Category: Commentary/Editorial, History, Politics || By

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"Nazi" and "fascist" have been slung around so much in the last 50 years that the words are almost meaningless. As several commentators have noted recently in reference to Glenn Beck --- who has essentially re-defined "Nazism" to mean anything he doesn't like --- references to Nazis should probably be confined to talking about actual Nazis.

But at some point, if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has feathers and swims in the water, it's safe to call it a duck.

At what point will our so-called liberal media wake up and realize that we're seeing the rise of a fascist movement in the United States?

(Click the "More" link to continue ...)

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Last weekend at a flea market I bought a scary book. It's not by Stephen King or Dean Koontz, and it's not even about the Pittsburgh Pirates since 1992, though Lord knows, that would be scary.

It's about the fall of the Weimar Republic --- Germany's first short-lived experiment with democracy, which was conducted after the abdication of German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and before the election of you-know-who in 1933.

It's called Sieg Heil: An Illustrated History of Germany from Bismarck to Hitler, and was written in the early 1970s by Stefan Lorant, who's most famous in Western Pennsylvania for his monumental work Pittsburgh: Story of an American City.

Although Pittsburgh went through multiple revisions and printings and remains widely available today, it was Sieg Heil that Lorant considered his most important work.

Sieg Heil is now long out of print, but you can find copies through Amazon.com and at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

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Lorant, sometimes called the "father of photo-journalism," was a German newspaper and magazine editor in the 1920s and '30s until he was arrested and thrown in jail for alleged political subversion. He knew a thing or two about real Nazis, not the ones from Glenn Beck's fevered imagination.

In high school and college, I learned little about Weimar Germany, because it's sandwiched between World War I and World War II. I remember hearing only that democracy failed in Germany because of hyperinflation. France and Great Britain held Germany primarily responsible for causing World War I, so they insisted that the German government pay outrageous war reparations.

The German government foolishly printed up worthless extra money and the Nazis eventually took over. The fall of the Weimar Republic, then, is sometimes used as an explanation why countries need a "hard" currency.

That's not the whole story as Lorant tells it. It's true that the Weimar government did print up too much paper money. The French and British did demand reparations in the amount of 132 billion marks, and as partial payment, they confiscated German coal, steel and agricultural products. That made consumer goods almost unattainable at any price and set off the initial inflation spiral.

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But inflation wasn't the only thing that paved the way for the Nazis, Lorant writes. One of the failures of the Weimar Republic, he says, was that the government was controlled by moderate to liberal factions that couldn't get along with each other. The constant political infighting between the far-left, left and centrists meant they exhausted themselves squabbling and ran ineffective campaigns.

The first president of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, was a "jovial, decent and honest man," Lorant writes, but was also a "conciliatory man who believed in compromise" and dedicated himself to uniting liberals and conservatives.

Instead, the liberals abandoned him, while the conservatives spurned him. Right-wing newspapers called him unqualified (he was just a "saddler's apprentice," they said) or attacked his patriotism. "Prove that you are not really a traitor," one paper demanded, according to Lorant.

When Ebert sued one of the newspapers for libel, a far-right judge who had been appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled against the president. Ebert died in 1925 a broken man.

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After Ebert's death, Paul von Hindenburg became president, and directed his cabinet "to bring down the massive budget deficit," Lorant writes. With many government jobs eliminated and veteran and unemployment benefits slashed, the economic crisis got worse.

The misery caused by the German austerity budget gave the far-right even more ammunition against the moderates and liberals, according to Sieg Heil. By 1930, the Nazis were campaigning on a platform of "bread and work for everyone," Lorant says.

The constant propaganda wars and street demonstrations by the left and right also wore down the German people. "The people were tired of the fighting in the streets ... they were tired of labor demonstrations," he writes. "They yearned for some sort of authority --- for someone who would tell them what to do. They cried out for law and order."

Hitler "felt their frustration" and wooed citizens with promises of strong moral leadership, Lorant says. "Against such attacks and promises, the campaign of the moderate parties appeared listless."

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You probably know that the Nazis blamed Jews for the country's economic problems in the 1920s. But not everyone was starving, Lorant reports. "The greatest inflation profiteer was not a Jew, but Hugo Stinnes, Germany's most prominent industrialist. He acquired mines, factories (and) real estate until he had amassed about 25 percent of all of the nation's industry. At one time he owned well over 1,000 different enterprises."

You may have heard that the Nazis closed churches. But that doesn't mean that Nazis were atheists. In fact, Lorant notes, the creator of National Socialism, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a fervent Christian who felt that Hitler was "destined by God to lead the German people."

Yes, the Nazis indeed closed churches because they saw themselves as a rival to their own authority --- but they wanted to replace them with an official state religion --- the National Reich Church --- that would be at least nominally Christian.

(Lorant doesn't mention this, but Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, claimed to be a devout Christian who read his Bible nightly: "Far in the distance roars the sea. Then I lie down and think for a long time about the calm and pale man from Nazareth."

(Goebbels also considered liberal or progressive churches "enemies of the state," saying that "if Christ came back he would drive his treacherous servants out of the temple with a whip," and that true Christians were being "betrayed by those who claimed to defend Christianity but in reality made coalitions with God-denying atheists, thus destroying the foundations of national and Christian morality.")

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By now, you know where I'm going with this, right?

Ineffective moderates and liberals who spend all of their time fighting amongst themselves? A vacillating moderate-left president who tries to compromise but wins over no support?

A right-wing that views itself as doing God's will on Earth? An economic crisis that gets worse because of government budget cuts?

A handful of industrialists who control the wealth? Far-right judges? Constant propaganda wars?

It all sounds mighty familiar. The parallels between Germany in the 1920s and the United States in the 2010s are obvious and alarming.

From my perspective, attacks on Obama's patriotism and heritage --- such as those made by Mike Huckabee last week --- are fundamentally no different from attacks made on Friedrich Ebert.

Or consider Goebbels' wish to turn Germany into a nation of what he thought were traditional Christian values. It's completely compatible with the desire of fundamentalist Christians and right-wing politicians to turn America into a "Christocracy."

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You're not convinced. Well, from Sieg Heil, I learned that the right-wing created a cult of personality around former German president and chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, portraying him as the savior of the German race --- and the Nazis as the natural inheritors of his leadership ability --- and often ascribed to him positions he'd never actually held.

A photo in Sieg Heil shows nationalist propaganda posters from 1932 that incorporated photos of Bismarck --- who had died more than 30 years before, and had been out of office since 1890.

(Lorant doesn't go into detail, but according to historian Robert Gerwarth --- these are paraphrases from Wikipedia --- the "Bismarck myth made him out to be a dogmatic ideologue and ardent nationalist when, in fact, he was ideologically flexible." Myths about Bismarck "exercised a destructive influence on the political culture of the first German democracy ... and legitimized a new style of right-wing politics."

(In other words, Bismarck didn't fire the air-traffic controllers or tear down the Berlin Wall, but he might have.)

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Of course, Sieg Heil is also a scary book in part because of Lorant's up-close and personal documentation of the persecution of the Jews. And that didn't start with concentration camps and death squads.

No, as Lorant methodically reports, the persecution started way back in 1920 with propaganda about Jews who were supposedly aligned with foreign governments (particularly the Russians) to tear down Germany. It escalated to boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, and then campaigns to get people to stop hiring Jews, and peaceful street demonstrations against Jews, and then violent ones.

In other words, every time the right wing attacked Jews and weren't challenged, they escalated their attacks. At first it was words. Then it was action. At first it was harassment. Eventually it was murder.

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How are right-wing attacks on Jews in Germany in the 1930s different from American street demonstrations recently organized against Muslims, including at the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" (which wasn't at "Ground Zero" and wasn't a "mosque")?

Or, how is it different from a rally like this one last week in Orange County, Calif., where three right-wing politicians --- including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives --- joined an angry mob in calling a group of Muslim charity workers "terrorists" and offering to send them "to an early meeting in Paradise"?

I see no discernible difference at all. You might say, "Well, Muslim extremists planned the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks." The Nazis blamed the Jews for any number of atrocities. They accused all Jews of being Communists in league with the Russians, much as the far-right today accuses all Muslims of practicing holy war and Sharia law.

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I was very reluctant to write this commentary. I am not saying Republicans or conservatives are Nazis. I'm not even comparing them to Nazis.

But I'm hardly the only one to notice these eerie and disturbing parallels between Germany between the two world wars, and the current state of affairs in America.

Last year, liberal philosopher and scientist Noam Chomsky said the "level of anger and fear" in the United States was like nothing he could remember in his lifetime, adding that he had a "dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering."

"I'm just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler's speeches on the radio, and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs," he said.

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Another liberal commentator, Naomi Wolf, warned in 2007 that democracies don't just disappear. They're eroded gradually, she said, and some of the hallmarks of fascism --- arresting and imprisoning people without warrants or trials --- are already happening in the United States as a result of the Patriot Act (which was passed and renewed with both Republican and Democratic support).

"We need to look at history and face the 'what-ifs,'" Wolf wrote. "For if we keep going down this road, the 'end of America' could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before --- and this is the way it is now."

We've gone almost four years further down that same road since Wolf's commentary. I'd like to think we haven't passed the point of no return --- but I also haven't seen any evidence of us applying the brakes, either.

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