I and others have been criticized by some for drawing parallels between the Bush administration and the German Nazis under Hitler. A major reason why we draw those parallels is that we are astounded that there has been so little outrage in this country to the Bush administration’s piece by piece dismantling of our Constitution and its assumption of ever more dictatorial powers. We look at the history of Hitler’s rise to power and we note the gradual process by which Germans gave up their freedom to Hitler, as briefly summarized here by Milton Mayer in “
They Thought they Were Free – The Germans 1933-45”:
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. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
Why have I invoked Nazis rather than other dictatorial regimes to draw parallels with the Bush administration? One reason is that I (and many others) am much more familiar with that regime than any other major dictatorship. Another reason is that the gradual assumption of dictatorial powers by Hitler closely resembles what is happening in our country today, whereas the
sudden onset of some other dictatorships makes their histories less comparable to our current situation.
But people criticize us for drawing those parallels, for such reasons as “Once you invoke Nazis, nobody will listen to you.”
Ok then. Naomi Klein describes the late 20th Century demise of Russian democracy in her book, “
The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. Her description paints a picture that has many parallels to our own recent history, and which should serve as a warning to us. So let’s take a look at that:
Some relevant background to the demise of Russian democracy – from Naomi Klein’s bookKlein’s book describes the extreme economic exploitation of numerous countries in the latter part of the 20th Century, including Indonesia, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, China, South Africa, Russia, and others. In order to explain what happened to Russian democracy in the 1990s it is useful to first understand the basic pattern, as documented in Klein’s book. All of her examples involve a common theme, which goes something like this:
Third World nations in the last third of the 20th Century have to a very large extent been kept down by external human forces who seek to profit from the labors of the poor. To a very large extent today, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are both very much under the control of the United States, are instruments which facilitate this process. They loan money to impoverished nations that are desperate for it, imposing conditions on those nations which work to keep the great majority of its inhabitants impoverished indefinitely. The process is something akin to loan sharking or indentured servitude. Since the governing elites of those nations usually profit from the deal, they have some motivation to play along with it.
The underpinning for the whole system is
right wing economic ideology of the type first put forth by Milton Friedman. Since the rules and results of the game are so painful to the vast majority of a country’s inhabitants, various methods have had to be developed to keep the population in line. Sometimes that involves martial law and widespread kidnappings, executions, disappearances and torture, as under Pinochet in Chile. But many other methods have been developed as well, and often financial pressures or threats are enough to do the job. Taken as a whole, Klein terms these methods “shock therapy” – a “therapy” that is brutal enough to make a person or a population docile enough to go along with what they’re told to do. This is how she describes the beginnings of it in the introduction to her book:
Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy – tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation… It was the most extreme capitalist make-over ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a “Chicago School” revolution… Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that “facilitate the adjustment”. He coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic “shock treatment.” In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy,” has been the method of choice. Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments…
A brief summary of the rise of democracy and break-up of the Soviet UnionExcept for a brief period in 1917, when the
February Russian Revolution overthrew their Czar, Nicholas II, Russia had never experienced anything resembling democracy until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The 1917 February Revolution was soon followed by the
Bolshevik Revolution of October of that year. The Bolsheviks, under Lenin and then Stalin, came to power promising a Communist paradise. But instead of fulfilling the promises of Communism, they soon set up a Communist dictatorship that was every bit as repressive as any seen under the Russian Czars. By 1922 they had incorporated many previously independent nations, and henceforth
became known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or Soviet Union for short.
So it remained until Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in 1985. Proving to be a stellar exception to the view that power corrupts, Gorbachev gradually
brought democracy to the USSR, which included freedom of the press, elections for parliament, president, vice president, and lower offices, and an independent constitutional court.
In August 1991, a group of hard line Communists who wanted their power back
staged a coup and arrested Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s President, led a successful counter-coup and secured the release of Gorbachev. With his new found hero status, Yeltsin instigated the
break-up of the Soviet Union in December 1991, thereby forcing the resignation of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union (since it no longer existed) and greatly increasing his (Yeltsin’s) power as President of the newly independent Russia.
Yeltsin granted dictatorial powers and initiates economic shock therapyIn late 1991 Russia was in very bad financial shape. The major Western powers and the IMF made it clear to Yeltsin that if he wanted any help with the Russian economy he would be expected to initiate a kind of economic shock therapy to his country. As I noted above, economic shock therapy is very unpopular with ordinary people, and therefore very difficult to implement in a democracy. Klein describes what Yeltsin did shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union:
In late 1991 he went to the parliament and made an unorthodox proposal: if they gave him one year of special powers, under which he could issue laws by decree rather than bring them to parliament for a vote, he would solve the economic crisis and give them back a thriving, healthy system. What Yeltsin was asking for was the kind of executive power enjoyed by dictators, not democrats, but the parliament was still grateful to the president for his role during the attempted coup, and the country was desperate for foreign aid.
The answer was yes: Yeltsin could have one year of absolute power to remake Russia’s economy.
Economic shock therapy for Russia began one week after Gorbachev’s resignation.
The effects of Yeltsin’s economic shock therapyKlein describes the effects on the Russian people to one year of economic shock therapy.
After only one year, shock therapy had taken a devastating toll: millions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when money lost its value, and abrupt cuts to subsidies meant millions of workers had not been paid in months. The average Russian consumed 40% less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets.
The failed attempt to end Yeltsin’s dictatorial ruleIn the face of such disastrous results, the Russian people clamored for their parliament to end the dictatorial rule that they had granted Yeltsin, and parliament responded. In March 1993 they
voted to repeal the special powers they had given him. But it was too late for an easy transition back to democracy. Klein describes what happened next:
Yeltsin had grown accustomed to his augmented powers and had come to think of himself less as a president and more as a monarch. He retaliated against the parliament’s “mutiny” by going on television and declaring a state of emergency, which conveniently restored his imperial powers. Three days later, Russia’s independent Constitutional Court (the creation of which was one of Gorbachev’s most significant democratic breakthroughs) ruled 9-3 that Yeltsin’s power grab violated… the constitution he had sworn to uphold…
Yeltsin responded by creating a referendum to confirm his rule. The referendum failed to give him his mandate, but he declared victory anyhow, abolished the constitution, and dissolved parliament. Parliament responded by voting to impeach him by a vote of 636-2.
But it was
too late for impeachment. With Western leaders and the Western press behind him, Yeltsin sent in troops to surround the parliament building. Thousands of Russian people came to protest peacefully. Yeltsin responded to that with more troops, who machine-gunned the protesters, killing about a hundred of them. He then ordered all councils in the country dissolved.
The
violence peaked on October 4, 1993, when Yeltsin ordered more troops to fight off demonstrators and to set fire to the parliament building. The result was 500 dead, 1,000 wounded, 1,700 arrested, and many tortured.
Russia’s spin into chaos under Yeltsin’s dictatorshipWith the threat to Yeltsin’s dictatorial rule smashed, he was then able to go full force with his economic “reforms”. Klein describes what happened next:
The fun was just beginning. With the country reeling from the attack, Yeltsin’s own Chicago Boys (adherents to Milton Friedman’s extreme economic shock therapy) rammed through the most contentious measures in their program: huge budget cuts, the removal of price controls on basic food items, including bread, and even more and faster privatizations – the standard policies that cause so much instant misery that they seem to require a police state to stave off rebellion…
In theory, all this wheeling and dealing was supposed to create the economic boom that would lift Russia out of desperation; in practice, the Communist state was simply replaced with a corporatist one; the beneficiaries of the boom were confined to a small club of Russians, many of them former Communist Party apparatchiks, and a handful of Western mutual fund managers who made dizzying returns investing in newly privatized Russian companies. A clique of nouveaux billionaires… stripped the country of nearly everything of value, moving the enormous profits offshore…The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth – it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money.
The use of anti-terrorism and war to maintain powerThings got so bad for the Russian people that Yeltsin’s approval ratings fell into single digits. With his popularity so low in December 1994 that it threatened his continued rule, he went to
war against Chechnya, which was attempting to secede from Russia. That war, plus the infusion of $100 million from his corporate cronies, plus 800 times more coverage on state TV than his rivals, allowed Yeltsin to be re-elected in 1996.
Continued economic shock therapy caused Yeltsin’s approval ratings to drop to 6% by 1998. But fortunately for the Yeltsin and the corporate oligarchy, another event came to their rescue: In September 1999, a
series of terrorist attacks on apartment buildings resulted in about 300 deaths. Vladmir Putin was put in charge of this emergency and responded by starting
another war against Chechnya. By this time Yeltsin was seriously incapacitated due to alcoholism. The corporate oligarchy engineered a
quiet transfer of power to Putin, and immediately after he took power he signed a law that
provided Yeltsin with immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he may have committed while in power.
Lessons for the maintenance of democracyAlthough George Bush and Dick Cheney have not been formally granted dictatorial powers by Congress, as was Boris Yeltsin in 1991, they have in fact usurped numerous dictatorial powers in practice: George Bush has usurped the legislative powers of Congress by appending over a thousand “
signing statements” to Congressional legislation which effectively nullified much of that legislation; he has usurped the Congressional responsibility to declare war by repeatedly
lying to Congress and the American people in order to justify a preventive war against a nation that posed no threat to us; he has
admitted to repeated violations of our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by ordering the interception of our communications without even seeking a warrant; and he has violated our Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments by rounding up and
indefinitely imprisoning thousands of men and boys without charges or trial, and
torturing many of them. And yet, despite a Constitution that gives Congress the responsibility to resist such usurpations of executive power, our Congress has continually relinquished that responsibility.
I’ve previously discussed numerous parallels between the Bush/Cheney regime and Hitler’s Nazi regime, including: The
appearance of relative normalcy for many years before dictatorship became entrenched beyond the point of no return; the
turning of a blind eye to government atrocities by much of the nation’s press and people; the
role of racism in facilitating a level of tolerance to those atrocities; the use of
concentration camps; the
pretense of fighting terrorism to create fear and quiet dissent;
and more.
The demise of democracy in Russia demonstrates many of the same parallels. I won’t recount them again here, as the above recounted story should be familiar enough to Americans who have watched the Bush/Cheney regime illegally usurp one power after another over the past 7 years. I believe that the most important lesson we should take away from that story is that it is extremely dangerous to relinquish too much power to a single person or a small group of persons – especially if that person(s) has repeatedly shown himself to handle power irresponsibly.
I don’t know what the odds are that the Bush/Cheney regime will attempt to retain dictatorial power rather than hand it over in January 2009. I estimate it at about 25%, but maybe that’s because I’m in denial. I must admit that the current race for the 2008 presidency has distracted me from thinking about this.
But consider this. What if it looks like a Democrat will win the presidency? And what if shortly before November 2008 we have another terrorist attack? What do you think will happen then?
Dennis Kucinich is
urging Congress to rise and accept
their responsibility for this issue of world shattering importance. Maybe if they accept that responsibility they could rid us of our tyrants
before we have another terrorist attack.
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