Meatstick Game: Guess the World Leader

Event: A nation is attacked by Middle Eastern terrorists:

• The leader claims that the attack originated from a group of Middle Eastern terrorists who rationalized their acts using religion.*
• Within 4 weeks the leader pushed through laws that: suspended parts of free speech and habeas corpus. Police were allowed to wiretap without warrants and people could be arrested w/o access to lawyers.
• He creates a new branch of the government to help protect the country. He appoints a trusted associate to lead the agency.
  
• He reaches out to industry and brings former execs into high positions in the government.
  
• He argues that other nations are harboring the terrorists that attacked his country even though the evidence couldn't be confirmed.
  
• He then attacks the country he believes are harboring the terrorists and proclaims, "Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."

The answer to the above is: Hitler

The event was the bombing of the German Parliament by a Dutch terrorist named Marinus van der Lubbe. The country Hitler attacked was Austria, followed shortly by Czechoslovakia.


I got the above information from an excellent book called "What Would Jefferson Do? --A Return to Democracy" by Thom Hartmann.

Mr. Hartmann gives the above history lesson in a chapter called When Democracy Failed.
He ends the chapter with a very interesting observation:

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the US alike.

Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war.

America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and through the WPA became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and plant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is ours once more.

*In my own limited research I have found that Hitler blames Communists for the attack. Thom Hartmann doesn't give the source in his book for this bullet