Signed: U.S. War Department"
How times have changed! How things have remained the same! 50 years after this sign was posted we no longer have a U.S. War Department; we Americans now have a Department of Defense. However, the sameness comes in considering that for we Americans "Behind us lie months and years of slavish obedience, years of bloodshed, years in which human individuality suffered incredible humiliations, all of which was caused by a criminal regime whose adherents will not escape due punishment". The irony of the comparison to our own situation in America is easily seen if one substitutes "Bush nobility" for "Prussian nobility" and is further magnified by considering that those who suffered most (the Jews) from the "criminal regime" in Nazi Germany are today most responsible for engineering and fomenting the suffering and humiliation of others (the Arabs and Palestinians) through Israeli aggression and the same type suppression they suffered under Hitler. Israeli purchase and exploitation of the entire American political system [1][2] for the purposes of financial aide and fighting their wars and then spying on and working against their benefactors, the United States, [3] only adds to the bitterness of the irony.
In 1946, we Americans could see that the suffering of millions of people and the death of 6 million Jews was the fault of Nazi Germany's leaders. Today we see that it is the fault of the Rudi Muller's and the Willie Schulze's of our armed forces who are responsible for the suffering of their prisoners. It is the Rudis and Willies who are responsible for using "Willie Pete" for night- time "illumination" of civilian areas and snipers to establish "free fire" zones in Falluja. It is "they" who are responsible for the radioactive contamination of an entire country and the radioactive contamination of themselves and their comrades with depleted uranium. It is "they" who decided to drop cluster bombs on civilian targets. It was not OUR LEADERS who were responsible for the disappearance of 8.8 billion dollars in Iraqi reconstruction funds or the 400 percent increase in world oil prices since the invasion of a virtually powerless country. It was not OUR LEADERS who invaded and destroyed a sovereign nation on false pretenses. It is not OUR LEADERS who are responsible for the rendition of real, imagined and purchased enemies using carefully camouflaged CIA planes for their transport into the nether world of carefully hidden CIA prisons. It is not OUR LEADERS who are preparing to invade Iran because it wants to exercise the same freedom of choice OUR LEADERS made for us when WE began the Manhattan Project.
How can we spoiled Americans have forefathers who fought a world war to stop the slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Communists and then wind up with a president whose grandfather helped Hitler rise to power and invested in the company which manufactured the Zyklon B Gas used to kill these "undesirables"? This is a mystery that shows many things about turning wheels and the "smallness" of the world.
This is a study of how we Americans changed from a proud people into a herd of sheep that are only waiting for the order to "strip and step into the showers. What happened to us? Why do we refuse to learn from history? How similar are we to those who put their clothes and valuables into neat piles before stepping into the "showers" of the 40's? What dichotomy allows our American military to act like Hitler's SS troops and their parents to be so weak that they allow their president to assume dictatorial powers without giving so much as a whimper? How can we believe the 9/11 fantasy constructed for us by our leaders (sic) and not believe we are presently living in a land with little freedom and no privacy from government surveillance? How can we listen to a demagogue like Alan Dershowitz extol the necessity of using torture on our "enemies" while trumpeting the fact that he lost 40 family members in the holocaust?
To reach some answers, this article will go back to pre-war Nazi Germany and examine the character and the way of life of 10 average German citizens living in Germany who were caught up in or volunteered for the Nazi movement and assumed roles in the movement as it germinated under Hitler and grew to the ending described by the 1946 sign over the gate at Babenhausen/Darmstadt. This examination and comparison will use as reference the 1955 Milton Meyer book, "They Thought They Were Free".
Then:
One of the more telling aspects of the transition from "normal" German life into the world of German Nazism was the realization by "our" 10 German citizens that there were no clear-cut dramatic changes in German life. Life changed imperceptibly as rules were gradually changed. There was a widening gap between the government and the people. People became very gradually accustomed to government by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that situations were so complicated that "normal" people couldn't properly understand or that the "situation" had to be handled in secret for "national security reasons". Additionally, each step in the transformation of German life was disguised to create the illusion of a common, grand threat to all which could only be discovered, interpreted and handled by the government.
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