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Not Charging the White Officers Who Killed Alton Sterling Is a Travesty |
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Monday, 02 April 2018 13:58 |
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Kane Gielskie writes: "The failure to hold police accountable for the killings of Black men and boys is standard practice at both the local and federal level."
Alton Sterling. (photo: Facebook)
ALSO SEE: Police Officer Who Killed Alton
Sterling in Baton Rouge Is Fired
Not Charging the White Officers Who Killed Alton Sterling Is a Travesty
By Colleen Kane Gielskie, ACLU
02 April 18
 n March 27, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that his office would not bring criminal charges against the two police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling as he lay pinned by them to the ground in front of a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
Attorney General Landry’s decision is two contradictory things: It is shocking, and it is unsurprising. The decision sends a clear message about policing in America today, and highlights the continuing crisis of accountability when it comes to unlawful use of excessive and deadly force by police.
The failure to hold police accountable for the killings of Black men and boys is standard practice at both the local and federal level. Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the nation’s so-called “top cop,” and his Department of Justice concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring federal civil rights charges against the officers involved in Sterling’s death. And, while the Baton Rouge Police Chief said disciplinary hearings would be held for the officers this week, the officers who killed Sterling, and whose killing of Sterling was caught on video, both remain employed by the Baton Rouge Police Department.
Sterling was one of 233 Black people shot and killed by the police in 2016. And while the national media spotlight on police violence has faded, the death toll has remained steady. The Washington Post Police Shooting Database records show 2934 people shot and killed by police between 2015 and 2017. That’s nearly 1000 deaths per year. Earlier this month, police officers in Sacramento fired 20 rounds at Stephon Clark, who was unarmed and standing in his own backyard. He died of the wounds inflicted on him by law enforcement. As did Danny Ray Thomas, another unarmed Black man, a man in mental distress, who was killed by police in Harris County, Texas, just days ago.
Sterling’s death is a glaring reminder that police officers too often use aggressive tactics and excessive force, informed by implicit bias rather than community protection. Upon first arriving at the scene, one of the officers reportedly put a gun to Sterling’s head and said “I’ll kill you, bitch.” The AG’s report describes the officer as giving Sterling a “stern” warning: “Don’t fucking move or I’ll shoot you in your fucking head.”
A death threat is not an acceptable warning. And, coming from police and directed at Black and brown people, it is too often a promise. The ACLU of Louisiana and partner organizations are working to reform police practices to combat these killings.
Some reforms are already under way. In November 2016, the Baton Rouge Police Department, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police, and the City of Baton Rouge committed to use only the level of force objectively reasonable to bring an incident under control, and use deescalation techniques when dealing with protesters. Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, who took office in January 2017, has successfully pushed for implicit bias training, a stronger use-of-force policy, and expanded the use of body cameras to the entire police force.
That the officers who killed Sterling have not been charged is by no means the end of this fight. There are questions that must be answered about Sterling’s death, and we demand that all body camera and surveillance footage of the incident be released. We demand accountability, equal justice, and an end to racialized policing.
Alton Sterling didn’t have to die on the pavement that night. The Baton Rouge police officers chose aggression. They chose to shoot Sterling six times. We must address and dismantle the conditions that led the officers to use deadly force when it was not needed or legal. We must end the epidemic of police violence once and for all — and bring accountability to this broken system.
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FOCUS | Weapons for Anyone: Donald Trump and the Art of the Arms Deal |
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Monday, 02 April 2018 11:56 |
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Hartung writes: "It's one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion."
Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. (photo: AP)
Weapons for Anyone: Donald Trump and the Art of the Arms Deal
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch
02 April 18
Few American exports are more successful globally than things that go boom in the night: Hollywood movies -- especially, of course, superhero films, which regularly garner vast international audiences -- and advanced weaponry of just about every imaginable kind. As TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung points out today, while Donald Trump has been hot to trot when it comes to selling American arms to the world, it will take no small push on his part to match Barack Obama’s record arms sales, as our former president oversaw the dispatching of staggering quantities of weaponry to global hotspots of every sort, especially in the Middle East.
Fortunately, there is one area where Donald Trump and American weapons makers could really make some new music: selling surveillance drones as well as armed drones to the world. Reuters recently reported that the Trump administration was planning to loosen restrictions on drone sales in the immediate future. In recent years, U.S. drone makers have labored under grievous restrictions when it came to peddling their wares to anyplace but the Pentagon. They, in fact, sold their products only to Italy and Great Britain, despite demand being, if you’ll excuse the expression, sky high. After all, who wouldn’t want to own the most impressive extrajudicial assassins on the planet?
Nor can this change come soon enough -- American drone makers have been pleading and pressuring for it for years -- since Israel, a pioneer in the drone-assassin field, and more recently China, have been expanding their armed drone sales globally, leaving American weapons makers in the lurch. As Hartung makes clear today, it's been rare indeed in the twenty-first century for the U.S. to find itself in such a position. A range of countries -- the Saudis, various other Persian Gulf states, Jordan, and India -- has been clamoring for their very own American surveillance drones and armed assassins and both, it seems, will soon be on the world market, though not (yet) the larger armed Predators and Reapers that the U.S. has deployed ever more widely and actively across the Greater Middle East and Africa.
Soon enough, thanks to Donald Trump, the U.S. will be back in the game. Meanwhile, from Libya to Somalia to Yemen to Afghanistan to Pakistan, in the first year-plus of the Trump era, American drone strikes have leaped (as have the deaths of civilians). In other words, The Donald has taken his place as this country’s assassin-in-chief with impressive alacrity.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Weapons for Anyone
Donald Trump and the Art of the Arms Deal
 t’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the latest in high-tech arms and munitions into the most explosive areas of the planet with ample assistance from the Pentagon. In recent years, the bulk of those arms have gone to the Greater Middle East. Donald Trump is only the latest American president to preside over a global arms sales bonanza. With remarkable enthusiasm, he’s appointed himself America’s number one weapons salesman and he couldn’t be prouder of the job he’s doing.
Earlier this month, for instance, on the very day Congress was debating whether to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, Trump engaged in one of his favorite presidential activities: bragging about the economic benefits of the American arms sales he’s been promoting. He was joined in his moment of braggadocio by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the chief architect of that war. That grim conflict has killed thousands of civilians through indiscriminate air strikes, while putting millions at risk of death from famine, cholera, and other “natural” disasters caused at least in part by a Saudi-led blockade of that country’s ports.
That Washington-enabled humanitarian crisis provided the backdrop for the Senate’s consideration of a bill co-sponsored by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. It was aimed at ending U.S. mid-air refueling of Saudi war planes and Washington’s additional assistance for the Saudi war effort (at least until the war is explicitly authorized by Congress). The bill generated a vigorous debate. In the end, on an issue that wouldn’t have even come to the floor two years ago, an unprecedented 44 senators voted to halt this country’s support for the Saudi war effort. The bill nonetheless went down to defeat and the suffering in Yemen continues.
Debate about the merits of that brutal war was, however, the last thing on the mind of a president who views his bear-hug embrace of the Saudi regime as a straightforward business proposition. He’s so enthusiastic about selling arms to Riyadh that he even brought his very own prop to the White House meeting with bin Salman: a U.S. map highlighting which of the 50 states would benefit most from pending weapons sales to the prince’s country.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, the three crucial swing states in the 2016 presidential election, were specially highlighted. His latest stunt only underscored a simple fact of his presidency: Trump's arms sales are meant to promote pork-barrel politics, while pumping up the profits of U.S. weapons manufacturers. As for human rights or human lives, who cares?
To be fair, Donald Trump is hardly the first American president to make it his business to aggressively promote weapons exports. Though seldom a highlighted part of his presidency, Barack Obama proved to be a weapons salesman par excellence. He made more arms offers in his two terms in office than any U.S. president since World War II, including an astounding $115 billion in weapons deals with Saudi Arabia. For the tiny group of us who follow such things, that map of Trump’s only underscored a familiar reality.
On it, in addition to the map linking U.S. jobs and arms transfers to the Saudis, were little boxes that highlighted four specific weapons sales worth tens of billions of dollars. Three of those that included the THAAD missile defense system, C-130 transport planes, P-8 anti-submarine warfare planes, and Bradley armored vehicles were, in fact, completed during the Obama years. So much for Donald Trump’s claim to be a deal maker the likes of which we’ve never seen before. You might, in fact, say that the truest arms race these days is between American presidents, not the United States and other countries. Not only has the U.S. been the world’s top arms exporting nation throughout this century, but last year it sold one and a half times as much weaponry as its closest rival, Russia.
Embracing Lockheed Martin
It’s worth noting that three of those four Saudi deals involved weapons made by Lockheed Martin. Admittedly, Trump’s relationship with Lockheed got off to a rocky start in December 2016 when he tweeted his displeasure over the cost of that company’s F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. Since then, however, relations between the nation’s largest defense contractor and America’s most self-involved president have warmed considerably.
Before Trump’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, new best buddy to Mohammed bin Salman, was put in charge of cobbling together a smoke-and-mirrors, wildly exaggerated $100 billion-plus arms package that Trump could announce in Riyadh. What Kushner needed was a list of sales or potential sales that his father-in-law could boast about (even if many of the deals had been made by Obama). So he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask if she could cut the price of a THAAD anti-missile system that the administration wanted to include in the package. She agreed and the $15 billion THAAD deal -- still a huge price tag and the most lucrative sale to the Saudis made by the Trump administration -- went forward. To sweeten the pot for the Saudi royals, the Pentagon even waived a $3.5 billion fee normally required by law and designed to reimburse the Treasury for the cost to American taxpayers of developing such a major weapons system. General Joseph Rixey, until recently the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which granted that waiver, has since gone directly through Washington’s revolving door and been hired by -- you guessed it -- Lockheed Martin.
In addition, former Lockheed Martin executive John Rood is now the Trump administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy, where one of his responsibilities will be to weigh in on... don’t be shocked!... major arms deals. In his confirmation hearings, Rood refused to say that he would recuse himself from transactions involving his former employer, for which he was denounced by Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren. As Warren asserted in a speech opposing Rood’s appointment,
“No taxpayer should have to wonder whether the top policy-makers at the Pentagon are pushing defense products and foreign military sales for reasons other than the protection of the United States of America... No American should have to wonder whether the Defense Department is acting to protect the national interests of our nation or the financial interests of the five giant defense contractors.”
Still, most senators were unfazed and Rood’s nomination sailed through that body by a vote of 81 to 7. He is now positioned to help smooth the way for any Lockheed Martin deal that might meet with a discouraging word from the Pentagon or State Department officials charged with vetting foreign arms sales.
Arming the Planet
Though Saudi Arabia may be the largest recipient of U.S. arms on the planet, it’s anything but Washington’s only customer. According to the Pentagon’s annual tally of major agreements under the Foreign Military Sales program, the most significant channel for U.S. arms exports, Washington entered into formal agreements to sell weaponry to 130 nations in 2016 (the most recent year for which full data is available). According to a recent report from the Cato Institute, between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry to 167 countries -- more than 85% of the nations on the planet. The Cato report also notes that, between 1981 and 2010, Washington supplied some form of weaponry to 59% of all nations engaged in high-level conflicts.
In short, Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway. Every president since Richard Nixon has taken that same road and, in 2010, the Obama administration managed to rack up a record $102 billion in foreign arms offers. In a recent report I wrote for the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, I documented more than $82 billion in arms offers by the Trump administration in 2017 alone, which actually represented a slight increase from the $76 billion in offers made during President Obama’s final year. It was, however, far lower than that 2010 figure, $60 billion of which came from Saudi deals for F-15 combat aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, transport aircraft, and armored vehicles, as well as guns and ammunition.
There have nonetheless been some differences in the approaches of the two administrations in the area of human rights. Under pressure from human rights groups, the Obama administration did, in the end, suspend sales of aircraft to Bahrain and Nigeria, both of whose militaries were significant human rights violators, and also a $1 billion-plus deal for precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia. That Saudi suspension represented the first concrete action by the Obama administration to express displeasure with Riyadh’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. Conducted largely with U.S. and British supplied aircraft, bombs, and missiles, it has included strikes against hospitals, marketplaces, water treatment facilities, and even a funeral. In keeping with his focus on jobs to the exclusion of humanitarian concerns, Trump reversed all three of the Obama suspensions shortly after taking office.
Fueling Terrorism and Instability
In fact, selling weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes often fuels instability, war, and terrorism, as the American war on terror has vividly demonstrated for the last nearly 17 years. U.S.-supplied arms also have a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of America’s adversaries. At the height of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, for instance, that country’s armed forces lost track of hundreds of thousands of rifles, many of which made their way into the hands of forces resisting the U.S. occupation.
In a similar fashion, when Islamic State militants swept into Iraq in 2014, the Iraqi security forces abandoned billions of dollars worth of American equipment, from small arms to military trucks and armored vehicles. ISIS promptly put them to use against U.S. advisers and the Iraqi security forces as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Taliban, too, has gotten its hands on substantial quantities of U.S. weaponry, either on the battlefield or by buying them at cut-rate, black market prices from corrupt members of the Afghan security forces.
In northern Syria, two U.S.-armed groups are now fighting each other. Turkish forces are facing off against Syrian Kurdish militias that have been among the most effective anti-ISIS fighters and there is even an ongoing risk that U.S. and Turkish forces, NATO allies, may find themselves in direct combat with each other. Far from giving Washington influence over key allies or improving their combat effectiveness, U.S. arms and training often simply spur further conflict and chaos to the detriment of the security of the United States, not to speak of the peace of the world.
In the grim and devolving conflict in Yemen, for instance, all sides possess at least some U.S. weaponry. Saudi Arabia is, of course, the top U.S. arms client and its forces are a catalogue of American weaponry, from planes and anti-tank missiles to cluster bombs, but hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid were also provided to the forces of Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh during his 30 years of rule before he was driven from power in 2012. Later, however, he joined forces with the Houthi rebels against the Saudi-led intervention, taking large parts of the Yemeni armed forces -- and their U.S.-supplied weapons -- with him. (He would himself be assassinated by Houthi forces late last year after a falling out.)
Trump’s Plan: Make It Easier on Arms Makers
The Trump administration is poised to release a new policy directive on global arms transfers. A report by Politico, based on interviews with sources at the State Department and a National Security Council (NSC) official, suggests that it will seek to further streamline the process of approving arms sales, in part by increasing the already extensive role of U.S. government personnel in promoting such exports. It will also remove what a National Security Council statement has described as “unreasonable constraints on the ability of our companies to compete.” In keeping with that priority, according to the NSC official, “the administration is intent on ensuring that U.S. industry has every advantage in the global marketplace.”
In January, a Reuters article confirmed this approach, reporting that the forthcoming directive would emphasize arms-sales promotion by U.S. diplomats and other overseas personnel. As one administration official told Reuters, “We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attaches, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters.”
The Trump administration is also expected to move forward with a plan, stalled as the Obama years ended, to ease controls on the export of U.S. firearms. Gun exports now licensed and scrutinized by the State Department would instead be put under the far-less-stringent jurisdiction of the Commerce Department. Some firearms could then be exported to allies without even a license, reducing the government’s ability to prevent them from reaching criminal networks or the security forces of potential adversaries.
In September 2017, Democratic senators Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, and Patrick Leahy sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raising concerns about such a change. As they wrote, “Combat firearms and ammunition are uniquely lethal; they are easily spread and easily modified, and are the primary means of injury, death and destruction in civil and military conflicts throughout the world. As such they should be subjected to more -- not less -- rigorous export controls and oversight.”
If Trump’s vision of an all-arms-sales-all-the-time foreign policy is realized, he may scale the weapons-dealing heights reached by the Obama administration. As Washington’s arms-dealer-in-chief, he might indeed succeed in selling American weaponry as if there were no tomorrow. Given the known human costs of unbridled arms trafficking, however, such a presidency would also ensure that whatever tomorrow finally arrived would prove far worse than today, unless of course you happen to be a major U.S. arms maker.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of “Trends in Major U.S. Arms Sales in 2017: A Comparison of the Obama and Trump Administrations,” Security Assistance Monitor, March 2018.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: In the Crystal Mason Case, What Was the Intent of the State of Texas? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 02 April 2018 10:41 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Crystal Mason voted in the 2016 election. She made no secret of it. She went to the polling station, showed her driver’s license, and cast a provisional ballot. Imagine her shock when she was then arrested and charged with felony voter fraud. Last week, she was sentenced to five years in a state prison. For voting."
Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years for illegally voting in 2016. Mason is a convicted felon who told the court that she did not know the law prohibited her from voting until she served all of her sentence, including federal supervised release. (photo: Crystal Mason)
In the Crystal Mason Case, What Was the Intent of the State of Texas?
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
02 April 18
was sickened last week to read about the case of Crystal Mason of Tarrant County, Texas. She’s a 43-year-old tax preparer who, in 2011, was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to tax fraud for inflating income tax deductions for her clients. She was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 2016. While still on federal probation, she registered to vote in Texas. Nobody—not the Bureau of Prisons, not her probation officer, not the court, nobody—told her that felons may not vote in Texas.
Crystal Mason voted in the 2016 election. She made no secret of it. She went to the polling station, showed her driver’s license, and cast a provisional ballot. Imagine her shock when she was then arrested and charged with felony voter fraud. Last week, she was sentenced to five years in a state prison. For voting.
Mason went to trial and believed that her defense was a sound one. She had no idea that she wasn’t allowed to vote in Texas. She thought she had paid her debt to society and she was ready to re-enter it. She told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “Do you think I would jeopardize my freedom? Do you honestly think I would ever want to leave my babies again? That was the hardest thing in my life to deal with. Who would—as a mother, as a provider—leave their kids over voting?” Mason believes that she is being singled out because she voted for Hillary Clinton. There’s no way to know if that’s true, but Tarrant County authorities recently convicted a second woman of illegal voting, and she was given eight years in prison. The sentences are draconian. This probably isn’t about Hillary Clinton as much as it’s about implementing a far-right law-and-order ideology that targets people of color and suppresses voter turnout in those communities.
But while the press is focused on the harshness of the sentences and the fact that many states don’t allow former felons to vote even after they’ve completed their sentences and probation, I think there’s a more important thing that’s being overlooked. That’s the issue of mens rea, or criminal intent, and that fact that a lack of criminal intent is no longer considered a defense.
Mens rea is Latin for “guilty mind.” It is the “mental element of a person’s intention to commit a crime or knowledge that one’s action or lack of action would cause a crime to be committed.” In other words, in most cases, you have to have had the intent to commit a crime and the knowledge that it was a crime for it to be an actual crime.
The concept of mens rea was borrowed from English common law. But by the 1950s, the U.S. interpretation had become so wildly different from the English interpretation, that the federal government set out to formulate a definitive formulation of mens rea for the U.S. courts. It was set out in the Model Penal Code of 1957. It establishes five levels of mens rea.
Strict liability mens rea is when the person engages in prohibited conduct, where the conduct is a civil infraction. Think jaywalking. Negligent mens rea is when a “reasonable person” would be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that his conduct is of a prohibited nature, and where the actor was not aware, but should have been. This was the argument used in court against Crystal Mason. Prosecutors said that, even if she didn’t know that voting was illegal, she should have because everybody knows felons can’t vote. Right? Reckless mens rea is when the actor consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that his conduct is of a prohibited nature. (You know check kiting is probably wrong, but you do it anyway.) Knowing mens rea is when the actor is “practically certain” that his conduct will lead to a result that is of a prohibited nature. (A friend asks you to help him buy a whole bunch of allergy pills. You know he’s probably going to make meth, but you do it anyway.) Purposeful mens rea is when the actor has the “conscious object” of engaging in conduct knowing fully that such conduct is illegal. (You just got out of prison, you plan to rob a bank, you buy a mask, and then you rob said bank.)
In my own case, as I was preparing for trial, prosecutors admitted that I did not have criminal intent when I spoke to two reporters about the CIA’s torture program. That didn’t matter, they argued. A crime is a crime is a crime. And in a precedent-setting decision for a national security case, my judge agreed. “Your honor,” one of my attorneys protested. “Are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage and still be punished for it?” “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” was the response. Criminal intent was thrown out the window.
I don’t know if Crystal Mason was targeted because she voted for Hillary Clinton. In any event, her vote wasn’t counted because she wasn’t on the voter roll and she cast only a provisional ballot, which was eventually rejected because she wasn’t registered. What I do know, though, is that no state in America goes after former felons trying to vote quite like Texas. On paper, it’s actually easier to vote as a former felon in Texas than it is in Florida, where no former felon may ever vote again, or Virginia, where the former felon must petition the governor to have his “civil rights reinstated.” In Texas, the former felon must have completed his sentence, including any parole or probation. He can then register.
But Texas stands alone in its single-minded pursuit of anybody who may have voted illegally. Most telling is a recent statement by Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, that voter fraud was “rampant” in the state. How many cases of voter fraud has Texas seen? There were three in the last election. Three. The governor was nonplussed. “We will continue our effort to crack down and make sure there is no illegal voting in Texas,” Abbott said.
Crystal Mason is his latest victim. And her only hope is a pardon—from Greg Abbott.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish
spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to
oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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How to Kill Democracy in Four Easy Steps |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34727"><span class="small">Clive Irving, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 02 April 2018 08:48 |
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Irving writes: "Democracy dies, not with a bang but with a whimper."
Joseph Goebbels. (photo: Getty Images)
How to Kill Democracy in Four Easy Steps
By Clive Irving, The Daily Beast
02 April 18
Eighty-five years ago the Nazi terror machine began operations. It met little resistance. And that’s the lesson that should really worry us now.
 he screams could not be heard from the street. The building, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, had previously been the Berlin School of Industrial Arts and Crafts and was too solidly insulated to reveal to passers-by the consequences of its new role as the headquarters of the Gestapo.
Inside was Hans Otto, an actor and member of the German Communist Party and chairman of the League of Workers’ Theater. One evening in 1933 he was picked up in a café by stormtroopers and taken to the Gestapo offices.
A few days later he was glimpsed by a fellow detainee for the last time: “He no longer was able to speak but could make only indistinct sounds…he was half naked and I could no longer recognize his face. His body was one bloody lump.”
Otto died shortly afterwards. He was 33.
Today you can visit the site of the Gestapo building, as I have done, although the school no longer exists – it has been replaced by the Topography of Terror, a museum that, as its name suggests, occupies the very ground in Berlin where the Nazi terror machine was initiated. (Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse no longer exists, either, it is now Niederkirchnerstrasse.)
When the Berlin Wall came down and the city, with the country, was unified Berlin recognized and formalized its guilt in directing Nazi atrocities by creating two searing places of pilgrimage, the Holocaust Memorial, a field of thousands of concrete slabs just south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Museum of the Jewish People, a building that has its own deliberate and visceral sense of entrapment as it records the extinction of millions of Jews, family by family, train load by train load.
But the Topography of Terror is equally important. It shows how many Germans were themselves victims of the terror and it is Germany’s own testament to the ghastly kind of efficiency that conceived and executed the nightmare.
The location of the museum was chosen two years before the Berlin Wall came down, in 1987, when it was still in East Berlin under communist control. Not far away and unmarked in a parking lot behind some new apartment blocks was the site of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide in 1945.
As the site was excavated the cellars of the former school, converted to prison cells by the Nazis, were uncovered. But prisoner interrogations did not take place there. They were conducted in the offices above.
That detail in itself struck me as I studied documents in the museum: this whole operation was, from its beginning to its end, run through a bureaucratic apparatus, with all the impersonal pedantry that that implies.
I leafed through fat spiral binders, the kind of files you might pull from a shelf in any office, and became chilled to the bone. They were the Gestapo’s commonplace bookkeeping, how many arrests made per day, neatly signed and counter-signed.
The torture – “intensified interrogations” in the official jargon – was recorded as a clerical exercise, carried out by those who became known as the schreibtischmorder, armchair murderers.
As ghastly as it was, the Gestapo apparatus was often merely a way station to death. Travel arrangements having been dutifully signed and counter-signed, prisoners were sent on their way to the concentration camps.
The first of those camps, Dachau near Munich, was opened 85 years ago this spring. In the first year about 4,800 people ended up in Dachau. They were the first wave of victims as Hitler set about eliminating all opposition. Many, like Hans Otto, were communists, trade unionists and social democrats, those who had most saliently and bravely fought the rise of the Nazis. There were also Jeovah’s Witnesses, Roma, homosexuals and those called, simply, “asocials.”
Very few of them were Jews. Those who were had the misfortune to fit into the assigned categories. Otherwise this was not the beginning of an organized genocide but the immediate purge of those Germans who were seen as most dangerous to establishing the new despotism.
Nonetheless individual groups of anti-Semitic thugs realized, correctly, that they were now free to attack Jews without restraint and there was an outbreak of very public attacks on Jews, some lethal, all over the country.
In response to the attacks on Jews there were calls in other countries, including the US, for a boycott of German products. The American, French and British governments did not support the boycott but Hitler, inflamed, ordered a counter-boycott of Jewish shops and department stores beginning on April 1.
In the event, there was only sporadic public support for the boycott and its enforcement was haphazard. It lasted for only a day. More sinister was a new law issued on April 7 to “restore professional bureaucracy” in which the civil service was to be purged of Jews. This was followed by a purge of Jewish doctors, lawyers and teachers.
Between July and October 1933 three other anti-Semitic laws were passed, the last one removing Jews from the editorships of newspapers.
The real shock of those early months in 1933 is to recognize how rapidly and easily German democracy was destroyed. Nobody has put it better than Ian Kershaw in his masterly biography of Hitler:
“Hitler was, in fact, in no position to act as an outright dictator when he came to office on 30 January 1933. As long as [President] Hindenburg lived, there was a potential rival source of loyalty – not least for the army. But by summer 1934, when he combined the headship of state with the leadership of government, his power had effectively shed formal constraints on its usage. And by then, the personality cult built around Hitler had reached new levels of idolatry and made millions of converts as the ‘people’s chancellor.’”
I have made several trips to Berlin out of a personal quest to try to better understand how this happened. And now it seems to me to have become more and more important because people of my generation, who grew up during World War II in Europe, live permanently in a peculiar state of heightened vigilance. We are clearly more sensitized to the persisting threat of fascism than those who don’t feel or understand the darkness with the same intimacy.
Even then, I’m reluctant to apply the Nazi analogy to the present because it so easily exaggerates the threat and, by doing so, strangely understates the real horrors of my childhood. But in several ways it does flash up salutary warnings for today, the first being that elites are not very good at rebutting excesses of power and preserving democracy.
After all, Germany was a nation with one of the world’s most widely respected intelligentsias, with centuries of leadership in literature, art, music, sciences, theological and political thought. Yet the universities and cultural elite articulated no effective opposition to Hitler and his thugs. They sat on their hands as what remained of the political opposition was systematically exterminated.
At the same time, the industrial leaders sensed new fortunes to be made in an arms race and the military leaders were either already signed up party apostles, like Hermann Goering, the creator of the new air force, or supine like the heads of the army and navy.
Four things prepared the ground for this capitulation.
The first was a disdain for elites of any kind, stirred up deliberately to encourage a sense of grievance in the masses of people who had suffered in the economic collapse of the 1920s and who viewed the flagrant decadence of Weimar Berlin as evidence of an urban elite (often portrayed as heavily influenced by Jews) that held too much sway.
The second was an understanding of the importance of a well-orchestrated propaganda machine. In the person of Joseph Goebbels Hitler discovered one of the great geniuses of modern political propaganda and, gaining control immediately of the national radio network, Goebbels infused the most pervasive new arm of the national media with the Nazi narrative of national rebirth under Hitler’s guiding vision of the Fatherland.
The third was putting into place all the apparatus of a police state in which the tasks of surveillance, intelligence and punishment were divided between the Gestapo and the state security service, the Reichsfuhrer-SS.
All this prepared the ground for the fourth and final step that would enforce total and unquestioning loyalty to the Fatherland: war.
Those four stages in the death of German democracy do not have any exact modern equal, either in the degree of their fanaticism or in the scale of the final catastrophe they produced, but there are elements that should be disturbingly familiar to us as precursors.
The disparagement of elites as imagined co-conspirators with the “deep state” was part of Donald Trump’s playbook from the beginning, and remains a familiar theme, reinforced by the bigoted chorus of Steve Bannon and Breitbart and, moving deeper into the shadows, by white supremacists.
Trump’s base was incubated and indoctrinated by what Andrew Sullivan has rightly described as a “full bore state propaganda channel” of the kind that Goebbels would have loved to have had at hand – Fox News.
While we are nowhere near approaching a police state we have readily succumbed to a degree of state surveillance of questionable legality on the basis that it is essential for national security.
And we have seen that by simply equating the launching of wars with the obligations of patriotism we get trapped into endless foreign conflicts with little hope of ever winning them, while feeding the military-industrial complex with billions and billions of dollars.
But it may well be that the real warning here is the reverse of what it at first seems to be, the emergence of a demagogue in the form of Trump.
Trump certainly has some of the instincts of a demagogue. He clearly loves strongmen to the point of idolatry. But he could actually be a weak man hiding behind the aspirations of a strongman. Ideologically he is a vacancy and intellectually he is, to say the least, weak and lazy.
That kind of weakness in a president is dangerous. George W. Bush was similarly weak and was led to disaster by a zealot, Dick Cheney, who gave us the Iraq war and the surveillance state. If John Bolton turns out to be Trump’s Cheney – he certainly has the ambition – the outcome could be the same, or even worse.
Indeed, a subtle form of proto-fascism has already infiltrated our lives. The torture of prisoners of war, voter suppression and the enforced deportation of immigrants all have large bodies of support as the concept of “normal” changes almost by the hour.
But most alarming of all, and another uncomfortable reflection of Germany 85 years ago, is that the people who should most immediately constrain this threat, the congressional leadership, are virtually silent accomplices. In fact, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan display a level of moral abasement that suggests that, even if they ever knew any modern history, they have forgotten it in the cynical pursuit of their political agenda.
That is how democracy dies, not with a bang but with a whimper.
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ormer White House staffers who were fired by Donald Trump held their first reunion on Easter Sunday in Houston’s Astrodome.
