Hitler’s power grab: the Enabling Act. (March 1933). The Nazis’ payoff for their bold false flag.
THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Special to The Greanville Post | Commentary No. 56: “Revisiting ‘9/11’ on its 15th Anniversary, in the Context of the Reichstag Fire ”
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The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 Disaster will shortly be observed this year. No single event in recent history has had such an impact on history itself. I, and many, many others have been writing on it, and the still un-answered questions about it, from the time almost immediately after it happened. In the view of many of us, the truth about what really happened has yet to be told. On September 10-11, at New York City’s Cooper union, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, the NY State Legislative Action Project for 9/11 Justice, the 9/11 Consensus Panel, and the 9/11 Truth Action Project will be holding the next in the series of “Justice in Focus” symposia on the topic of “9/11 Truth” which have been held annually for some years now.
The Reichstag Fire, the Tonkin Gulf incident, events like that were major historical pivots in the 20th century, yet they were all engineered, false flags designed to tighten control over the masses. In the 21st, 9/11 is still the granddaddy of all false flags—so far. Much worse is still to come, unless people get really organized.
“9/11” is a subject that I have visited periodically over the years, most recently on The Greanville Post last April, upon the publication of the redacted version of “The 28 Pages.” This time around I thought to go back to some of my earliest writing on the subject. It appeared on a long-closed webmagazine called “The Political Junkies.net.” This time around, because the 9/11 disaster and the U.S. Republican government’s response to it has had such a profound impact on world affairs, the multi-faceted and super-deadly current conflict in the Middle East being just one of them, I thought that it might be useful to re-visit a singular event that occurred a long time ago, that also had a huge impact in subsequent years, That would be the Reichstag Fire, that occurred in Berlin, Germany, on February 27, 1933, just about a month after Adolf Hitler became the German Chancellor. There are some remarkable comparisons between the governmental responses to the two events, of which this column will only scratch the surface. This text is drawn from several columns of mine on the subject of 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire which I have written over the years, the first being done in November, 2001.
For those who may not be au courant with the history of Nazi Germany, let me lay out the bare facts of the period. On January 30, 1933, the then President of the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933), the World War I hero Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, as part of a deal with the non-Nazi Right-Wing political parties, appoints Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party as Chancellor. Among other things, the Nazis begin moving very quickly against the trade unions and the two left-wing parties, the Socialists (SPD) and the Communists (KPD), arresting certain members of their leaderships and driving others into exile. On February 27, the grand, historic, German Parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, is hit by a fire that would make it unusable until it was eventually restored after the end of World War II.
The story of “the cause” that was released almost immediately (within hours) by the Nazis was that the fire was set by a mentally-handicapped Dutch former Communist turned anarchist, acting entirely alone, one Marinus van der Lubbe. (The Reichstag conveniently happened to be decorated with highly flammable furniture, drapes, and wall-coverings. Apparently, a few matches did the trick.) Within hours, Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels, et al had proclaimed the fire to be the result of a KPD plot. It happened that the KPD knew nothing of it and that the “incriminating documents” quickly produced by the Nazis were later proved to be forgeries. But that meant nothing at the time.
The Nazis quickly created a national hysteria over the “threat of the KPD and the SPD,” lumped together as “the Marxists,” to the “peace and tranquility of the German nation,” to the “security of the German volk.” To deal with “the Marxist threat,” on Feb. 28, the day after the Fire, before there could be any kind of investigation beyond the Nazi declarations and proffered false documents, with Pres. Hindenburg’s approval, and in accord with a provision of the post-World War I Weimar Republic’s Constitution, all of the civil liberties protections in it were suspended. But this wasn’t enough for the Nazis.
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n March 24, 1933, a Reichstag from which all the elected Communist deputies had been purged along with a number of the Socialist deputies, and in which many of the Centrist Deputies were totally intimidated (at the time of the vote, the Reichstag’s temporary chamber was surrounded by members of the Nazis’ private army, the Sturm Abteilung, the SA [or “Brownshirts”]), passed a Constitutional Amendment giving virtual dictatorial power to Hitler and his cabinet for a four-year period. It was called the Enabling Act. In practice, it made Hitler into a dictator with no checks of any kind on his power (unless it were to come from another non-Constitutional power bloc, like the Army). It is fascinating to note that the sticklers for the “law” that they were, the Nazis, in what subsequently passed for the “Reichstag,” dutifully renewed the Act every four years of the Hitlerite period. And so, the Reichstag Fire enabled the Nazi Party to gain something that would have been much more difficult for them to achieve without it: dictatorial control of the nation of Germany.
SIDEBAR | By Patrice Greanville
False flags—the art of devious criminal statecraft— has a long history, and, contrary to propaganda, it is the Anglo-Americans, and especially the US, who have always excelled at this. The 20th century is rich in examples, some even thwarted in time, like “Operation Northwoods” (a proposed false flag operation against the Cuban government, that originated within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other U.S. government operatives to commit acts of terrorism against American civilians and military targets, blaming it on the Cuban government. For foggy reasons, JFK turned down the plan.) In all cases, the central question is cui bono? Who benefits the most? Who has the incentive to do such a thing? The answer to this question is given clearly and irrefutably by history: The world’s ruling classes, headed in our time by the US corporatocracy headquartered in Washington.
Richard Cavendish provides a useful summary: "On the night of February 15th, 1898 the United States battleship Maine, riding quietly at anchor in Havana harbour, was suddenly blown up, apparently by a mine, in an explosion which tore her bottom out and sank her, killing 260 officers and men on board. In the morning only twisted parts of the huge warship’s superstructure could be seen protruding above the water, while small boats moved about examining the damage. The Maine had been showing the flag in Cuba, where the Spanish regime was resisting an armed uprising by nationalist guerrillas. No one has ever established exactly what caused the explosion or who was responsible, but the consequence was the brief Spanish-American War of 1898. American sentiment was strongly behind Cuban independence and many Americans blamed the Spanish for the outrage. The yellow press, led by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, proprietors of the New York Journal and the New York World, took every opportunity to inflame the situation with the exhortation to ‘Remember the Maine’."
Teddy Roosevelt, the man who never lost an opportunity to prove his manhood and bloodlust, and a raging chauvinist and imperialist to boot made the war with Spain a personal crusade. Eventually, the US quickly defeated the much weaker Spanish empire and began its global power grab, "liberating" first the Philippines and Cuba and later extending its baleful influence to every corner of the planet, where it remains embedded to this day.
2. Gulf of Tonkin Incident 
This false flag provided the needed justification to open wide the spigot of US war on Vietnam and Asia in general. Says the Wiki: The Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnamese: Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ), also known as the USS Maddox incident, involved what were originally claimed to be two separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but eventually became very controversial with widespread claims that either one or both incidents were false, and possibly deliberately so. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1][5] Maddox fired three warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats then attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.[5] Maddox expended over 280 3-inch and 5-inch shells in what was claimed to be a sea battle. One US aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were allegedly damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were said to have been killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties.[6] Maddox "was unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round".[5]
DISTORTION OF THE EVENT Evidence was still being sought on the night of August 4 when Lyndon Johnson gave his address to the American public on the incident. Messages recorded that day indicate that neither President Johnson nor Secretary McNamara was certain of an attack.[34]
Various news sources, including Time, Life and Newsweek, ran articles throughout August on the Tonkin Gulf incident.[35] Time reported: "Through the darkness, from the West and south...intruders boldly sped...at least six of them... they opened fire on the destroyers with automatic weapons, this time from as close as 2,000 yards."[36] Time stated that there was "no doubt in Sharp's mind that the US would now have to answer this attack", and that there was no debate or confusion within the administration regarding the incident. The use of the set of incidents as a pretext for escalation of US involvement follows the issuance of public threats against North Vietnam, as well as calls from American politicians in favor of escalating the war.[37] On May 4, 1964, William Bundy called for the US to "drive the communists out of South Vietnam", even if that meant attacking both North Vietnam and communist China.[37] Even so, the Johnson administration in the second half of 1964 focused on convincing the American public that there was no chance of war between North Vietnam and the US.[37] (A suitably deferential obit on Bundy, a Yale-grad and therefore by definition a ruling class type, an elegant imperialist scoundrel, was run by the NYTimes on Oct. 7, 2000.) Bundy was one of the major players in JFK and Johnson's cabinet during the Vietnam war, one of the "best and the brightest.").
North Vietnam's General Giap suggested that the DESOTO patrol had been sent into the gulf to provoke North Vietnam into giving an excuse for escalation of the war.[37] Various government officials and men aboard Maddox have suggested similar theories.[37] American politicians and strategists had been planning provocative actions against North Vietnam for some time. George Ball told a British journalist after the war that "at that time...many people...were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing".[37]
3. The Bologna Train Station Bombing 
The Wiki provides a page on this topic, with a number of interesting facts, although the account is still clearly very much in flux, disputed by the usual parties, and occasionally murky. In the postwar, with the left ascendant, the purpose was to essentially maintain and reinforce the West's "strategy of tension", resist a supposedly imminent Communist invasion of Western Europe, and create a tool to convince public opinion of the "dangers and horrors of communism and totalitarianism". To this end hidden terrorist cells were created throughout Europe, first in Italy, in what was termed Operation Gladio. (More below). There is little doubt that Gladio was behind the Bologna massacre, as many immediately pointed fingers to the Communists—and especially the Red Brigades (eventually infiltrated by the CIA and Western intel)—for the outrage, even though the attack had been perpetrated in the most left wing city in Italy.
A recent note on the Wiki states: Bologna massacre (Italian: strage di Bologna) was a terrorist bombing of the Central Station at Bologna, Italy, on the morning of 2 August 1980, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. The attack was carried by the neo-fascist terrorist organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), which always denied any involvement; other theories have been proposed, especially in correlation with the strategy of tension. The bombing is the fourth deadliest terrorist attack in Western Europe behind the Nice attack in 2016, Paris attacks in November 2015, and the Madrid train bombings in 2004. (Source: Wiki)
The Wiki notes: Operation Gladio (Italian: Operazione Gladio) is the codename for a clandestine North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) "stay-behind" operation in Italy during the Cold War. Its purpose was to prepare for, and implement, armed resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all of them. The name Gladio is the Italian form of gladius, a type of Roman shortsword. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and some neutral countries.[1]
The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and any relationship to terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the "Years of Lead" (late 1960s to early 1980s) is the subject of debate. Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.[2]
Swiss historian Daniele Ganser in his 2005 book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, accused Gladio of trying to influence policies through the means of "false flag" operations and a "strategy of tension". Ganser alleges that on various occasions, stay-behind movements became linked to right-wing terrorism, crime and attempted coups d'état.[8] In NATO's Secret Armies Ganser states that Gladio units closely cooperated with NATO and the CIA and that Gladio in Italy was responsible for terrorist attacks against its own civilian population.[63]
4. 9/11—Attack on the Twin Towers and other points
The events of September 11, 2001 have been discussed so extensively and in so many quarters that there is no need to recapitulate here what transpired on that day, except to state, again, that the marks of a huge and elaborate false flag operation staged directly by or with complete collaboration of the US government are everywhere. The purpose, among those that can be readily surmised, seems to have been the facilitation of a new political order, the ushering of a fascistic police state, and the acquiescence by the populace in the US and rest of the developed world to constant wars and other unpopular measures, including economic and social policies, designed to secure US hegemony and the further enrichment of the global plutocracy. By any standard, 9/11 is one of the most important—perhaps the most important—false flag operation in history.
5. Ghouta chemical attack in Syria The official narrative, as much as the Wikipedia can represent the commonly accepted opinion on this event, suggests a false flag attack calculated to stampede Western public opinion to support the outright armed intervention by the US and NATO powers to ensure the toppling of the already besieged government of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. It should be noted that the US had been planning (and continues to this day) the overthrow of Pres. Assad for decades, pursuant to a Neocon vision of complete US hegemony over the Middle East and the rest of the world, and calculated to curtail the rise of competing powers, especially Russia and China. Basically, the most credible evidence points to the involvement of Washington, Israel and Saudi Arabia (through the notorious Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a close Bush family friend, which in 2o13, not coincidentally, filled the post of Saudi Arabia's Director General of Intelligence). In any case, for what it's worth, here's a portion of the Wiki's account. Bear in mind that most if not all of the major "witnesses" —notably the UN and other supposedly impartial organizations—are now largely or completely corrupted by the US and do its bidding. The Russians, as usual, simply following the trail of what is credible according to international class analysis, quickly pointed out the attack had been a false flag engineered by the West:
The Ghouta chemical attack occurred in Ghouta, Syria, during the Syrian Civil War in the early hours of 21 August 2013. Two opposition-controlled areas in the suburbs around Damascus, Syria were struck by rockets containing the chemical agent sarin. Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people[2] to 1,729.[13] The attack was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran–Iraq War.[14][15][16]
Inspectors from the United Nations Mission already in Syria to investigate an earlier alleged chemical weapons attack,[17](p6)[18] requested access to sites in Ghouta the day after the attack,[19][20][21][22][23][21] and called for a ceasefire to allow inspectors to visit the Ghouta sites.[19] The Syrian government granted the UN's request on 25 August,[24][25][26] and inspectors visited and investigated Moadamiyah in Western Ghouta the next day, and Zamalka and Ein Tarma in Eastern Ghouta on 28 and 29 August.[17](p6)[27][28]
The UN investigation team confirmed "clear and convincing evidence" of the use of sarin delivered by surface-to-surface rockets,[17][29] and a 2014 report by the UN Human Rights Council found that "significant quantities of sarin were used in a well-planned indiscriminate attack targeting civilian-inhabited areas, causing mass casualties. The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents."[30] It also stated that the chemical agents used in the Khan al-Assal chemical attack "bore the same unique hallmarks as those used in Al-Ghouta."[30][31][32]
The Syrian opposition,[33] as well as many governments, the Arab League and the European Union[34][35][36] stated the attack was carried out by forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.[37] The Syrian and Russian governments blamed the opposition for the attack,[33] the Russian government calling the attack a false flag operation by the opposition to draw foreign powers into the civil war on the rebels' side.[38] Åke Sellström, the leader of the UN Mission, characterized government explanations of rebel chemical weapons acquisition as unconvincing, resting in part upon "poor theories."[39]
Several countries including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States debated whether to intervene militarily against Syrian government forces.[40][41][42][43] On 6 September 2013, the United States Senate filed a resolution to authorize use of military force against the Syrian military in response to the Ghouta attack.[44] On 10 September 2013, the military intervention was averted when the Syrian government accepted a US–Russian negotiated deal to turn over "every single bit" of its chemical weapons stockpiles for destruction and declared its intention to join the Chemical Weapons Convention.[45][46]
6. The Kiev "Massacre" 
The so-called "Kiev massacre", used by the West through its mendacious media to justify its meddling in Ukrainian affairs, was covered extensively by The Greanville Post. No one has examined this criminal act better than Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D. in his The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine. I strongly suggest you read it.
7. The MH17 Defamation Campaign / "Russian Invasion of Ukraine"
The shooting down of the MH17 commercial liner over Eastern Ukraine on July 14, 2014 made headlines around the world for weeks. The American media, as usual in the lead of the pack of liars, immediately pointed fingers at Moscow and the Donbass rebels, resisting the putschist neofascist regime installed in Kiev by NATO at Washington;s behest. All logic and subsequent evidence points to a false flag operation designed to punctuate the US-led hybrid war campaign against Russia and China, a demonization that continues to this day and, if anything, has grown in fierceness, hypocrisy and indecency. Our post MH17 One Year On: What Really Happened and Why laid it all out clearly. This is an excerpt:
Western mainstream media outlets wasted no time in disseminating this government-issued conspiracy theory, backed-up by a number of other clams of “evidence” coming out of the Washington-backed regime in Kiev. At the time, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed to have a “mountain of evidence” convicting ‘pro-Russian separatists’ and Moscow. Unfortunately, Kerry’s mountain was no more than a mole hill. Nearly all of those claims have since been debunked and exposed as fraudulent – but from a public opinion perspective, the damage was already done.
Within 48 hours, News Corp and other pro-war rags ran a series of loaded headlines including, “Putin’s Missile”, “Putin’s Victims” and “From Vlad to Worse”. Vladimir Putin and his government in Russia were already convicted in the Kangaroo court of public opinion under the guise of guilt by association with Russian speaking rebels under siege by Kiev’s military forces.
Of course, it hardly needs to be said that there has been no Russian invasion of Europe, Poland, the Baltics and all the rest. And there won't be any unless Washington attacks and forces Moscow's hand. —PG
SIDEBAR ENDS HERE. REGULAR ARTICLE BY S. JONAS RESUMES HERE
Interlude: Who set the fire?
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or many years: no one knew for sure. Was it indeed the mentally-handicapped Dutch anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe, acting on his own, who then Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Goering had had arrested at the scene, was it Van der Lubbe acting for Goering in one way or another, or was it a ten member Sturm Abteilung (SA) detachment operating under Goering’s orders?
An article, “The Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933-2008” (Tigar, M.E. and Mage, J., The Monthly Review, Vol. 60, No. 10, March 2009), based on evidence both from the time and more recently uncovered, set the record straight. Van der Lubbe was on the scene, for one reason or another, but the fires were clearly set by the Goering detachment. Interestingly enough, most of the members of that detachment were murdered during “The Night of the Long Knives,” June 30, 1934. On that night, Hitler’s operatives killed just about any members of the Nazi Party who could possibly become rivals to him, including the commander of the SA, Ernst Roehm, whose gangsters had been so important in Hitler’s coming to power in the first place. It happens that the conclusion that, if van der Lubbe played any role at all in the Reichstag Fire it was a minor one, was upheld by the Federal Court of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany when, in January, 2008, it overturned the conviction and subsequent death penalty on him.
OK. So the Nazis set the Reichstag Fire and immediately (that is within hours) blamed it on the KPD. Well, why would they do that? A month into his reign, things are not going so well for Hitler. He has already made his first roundups, of known Communists and left-wing labor leaders. But, the Depression is still on, he still has Pres. Hindenburg to deal with, the army is on the fence (in fact, many of the Old Prussians can’t stand the “Little Corporal,” a Great War enlisted man and an Austrian to boot), and there is still a functioning Reichstag to deal with. It is minus the elected Communist deputies, but there are enough Socialists and other Nazi-opponents left to deny him the two-thirds majority he needs to change the Constitution. What to do?
The Nazis either get a mentally-handicapped person to really set the fire for them or let himself get set up as the scapegoat. But in any case, everything is blamed on the “Communist terrorists.” Hitler then manipulates the remaining membership of the Reichstag in his favor by scaring off some of the Socialists who are still there, intimidating a few other opponents, and making a bargain with the Catholic “center” party that in power, the Nazis will leave Catholic education alone. They get the Enabling Act passed by the two-thirds vote it needs, since it is a Constitutional amendment. The rest is history.
Okay. So what was the possible parallel in the US, at the time of 9/11? How about the following? In 2000, the Right-Wing and their industrial partners such Big Oil and the military-industrial complex, succeed in getting a President in place. That was very important for them for if Gore had won, he might, just might, have been there for eight years and he would not have been as easy a target as Bill Clinton had been. Although to be sure, like Clinton he was a right-wing Democrat, on matters like energy policy, global warming, and the environment he might, just might, have gotten things done. So, they, the U.S. Right, avoided that horrible prospect (horrible for Big Oil, at least), by getting the U.S. Supreme Court to elect George W. Bush President, by one vote. BUT, less than one year into Bush’s first term, just like the Nazis had, they faced certain problems:
- They know that their man didn’t really win, and further, in terms of the popular vote, was a minority President (a fact the media completely ignored). (Interesting: the Nazis never got more than 37% of the vote in any open election in pre-Nazi Germany.)
B) Their guy is a weakling (just like Hindenburg was).
C) There is a recession underway.
D) They have, as least temporarily, lost control of the Congress through the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont. Since that happened, none of their programs, from energy/environmental policy to more tax-cuts for the wealthy and the large corporations, were going through.
E) The Enron bubble had burst.
F) Cheney wouldn’t tell what he had talked about with his oil cronies (energy prices? Enron? Invading Iraq [already very quietly on the table, according to Clinton national security advisor Richard Clarke] to gain a secure supply for many years to come, perhaps?)
What to do? Meet their needs, of course. At what cost? At whatever cost, just as long the whole thing is kept secret.
The needs to be met included the following:
A) Replacing a weak chief executive with a strong one, either literally or functionally.
B) Finding an excuse for the recession, so that this doesn’t get blamed on this Bush and the Republicans, as was the last one.
C) Bypassing or having a compliant Congress on important measures (since they couldn’t possibly win votes on stuff like securing major, retroactive tax cuts for the large corporations, or trashing the environment).
D) Being able to ignore the judiciary (which, despite their efforts since the Reagan years, still had some judges who knew what the Constitution is.
E) Eliminating Constitutional rights by Presidential decree (see The Patriot Act), but even more important, establishing that the President could commit such a revolutionary act by decree.
The document that became the Patriot Act, introduced to Congress about two weeks after “9/11,” was already secretly being written. It had to be, for two reasons. First of all, the original was about 340 pages of dense legal language. Among other things, it overturned, conveniently enough by statute, not by Amendment, major portions of the Constitution, such as the Fourth Amendment which guarantees protection against unreasonable, non- judicial, search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process of law, and the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees jury trials in criminal cases. The bill was introduced into Congress only some two weeks after 9/11. Try writing a 340-page, extremely complex bill in two weeks. Moreover, if you are already writing such a bill [that would be DOA in normal times] and you really wanted to get it passed, wouldn’t you hope for, or worse yet try to create, times so abnormal that you could rush the legislation through a panicked Congress?
F) Giving the President the possibility of presiding over a “permanent war” against “terrorism” (the War on Iraq at that time being only a gleam in the eyes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al).
But, the Right-Wing-Republican/religious-fundamentalist cabal being postulated here couldn’t accomplish that agenda with a finger snap. Just as Hitler could not have gotten anything like the Enabling Act through the Reichstag with the Communists and Socialists in place, so the cabal had no chance as things stood to achieve their principal goals. In fact, at the time of the 9/11 disaster the political tide was beginning to turn against them, especially with the economy going into recession and the Senate in the hands of a functional Democratic majority that was proving not-too-pliable.
How nice would it be in terms both of politics and policy to have an excuse to get their program going in such a way that could withstand criticism from most people and most countries around the world too. And then, if the same event that could do those things could open up the possibility of beginning the destruction of Constitutional democracy at home. As noted above, we are not talking here simply about the invasion of individual rights, but also the end of “checks and balances:” the bypassing of the independent judiciary, the bypassing of the legislature, and the substitution of rule by Presidential Decree. And then to top it all off, to be able to sneak through their right-wing domestic agenda under the cover of “fighting terrorism.” What better than a grand “terrorist” event, like the destruction of the WTC? Or, in Berlin of 1933, the destruction of the Reichstag?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Senior Editor, Politics, Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being Senior Editor, Politics, for The Greanville Post, he is: a Contributor for American Politics to The Planetary Movement; a “Trusted Author” for Op-Ed News.com; a contributor to the “Writing for Godot” section of Reader Supported News; and a contributor to From The G-Man. He is the Editorial Director and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine.us. Further, he is an occasional Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter, BuzzFlash Commentary, and Dandelion Salad. Dr. Jonas’ latest book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Brewster, NY: Punto Press, available on Kindle from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Drug-War-Solving-Problem-ebook/dp/B01EO9RGKO/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461783388&sr=1-4&keywords=Ending+the+Drug+War
His most recent book on US politics is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, Brewster, NY), and available on Amazon.
Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s Editor in Chief.
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