An Essay by Michael Putegnat
As I drive along looking for a radio station that is not shouting slogans and insults at some minority segment of our fellow citizens, I wonder if what we are seeing now is like the propaganda Jews had to endure during the early rise of the Nazis in Germany. At some point Germans, who felt that the escalation of verbal attacks upon minorities by Nazi bullies was wrong, went silent and in that silence rabid intolerance grew like an epidemic into outright brutalizing.
That silence was possible because the Nazis cleverly exploited deep seated prejudices among the German people to terrible effect. They justified this in the cause of national security. The citizens made the bargain where the promise of safety and national pride was exchanged for what seemed reasonable suspensions of their civil rights and their moral responsibility to their fellow minority citizens. And once that bargain was struck there was no going back. Their souls were mortgaged.
In the 1930’s Germany was trying to pull itself out of a crushing economic and psychological depression. Communism was trying to get a foothold and sent chills of fear through Western European politics. And Adolf Hitler exploited that fear to convince enough of the frightened Germans that the solution was a strong leader, given extraordinary powers, who would save them. There is, after all, in each of us something of a child that hopes that some parent figure will intervene and spare us from troubles. It is an effective placebo to imagine that all the evil that threatens us can be distilled into minority groups because they can be dealt with in a final solution. The distraction they offer alone is relief.
A major force in Hitler’s party was the propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who developed the strategy and means for herding public opinion along the narrow path that served the purposes of the government. He was a master of fear mongering. Using radio, movies, the press and carefully staged events, he was able to whip the simpler minded Germans into a frenzy of nationalism while at the same time bullying the more thoughtful ones. The Nazis attacked dissension in individuals, the press, even foreign governments. They invented “Swift-boating.”
Eventually, those Germans who knew better left, acquiesced, or were exterminated. The powerful leader who promised national pride and security brought his countrymen humiliating subjugation first and complete destruction ultimately. Ultimately, what the Germans were willing to accept became a threat to the rest of the world and the world joined together to eradicate the virus. The cost was millions of human lives.
Fortunately, our situation in the U.S. today is not much comparable to Germany in the 1930’s. We are not in an economic depression, we are not desperate, we do not face a mass invasion by powerful armies, nor do we share as much a willingness to surrender our civil rights to a leader making empty promises. Our constitution is a hard thing to suspend and the term limits on the presidency make power accumulation a more difficult hurdle. But most importantly, we have tens of thousands of bold and courageous citizens who stand up for their fellows and speak out. Thanks to them, and each of us, our democratic society is safe.
But there is something to take from our start of the 21st century. Ideologues will rise occasionally in society. They will attempt to make us afraid of something, then they will offer to save us from it. In exchange for a sense of security, they will ask us to acquiesce to a gradual surrender of our liberties, our privacy, and our individual self expression. They will distract us from that gnawing feeling of loss by focusing our outrage on those that are different from us. And they will do this over and over until we can’t find our way back to what we were.
The genius of our republic is that it is based upon a moral duty to one another as human beings and not to any government. Our hardened protective shell is our courage and resolve to never surrender our liberty. Ever.
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