The date was January 30, 1933. Hitler set about destroying a constitutional German republic through constitutional and quasi-constitutional means.
Upon asserting his power Hitler informed the courts that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.
He had encircled power by surrounding himself with loyalists and weeding out any type of naysayers. The Nazi Party controlled barely 51 percent of the Reichstag, but Hitler believed that he should exercise absolute power.
His plan was to dismantle the separation of powers, grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution.
Hitler opened a meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists.
At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.
When Hitler wondered whether the army could be used to crush any public unrest, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg dismissed the idea out of hand, observing “that a soldier was trained to see an external enemy as his only potential opponent.” As a career officer, Blomberg could not imagine German soldiers being ordered to shoot German citizens on German streets in defense of Hitler’s (or any other German) government.
Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now floundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down. The idea was to attack, attack, attack, keep the opposition off guard./
Huge department firings and removals took place. Over the next several months, hirings to fill needed positions with true loyalists followed.
Basically, Hitler was declaring war on his own government.
If any of this pattern is recognizable, you are either in opposition, or part of the new system/government of a scary future.
Yes folks, you are witnessing the ‘new order’ of the current administration. Our democracy is being eroded by a lunatic gaining more power as the days pass. What is ironic is that the general public is missing the back room deals, the elimination of opposition, cutbacks in human services. What the government is gaining is the appointments of people that never would have been uploaded to key positions in the government.
Decades to treaties, common sense approaches, free speech and government round-ups of the undesirables, the unions, the very fabric which once defined the United States is being crushed. The industrialists, the millionaires and billionaires will undoubtedly support the ‘new order’ and wild campaign promises will either be forgotten or enhanced under the new plans.
Religious factions that once supported the ‘new order’ will learn too late the error of their ways. Farmers will be left to deal with the ‘new order’.
Recently, a MAGA loyalist/elected official introduced the Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act to officially designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate President Donald J. Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day. Don’t worry, the Flag Day of the proposal will soon be eliminated. All that will be left is the Heil Trump salute.
