Stalin
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- Apr 4, 2008
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a warning from history
:...On the night of 27 February 1933, six days before national elections, the German Reichstag was set on fire. Firefighters and police discovered a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene, who confessed to being the arsonist. The Nazi Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, soon arrived, followed by the future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, who had been dining together.
Two competing, still unresolved, conspiracy theories would circulate about the real culprit: the Nazis, with van der Lubbe as front; or a communist cabal. But the three men had no doubts. Göring pronounced the crime a communist plot. Hitler called it “a God-given signal”, adding: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”
On 10 September 2025, within minutes of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, before a suspect or a motive had been identified, a cacophony of voices – from neo-Nazi influencers to Republican members of Congress – were blaming the left for the murder of the hugely effective far-right political organizer.
Donald Trump amplified the indictments. “Radical left … rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he said, in a televised address from the Oval Office that night, pointedly omitting examples of violence against progressives or Democrats.
Is Kirk’s assassination Trump’s Reichstag fire?
There are major differences between Germany in 1933 and the US in 2025. Germany’s democracy was but 14 years old at the time. Created amid the privation of the postwar depression and attended by popular ressentiment at the country’s defeat, the Weimar Republic was unstable from the start. And simultaneously, out of those same conditions, the Nazi movement was born and gained strength.
Hitler’s attempted coup d’etat of 1923 – the beer hall putsch – failed but brought him national attention. During what the Nazis called the “time of struggle” between 1925 and 1932, stormtroopers and assorted thugs committed nearly continual acts of terrorism and violence toward political foes. Jews, and other minorities. The conflagration of 27 February 1933 burst from tinder ready to combust.
By contrast, US democracy is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. It has weathered division, corruption, and violence – and, in many instances, stood stronger, better governed, and more just in their aftermath. Today – despite attacks on the press, boldly partisan gerrymandering, police brutality against peaceful protests, and the rightward lurch of the judiciary – Americans still have civil liberties, however frayed and endangered. That is more than Germans had after the Reichstag fire. But it is becoming clearer that, without widespread popular resistance, it will not stay that way.
www.theguardian.com
comrade stalin
moscow
:...On the night of 27 February 1933, six days before national elections, the German Reichstag was set on fire. Firefighters and police discovered a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene, who confessed to being the arsonist. The Nazi Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, soon arrived, followed by the future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, who had been dining together.
Two competing, still unresolved, conspiracy theories would circulate about the real culprit: the Nazis, with van der Lubbe as front; or a communist cabal. But the three men had no doubts. Göring pronounced the crime a communist plot. Hitler called it “a God-given signal”, adding: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”
On 10 September 2025, within minutes of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, before a suspect or a motive had been identified, a cacophony of voices – from neo-Nazi influencers to Republican members of Congress – were blaming the left for the murder of the hugely effective far-right political organizer.
Donald Trump amplified the indictments. “Radical left … rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he said, in a televised address from the Oval Office that night, pointedly omitting examples of violence against progressives or Democrats.
Is Kirk’s assassination Trump’s Reichstag fire?
There are major differences between Germany in 1933 and the US in 2025. Germany’s democracy was but 14 years old at the time. Created amid the privation of the postwar depression and attended by popular ressentiment at the country’s defeat, the Weimar Republic was unstable from the start. And simultaneously, out of those same conditions, the Nazi movement was born and gained strength.
Hitler’s attempted coup d’etat of 1923 – the beer hall putsch – failed but brought him national attention. During what the Nazis called the “time of struggle” between 1925 and 1932, stormtroopers and assorted thugs committed nearly continual acts of terrorism and violence toward political foes. Jews, and other minorities. The conflagration of 27 February 1933 burst from tinder ready to combust.
By contrast, US democracy is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. It has weathered division, corruption, and violence – and, in many instances, stood stronger, better governed, and more just in their aftermath. Today – despite attacks on the press, boldly partisan gerrymandering, police brutality against peaceful protests, and the rightward lurch of the judiciary – Americans still have civil liberties, however frayed and endangered. That is more than Germans had after the Reichstag fire. But it is becoming clearer that, without widespread popular resistance, it will not stay that way.
History teaches us that authoritarians use any excuse to seize power | Judith Levine
Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag blaze to justify snuffing out civil liberties. In the US, the calls for a crackdown have already begun
comrade stalin
moscow
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