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This from Scriptonite ... NAZI GERMANY VS. MODERN BRITAIN: SOME SIMILARITIES THAT SHOULD DISTURB YOU There has been a digging away at the core principles of Britain’s system of Law and Justice over the last decade which threatens to undermine it entirely. Today, we look at key changes in pre war Nazi Germany which saw the Nazification of Germany’s nation of Laws, and corresponding changes in the British justice system today. We need to acknowledge the warning signs and uproot this resurgent fascism while it’s still a sapling, or we’ll be hacking away impotently at a mighty oak before we know it. Godwin’s Law? Oh Give it Up No doubt someone is already preparing a comment accusing me of Godwin’s Law for making this comparison. So I’ll take a moment to set out why I am making it, and why it does not conform to the term. Godwin’s Law was intended to highlight the sort of ‘Little Hitler’ comparisons to the Third Reich ... “Train conductor just gave me a fine for not having a ticket … Nazi!” “Health and Safety laws mean I can’t smoke in my office any more … it’s like Nazi Germany in here!” “The government is telling me I can’t smack my kids any more … Fascists!” This is the sort of thing that Godwin’s Law pertains to. This is not what I am doing today. I am laying out some genuine similarities in the functioning of the state and private institutions of Germany between 1933-7 as it moved from a nation of laws to a nation of Nazis, with recent developments in British institutions. These similarities should raise real concerns about the direction in which successive governments are driving our nation. The reason I have chosen Germany is that it is the closest, most recent and most readily acknowledged example of such a transition. Despite this, I accept that nevertheless many people are determinedly unwilling to consider the awful prospect that our government might not be acting on our best interests and will use Godwin’s Law as a tool of cognitive dissonance. In essence, Godwin’s Law itself can become a tool of censorship, used to close down important debate about the authoritarian impulse of the state and corporate power. Law and Justice Prior to the commencement of Nazi Germany in 1933, Germany had operated under the Weimar Constitution in a Republican democracy since the end of World War I in 1918. Judges were independent, bound only by law, protected from arbitrary removal and duty bound (at least in theory) by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law. Protective Custody With the reinterpretation of “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) in 1933, police power became independent of judicial controls. In Nazi terminology, protective custody meant the arrest – without judicial review – of real and potential opponents of the regime. “Protective custody” prisoners were not confined within the normal prison system but in concentration camps under the exclusive authority of the SS (Schutzstaffel, the elite guard of the Nazi state). The End of Open Justice The Nazis set fire to the German parliament building (the Reichstag) in February 1933 and pinned the blame on the Communists in a cunning move which was pivotal in bringing Hitler to power. The point was to provoke such fear that Communists were mounting a coup, that a strong National Socialist was required to quell the rebellion and restore stability. It succeeded. However, when the suspects were brought before the court, all but one of the suspects (a mentally incapacitated Dutchman who had confessed) were found not guilty. The ruling so incensed Hitler and the Nazis that within a month they had passed legislation which removed the right to try cases of treason at the Supreme Court. Henceforth, this responsibility would be carried out by the new People’s Court which was no court at all. Now, one might ask, how on earth is this in anyway similar to the British justice system? The Nazis are not the only government exploiting misplaced fears to curtail civil liberties. In 2009, the former head of MI5 Stella Rimmington accused the British government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to pass laws intended to restrict our civil liberties. She was right. In recent years, an astonishing amount of legislation has been passed curtailing civil liberties, the right to protest and the right to fair and open justice in Britain. The Labour government passed 25 Acts of Parliament and 50 individual measures to restrict civil liberties for UK citizens in the name of ‘national security’ in its thirteen year term. Protective Custody The US opened Guantanamo Bay and began kidnapping citizens from around the world, detaining them illegally for years without charge or trial and committing torture against them and the British government was complicit in it. Control Orders were passed in 2005 and gave police the right to place citizens under permanent house arrest with an electronic tag without any judicial intervention, that is, outside of the court system. Between 2005 and 2011 fifty people were made subject to these control orders. After promising to remove the powers on election, the Coalition government simply replaced them with TPIMS, which amount to the same thing but restricted the orders to a review after two years. The Terrorism Prevention Act and other legislation give the State the power to detain citizens indefinitely by identifying them as a terror threat, without reference to a judge or a court. This amounts to protective custody. The End of Open Justice One piece of legislation you might not be aware of is The Coroners and Justice Bill of 2005 which removed the independence of coroners, and gave the Executive (state) the power to suspend inquests or hold them in secret, even in cases of homicide. Recently, when British citizens started to be released from Guantanamo Bay and seek justice for their treatment, the UK government first appealed to the courts to block the cases, then to redact information that would show their complicity in torture and rendition, and finally sought to pay people off. As the compensation bills mounted, they changed tack and drafted The Justice and Security Bill, which stipulates that in future, all such civil cases will be tried in secret courts. These courts would be blocked to the media and the state would be able to present its argument and evidence to the judge in the absence of the plaintiff in the case. This decision ends a 700 year old tradition in the UK of open justice, in the name of national security but in reality, for the sake of state control of information and justice. The Rev.Nicholas Mercer, a lieutenant colonel who was the army’s most senior lawyer during the last Iraq war, told the Daily Mail: “The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.” These two pieces of legislation have made it legal for the state to intervene in and end the investigation of suspicious deaths, and lawfully kidnap and imprison its citizens without ever being challenged in an open court. Open justice is no longer guaranteed. Propaganda and the Demonisation of Groups The Nazis used propaganda to such a degree and with such horrific results that the practice was widely condemned and Ministries for Propaganda across the world changed their names … in itself an act of propaganda. I would like to compare and contrast two specific pieces of propaganda, one by the Nazi Regime and one by the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper. Theresienstadt The Nazis made puff pieces about one concentration camp called Theresienstadt which made it look like a holiday camp. The reality was that Theresienstadt was a transitory base to transport Jews from the East, to the death camps. Of the 140,000 Jews taken to Theresienstadt nearly 90,000 were deported to death camps where they died. 30,000 Jews died at Theresienstadt itself. However, the propaganda sold the lie to the German public that the Jews were taken elsewhere but treated well. This allowed the holocaust to go on far longer than it might have if people had been forced to face the reality of it. Guantanamo Bay Guantanamo Bay is a detention camp which has imprisoned nearly a thousand (officially acknowledged) detainees of the US (and British) government for years on end, without judicial intervention and under conditions of torture. The Dail Mail however recently ran an article entitled “Inside Guantanamo Bay‘ which sold the place as some sort of recreation centre for the world’s scariest muslims. Alongside random pictures of fresh fruit, books written in Arabic and (gasp) halal meat, were quotes like this: “Far from languishing in a dank and desolate dungeon as many in the outside world imagine, inmates are in fact able to rent Harry Potter movies, borrow car magazines and even get strawberries for their tea. To relax, prisoners can visit the camp’s in-house library, which contains a host of books, in Arabic and English, Hollywood blockbuster DVDs and magazines.” This article is one of many staged in cahoots with the US military. President Obama signed an Executive Order in 2009 to close Guantanamo Bay. These articles have been released as the majority of the 166 men still detained without trial have mounted a hunger strike in a bid to regain their freedom. More than half of these men have been cleared for release for months, yet remain behind bars regardless. One cannot help but note the similar playbook adopted by the holocaust and Guantanamo Bay apologists. Outside of this isolated issue, the government has launched a propaganda war on the poor which has seen the unemployed, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups suffering escalated hate crimes as a result. The GOS says: Don't agree with all of that, especially the last sentence; some would say that it was left-wing politicians who feather-bedded the unemployed so that any attempt to claw back some of the wasted money is seen as an attack on the poor. And I can't actually think of any hate-crimes recently against the unemployed, can you? I can think of a few BY unemployed people, though. It's all a bit thin, to be honest. For instance, it was the British who started concentration camps during the Boer War, and there is one pretty significant difference between Theresienstadt and Guantanamo Bay which is that so far as we know the Americans haven't been using Guantanamo to wipe out an entire ethnic minority. Still, it's thought-provoking which is why I find it worth quoting. “Godwin's Law” mentioned above is described as follows in Wikipedia: Godwin's law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies is an observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990 that has become an internet adage. It states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In other words, Godwin observed that, given enough time, in any online discussion, regardless of topic or scope, someone inevitably makes a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis. Although in one of its early forms Godwin's law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now often applied to any threaded online discussion, such as forums, chat rooms and blog comment threads, and has been invoked for the inappropriate use of Nazi analogies in articles or speeches. In 2012, "Godwin's Law" became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. either on this site or on the World Wide Web. Copyright © 2013 The GOS |
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