I Am Concerned

We are at a pivot point where we are facing the direction that our country will go and what concerns me is the person who is in charge of our country.

The COVID-19 virus has created great stress in our country and Trump is driving a wedge into that stress and politicized the virus. And into that gap was another murder of a person of color by a police officer and the outrage that came out of the murder Trump is pouring acid into the wound.

Yesterday he used force to clear a path to a church to make a political speech defiling the church sanctuary to pour more acid into the hate.

Also yesterday he threaten to use the military to curb the protests.

In addition there are outside agitators who are infiltrating the peaceful protests to stir up violence, their goal is a race war. Add to that reports of foreign powers that honed their skills on the 2016 elections are now creating unrest between the races.

My concerns are that Trump will declare marshal law and bring into the military to seize power under an emergency decree.

It happened before.

In 1933 Hitler in the middle of a crisis seized power.

This is from Jewish History…

Hitler was able to mobilize criminal elements into street thugs who literally beat up his enemies. These became a paramilitary organization, the “brown shirts,” named after their uniforms. Hitler took unemployed people off the street, gave them a brown shirt with an armband sporting a swastika, taught them the Nazi salute and handed them a stick to beat others. Suddenly, these powerless people had power.

None of this could have come about without financial backing and Hitler found ready financial support among the German industrialists. They were uneasy with him, but at least he wasn’t a communist calling for the seizure and nationalization of their businesses. They were confident that their financial power would control him – but, in the end, it would be he who would manipulate them to do his bidding.

There are so many parallels between now and then.

Trump’s “Brown Shirts” are the Tiki Torch parade of the white supremacist and now we find out that white supremacist are inciting the violence in the protests. Trump has the financial backing of the “One Percenters” of Wall Street.

More than anything else, the Great Depression helped boost Hitler. In the election after the Depression first struck the Nazis doubled their seats in the Reichstag, the German Parliament, going from 7% to 13.5% of the vote. And in the ensuing election they reached 21%. At their height they would reach about 40%.

We are also in the grips of wealth inequities that is creating a divide between the have and the have nots that has been exasperated by the virus with health inequities.

Once Hitler got power, however, no one controlled him. He increased the activities of his brown shirts, even beating to death opposing politicians. Then he presented the Reichstag with the Enabling Act, a bill that would give him absolute powers, in effect making the Reichstag powerless. Although it was political suicide to vote for it, no one dared vote against Hitler and it was passed into law.

We have seen this here in Trump’s impeachment which the Republicans rendered Congress powerless to control Trump.

Throw into this the Posse Comitatus Act and we have a recipe for disaster. The law was modified in 2007 with the Defense Authorization Bill.

`Sec. 333. Interference with State and Federal law
`The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it--
`(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
`(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.'.

Add a Secretary of Defense Esper who said “I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal” to put down nationwide protests.

Add the November elections.

Stir the mix and you have a recipe for a coup d'etat.