LESSON MIS-LEARNED
I was listening to an NPR interview with FBI Director Robert Mueller. The director was asked if the FBI's implementation of the Patriot Act was a threat to civil liberties. Mueller, not surprisingly, said no. He noted that the FBI even sends new agents to the Holocaust Museum to sensitize them about what can happen when intelligence services and other authorities don't follow the Constitution.

Except there's one problem. The Nazis DID follow their constitution. The Nazis came to power under the ostensibly democratic Weimar constitution. That constitution specifically allowed the chancellor (Hitler, before he declared the Reich) to suspend the constitution in case of a state of emergency. When the Reichstag was burned down, an act blamed on the communists though many believe it was done by the Nazis themselves as a pretext, the Nazis had their excuse to suspend the constitution... a suspension which was legal according to that very constitution. The Nuremburg and other acts that discriminated against and persecuted Jews were legal and constitutional.

I understand the point Mueller was trying to make. he was trying to reassure us that there were sufficient safeguards in the Patriot Act, even though most oversight is secret, opaque and non-public. So we have to take his word for it, which is exactly what makes many Americans uncomfortable. If something can't be justified and defended publicily, I'm automatically skeptical. While I don't think the leaders of this administration are a bunch of Nazis, I'm not pleased with the direction some of them are taking us. Learning the lessons of history doesn't meaning waiting until we get in exactly the same situation before we say "Oh wait, maybe this isn't a good idea." The situation doesn't have to be a mirror image to notice unpleasant parallels. It mustn't. By then, it's too late.

In the face of Director Mueller's observation, it's worth recalling Martin Luther King Jr's A Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he noted:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters [in the face of the 1956 Soviet invasion] did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today [1963] I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.