American Freedom

In 1955, the University of Chicago Press released a remarkable book, They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer. Mayer had traveled to a small town in post-war Germany to live and befriend ten of the common citizens, every one of them a Nazi. He wanted to know what life was really like under Hitler, how the common man viewed it, whether they understood the evils inherent to the socialist system that had ruled them.

Keep in mind that in 1955, Germany was still looked on with enormous suspicion by everyone. German invasions of neighboring countries had started three of the last three major European wars (Franco-Prussian, WW I and WW II) in the last century, and there were quite a few people who believed the German people were congenitally unable to live peacefully. Indeed, prior to his death, FDR even proposed that the entire nation be sterilized.

Mayer’s conversations found something quite different. The small-town citizens in Germany were much like small-town people everywhere. They paid their taxes, went to their jobs, had their little internal quarrels and that was about it. They were Nazis because National Socialism was freedom and they were free men under its rule. Only one of the ten saw anything problematic in it at all, at any time.

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. I once had a sociology professor who spouted on and on about how dictators oppressed their subjects, forcing them to do things that the free man would never do.

He was completely wrong, of course. As history has shown time and again, the strongest man is only as strong as his arm or his vision.

Any ruler, whether democrat or despot, saint or sinner, potentate or president, rules only because a substantial number of people permit him. A ruler maintains himself in power by convincing enough people that (a) there is an insoluble problem and (b) he is the best man to address that problem. If either (a) or (b) ever fails to be convincing, then his rule ends.

When the Italians were convinced that Mussolini was no longer an asset, he became a lamp-post ornament. The Italians could have hung him anytime they wanted to; they simply weren’t convinced his exit was in their interests until they met a stronger strong-man. In this sense, the only distinction a democracy has over a dictatorship is a reduced (but not entirely eliminated) tendency to kill the ex-leader as he exits, stage left. It’s not at all clear that there is such a thing as a dictator.

Mayer points this out early on:

When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.”

I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, “What do you mean, ‘what it would lead to,’ Herr Wedekind?”

“War,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war.” [The baker saw nothing wrong with Nazism until September 1, 1939, when, he was told, Poland attacked Germany.]

The lives of my nine friends – and even the tenth, the teacher – were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now – nine of them, certainly – as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets.

****

An anti-Nazi woman jailed for listening to foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal), said, “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother’s arm and whispered, ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren’t a Jew, I think I’d be a Nazi!’ No one outside [of Germany] seems to understand how this was.”

That, Mayer discovered, is how Nazism became a mass movement:

The crash of the synagogue dome awakened the Rupprechts. They could see the glowing half dome from their house.

“Papa,” said the mother, “It’s the synagogue.”

The father said nothing.

“Of course it’s the synagogue,” said 14-year old Horst, excited, “Juda verrecke! May the Jews drop dead! May I go to the fire? They’ll all be there, Pa. Can I?”

“They won’t all be there, Horstmar. You won’t be there.”

It was a long speech for his father.

“Horst, Where did you learn to say ‘Juda verrecke’?”

Horst replied, “In the Ha-Jot, the Hitler Youth.”

“So,” said his father, “in the Ha-Jot.”

“They don’t teach it, Pa, you just hear it there. The other kids say it. They all say it.”

“Like ‘they’ll all be there,’ ” said his father.

“You just hear it, Pa, don’t you understand?”

“No.”

America is free in the sense that it is the strongest. It has the strongest economy in the world, the strongest military in the world. But, as Scripture points out, every man under the power of sin is a slave, not a free man. So, is America free?

The Nazis killed six million Jews, five million Gentiles, three million of those being Catholic. They were tried for crimes against humanity, one of which is abortion.

America has killed forty million children and thousands of mothers precisely via abortion, millions of these abortions being carried out using exactly the same techniques used by the Nazis in the camps.

Adolf Hitler attempted to carry out a Putsch in 1923 and received a five year sentence, of which he served about nine months.

The serial murderer, Jack Kevorkian, who used essentially the same gassing and poisoning techniques used by the Nazis, was acquitted of murder numerous times before he was finally convicted and sentenced to 25 years: he served eight.

Nazi doctors conducted deadly medical experiments on camp prisoners for about four years starting in 1941.

American doctors conducted deadly medical experiments on the black community for about forty years, starting in 1932 and only ending in 1972.

The Nazis began compulsory sterilization programs in the 1930s. Theirs ended in the 1940s.

America began compulsory sterilization programs in the 1900s. Ours ended in 1981. Certain segments of our population even today recommend mandatory hormonal sterilization for welfare recipients and/or illegal immigrants.

By 1935, it was illegal for a Jew to be a citizen in Germany. Hitler contemplated mass deportations of Germany's illegals to Madagascar.

In 2007, we call for the mass deportation of Hispanics who have been declared legal outlaws by the state.

We think we are free. Are we?

I am an American of German extraction. Are we - am I - more free in this country than my cousins were in Germany sixty years ago?

Well, there are no brownshirts to break down my door. I can run a business more easily here than anywhere in the world. Economically, I am very free, just like the ten men Mayer interviewed. But is money all that matters?

Aren’t we all in the American version of the Hitler youth? Euthanasia, contraception, abortion, sterilization: even when it is not explicitly taught, everyone talks about the need for these things. It's obvious that we should accept contraception, sterilization, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, and fight to deport Hispanics without proper papers.

Don't I understand?

No.

As long as we sterilize ourselves, kill our own children, euthanize the aged among us, rail against the dirty, conniving illegal, are we free? Are these things to be proud of?

In these respects, I am not proud to be an American, because I am not sure we’re free.

Ann Don't Know Nothing

For years now, I have argued that the animus against Hispanic immigrants who cross the border without first asking permission from the Border Patrol was driven more by anti-Catholicism than it was by a concern about the lack of papers.

Now, Ann Coulter has taken the wraps off the facts and demonstrated that truth in spades. America is great because it is Protestant, and if it ceases to be Protestant, it will cease to be great.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who opposed and voted against the Mexican-American war during his tenure in Congress, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican President who said America's theft of Mexican territory was the only armed action he had ever been ashamed to be involved in, and unlike Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an entire book, Civil Disobedience, while serving jail time for refusing to pay taxes to support our illegal invasion of Mexico, Ann is fine with Protestant Manifest Destiny.

The main problem with illegal immigration isn't the illegal part, it's the Catholics.

The First Time
When President Polk declared war on Mexico in 1846, he claimed that "American troops had been shot on American soil." In fact, Mexican troops had fired on American troops that had deliberately violated disputed territory between Texas and Mexico. The Mexican province of Texas itself had been forced into rebellion by illegal American Protestant immigrants, who refused to abide by Mexican law and become Catholic, as was required of all settlers. Many of the WASPs also enjoyed holding slaves, even though this was outlawed by the Mexican constitution of 1824.

As an interesting sidenote, Sam Houston, the illustrious leader of the band of invading WASPs (the American version of killer bees), was actually on the run from his family at the time, trying to avoid having to financially support his wife and children in Tennessee. In short, he was sort of an early Bill Clinton.

When Abraham Lincoln demanded to know exactly what spot of American soil had been violated, the Democrats began an illustrious tradition: they ignored the question. Democrats supported the war because it held the opportunity of bringing in more slave states.

As a result, John Quincy Adams joined Lincoln and fourteen other Whigs in voting against the American invasion of Mexico. Though they lost the vote in the House by a wide margin, the Senate only approved the war by a single vote. The results were well-known - we successfully provoked a war and got the land we wanted.

The Second Time

Unfortunately, going to war against Catholics in order to grab Catholic territory was not a trait peculiar to Lincoln's generation of WASPs. The Spanish-American war fifty years later was nothing more than American interference in the internal affairs of Catholic Spain and her colony, Cuba, in order to gain still more land.

Journalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst successfully inflamed existing Protestant opinion, that of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing and Ku Klux Klan factions, through their stridently skewed journalism, with Hearst reportedly telling his photographers, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." By the end of that war, Protestant America picked up Catholic Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

The Third Time
But assaults against Catholics didn't stop there. Although the Spanish American War ended hostilities on August 12, 1898, with a peace treaty signed on December 10, the Catholic Philippines had already declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. Despite this, America had sent 11,000 occupying troops by August of the year.

We also insisted on "buying" the Philippines from Spain for $20 million in December. Then, we proceeded to start yet another war of pacification in that new Catholic territory by February 1899.

What was the provocation this time? Well, a Filipino man crossed San Juan bridge into US-occupied Manila. Not understanding English, he ignored an order to halt as he walked across, and was summarily shot by American troops. That's what those damned foreigners get for not understanding English.

President William McKinley, who had to look on a map in order to find the Philippines, would later describe the incident to reporters by saying "the insurgents had attacked Manila." A better description of the offense might be "walking while Catholic."

This war, never formally declared, limped on violently for years. As a result of the United States' inability to pacify the region, the U.S. imposed strict quotas against Filipino immigration. Asians were already barred from US citizenship by 1870, and any American woman who married an Asian automatically lost her citizenship. By 1934, the annual immigration quote for Filipinos was fifty (50).

Catholics Need Not Apply
We make up 25% of the population, we have supplied some of the greatest scientists the world has ever seen, we have surrendered our Faith through endless political compromise, staunchly supporting the American Protestant worldview for decades. Our thanks?

Get the hell out. This is America. Catholics who insist on being Catholic aren't wanted here.

Losing Our Culture

Recently, a correspondent chastised me for being so much in favor of open borders and allowing illegal immigrants to work.

If we were to get rid of our immigration laws, the U.S. population would explode in an uncontrollable fashion. According to a recent study, as many as 1 in 6 persons around the world would leave their countries and come here. That's one billion people, many of them would have tremendous cultural differences that would make much of this nation unrecognizable. Our population is up to 300 million. Do you honestly believe we should allow our population to double or even triple in the next hundred years or so? Our quality of life would evaporate into even more gridlock and crime, not to mention the burden on social services. Your open borders would see something like one billion people in America by the next century, America would turn into a chaotic welfare state.....bleeeech.

The points are curious.
While 1 in 6 would like to come here, it's highly unlikely that such a large percentage would actually make it. But even if they did, how would this loss of culture be any different than what we have already experienced?

Consider the country of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln:

They lived in a country:

• 80% agrarian (we are now 80% urban),
• built around family farms with
• no abortion or contraception,
• no naked women in advertisements,
• no naked couples publicly copulating in theaters to the delight of audiences,
• no mass shootings (apart from shooting Indians),
  
• institutional slavery,
  
• no vote for women, slaves or men without property,
• virtually no divorce,
  
• virtually no standing army,
• the bare minimum of a navy,
  
• no separation of church and state (in the modern sense),
• government representation at a much higher per capita level than today,
  
• no all-powerful Supreme Court (SCOTUS was seen as the WEAKEST of the three branches, even decades after the ruling which ostensibly gave it supreme power),
• no Environmental Protection Agency,
• no CIA, FBI, NSA or Secret Service,
• no Social Security,
• No Medicare/Medicaid,
  
• no corporations,
• no taxes on personal income,
• no taxes on business income (there was no corporate income - see point above),
• no sales tax,
  
• no Department of Education,
• no public school system,
• virtually no private school system,
• no literacy problems (nearly 100% literacy in the colonies in all the decades prior to the Civil War).

If we take the argument at face value, this hasn't been America for quite some time.
So what's the beef?

We're worried that Hispanics may change our culture?

Without a rapid increase in population, we will not have enough people to sustain the changes we have already imposed - Social Security will collapse, despite the extra billions of dollars poured into the coffers by illegals with fake SSNs. Old people will have to be euthanized. And Muslim Europe is growing more Muslim by the minute.

So, which is the greater danger: the Hispanics or us?