Left In Lowell

Imagine a country with a democracy. It has gone through a war, and after it, a major depression. The people are desperate. No one will help them. A leader emerges, but the checks and balances on his power are strong. Then the country is attacked - internally - with a major government building burnt to the ground. The enemies of the leader are declared responsible, the leader’s party is swept into unchecked power as the people react in fear. The leader then uses ostensibly legal means to enact some of the most horrible crimes on humanity ever yet known in the modern world. He passes law after law in the name of “emergency” that today chill our souls to read aloud.

If you know your history, you know I’m talking about Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Now, before you get all huffy or excited (depending on your political affiliation) that I’m comparing George W. Bush to Hilter, I’m not. At least not directly. But I do want to look at the narrative of the Nazi party and its rise to power to illuminate why it is that true patriots of democracy, glancing around at our own situation today, are convinced that our democracy is at a dangerous crossroads.

People don’t remember that G.W.Bush wasn’t really doing so hot before 9/11/01. He had made so many missteps, his presidency was already being called by some “lame duck.” If he’d continued in that direction, there’s no doubt he would have been overwhelmingly thrown out of office in 2004. But something happened to change all that. We got real scared.

Like the German people in 1933, the attack on our country left us feeling vulnerable. For the Germans, the bogyman was the Communists; the Nazi party used the burning of the Reichstag parliamentary building to claim the Communists were attempting revolution. Having next-door neighbors who did actually have a bloody Red Revolution didn’t help.

In the USA, however, the attack came from outside our borders, committed from within. The growing threat from the extremist Muslims we had formerly trained to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s was more than ignored by Bush and his administration; it was shuffled to the backburner all the way up to the very hour that three planes flew into three buildings and a fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

Unlike the Germans, we created our own enemies, over and over again. The Germans made enemies by attempting to build an empire with an army; the US is attempting to build an empire with the excuse that the outside world is a threat already. We constantly interfere with the world and it comes back to bite us in the ass which we then use as reason to attack them.

But not only that. The events after 9/11 are more telling than the fateful day itself. We enacted the USA PATRIOT Act (complete with an acronym for a name that would shame the opposition to vote for it despite having no time for them to read its 300+ pages). The media failed (whether by laziness or cowardly retreat) to do due diligence on the intell Bush claimed he had - while many of us out here already knew the intell was false or not vetted (all you had to do was pay attention). We took out a dictator who had tortured his own people, only to become the torturers ourselves. We host secret prisons in foreign countries for the same purpose. We hold our enemies not as POWs or by the Geneva convention, but in legal limbo. We spy on Americans without due cause. We fail to hold our election process up to the same standards we want others to have - with partisan interference keeping thousands of legitimate voters from casting theirs in Florida, Ohio, and other states. We deregulate businesses so they can pollute and produce shoddy products with impunity, but are in danger of having our most intimate lives interfered with (abortion, marriage, end-of-life decisions).

So imagine a country with a democracy. Its military and economic might seems limitless, an ever-expanding sky of opportunity and safety. A leader emerges, having tricked the people into thinking he was a center-right average Joe, and being installed in the end not directly by election, but by the country’s highest court in the land (complete with conflicts of interest). He muddles along, despite his party’s control of the whole government, with hopes and dreams of handing out favors to his rich friends and maybe taking care of that now-impotent dictator in a country where there’s lots of oil and money to be had. Nine months later the country is attacked - internally - with a major government building and two others of economic importance burnt to the ground. The enemies of the country are responsible. The leader declares it his intention to go after them, and sends too few troops to a foreign country most of his people couldn’t place on a map. The perpetrators of the attacks mostly slip away as the leader turns to attacking an unrelated, unarmed, devastated country for falsified reasons. He uses the fear of the people to enact law after law that chills the soul when read aloud. He claims unlimited power to spy on American citizens without due process, he believes torture overseas committed by his government is only “protecting the people from terraists,” and in a time of war and costly military spending, cuts taxes (mostly for the rich) and slashes spending on the poor which no where near makes up for the tax cuts but instead send the government into deficits and debt.

What will history say about the United States in this moment in time?

I know it’s depressing to leave you on this note for the holidays, but seriously, go out, have a great time with your family and friends, and come back refreshed for the fight we have ahead of us.