What Should We Have Learned, and What Should be Done Next Time?

This week’s column is being written on November 4, 2014, the election day of the most propagandistic, most costly, most wasteful mid-term American political campaign of all time, bar none.

It‘s obvious to me that the worst of the venom and untruths in the political ads have been coming from anonymous wealthy, (mostly right-wing) political, economic or religious groups or from the political action committees run by cunning political operatives like the NeoConservative Republicans Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others. (Adelson is the multibillionaire gambling empire magnate and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who has endorsed the likes of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, flushing down the toilet hundreds of millions of his and his corporation’s dollars in campaign “contributions” to right-wing politicians.)

The final results of this sobering circus, where the two major political parties have spent billions of desperate dollars mindlessly purchasing expensive TV commercial time (to the delight of television executives), will not be tabulated by column deadline tonight. So there is no point in my trying to help voters discern - this time around - what parties or candidates might be best for them, their children, our terminally-ill planet, our rapidly disappearing democracy, or our corrupted economic system that is being strangled by extremist forces on the right-wing fringes of the political spectrum.  

The moneyed interests of powerful right-wing think tanks have cunningly been trying to influence our votes with the lavish help of the corporate-controlled major media outlets that are virtually all owned by the super-rich 1% who care greatly about their bottom line but not about the common good.

A Brief Review of European Fascism and its American Progeny

So what lessons can be learned from the mid-term elections of 2014 that can be applied post-election?

Perhaps a little review of the hidden history of false flag operations and the ideologies behind them would be in order, since, no matter what the political spectrum looks like tomorrow, we will certainly be affected by them in the near future. Hillary Clinton truthfully blurted out the truth a couple of decades ago when she talked about the reality of “the vast right-wing conspiracy” that was undermining America. She was correct, of course, but was immediately chastised and threatened into silenced by the very co-conspirators who ultimately went on to orchestrate, among many other activities, the destructive NAFTA accords, the bloating of the military budgets, the killing off of single payer health insurance, the Citizens United ruling, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the 800 right-wing think tanks, the Koch Brothers subsidiaries, Karl Rove’s many PACs,  the Tea Party movement, the rise of the new Jim Crow racism, the voter suppression tactics in Republican-dominated states, the glorification of American militarism, etc., etc. The reality of what Hillary truthfully revealed is now a taboo subject for any politician who fears the wrath of the conservative and corporate powers-that-be.  

Much of the Republican Party’s financial support (and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party’s) comes from elite plutocrats from the upper 1%, but the GOP’s grassroots support comes from uninformed, mis-informed, fearful whites who seem to, if they get any news at all, mainly listen to the right-wing propaganda provided by FoxNews. Within that group of liberal hating voters are, among others, xenophobes, homophobes, sexists, racists, proto-fascists, Neo-Nazis and war profiteers, and their political successes have facilitated the Tea Party’s expulsion of moderate Republicans from the GOP.

Those purges have led directly to the infamous anti-Obama Gridlock strategy in Congress, the major objective of which was to cause Obama’s presidency to fail in accomplishing its stated, relatively progressive 2008 agenda. That anti-democracy conspiracy was helped greatly by the 2010 Roberts’ Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling (allowing unlimited, anonymous financial contributions to political parties from amoral, non-human corporations). The conspiracy successfully blocked most of Obama’s appointments, blocked the passage of many worthy initiatives, and refused to give Obama any credit for anything. The objective in that strategy for Republicans was to be able to more successfully run against Obama’s party because he could be accused of being a failed president, despite, by the way, his 41% approval rating versus the 9% approval rating of his Republican tormentors.

The conspirators who never lifted a finger to help America do well during Obama’s presidency, will probably continue, in future election cycles, to raise their ugly heads as long as the fortunes of their paymasters and professional agitators hold out - or until a sizable majority of voting citizens come to their senses and say no to the politics of fear and hate and gridlock.

The Democratic Weimar Republic was Made to Fail

What has been happening in 2014 politics has been going on in America in every political season in recent memory. I started becoming aware of toxic partisan politics during the Nixon and Reagan eras.

Telling the story of what happened in German politics during the 1920s and 1930s following the collapse of the German empire after WWI is instructive.

Germany’s experiment in democracy started in 1918 with Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication of the throne after his army surrendered to the Allies. Democracy was a foreign concept to the average conservative German, so it was often opposed - with various degrees of intensity - during the 14 years of its existence. There were vows from some of the most extreme right-wing parties to cause it to fail (analogous to the anti-Obama quasi-racist southerners like Kentucky’s Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, whose fellow conspirators publicly vowed the make Obama fail even if they had to crash the economy to do it). See http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/11847-did-republicans-deliberately-crash-the-us-economy for more.

In Germany the largest political party during most of the Weimar Republic’s existence was the liberal Democratic Socialist Party, which was vehemently opposed by every right-wing, conservative, liberal-hating, nationalist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist or pro-monarchist party, all of which eventually coalesced around the worst of them, the far right-wing Nazi Party, to kill off democracy in Germany. The survival and rise to power of the Nazi Party was greatly helped when Wall Street’s excesses crashed the world economy in 1929 at the exact same time that the Nazi Party was on the verge of bankruptcy. German capitalists bailed out Hitler and his party, for a price.

It was a few years after that crash, in 1933, when Hitler, who had evolved into a willing tool of Big Business, got every right-wing and centrist political party to vote to dissolve the parliament and grant him dictatorial powers - with the blessings of many of Germany’s most powerful corporations and those wealthy elites who had bailed out the Furher four years earlier. Democracy in Germany didn’t simply fail; it was made to fail, just like the orchestrated failure of the Obama presidency.

<<< In Germany the largest political party during most of the Weimar Republic’s existence was the liberal Democratic Socialist Party, which was vehemently opposed by every right-wing, conservative, liberal-hating, nationalist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist or pro-monarchist party, all of which eventually coalesced around the worst of them, the far right-wing Nazi Party, to kill off democracy in Germany. The survival and rise to power of the Nazi Party was greatly helped when Wall Street’s excesses crashed the world economy in 1929 at the exact same time that the Nazi Party was on the verge of bankruptcy. German capitalists bailed out Hitler and his party, for a price.

It was a few years after that crash, in 1933, when Hitler, who had evolved into a willing tool of Big Business, got every right-wing and centrist political party to vote to dissolve the parliament and grant him dictatorial powers - with the blessings of many of Germany’s most powerful corporations and those wealthy elites who had bailed out the Furher in 1929. Democracy in Germany didn’t simply fail; it was made to fail, just like the orchestrated failure of the Obama presidency.

The Death Knell for German Democracy: When Misinformed Germans Voted for Their Future Oppressors on November 6, 1932

Anybody living in Germany during the 1920s and 30s experienced the increasingly violent elections. Fascist brown-shirted thugs (mostly angry, unemployable, psychologically traumatized WWI combat veterans) intimidated left-wing and minority (especially Jewish) voters and many stayed away from the polls. Nazi politicians were protected by those street-fighting gangs who were ready and very willing to beat up anybody. The uber-patriotic, flag-waving Nazis usually pretended to be likeable moderates during their political campaigns, thus deceiving enough befuddled and mis-informed voters into voting for them.

In the November 6, 1932 elections, the extreme right-wing Nazi Party became the largest political party in Germany, taking control of the Reichstag. It was essentially the culmination of what could be called a rolling coup d’etat. That coup proved to be irreversible, for within a few months of that election, the Weimar Republic was strangled to death. The only opposition to the Nazi juggernaut was the leftist Democratic Socialist Party, which was soon to be brutally annihilated, with many of its leaders winding up in jail or in concentration camps, along with many publishers and editors of the liberal press.  Most of the political party members of the Reichstag who voted for their future oppressors totally misread how lethal Hitler’s hidden agenda was - until it was too late. Many members of Hitler’s coalition did not survive.

False Flag Ops and the 1933 Reichstag Fire

But there were more tricks up Hitler’s and Joseph Goebbels’s sleeves that consolidated the gains achieved by their legal coup. After finally gaining total control of the government, total control over the media, total control over the economy (Goebbels started the Reich Chamber of Commerce in May 1933), and enough military power for their “lebensraum” agenda, the Nazis devised an additional action to further their crack-down on the civil rights of intellectuals, free-thinkers, liberals, communists and non-Aryan minorities.

Nazi insiders conspired to burn down the symbol of German democracy, the Reichstag parliament building, on February 27, 1933, mere weeks after Hitler’s January 30 appointment to the Chancellorship. And they blamed the fire on an innocent “lone, crazed communist” (which was the same tactic used against Lee Harvey Oswald after JFK’s equally dramatic, world-changing assassination).

The day after the fire, Hitler (who knew it was a false flag operation designed to panic the German people) prevailed on the sickly, out-of-the-loop war hero and Reich President Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending a variety of civil liberties, liberties that had been guaranteed in the Weimar constitution (and inspired by the US Bill of Rights). Those now suspended liberties including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches, and freedom from censorship of mail and phone conversations, among others. The decree was specifically directed against “Communist acts of violence endangering the State.”

The Constitution-shredding Patriot and Homeland Security Acts that were hastily passed in the confused aftermath following the dramatic events of 9/11/01 had created in the minds of the public (whose only information that they were allowed to see after day one came from the Bush White House and the corporate- and government-controlled major media).

False Flag operations are conspiracies between two or more evil-doers to perform an evil deed that is then blamed on another entity. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was justified on the basis of a false flag operation that the Nazis called Operation Himmler. Operation Northwoods was a false flag operation. The Gulf of Tonkin episode (that justified the air war against North Vietnam) was a false flag operation. And many scholars that have studied the events of 9/11/01 strongly feel that it was also a false flag operation that justified the endless “war on terror”. The Reichstag Fire was a classical false flag operation.

Typically intensive propaganda efforts are used to repeat the lie over and over again, thus pummeling the public into believing the lie to be truthful and, in the case of both the Reichstag Fire and 9/11/01, justifying the banishment of liberties for law-abiding citizens, for the dramatic events of 9/11/01 were rapidly followed by the introduction and immediate passage (only Dennis Kucinich actually read the huge bills before voting on them) of the previously prepared and published Patriot and Homeland Security Acts that made lawful the installation of a police state similar to the one that Hitler hastily installed in Germany following the Reichstag Fire.

Millions of gullible American citizens saw the heavily edited TV coverage of the two Twin Towers (with coverage of the demolition of WTC 7 carefully censored out) as the two buildings exploded into smithereens, the millions of tons of reinforced concrete disintegrating into fine powder before they hit the ground, and with the massive steel girders sliced into small sections within seconds.

The TV networks immediately blamed the terminally ill Osama bin Laden and 19 Arab men for the deed without any proof of their guilt, evidence of any of them being on the airline manifest lists, nor were any of them seen on any of the videos that were taken in any of the airports. The propaganda machinery in America after 9/11 was as pervasive as the Nazi propaganda was in 1933.

Both the Reichstag Fire and 9/11 were false flag operations orchestrated by powerful right-wing groups (despite the denials of both the Hitler and Cheney/Bush administrations and the lack of honest journalism in the pages of Der Sturmer and The New York Times). Both events were designed to get the naïve and unthinking public primed and ready to support unjust wars for empire. For more on 9/11 as a false flag op, see: http://www.storyleak.com/911-false-flag-operation-state-sponsored-terrorism-by-the-usual-suspects/.

And Then They Came for the Jews, the Trade Unionists, and the Liberals

Soon after the Reichstag Fire, Jews, communists, socialists and trade unionists (all of them enemies of Capitalism and the Nazis – and the Vatican, it should be mentioned) were rounded up and targeted for incarceration and eventual elimination. The Final Solution for the Jews evolved gradually after that, continuing with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, aggressively launched with Krystallnacht in 1938 and culminating in the extermination camps early in World War II.

Germany’s labor unions thrived under the democratic Weimar Republic but, as has been the case everywhere this very democratic idea has been tried, they were infiltrated by corporate spies. When the fascists gained control of the government (to the delight of Germany’s Big Businesses), union leaders started being threatened, intimidated, beaten, imprisoned, murdered or otherwise “disappeared”, starting the day after the 1933 May Day events, which were allowed by Hitler. The very next day however, on May 2, 1933, every union hall and union office in Germany was smashed by Hitler’s Brown Shirt thugs, and every union’s resources were stolen by the Nazis, never to be returned to their rightful owners.

Germany’s multinational corporations (the economic upper 1%) hated the trade unions especially the notion of any “share the wealth” socialist economics, so they naturally supported any political party or politician that espoused an anti-leftist agenda. Capitalists have always sought legal ways to pay as close-to-slave-wages as possible to its workers. During World War II, many German corporations reported unheard of levels of profitability when foreign slave workers started being forced, under threat of death, to work for no pay in their factories. They had been transported from the occupied territories after German military had invaded their homelands All varieties of fascism are great for business and the financial elites, at least until their factories and their guilty nations are wiped out in the inevitable blowback.

Capitalists are perpetually on the lookout for ways to expand their markets. Nazi Germany’s corporations were no different. Hence German corporations tended to be supportive of Hitler’s Lebensraum agenda and his wars of expansion, occupation, and annexation that victimized Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Belgium, France and Russia.

After the unions, the next anti-.fascist groups to be “disappeared” in Germany were the intellectuals, the poets, the artists and the liberal media. Liberal printing presses were smashed and liberal editors and publishers arrested and put into concentration camps as dissenters and therefore enemies of the state.

And it wasn’t too long before other “undesirable” minorities such as Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, blacks and “illegal immigrants” (including those minorities labeled as ”mentally” ill or having disabling or seemingly incurable congenital illnesses) were first legally deprived of their voting rights, citizenship and human rights. Eventually these groups were brutally rounded up, many of them eventually being deprived of their right to life.

What Should Pro-democracy Antifascists be Doing Between Now and the Next Election Cycle?

Unless readers of this column have been living under a rock or have been using FoxNews and other hate- and fear-mongering talk shows as their major source of information, they will understand that our democracy is being threatened, just like the Weimar Republic, by any number of other authoritarian, non-democratic entities that are being heavily funded by billionaires and the corporations who have the propaganda power of the press.

The groups that want us to believe the myth that capitalism and democracy are one and the same include the following non-democratic, chain-of-command institutions, where group decisions are not made democratically, voting doesn’t happen and where unconditional obedience to powerful elites is demanded of subordinates. That includes such entities as the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, multinational corporations, religious institutions, some educational institutions, police departments, and parents who utilize punitive parenting tactics (where parental cruelty easily spreads contagiously through the generations with disastrous social, political and spiritual consequences for both the individual and the society).

Let us naïve voters beware, especially us liberals who tend to wear rose-colored glasses, wanting to believe our elected or unelected leaders in the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and the corporate media. I would advise progressives, who may have the most to lose, to start preparing for the next election cycle right now, working to expose, and then correct, the tyranny of the Federal Reserve Board, the Wall Street financiers, the Security and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Citizens United, ALEC, the right-wing political action committees and the corrupting influence of multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers and others of their ilk..

I recommend that progressives start organizing right away, no matter who declares victory tonight or what party controls next year’s legislative or executive branches of government. Progressives need to learn how to sniff out the crypto-fascists, the plutocrats, the charlatans and the psychopaths among us who are wearing sheep’s clothing. We need to learn how to recognize propaganda wherever it exists and learn how to read between the lines. We need to always question authority figures, and we need to speak out consistently when injustice occurs anywhere.

And then, between now and the next election cycle, we may actually be able to identify the Friendly American Fascists among us as well as the paymasters of any psychopathic politician that wants to take control of our democracy, our government, our judicial system, our military or our economy.
    
And, above all, we need to keep in mind that, like all hungry wolves in sheep’s clothing, they are always on the lookout for their next meal.

Dr Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, Minnesota who practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and often writes about mental ill health, toxic food issues, corporate pollution, the corporate-controlled media, corporate-controlled politics, crony capitalism, militarism, racism, fascism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements.