might resemble mere mechanics for his crime family, Putin would call them apparatchiks, “agents of the apparatus”. They assist Trump’s propaganda machine in much the same way that Joseph Goebbels used underlings to run his Propaganda Ministry in Germany. As we watch Fox News slavishly control the information distributed to Trump’s lunatic base, what we’re actually observing is an attempt to do what Putin has done through his government owned newspaper, Pravda; what all dictators do: gain and exert control over the news media, arts, and information the way Hitler did it in Germany. They do it by utilizing Orwell’s doublespeak: they call themselves fair and balanced. This purported reformation that Fox is currently touting likely represents its gyroscopic control system kicking into gear – as tea leaves are read, advertising decisions begin to hurt, and preparations are necessary to stay afloat in the roiling seas of the storm that lies ahead.
While Trump might look like the Fat Elvis of Conservative right-wing politics in America, he’s every bit as malignant as the lunatics that brought the world the Second World War.
Historian, Richard Frankel, an expert on Nazi Germany, says: “If we wait for Trump and this moment to fully become like Hitler and the Nazis – and that is the point at which you start to act – then it is already too late. The unfortunate aspect is that, if you set the bar so high in terms of outrage and horror, then people all too often let things continue when they could have been stopped earlier. Once it gets to that point it’s way too late”.
Christopher Hitchens, one of the most insightful chroniclers of George Orwell, said this about the birth of totalitarian regimes like Trump’s: “This trick of attaining power is often masked in language; the way euphemism is used to mask brutal reality. That’s the trick – you get a nice name for a nasty thing, and you spread it around and make it seem technical. In Stalin’s time, the regime’s belief that, in ordinary times, extraordinary measures must be taken, couldn’t be more apt today. Orwell knew that meant mass graves”.
We are not in a state of emergency. Our borders are not crumbling under the weight of savages looking to eat our lunch. Our industrial job loss is not a function of cheap overseas labor; it’s a function of perverse tax incentives that reward offshoring for corporations – of an unforgivable failure of imagination in our own legislature to respond properly to the challenges posed by a globalized world. We are not the Germany of mid-20th century Europe. The American Carnage to which Donald Trump refers is the carnage he is wresting upon our democracy – the same carnage that resulted from the complicity of Germany’s plutocracy; the plutocracy that believed that Hitler was their useful idiot.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, provocative, or controversial, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
image: wikimedia commons
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs