Lurching Toward Theocracy

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Fuhrer’ or ‘Duce’. But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’”

-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.…”

-- They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, 1955

“Whoooo could imagine, that they would freak out, in Kansas, Kansas, badoobie-doobie-do, Kansas, Kansas...”

-- “Help I'm A Rock,” The Mothers of Invention, 1966

“... STOP groups like the ACLU from removing all mentions of Christmas from the public square!”

-- Christian Response e-Alert, December 2004

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst von Rath, a low-ranking German official, at his embassy in Paris. Two days later, Kristallnacht (“Night of Crystal”), a pogrom that destroyed synagogues, Jewish-owned homes, stores and community centers, commenced.

Kristallnacht was incited by a well-organized “intense campaign against Jews [which] began on German National Radio,” Milton Mayer wrote in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's Propaganda Minister, directed the campaign that appeared to move ordinary Germans to action against Jews: Are the German people going to be “sitting ducks all over the world for Jew murderers?” the radio voice challenged. “Are the German people to stand helpless while the Fuhrer's representatives are shot down by the Jew swine? Are the Schweinehunde to get off scot free? Is the wrath of the German People against the Israelite scum to be restrained any longer?”