How did we get here

Yesterday I had a birthday and I dropped off my voting ballot. Now that’s a first for me but I have never been more concerned about our country’s future than at present. I attribute our demise due to not knowing history. History is more than a Google search. It’s an understanding of what has gone on before you and as a result, understanding what lies ahead.

The American education system no longer teaches government and that’s a pity that encourages complacency and ignorance. Our materialistic world focuses only on what you get; the greed to acquire with no goal other than more, more, more. Yet when we die we are all in the same boat, stripped of all of our possessions and asked how we spent our time on earth and how we served humanity. The key in that phrase is not how we served our immediate family or tribe but the larger good we call community.

So this history lesson will point out how things come full circle.

A century ago fascism rose and then fell in Europe — taking millions of people with it. Fascism's history from its roots in the turbulent aftermath of World War I, when masses of angry people rose up, to the rise of charismatic leaders who manipulated that anger, the totalitarian societies they built, and the brutal measures they used to enforce their ideology. It ignited the horrific consequences of genocide and war.

The chaotic aftermath of the war created fertile ground for the seeds of fascism. Nowhere was that more true than in defeated and devastated Germany.

Imagine Germany after 1918. For four long years, they'd fought bravely — lost over two million men, and then surrendered. Veterans limped home to a country in shambles. Their emperor had been toppled, replaced by a weak democracy. Their nation was humiliated and the treaty of Versailles gave harsh terms for financial remunerations.

In a vacuum of power, a fringe movement — claiming to be the champion of the oppressed — emerged. They dressed in intimidating brown-shirt uniforms, roamed the streets in gangs, and wanted to restore Germany's national pride. They called themselves the National Socialists, or "Nazis." Their leader: Adolf Hitler.

Those early Nazis found a natural base in Munich. While a pleasant and idyllic city today, the capital of Bavaria was known for its conservative and nationalistic passions.

In Hitler’s book Mein Kampf he wrote democracy doesn't work, that it's a flawed system that can be manipulated by outside forces for their own gain; and he blamed the communists for it — ultimately at the end of everything wrong it's a Jewish "world conspiracy," so Jews are behind the wrongdoing. His solution for that, is fascism or National Socialism…and that he can make Germany strong — he can unite the country; he can unite the master race and get Germans back to their rightful status.

Are you beginning to see a parallel? Big talk promises made with no real political agenda other than to create a frenzy and point a finger.

When Hitler was locked up in prison, he was tapping into ideas that had already been percolating in places around Europe. One of those was the country where the fascist ideology would first come to power: Italy.

Fascism started as violence or gangs in most cases, the veterans of the war. They went around the streets beating workers up, beating up the socialists.

Hitler coined the phrase Führer. Which meant leader. Sort of like a sign in my neighborhood that reads: Under God, Trump. Politicians who want the masses to think of them as a god-like figure.

In Italy, Mussolini promised Italy would be great, modern, that it would be finally unified. Where there would be work for everybody. For his first 15 years, he ruled with dictatorial power and impressive success. He pumped up the economy, created jobs, and invested in infrastructure.

However, there was a price. Freedom. Individualism doesn't exist in fascism. Not in any aspect. Not in art, not in lectures at universities, and it doesn't exist in newspapers, or in the press.

Individuality was something that was deemed unfit for a German, basically, so what mattered was the Volksgemeinschaft — the society; the common denominator of the German people.

All people who tried to make it any different in their private life, in their professions, such as the writers, artists, professors, the intelligentsia, in the way to express their opinions — they all had to be stopped.

Trump a day after his coronavirus hospitalization was out at a rally saying, “I feel so powerful.” Fascist dictators understood the propaganda power of big rallies, where they can manufacture the adoration of their people, bask in it, and then broadcast it to the rest of the population — as Hitler said, turning the "little man" into part of a "great dragon."

Further west, Spain and Portugal were also flirting with fascism. Spain, like other nations at the time, was making the awkward transition from 19th-century monarchy to 20th-century democracy. By the 1930s, it was governed by a modern but fragile democracy. By 1936, the Spanish people had become extremely polarized, as the old guard of royalty, military, and industry pushed back.

Representing this reactionary faction, a military strongman, General Francisco Franco, invaded Spain from Spanish Morocco. Using colonial troops and borrowed Italian planes, he attempted a coup d'état. Like Mussolini and Hitler, Franco vowed a return to order and to restore Spanish power and national pride. But the democratically elected government fought back, and the nation descended into a bloody civil war.

Conservatives under Franco fought the liberal democratic government. It was a brutal war between classes and ideologies, dividing both villages and families. In three years of fighting, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards died. Franco used predictable strongman tactics — including intimidation by police and the military. Hitler and Mussolini, who mistakenly believed Franco would join their fascist alliance, threw gas on the fire.

One of the most tragic episodes of this tragic war was in Guernica, a workaday town in the Basque region of northern Spain. It was here that the world first witnessed the terrible power of the fascist state — a prelude to World War II.

Guernica was the capital of an independent-minded Basque community that stood up to Franco. To break their spirit, Franco enlisted the help of Germany's air force, and the defiant town was decimated in the world's first saturation

Hitler may have stoked Germany's economy and put people back to work. But it was becoming clear that, whatever benefits fascism brought to its political base, it had a darker side — and it came at a huge cost. Despite its veneer of respectability, and its popularity among ordinary people, the thriving fascist state relied on increasingly brutal repression.

Hitler continued his ruthless creation of a totalitarian fascist state. The free press was silenced, as were intellectuals and universities.

But perhaps most important is the preservation of government by the constitution and the rule of law, and one way to eliminate that and make new laws was to burn the Reichstag, read more about that here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-power-180962240/

The dictates of an all-powerful leader are dangerous. When they seek to wipe out a constitution, it’s easy for leaders who present themselves as interpreters of the law to take hold.

When there's a great fear of the future, where people feel threatened and they're afraid to lose their stronghold, it's easy for egalitarian thinking to come into play, and it leaves ample room for dictatorship.

One of the things that we can do to make sure that something like this will not happen in the U.S., is to not trust politicians that promise easy answers for complicated problems.

Democracy is fragile, and it should not be taken for granted, so defending it is extremely important. We do not need to follow leaders blindly but need to maintain critical independent thinking.

As we've seen through the story of fascism in Europe, charismatic leaders rose to power through the democratic process and then seized extra-constitutional power by unlawful means. When citizens allowed leaders to do this, individual freedoms and rights soon fell by the wayside, and democracy was lost. While democracy was restored to Western Europe, it easily could have been lost forever — and the cost was millions of lives. As history continues to unfold around us today, it's important to remember that freedom and democracy are not guaranteed. We are all participants and we are all responsible.

The story of fascism in Europe taught us that strong and charismatic leaders can capitalize on fear to lead a society astray. It requires a vigilant and engaged populace. And if we take freedom for granted, we will lose it.

Be responsible, go to the polls and, keep in mind you are not voting for a story, a personality of for who will or who won’t raise taxes on individuals that make over 400K per year, you are voting for a candidate who will tax corporations so they pay their share, respect our constitution and who will maintain democracy.