Enabling Act of 1933

The decree issued the following morning suspended civil liberties and broke the Communist Party.

The Enabling Act passed on March twenty-third with communist deputies already in custody.

The trade unions were abolished in May.

Hold the exact terms of that transaction.

And what Hitler said, everyone is always looking at these issues from the fanatic point of view.

Hitler, right before he was appointed basically dictator through something called the Enabling Act, when two-thirds of the legislative body voted to give Hitler dictatorial powers for four years.

Completely democratic process.

And there you watch a democracy committing suicide live.

These are the people calling the cops when you had a barbecue during lockdowns, et cetera, where you didn't wear the two masks alone in your car and let's call the police, you know? got fascist and nazi cases as well you had the reichstag fire in february 1933 was immediately blamed on a communist plot so they'll play the other side they'll be like oh well we're against the communists but really they're all the same right the resulting reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties free speech press assembly etc enabled mass arrests of political opponents and was sold as necessary to prevent imminent bolshevik revolution Nazi propaganda maintained a continuous threat narrative around communists, Jews, and other internal enemies.

The Enabling Act soon followed, consolidating power.

And this matches the crisis emergency powers normalization pattern.

And it's also how we understand that when you see the battles going on between these variants of the same Kool-Aid, you'll see that they're just two different gangs fighting over the same turf.

You know, um, he-- Mussolini, Mussolini fundamentally, uh- fundamentally, um, altered the structural balance of power between the executive and, um, and, um, and the parliament, and, and, and, and the electoral system itself, as well as the parliament, which was largely becoming somewhat gelded anyway by, uh, the Acerbo law, um, which basically guaranteed, like, the National Fascist Party, you know, like a s- a certain percentage of cabinet seats, okay.

So, um, it, it essentially became a one-party state without, um, you know, um, something like the Enabling Act to finesse it.

And for the record too, and this is a subject for a different series or epher- or episode, but, um, you know, Hitler didn't, uh, Hitler didn't, um, take the oath of office as, as chancellor.

You know, and then, um, or even later after the, after the Enabling Act, you know, when he became a chancellor and, and Führer of the German Reich, he didn't, um, he didn't suddenly declare that, like, you know, now, like, you know, organs of state are all, you know, are all apparatus of the party, you know.

Um, and the internal police apparatus was very directly, um, co-opted by National Socialists and became an organ of the party, which is interesting in and of itself.

But other than that, um, that's one of the reasons there was this kind of agonistic pluralism in the Third Reich, where in some ways people didn't, couldn't quite grasp, like, where, you know, sort of like the state bureaucracy stopped and the party bureaucracy began.

Um, it's, it, as they, uh-

The Enabling Act.

Exactly.

The Enabling Act after the Reichstag fire.

Exactly.

Very, very good.

You know, like the National Socialist Party, um, it was, it was e- it was literally elected.

Um, Hitler himself, by the Enabling Act and by, um, various referendums, he had tremendous power, but even that wasn't really unprecedented.

You know, like the Reich president had had literally like extra constitutional authority as he saw fit.

But, um, you know, the German state and the National Socialist Party were discrete entities, and it, um, it-- there, there were, there was tension there, like structurally.