I do not need a politician to stand up for civil rights, the rule of law, international treaties signed by the US and the US Constitution when it’s popular. I need them to stand up for those things when it’s difficult.
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Popularity: 11% [?]

“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our Homeland.”

This quote, according to hundreds of pages on the web, is by Adolf Hitler from a 1933 (or 1932 or 1922 on some pages) announcement of the creation of the Gestapo. These pages all have two things in common:

1. They all compare Bush to Hitler
2. They never cite their source

As a geeky historian, I find the second more troubling than the first. In fact, the creation of the Gestapo (note the presence of uncited quotes in this article), which began piecemeal around Germany, culminated in the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things

placed severe limitations on personal freedom, the right of free expression, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly; it permitted the authorities to spy on people’s private communications through the post, telegraph, and telephone; it allowed the police to conduct search and seizure operations in private homes; andit enabled the police to arrest people and put them in protective custody without charging them with a specific offense[1]

It is, indeed, hard to avoid seeing the parallels with our government’s behavior since September 11. We have allowed our government to eavesdrop on phone conversations. We have permitted our elected officials to pass laws permitting the government to demand our purchasing records from bookstores (illegal search and seizure), which was largely solved by the bookstores refusing to make the information available, but the parallel is significant. We have also arrested people without charging them with a specific offense and we have allowed them to be tortured even if not guilty of a specific offense, because they might spill the beans about other threats to public security. So it is not amiss to compare the Gestapo to measures by the Bush administration. Obviously, one should not belabor the comparison: Bush is no Hitler. Bad as he is, Bush is nevertheless closer to Roosevelt than he is to Hitler. However, the utility of the comparison is not to paint Bush as a modern Hitler, which is ridiculous, but to point out how willing his is as a president and we are as a people to go down the same road that the Germans went down in return for a little security. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so it behooves us to make sure that the first step is in the direction of freedom, not totalitarianism. It is most certainly useful to see how dictators have taken control in the past so we can guard against it in the present, and in that light, Bush should make us afraid.

But what about the quote? It isn’t so far from the text of the special law of 26 April 1933 for the creation of the Secret State Police Office (Gestapa) that said it was necessary to create such a police force “In order to assure the effective struggle against all the efforts directed against the existence and security of the state.”[2] That gets at the essence of the quote, but it comes up short of being a parallel with the supposed Bush quote.

It may well be that the quote that is all over the net is accurate, but I would like to see one citation. Just one. At this point, most people object to my historian geekiness and say that the special law is “close enough” to the version on the net. But when we let the accuracy of our facts slide, we are also taking one step in the wrong direction. That journey of 1000 miles also ends in totalitarianism. The most important bulwarks we have against tyrants is that we do not let them control history. Stalin tried by airbrushing cosmonauts in and out of photos. The Roman Inquisition tried it by burning books. Open discourse based on verifiable facts is the bane of tyrants. Ultimately, it is more important than force of arms, because if you can twist history so that the people believe the Big Lie, you have no need of arms, but when the illusion of the Big Lie is broken on a broad enough scale, no amount of arms can restore the illusion.

When we parrot quotes that are parroted on the web by authors who are parroting others who can never cite their actual source, we go down that slope where we leave the realm of facts and enter the realm of myth, and the realm of myth is the favorite homeland of tyrants and demagogues everywhere. The land of myth is the one where we have a virtual paradise on earth if we could just get rid of the Jews. The land of myth is the one where Chinese peasants under Mao were living in a workers’ paradise and, as Jung Chang talks about in her wonderful memoir Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China, ended with Chinese children saving their pennies to send to the poor starving children in capitalist countries. The realm of fact is the one where at that very time, Mao was letting over one hundred million peasants starve to death in the name of an ideology. That’s why it matters whether your facts are checked or accepted on faith, whether your history is accurate and documented, or just “close enough”.

Sources

1. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror : The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, p. 87. This is more or less a paraphrase of the decree itself, the text of which and translation is on the Wikipedia.
2.Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks), p. 29

Popularity: 11% [?]

According to the principles established by the Nuremberg trials, you and I are probably in the clear with respect to charges of crimes against humanity or war crimes, but perhaps our political leaders are not. Could those principles be extended to all taxpayers who fund war criminals? It might sound obvious or absurd depending on how you view the issues, but it’s not an easy question.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

I sent the following letter to my representative asking him to look into the Charles Swift situation. Swift, a military lawyer, mounted a serious defense of an accused prisoner and may have been the target of retribution for having done so. (more…)

Popularity: 27% [?]

President Bush, addressing the United Nations, said that American forces and interrogators were being hampered by the vague language of the Ten Commandments and added that he did not wish US forces to be bound by them. Democratic leader Harry Reid accused the president of trying to “reinterpret” the Decalogue.
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Popularity: 31% [?]

The Bush administration responded forcefully today to critics of “aggressive interrogation”, known euphemistically as “torture lite.” Critics, including the FBI, have alleged that torture is ineffective and does not elicit quality information from suspects. The Bush administration has pointed out, however, that these techniques have been extremely effective in the past. Notably, press secretary Tony Snow said, torture saved Europe from witches in the past and can save us from terrorism today. (more…)

Popularity: 25% [?]

Once again the United States leads the world in prisoners per capita. After an encouraging decline in recent years, the US prison population rose 2.6% last year, meaning that 1 out of every 136 Americans are currently in prison. This means that 4.7% of AfricanAmerican males are now in prison. More striking, 11.9 percent of black males aged 25-29 are in prison! By far, the south leads the way (10 of the 14 states with the highest incarceration rates), with Louisiana leading the way at over one percent incarceration (1138 per 100,000). That said, the state with the highest rate of black incarceration was… in South Dakota. The greatest differential between black and white incarceration rates was in Iowa.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Among others, an Egyptian blogger, winner of a Reporters Without Borders award last year was detained by the Egyptian government during a peaceful protest in favor of a more independent judiciary as covered by Reporters without Borders on May 12 in Egypt. You can get more information at Free Alaa!, at the Reporters Without Borders links just given, on Alaa’s own website (he is blogging from prison it appears). I’m not sure what you can do, but people are mobilizing to cover the story by doing what I’m doing, namely writing a short piece and including a link that uses the word “Egypt” as anchor text and links to http://freealaa.blogspot.com/ in an effort to make that one of the top-ranked sites for a search on “Egypt”.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been caught out reading conservatives again. I always think it’s noteworthy when there’s widespread agreement between the ideological left and the ideological right in criticizing a policy or a politician. Somehow I ended up at the Cato Instutite website and spied Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush, an anti-Bush screed by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch, know primarily for their anti-Clinton screeds. Anyway, their white paper makes for an interesting read. Nothing new, but it is a concise analysis of Bush’s presidency ranging from signing the McCain-Feingold legislation to harrassing non-violent protesters (both action the authors see as attacks on First Ammendment rights) and contrasting this with Jefferson pardoning persons convicted by the Supreme Court under the Sedition Act, saying that in Jefferson’s opinion, the judiciary had trammeled the First Ammendment rights of the convicted. They also discuss the administration’s torture memos, expanded authority to arrest and more. The paper is littered with pearls like:

Under this sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of
every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House.78

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I just came across this in Wired News online. An affidavit in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against At&T details the existence of a setup in the Worldnet headquarters that allows the NSA to grab data off the fiber optic lines that carry a huge percentage of the country’s internet traffic. Specifically, Mark Klein, the retired engineer who gave the affidavit says that “it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet — whether that be peoples’ e-mail, web surfing or any other data.” See the full story in Wired Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room as well as a complete copy of the affidavit.

I often see the bumper sticker “Freedom isn’t free”. I guess it turns out that the price of freedom is surveillance of all your communication. Land of the wiretapped, home of the scared!

Popularity: 11% [?]