Maher: "New Rule: Democracy's Deathbed"

Click here to view this powerfully satiric video by Bill Maher, the TV host and political commentator and compare it to a passage from journalist William L. Shirer's book: The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, his eyewitness account of the rise of Nazi Germany before World War II.

Shirer arrived in Berlin, the German capital, in the fall of 1934, just over a year after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power. He wrote: 

What surprised me at first was that most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were becoming regimented to a degree never before experienced even by people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... 

The vast majority did not seem unduly concerned with what happened to a few Communists, Socialists, pacifists, defiant priests and pastors, and to the Jews. A newly arrived observer was forced, however reluctantly as in my own case, to conclude that on the whole the people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, and much to my surprise, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow Adolf Hitler was imbuing them with a new hope, a new confidence and an astonishing renewed faith in the future of their country.