Djelloul Marbrook

Historians are still arguing about who set the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, just as a lively debate is underway today on the worldwide web about whether the authorized version of the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks is true.

But nobody is arguing about what happened in Germany the next day. The newly elected Chancellor Adolph Hitler persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to issue a decree that abrogated these constitutional protections:

* Free expression of opinion
* Freedom of the press
* Right of assembly and association
* Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications
* Protection against unlawful searches and seizures
* Individual property rights
* States’ right of self-government

A fictional enemy was posited by a thug government. Any possible threat to the German state was exaggerrated beyond recognition. And a dictatorship was established to meet it.

Today we are beginning, belatedly, to debate the Patriot Act, which gave the federal security state extraordinary powers in a fit of Islamophobia. But the debate remains shallow, ill reported and desultorily conducted. No mention is being made, as it should be, that current efforts by the telecommunications industry to gain control of the Internet by persuading (bribing?) Congress to approve a system of multi-tiered access to the Internet is closely related to the subject of setting aside civil liberties to confront a supposed threat.

The scholar Francisco Gil-White argues that the 1947 National Security Act signed by President Harry S. Truman effectively killed the free press in America and that the current Patriot Act debate is a red herring distracting us from the more serious issues raised by the 1947 legislation, which, he argues, has done incalculable damage to public discourse.

What seems inarguable is the spooky similarity between Nazi and Bush Administration tactics. There is nothing new about pumping up paranoia about a supposed threat in order to cow a population into surrendering its liberties to an authoritarian state. Emperors and caliphs, generals and khans, sultans and popes have done it. The question for us is whether the United States can yet become the first great nation to call the bluff of the bullies who do this.

—DM