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This week’s column is being written in the closing throes of the most propagandistic, most costly, most wasteful, nastiest election of all time, bar none. And it is obvious to me that most of the venom and untruths have been coming from (often anonymous) right-wing political or religious groups or the likes of cunning political operatives and/or moneyed billionaires like Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, and Sheldon Adelson (the multibillionaire gambling empire magnate and chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who first endorsed Gingrich, investing millions in Newt’s campaign and then jumping ship and investing a hundred million dollars in the Romney campaign).

The final results from this sobering circus will not be tabulated by press deadline (perhaps it won’t be decided for days or weeks). So, for those of us who are Reader Weekly columnists, there is no longer much point in trying to help voters this election to discern what might be best for our fragile, rapidly disappearing democracy, a political system that is being strangled by extremist forces on the right-wing/conservative fringe of the political spectrum, some of whom, perhaps unknowingly, having been cunningly influenced by the moneyed interests of right-wing think tanks and mainstream media outlets that are virtually all owned by the sociopathic, super-wealthy, often racist 1 Percent who do not care about the common good but only about their bottom line.


A brief review of
European fascism and
its American progeny

So perhaps a little review of history would be apt, since we will certainly be subject in the near future to some of the same tactics of what Hillary Clinton once accurately described as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” that has been made clear in the Republican party platforms over the past few election cycles as well as from the electoral support they get from racist, proto-fascist, Neo-Nazi groups, from the recent Tea Party’s vicious expulsion of moderate Republicans, and from the GOP’s gridlock strategy in Congress, the sole motivation of which was to cause Obama to fail in his agenda, never giving him any credit for anything, so that they could run in 2010 and 2012 against his inability to be effective!

The right-wing conspirators (after reading this piece, you will know approximately who they are) will continue to raise their ugly heads, win or lose (as long as the fortunes of their paymasters hold out) during future election cycles until a sizable majority of voting citizens come to their senses and say no to the politics of fear and hate, until the GOP purges the proto-fascist elements within its ranks and comes back from the brink of extremist politics.

What has been going on here in American, mostly in plain sight, in every political season since the Nixon and then the Reagan eras? A good analogy from world history would be what happened to Germany’s “made-to-fail” experiment in democracy that culminated with the ascendency of the anti-democratic, racist, pro-war, anti-Semitic, homophobic, right-wing extremist Adolf Hitler.

Anybody living in Germany during the 1920s and 30s  witnessed the distressing violence-prone democratic elections where the socialist-hating Nazi politicians, with their vicious, hard-right agenda (and their street-fighting thugs at the ready), sometimes pretended temporarily to be moderates just before election day, thus deceiving enough befuddled voters into voting for them before they realized they had been duped.

November 6, 1932,
the last chance Ger
man democracy had

A case in point was the November 6, 1932, elections that were essentially the culmination of what could be called a rolling coup d’état, a series of events that proved irreversible. For within months of that election, the democratic Weimar Republic was strangled to death, with the help of anti-leftist political parties that didn’t realize how lethal Hitler’s hidden right-wing agenda was.

Recall that the Weimar Republic had been crippled with war debt and suffocating reparation payments to its foreign war victims from the very beginning of its existence, thus making it a very high risk for failure. The centrist and right-wing political parties that were in existence during the rise of European fascism (1920s and 30s) were as overtly anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and leftist-hating as Hitler was, perhaps just slightly more vehement than are today’s American neo-conservatives who are all over Mitt Romney’s candidacy. Germany’s experiment in democracy was doomed from the beginning.

The various parties that worked to subvert democracy in Germany over the decade leading up to the death of the republic included the ones who were the most right-wing, the Nazis. Many pro-democracy altruists in Germany, tired of the corrupt capitalism and the oppressive militaristic monarchy they had endured for several generations, worked hard to have democracy succeed. But a murderous backlash from the far right-wing (including the assassinations of any number of liberal leaders) tried to destroy the democratic experiment from the very beginning.

It is important to recall the pompous, authoritarian, out-of-touch, and very wealthy war-monger Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, immediately following the German surrender in 1918, abdicated the throne, fleeing the country with his money and his tail between his legs. Wilhelm had many pro-monarchy supporters back in Germany who were working as hard as the democratic socialists, but they were trying to restore the monarchy and to make democracy fail. Their efforts weren’t just sour grapes—they wanted Kaiser Bill back in power.

After the November 1932 election, a coalition of right-wing political parties was formed, led by the Nazi Party (who received the most votes in that election). But there had to be a much larger supermajority to dissolve the Reichstag and enable Hitler to become dictator, so Nazi thugs intimidated, beat, and imprisoned leftist  such as Communists and social democrats so that such a supermajority could pass an Enabling Act that led to total control of the Reichstag and the eventual dictatorship for Hitler. With Hermann Goering as president of the Reichstag, with the capitalists and financiers funding the Nazi Party agenda, and with Nazi newspapers spouting lies, Hitler and his henchmen out-maneuvered everybody.

The 1933 Reichstag
Fire and 9/11/01

And so, finally achieving power, the Nazis needed one more action to start their crack-down on the civil rights of non-Aryan minorities. A conspiracy of Nazi insiders arranged to burn down the Reichstag (February 27, 1933) within four weeks of Hitler’s January 30 appointment to the chancellorship.

The very next day after the fire, Hitler prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree suspending a variety of civil liberties that had been guaranteed in the constitution, 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 directed against “Communist acts of violence endangering the State.”

It needs to be understood that the Reichstag Fire of 1933 is now believed to have been an inside job by the Nazis. It was a false flag operation (that is, placing the blame on somebody else for political reasons, using pervasive and repeated propaganda to reinforce the lie) that is quite analogous to what really happened on 9/11/01, the “New Pearl Harbor” that was articulated earlier in 2001 by the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a nefarious right-wing think tank full of George W. Bush insiders that was certainly part of the group that planned or just inspired the false flag collapses (actually controlled demolitions) of the three World Trade Center buildings—which, interestingly, were immediately followed by the pre-positioned Patriot and Homeland Security Acts that infringed upon our constitutional civil liberties.

The dramatic Reichstag Fire that was witnessed by tens of thousands of Berliners was prominently blamed on the classical “lone gunman,” a framed, mentally retarded Communist (an assertion that was publicized widely in the Nazi press) who was later convicted and beheaded.

Similarly, millions of gullible citizens saw the live TV coverage of the Twin Towers dramatically coming down at free-fall speed, an event immediately blamed on Osama in Laden and 19 Arab men without any proof of their guilt. And the propaganda machinery of 2001 American was as pervasive as the Nazi propaganda was in 1933.

According to all the forensic and scientific evidence (plus the huge volume of eyewitness testimony and video documentary evidence in the case of 9/11), both incidents led to unjust and unnecessary wars and both have been demonstrated to be false flag operations in order to get the naïve and unthinking public (and the complicit media) primed and ready to support further orchestrated and unjust wars to come. (See www.ae911truth.org and scores of other 9/11 truth-seeking websites for the evidence that the official White House conspiracy theory—that two planes and the resultant brief fires caused three massively steel-reinforced skyscrapers to fall down—is provably false; that there is irrefutable evidence that controlled demolition, and not jet fuel fires, brought down the three WTC towers; and that the explosives could not have been planted by any group other than an inside group of conspirators.)

And then they came
for the trade unionists,
the Communists,
and the Jews

Soon after the Reichstag Fire, Communists, socialists, and trade unionists, all of them mortal enemies of Big Business, were attacked. Many were arrested, tortured, killed, or otherwise disappeared. Big Business members, especially multinational corporations (the 1 Percent of German society), are deathly afraid of any commerce that doesn’t promise obscene profits, so they therefore become anti-leftists who prefer paying slave wages to their workers (if they can get away with it) and are therefore natural supporters of (right-wing) fascism.

It is an also inherent quality of industrialists to want to expand their markets. German corporations were therefore also supportive of wars of expansion, colonialism, and occupation, and thus Hitler’s “lebensraum” (“living space”) agenda that was behind the invasion of Poland and the suicidal invasion of Russia.

Germany’s unions, as they have been in the U.S., were infiltrated by corporate spies. Union leaders were beaten, imprisoned, and murdered, starting the day after the 1932 May Day events. Every union hall and union office in Germany was smashed by Hitler’s Brown Shirt thugs on May 2, 1933, and every union’s resources were stolen by the Nazis, never to be returned to their rightful owners.

After the unions, the next anti-fascist group to be “disappeared” was the liberal media. Their printing presses were smashed, and liberal editors and publishers were arrested and put into concentration camps as dissenters and 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 legally deprived of their voting rights, citizenship, and human rights. Eventually these groups were brutally rounded up, many of them being ultimately deprived of their right to life.

Thanks to the five right-wing activist judges on the Roberts’ Supreme Court and its 2010 democracy-killing Citizens United decision that granted personhood to inanimate, soulless, conscienceless, and yes, even criminal corporations, both the 2010 and the 2012 elections have been corrupted by the filthy lucre of cunning “persons” like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Karl Rove, the 400-plus right-wing think tanks, and their SuperPACs. The stink is overwhelming.

Most of those slippery groups and individuals (the 1 Percent overlords) have been investing in TV propaganda, spending lavishly on attack ads and working, by hook or by crook, to see that their fellow white-skinned multibillionaire buddy Mitt Romney will win the presidency, which will allow them to take control over the Romney administration agenda and ensure that their return on investment will have been worth it.

Let the naïve voter beware, especially the ones wearing rose-colored glasses. But I recommend that you start doing it right away, no matter who won this cycle. And try to accelerate your efforts to sniff out the cryptofascist by starting to read between the lines and disbelieve the charlatans. And then, well before the next election cycle, we all will be able to identify the Friendly American Fascists, who, like all hungry wolves in sheep’s clothing, never seem to sleep.