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America: The Fourth Reich

It should not be denied any longer: America is hurtling along the road to full-fledged fascism. To recognize this is the necessary first step in deflecting the juggernaut and creating the possibility of more peaceful tomorrows. It is legitimate and also necessary to correctly employ the power of naming.

By Barrie Zwicker, Global Outlook, Issue No. 6, Winter 2004

Fascism according to the Collins English Dictionary is “any (#1) right wing (#2) nationalist ideology or movement with (#3) an authoritarian and (#4) hierarchical structure that is (#5) fundamentally opposed to democracy and (#6) liberalism”. Add (#7) racism and (#8) brutality and you have Hitler’s Third Reich in a nutshell.

By any sober analysis America has become extremely right wing and nationalist. At the same time I am soulfully aware of the tremendous numbers of Americans ashamed, appalled, afraid and angry about the direction of their government and that of too many of their fellow citizens.

Signs of growing authoritarianism in the US are evident especially to those outside the self-absorbed cocoon of US culture. The signs include the supine attitude toward authority of most of the mainstream media.

Contrary to incessant rhetoric about democracy, the US power structure is considerably hierarchical. Money power comprises the main rungs of the hierarchy. According to the New York Times the Republicans were confident of raising at least $170-million for George W. Bush’s 2004 election campaign, redefining what the Times called ‘standards’ for fund-raising. Both the hierarchy of money and the antagonism to democracy are spelled out in Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

That the US establishment is opposed to liberalism – no matter how you define liberalism – can hardly be debated. We already have six grounds for applying the term Fourth Reich. But consider another 20 parallels between the USA today and Hitler’s Germany:

Concepts like anti-communism, anti-Marxism, anti-socialism stir up visceral reactions. The core opposition to the regime is from the strong conscious left.

A fundamentalist faith in capitalism, specifically the systematized form of greed known as monopoly capitalism, is dominant. Corporations are at the centre of the power structure. Corruption at the top is endemic.

The number of people consigned to the grave by military and paramilitary actions in both cases is in the millions. Backdate the Fourth Reich to the end of the Second World War and the number murdered by US forces equals or outnumbers the toll in the Holocaust – almost three and a half million people in Vietnam alone. The brutality is a matter of record for those who are willing to look at it. See William Blum’s Killing Hope for one researcher’s record.

In both cases the leader was illegally installed into power, Hitler in 1933, George W. Bush in 2000.

The ambition of world domination. The Third and Fourth Reich’s invade as many countries as can be gotten away with. A Blitzkrieg approach is favored. For Hitler: Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. For George W. Bush: Afghanistan, Iraq and who ever’s next – Syria? Iran? Libya? Cuba?

Seizure of other countries’ oil. Grabbing Russia’s Baku oil fields was a major objective of Hitler – the Caspian oil fields and those in Iraq are the same for Bush.

The ‘pitiful giant’ syndrome is invoked. “Our enemies are powerful,” it goes, so we must arm endlessly in ‘self-defense.’ Often accompanied with this rhetoric is the high-sounding: “Our enemies taunt us, and we are patient, but our patience is not endless.”

Pre-emptive or ‘preventive’ war is policy and practice.

Highly orchestrated propaganda campaigns are a Reich staple. HitlerÂ’s stylized mass rallies come to mind. The propaganda of the Fourth Reich is suited to the TV age: sophisticated and media-savvy deluxe. Embedded journalists, for instance. An example from the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the much-publicized return of petite blonde soldier Private Jessica Lynch to her family, in full uniform. Props included a hometown band and Blackhawk helicopters.

Where the media are not sufficiently pro-regime and self-censoring, censorship and intimidation of the media are commonplace. Brutal intimidation under the second Bush regime includes bombing Al Jazeera television facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter killing an Al Jazeera journalist, thus constituting censorship by assassination.

Use of religion. Invocations of God’s approval for the Reich and its works. William L. Shirer in his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich quotes the Fuhrer’s minister of church affairs as declaring that the Nazi party “stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism… National Socialism is doing God’s will…”

An ever-encroaching police state is a sure sign youÂ’re living in a Reich.

Illegal actions. International and domestic laws are breached, resisted and undermined, along with rejection or subversion of multilateral agreements and organizations. Hitler pulled Germany out of the League of Nations altogether. In AmericaÂ’s case the United Nations is vilified, sidelined or embraced according to the EmpireÂ’s needs at any given time.

Use of fear is an important tool of a Reich. Inflated or imagined threats of ‘terrorism’ are drummed into the domestic public’s mind.

Alarms of ‘terrorism’ by a Reich are hypocritical to the nth degree considering the wholesale terrorism a Reich unleashes on others. Third Reich Stuka dive-bombers over Spain, V-2 rockets into London. Fourth Reich ‘daisy cutters, cluster bombs, ‘bunker busters,’ DU munitions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Skies full of helicopter gunships in a string of countries going back to Vietnam.

Actual retail terrorism: the clandestine formation, training, funding and control of functioning terrorists serving as dark pawns of the Reich. This is one of the lesser-known parallels. William L. Shirer explains once again: “For months prior to July 1934 the Austrian Nazis, with weapons and dynamite furnished by Germany, had instituted a reign of terror, blowing up railways, power stations and government buildings and murdering…”

Both Unholy Wars by British investigative journalist John K. Cooley and War and Globalisation, the Truth Behind September 11 by Michel Chossudovsky, document the close links between the CIA, PakistanÂ’s ISI (virtually an arm of the CIA), Saudi intelligence and the bin Laden family, and that the CIA was deeply involved in the creation and subsequent operations of AL Qaeda.

A preoccupation with secrecy. Secrecy is a precondition for deception. And deception, above all, is the key to everything for a Reich. The leaders are marinated in a complete obsession with lying an deceiving at every turn. Deceptions are the regimeÂ’s key to mobilizing public opinion. Deception is needed to fool the citizenry into relinquishing their civil rights and thereby closing many avenues of dissent. Deception precedes and leads to the police state. Deception precedes and leads to war. At every step deception is required for a ReichÂ’s gaining and maintaining power, and carrying out all its other nefarious actions. Without successful deceptions the Reich agenda simply cannot proceed. If the deceptions can be unmasked early enough and sufficiently the Reich collapses. No Reich so far has collapsed this way. In an information age it might be possible.

The masterpiece deceptions are those so big that ordinary decent honest people cannot or will not comprehend or face that they exist. The fact is they are a species of what the anarchist Bakunin described as “the propaganda of the act.” An act such as a bombing or assassination is also a message or propaganda. A potent version is the fake act, for instance a bombing which the perpetrators make appear to be carried out by others. The gold standard of these is the election-stealing or war-triggering fake event, especially one involving ‘foreign terrorists.’

This makes pivotal the parallel between the Reichstag fire of 1933, on the one hand, and the events of 9/11, on the other.

The Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 was in its day as iconic as were the events of September 11, 2001 in ours. The Reichstag fire was blamed on a Dutch communist, who was subsequently decapitated. And by extension, the fire was blamed on all Communists. The historical evidence is that the Nazis arranged the conflagration. In the Rise and Fall, Shirer writes: “… beyond reasonable doubt it was the Nazis who planned the arson an carried it out for their own political ends.”

The idea for the fire writes Shirer, almost certainly originated at the top, with Goebbels and Goring.

Vice-Chandellor von Papen recalled that when he arrived at the blazing parliament buildings Goering was already on the scene shouting, “This is a communist cirme…”

“Hitler lost no time,” Shirer writes, “in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit.” The very next day he prevailed on the President to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State,” suspending the seven sections of the constitution, which had guaranteed individual and civil liberties. It was described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence against the state.”

The parallel with the events of 9/11 is stunning. The official narrative, introduced with Goring-like speed, emerged within two hours: the “attack on America” was portrayed as the work of ‘terrorists,’ namely one evil man, Osama bin Laden, and a small group of co-conspirators – the 2001 equivalents of the 1933 Communists.

The number and magnitude of anomalies surrounding 9/11 can point to only one conclusion: 9/11 was a completely mad