One thing I've noticed is that whenever we liberals make a stink about how much this government is beginning to resemble a totalitarian regime, we are immediately accused of paranoia, hysteria, typical "tinfoil hat" stuff.

February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van
der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag)
building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and
reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief
action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler
was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed
around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."

...We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent
warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generating
devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock and
awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book
"Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German
democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German
corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism
(fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the
extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business
leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."