Organized Crime

All of the worst tyrants in world history have been enemies of states’ rights, federalism, and divided sovereignty. Tyrants lust after monopolistic political power, and monopolistic political power cannot exist if the people have an escape route from it. Dissent must be crushed and avenues of dissent abolished if one is to exercise dictatorial powers over a society. Adolf Hitler articulated this view as well as any twentieth-century tyrant did. On page 566 of the 1999 Mariner/Houghton Mifflin edition of Mein Kampf Hitler echoed the views of Lincoln, Hamilton, Story, Marshall, and Webster when he wrote:

[T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states.

This was Hitler’s reiteration of the argument that Lincoln made in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861 where he said:

[T]he Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence . . . by the Articles of Confederation in 1778 . . . and establishing the Constitution. . . . It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.

Hitler wrote the above words in the context of making his own case for the abolition of states’ rights in Germany, and he naturally referred to Lincoln’s novel and a-historical theory to bolster his case.

Hitler mocked what he called the “so-called sovereign states” in Germany because they stood in the way of a centralized Reich with their “impotence” and “fragmentation.” Such “fragmentation” had been understood by Europeans for centuries to be an important source of freedom from tyranny. Europeans had been slowly eliminating such freedom through governmental consolidation and Hitler wanted to speed up the process by turning all of Europe into one big “Reich” administered by himself.

Hitler praised German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck for proving “the greatness of his statesmanship” by gradually diminishing the sovereignty of the German states and centralizing governmental power in Germany. This was a most welcomed development, Hitler wrote, since the power of the central state in Germany was supposedly threatened by “the struggle between federalism and centralization so shrewdly propagated by the Jews in 1919–20–21 and afterward . . .”

He further condemned federalism as “a league of sovereign states which ban together of their own free will, on the strength of their sovereignty” to cede some—but not all—of their sovereignty to form “the common federation” This was an accurate description of the original American constitutional system of states’ rights or federalism, and Hitler voiced his extreme opposition to it.

Bismarck did a good job of destroying most of the vestiges of federalism and states’ rights in Germany, Hitler wrote, but he did not go nearly far enough. “And so today this state [Germany], for the sake of its own existence, is obliged to curtail the sovereign rights of the individual provinces more and more, not only out of general material considerations, but from ideal considerations as well.” Thus, a rule “basic for us National Socialists is derived,” wrote Hitler: “A powerful national Reich.”

Adolf Hitler then asserted the “inevitability” argument: “Certainly all the states in the world are moving toward a certain unification in their inner organization. And in this Germany will be no exception. Today it is an absurdity to speak of a ‘state sovereignty’ of individual provinces.” He condemned the idea of federalism as the work of “unclean party interests” and promised that the National Socialists (Nazis), moreover, would totally eliminate states’ rights altogether:

Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power.

The “mischief of individual federated states . . . must cease,” Hitler demanded. In the future of Germany the individual states would no longer be involved in “state power and policy,” he wrote. Nazism is not the “servant” of the people of “the individual federated states,” Hitler continued, while predicting that “the National Socialist doctrine” will “some day become the master of the German nation” that will “reorder the life of a people.” The people are to be servants of the state, not the other way around. Hitler believed that this could only be achieved by first abolishing states’ rights in Germany.