[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]My conservative friends advise me that by implying that the GOP is a domestic enemy of America that I’m being unnecessarily divisive.
One good friend said, “Contrary to what you love to espouse, the GOP is not the devil incarnate. It may be politically convenient for you, but it is not true.”
I beg to disagree.
I am not implying or espousing but stating a demonstrable fact. The GOP leadership is un-American. They specialize in holding the American people hostage.
Their disregard is evident each time they push one of their unpopular initiatives because they begin to strangle a segment of the American people for leverage.
Two examples: They held unemployed Americans and first responders hostage to push through the extension of the Bush tax cuts to benefit the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. Thereafter, they threatened to shut down the entire government in an attempt to push through initiatives that would have brought severe hardships upon the poor and middle class.
Their methods and propaganda are right out of the Nazi playbook. The GOP leadership has calculated that the more miserable they can keep the American people, the better chance they have of regaining power. That would allow them to get on with the business of enslaving the people. Routinely, they employ tactics from Joseph Gobbels’ handbook on the effective use of propaganda to keep us so angry and divided that we’re blind to their concerted effort to keep America ignorant, distracted and miserable.
How Can You Disagree with Me?
The issue doesn’t require debate. The facts are indisputable. Unfortunately, in politics as in religion, people close their eyes to facts that contradict what they want to believe. The same is true in both parties.
Many of President Obama’s supporters suffer from this ailment. They ignore Obama’s tendency to engage in collusive “compromises,” just as Republicans look past the horrific Republican conspiracy against America.
Both cases involve a direct assault on the quality of life of their own family and children.
The GOP is enabled by hiding behind Goodwin’s Law, which asserts that whenever you bring up Hitler or the Nazis as a metaphor to define others, you render your argument meaningless. Goodwin’s Law doesn’t take into account that there are times when the comparison is unavoidable. I seriously reassert, without hyperbole, that the modus operandi and goals of the current GOP leadership come directly from the Nazi tradition, inspiring a sense of deja vu.
Adolf Hitler pointed out the following in Mein Kampf :
“The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward . . . Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side.”
This is exactly the tactic employed by the GOP. They assume that the people are stupid so they repeat the same script, conspicuously avoiding truth unfavorable to them. On any news cycle, they trot out the same mantras: “Tax- and-spend Democrats,” “Government-controlled healthcare,” “Death panels,” “Obamacare,” “Job-killing policies.”
Learning from Germany
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, said it was essential to gain control over the media, which the GOP embarked upon during the Reagan administration when they abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The doctrine allowed equal time for opposing points of view, and the GOP couldn’t have that. Then conservative interests began to buy and take control of television and radio networks across the country. The rest is history. If the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been abolished, every time Limbaugh, Beck or Fox News made a ridiculous statement on public policy, the network would have had to give equal time to any qualified person or group espousing the opposing point of view.
Goebbels advocated limiting the people’s access to information. This prescription accounts for the GOP’s thirty-year assault on our educational system and their current attempts to revise history. It explains their assault on the National Public Radio. It isn’t enough to lie to the people. They are trying to prevent them from hearing the truth. As a result, young people don’t realize it’s un-American for the government to torture prisoners or for Gov. Rick Snyder to fire elected local officials.
Goebbels discussed the tactic of accusing your opponent of the assault on freedom that you’re actually committing, which the GOP has done. Ever since Obama took office, the GOP has been accusing him of promoting big government and trying to take government control of our lives. It turns out that all over the country Republican governors are trying to install big government and initiate totalitarian policies that strip the people of their rights of self-determination.
A Formula for Causing Trouble
That brings us to the Nazi device of creating a crisis as a pretext for initiating unpopular policies. The GOP contends their assault on the poor and middle class is necessary to address the nation’s deficit. What they don’t tell us is that they created the deficit through Bush’s reckless spending in the first place. John Dyer of MSN Money points out that Bush alone cost the nation $11.5 trillion, and I suggest that it wasn’t purely due to incompetence.
The GOP has been on a single-minded more than seventy years to reverse New Deal initiatives that President Roosevelt put into place to rescue the American people during the Great Depression. The GOP’s determination to abolish Social Security, the minimum wage, and the Fair Labor Standards Act has been more virulent than their current drive to abolish President Obama’s healthcare reform.
These programs have been so popular that they haven’t been able to go after them legislatively, so the GOP has purposely spent us into a ditch to manufacture a crisis as a pretext to initiate policies that they wanted to pursue in the first place.
That explains a lot, why the nation is in such straits even though President Clinton left Bush a $150 billion surplus. It also tells us why Bush couldn’t defend why he was so anxious to invade Iraq that he sacrificed the lives of American troops by sending them to war without the necessary gear to protect their lives.
That is why he made the irrational decision to pursue two wars and a huge tax cut simultaneously and put it all on a credit card, costing the nation $5 trillion. Bush had to take out a loan to cover just the loss of revenue created by his tax cut for the rich. Interest on that loan cost the nation $265 billion.
When we consider that the GOP has been purposely spending America into a ditch to attack the poor and middle class safety net, we learn why the party of fiscal responsibility not only applauded but lionized Ronald Reagan after he came close to tripling the national debt.
Even though the poor and middle class had nothing to do with creating the economic disaster, the burden of resolving it is being placed on those least able to pay.
The most unconscionable attack example is with Social Security. They claim it is in critical condition. The only reason for that is the government has borrowed $2.5 trillion from the program and they don’t want to pay it back. The GOP solution is to absorb the cost of money that they borrowed from us.
In spite of the Republican claim to be against big government, Gov. Snyder of Michigan has signed a bill allowing him to declare a state of budgetary marshal law to take over the cities and municipalities and appoint “Emergency Managers” with the authority to fire elected officials, rescind municipal contracts and labor agreements, and ignore rules of public accountability.
He has installed a dictatorship, and other Republican governors are following his example.
The GOP judiciary, “strict constructionists,” we are told, not only ruled that international corporations were equal to citizens in addressing our political system, but in the 2000 election disenfranchised American voters to appoint the President of their choice. They ruled that the judicial jujitsu could not be used as a precedent in future cases.
The GOP has but one step left. If they can gain control of our national government and establish the same rules that now exist in Michigan, America’s beautiful experiment in democracy is over.
Yes, Tom, the GOP is the devil incarnate.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
