Reichstag Fire
I was at a patio party celebrating a neighbor’s 75th birthday yesterday. It was not the sort of gathering where I would normally wave the red flag of political dissent, but one of the guests was a retired professor of history and political science so I risked asking his opinion of the Bush Regime’s agenda. Happily we were pretty much in agreement, pretty much appalled, and generally concerned about what we took to be an attack on traditional constitutional guarantees.
And then he made a comment that quite surprised me, both because it seemed so pertinent and because, I must confess, the parallel hadn’t occurred to me.
"You know," he said, "the attack of 9/11 was Bush’s Reichstag Fire."
He paid me the graceful compliment of asking me if I were old enough to know what that was. I assured him I was. It turns out that a search engine inquiry for "Reichstag Fire" yields hundreds of references, some informative and some quite paranoid.
To refresh your recollection about this event you may look here for a brief time line of events and consequences.
I thought the parallel interesting…the use of an attack on a symbol of national pride to leverage a domestic agenda that would otherwise have been hard to impossible to effect. As did so many Germans, Americans seem willing to accept a restriction on personal liberties and guarantees of due process in exchange for ‘security.’
