NAZI GERMANY'S WAR ON TERRORISM
Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building by
a deranged Dutchman to declare a "war on terrorism," establish his
legitimacy as a leader (even though he hadn't won a majority in the
previous election).
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he
proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded
by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with
emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion – "a sign from God,"
he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its
ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to
the Middle East and found motivation for their "evil" deeds in their
religion.
Two weeks later, the first prison for terrorists was built in
Oranianberg, holding the first suspected allies of the infamous
terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the nation's flag was
everywhere, even printed in newspapers suitable for display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular
leader had pushed through legislation, in the name of combating
terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it, that
suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and
habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones;
suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and
without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's
homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State"
passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil
libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the
national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack on the Reichstag
building was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned
to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained.
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion
of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common
usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to
refer to it as The Fatherland. As hoped, people's hearts swelled with
pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our
land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply
foreign lands.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, Hitler's advisors determined
that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation
were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated
administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the
nation, including those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry
and thus probably terrorist sympathizers. He proposed a single new
national agency to protect the security of the Fatherland,
consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police,
border, and investigative agencies under a single powerful leader.
Most Americans remember his Office of Fatherland Security, known as
the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and Schutzstaffel, simply by its most
famous agency's initials: the SS.
And, perhaps most important, he invited his supporters in industry
into the halls of government to help build his new detention camps,
his new military, and his new empire which was to herald a thousand
years of peace. Industry and government worked hand-in-glove, in a new
type of pseudo-democracy first proposed by Mussolini and sustained by
war.
http://c0balt.com/resources/terror/terror.shtml
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