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Godwin's Law
Author: TriSec    Date: 04/10/2010 11:46:35

Good Morning.

http://dutron.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/enrst-rohm.jpg


WWII geeks will recognize this fine-looking fellow. His name was Ernst Rohm, and he led the paramilitary SA Brownshirts back in the late 20s and early 30s during Hitler's rise to power.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_XPZm8uXU4e0/SN4MdJR2cMI/AAAAAAAAARs/GgaMRXx7BTU/s400/gov-palin-2006_official.jpg


Of course, we all recognize this fine-looking lady. She's the de facto leader of the Tea Party movement, during what we all hope is *not* their rise to power during the teens of this century.

Raine recently blogged about race hatred and the chilling effect it's having on the national debate. I wish I could calm that down some, but I fear that today's blog will only add more fuel to that simmering boil.

The pictures I selected above are not an accident...while I loathe what the Tea Party represents, and even more so their mis-appropriation of something that's near and dear to Bostonians...it's their ongoing behavior that I find truly troublesome and indeed, dangerous.



Let's take a look back in history. (all quotes from Wikipedia)


The term Sturmabteilung predates the founding of the Nazi Party in 1919. It originally comes from the specialized assault troops used by Germany in World War I utilising Hutier infiltration tactics. Instead of a large mass assault, the Sturmabteilung was organized into small squads of a few soldiers each. The first official German stormtroop unit was authorized on 2 March 1915; German high command ordered the VIII Corps to form a detachment for the testing of experimental weapons and the development of appropriate tactics that could break the deadlock on the Western Front. On 2 October 1916, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff ordered all German armies in the west to form a battalion of stormtroops. First applied during the German Eighth Army's siege of Riga, then again at the Battle of Caporetto, their wider use in March 1918 allowed to push back Italian lines tens of kilometers.

The DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or German Workers' Party) was formed in Munich in January 1919 and Hitler joined in September of that year. His talents for speaking, publicity and propaganda were readily recognized and by early 1920 he had gained some authority in the party, which changed its name to the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers' Party) in April 1920.

The precursor to the SA had acted informally and on an ad hoc basis for some time before this. Hitler, with an eye always to helping the party to grow through propaganda, convinced the leadership committee to invest in an advertisement in the Munchener Beobachter (later renamed the Volkischer Beobachter) for a mass meeting in the Hofbräuhaus, to be held on 16 October 1919. Some 70 people attended, and a second such meeting was advertised for 13 November in the Eberlbrau beer hall. Some 130 people attended; there were hecklers, but Hitler's military friends promptly ejected them by force, and the agitators "flew down the stairs with gashed heads." The next year, on 24 February, he announced the party's Twenty-Five Point program at a mass meeting of some 2000 persons at the Hofbrauhaus. Protesters tried to shout Hitler down, but his army friends, armed with rubber truncheons, ejected the dissenters. The basis for the SA had been formed.


Ah, but what does this have to do with the teabaggers? Aren't they using exactly the same tactics? Try showing up at a rally wearing an Obama T-Shirt, or yell something when Sarah is speaking and see what kind of reaction you get from the crowd. It's intimidation and thuggerry...political intimidation and thuggery. Just like the Brownshirts.

There's been much talk recently about the GOP and the Tea Party "merging" into a unified front. But aren't the Teabaggers more beneficial to the GOP in their current role? It's been a few weeks since healthcare reform passed, but what's still in the headlines? Death threats, intimidation, smashed windows, and a whole host of other things have been attributed to "disgruntled voters". But who do you think is really behind all this? Of course, the media just laps it all up without diving deeper into the reasons behind the anger...it's too easy a story to write that an angry teabagger threatened Speaker Pelosi's life.

But what will happen when the GOP finally gets back in power? Right now, I find that they are content to sit back and let Sarah and the movement take all the heat and garner all the headlines, while they busily exploit the masses with lies and demagoguery. We do still have a nominally free press that's supposed to expose this kind of debauchery, but will they? It's been a truism for as long as there's been TV. "If it bleeds, it leads." It's far easier to show an angry crowd throwing rocks at a Congressman's window than it is to take the time to debunk what the party leaders are spouting to their followers.

As the rhetoric and the threats grow louder and scarier, we all need to stop for a moment and look in the mirror. What's it going to be? The world watched horrified in 1933 as Hitler won power through legal means. It didn't take very long for him to seize full control and start dismantling the fledgling democratic Germany step by step. In the early days, there were plenty of opportunities to stop the "Nazification" of Germany...but the people, beaten into submission by the Brownshirts, swayed by the mistruths of the media, and hypnotized by the charisma of the party leader simply became "Good Germans" and acquiesced to whatever the Party wanted. The conditions are ripe for such a scenario to happen on our shores, and woe to us that would oppose it.

But what of the Brownshirts?

After Hitler had seized power by legal means, the Brownshirts were no longer necessary to him. In fact, the "regular Army" saw them as a threat. As part of a secret deal, Hitler got the loyalty of the Wermacht in exchange for the liquidation of the Brownshirts...an event that became known as the "Night of the Long Knives".


Perhaps the greatest single factor leading to the downfall of the SA was Röhm's decision to directly challenge the Reichswehr. After Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, Röhm lobbied Hitler to appoint him Minister of Defense, a position held by the conservative Werner von Blomberg. While Blomberg and others in the traditional military saw the SA as a source of recruits for an enlarged army, Röhm wanted the SA to become the new German military (absorbing the Reichswehr) with himself as leader. Limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 soldiers, army leaders were concerned that they would be swallowed up by the much-larger SA. In January 1934, Röhm presented Blomberg with a memorandum demanding that SA should replace the army as the nation's ground forces, and that the Reichswehr become a training adjunct to the SA. President Paul von Hindenburg would not stand for this, and threatened to impose martial law if Hitler did not act against Röhm.

After this ultimatum, Hitler ordered the arrest and subsequent execution of the leadership of the SA, which took place on June 30-July 2, 1934, on what is known as the Night of the Long Knives. At Hitler's behest, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich faked a dossier that purported to show that Röhm had received payment from the French to carry out a coup against the Führer. Hitler personally led the SS raid on the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee, where Röhm and SA-Obergruppenführer Edmund Heines were garrisoned. Victor Lutze became the new leader of the SA, and the organization was soon marginalized in the Nazi power structure in favor of the SS. On June 30, 1934 Hitler issued a 12-point directive to Lutze to clean up the SA and wrote that “SA men should be leaders, not ludicrous apes”. Membership in the organization dropped from 2.9 million in August 1934 to 1.2 million in April 1938. It became little more than an old comrades' association, appearing at the Nuremberg Rallies and called out for ceremonial duties and for lining the streets for parades.

Another factor contributing to the decline of the SA was the reintroduction of conscription in 1935 and the build-up of the German Army. Members of the Hitler Youth enrolled in the Wehrmacht rather than "graduating" to the SA. Its only significant action after the Night of the Long Knives was Kristallnacht, when SS and SA units were activated to riot against Jews, destroying Jewish businesses and synagogues. Nevertheless the SA continued to remain active until the end of WWII, but virtually all of its functions and powers were taken over by the SS. Its loss of status within the Third Reich was such that after the war the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg declared that the SA had become nothing more than "unimportant Nazi hangers-on."


If the GOP regains power, what is to become of the Teabaggers? Will they remain a useful part of the propaganda machine...or will Sarah and her organization be sacrificed on the altar of power too?


 

13 comments (Latest Comment: 04/11/2010 07:01:33 by livingonli)
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