Sullivan links to Harley Sorensen's latest column which compares modern-day America to Nazi Germany, 9/11 to the burning of the Reichstag, the Super Bowl the the 1936 Olympics and stating flat out that Guantenamo Bay is the equal of a Nazi concentration camp.
In 1933, the Reichstag, Germany's parliament building, was burned to the ground. Nobody knows for sure who set the fire. The Nazis blamed communists. "This incident prompted Hitler[,then Germany's chancellor,] to convince [German President Paul von] Hindenburg to issue a Decree for the Protection of People and State that granted Nazis sweeping power to deal with the so-called emergency."The Reichstag fire parallels the Sept. 11 attacks here, and Hindenburg's decree parallels our USA Patriot Act.
Soon after Hitler took power, the concentration camp at Dachau was created and "the Nazis began arresting Communists, Socialists and labor leaders ... . Parliamentary democracy ended with the Reichstag passage of the Enabling Act, which allowed the government to issue laws without the Reichstag."
With Bush leading all branches of government around by the nose, there's a question whether parliamentary democracy still exists here. Certainly, concentration camps exist, if we're willing to call the lockup at Guanténamo Bay what it really is. And the USA Patriot Act allows the president to effectively take citizenship rights from any American-born criminal suspect.
"Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and propaganda against 'Non-Aryans' was a thinly disguised attack against anyone who had Jewish parents or grandparents. Jews felt increasingly isolated from the rest of German society."
How comfortable do American-born Arabs feel in the United States today?
While the German concentration camps were being built and Jews were being persecuted, in 1936 Nazi Germany hosted the Olympic Games and put its best face forward to the world. We have the Super Bowl.
It's worth keeping in mind that this is the same Harley Sorensen who was so astoundingly wrong on the issue of being lied to about deaths of those wounded in Iraq. The same guy who was either so lazy or so incompetent as to take his failure to follow a link at the bottom of the very same page he linked to as proof that the government was lying to us. His is about as far from a trustworthy opinion as you can get.
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