Of all the goings on and matters of public interest within its scope, it’s odd that the Newport Daily News would spend an editorial on Tiverton Town Council Member Hannibal Costa’s comparison of federal mandates on the town (with threats of withheld funding) to the Nazis’ rise to power. From Wednesday’s Daily News:
… comparing a Federal Emergency Management Agency training requirement to Hitler’s reign in Germany? Not only is that patently offensive, it’s not even an apt analogy. …
Costa’s comments were reminiscent of protests during the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when signs surfaced showing Obama with a Hitleresque mustache, calling his platform “national socialism,” and right-wing pundits called him the “Black Hitler.”
Those comments were incredibly insensitive and incendiary, much like Costa’s take on FEMA Monday night: “That sounds like a dictatorship,” he said. “What the hell country do we live in these days?”
Certainly not Nazi Germany. Costa and his ilk would do well to remember that.
Look, Costa’s remarks were certainly hyperbolic, especially given the limited nature of this particular federal requirement, but the Daily News distorts his position in a couple of ways. First, Mr. Costa has been making this sort of complaint since well before the election of Barack Obama, and there’s no reason to assume that he had the president — as compared with the entire national bureaucracy — in mind.
Second, the comparison was not to “Hitler’s reign,” but to his ascension. Yes, the Nazis were more overtly conspiratorial in manipulating the votes of political representatives (that’s the hyperbole), but strictly speaking, they “took over Germany,” as Costa put it, by enacting enabling legislation and policies. Indeed, the key law is called “the Enabling Act”:
For Adolf Hitler, the goal of a legally established dictatorship was now within reach. On March 15, 1933, a cabinet meeting was held during which Hitler and Goring discussed how to obstruct what was left of the democratic process to get an Enabling Act passed by the Reichstag. This law would hand over the constitutional functions of the Reichstag to Hitler, including the power to make laws, control the budget and approve treaties with foreign governments.
The emergency decree signed by Hindenburg on February 28, after the Reichstag fire, made it easy for them to interfere with non-Nazi elected representatives of the people by simply arresting them.
Prior to the Enabling Act, the German government had faced perpetual political gridlock, leading the chancellor to enact policies through emergency decrees. That practice began well before the Nazis’ rise, but it’s still properly understood as part of the process by which Germany became vulnerable to transition to dictatorship.
The point is that, working within a democracy, regimes do not begin behaving as totalitarians (for one thing, eliminating people) until they’ve built a machine that implicates those who ought to restrain them, as well. They make more and more parties dependent upon or frightened of them, in various ways, until the time is opportune to pull the trigger on the trap. Elected town officials — and their ilk — shouldn’t wait until the machine is nearly complete before they begin noting the danger, and while rhetorical excess ought to be curbed, the impulse to make the inferences taboo increases vulnerability.
The Newport Daily News dug deep into the minor proceedings of a town meeting for an opportunity to express its tender sensibilities. We can only hope that the editors’ desire to pose reasonable does not still their tongue when tyranny dips more than a finger into the political waters.
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