Americans sense of history is virtually non-existent. Most probably can’t even tell you where Germany is located. That makes sense in a nation which foisted Trump onto the world scene.
Citizens in the USA country don’t pay much attention to anything but what is going on any further than the drivel coming out of their television.
In Germany, which has been hit hard by the Pandemic the government is proposing a law imposing restrictions which many are comparing to the draconian laws Hitler’s rubber stamp Reichstag imposed in 1933.
The soon to be tossed out wannabe despot Trump probably longed for the opportunity to impose his fascist mentality on the American public. Fortunately he is being rebuffed.
The scary reality is that 72,000,000 Americans, many of whom live on a 24/7 diet of Fox junk News, went to the polls this year and supported this thug. It’s a sad commentary on the USA and leaves many people who treasure democracy feeling adrift and forlorn.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 11.18.2020
Anti-lockdown protesters have compared the Infection Protection Law, proposed by Angela Merkel’s government, to the law that paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. But the two laws are hardly comparable.
“It is a very unusual day”, said Social Democrat MP Helge Lindh as he approached the German Bundestag by foot Wednesday morning. He was referring to crowds of protesters gathering outside the parliament building.
Their goal was to stop the new infection protection law, intended to make it easier for the government to swiftly introduce lockdown measures in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Several hundred demonstrators defied bans to protest outside the parliament buildings and in the surrounding government district. Some protesters even tried to block access to the building, before the protests were dissolved by police.
“It must be possible to demonstrate and to criticize,” Lindh told DW by telephone. “But tolerance can not go so far to accept that the infection protection law is being equated with the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, with the Enabling Act of 1933.”
On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler placed before the parliament a “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and the Reich” — the law that came to be known as the “Enabling Act.”
Some protesters, as well as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), have repeatedly drawn this analogy. They claim the new law will give the government dictatorial powers, drawing a parallel to events in 1933. “This is blindness towards the lessons of history,” said Lindh. “And it is a complete trivialization of National Socialism.”
It amended the constitution, giving sweeping legislative powers to the government: “Laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government of the Reich…Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution…”
The law passed through both chambers of parliament and gave Hitler and his National Socialist party absolute power over the German state.
“Parliamentarism was dead after that,” Andreas Wirsching, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, told DW. “It was the self-abolition of parliament. And most members of parliament realized this when they voted for the law.”
Almost 100 communist members of parliament had already been imprisoned, were in hiding, or had fled the country when the Reichstag convened to pass the “Enabling Act.” Nazi paramilitary storm troopers were positioned at the parliament’s entrance, putting pressure on the remaining members of parliament.
To compare today’s Infection Protection Law to the legislation pushed through back then is “purely demagogical,” Wirsching said. “The ‘Enabling Act’ had one goal: dictatorship. That’s why the analogy is nonsense.”
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