[Infowarrior] - McGovern OpEd: Creeping Fascism

[Richard Forno]

Lessons from the Past
Creeping Fascism

By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA analyst


    "There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with
which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in
Germany, as if from a box at the theater ... Perhaps the only comparably odd
thing is the way that now, years later...."

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who
as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover
and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he
died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines
Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller
and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as "Defying Hitler."

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today
is the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article
in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about
the book and the comparison to Bush's America...this is almost
unbelievable."

More about Haffner below. Let's set the stage first by recapping some of
what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the
Nazi ascendancy, noting how "odd" it is that the frontal attack on our
Constitutional rights is met with such "calm, superior indifference."

Goebbels Would be Proud

It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the
rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been
eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had
learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White
House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of
War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing
the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur
Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would
simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with
Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping
story did not fit Adolph Ochs' trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit
To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the
newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story
"woefully inadequate.")

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer
hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office
for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in
vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out;
part of it, at least.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern12282007.html


Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch
chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to
Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He
can be reached at: rrmcgovern at aol.com