Five days before the Presidential election, barring a power grab by the current Administration, recall these immortal words:

Our next task is the removal of unemployment, the providing of work. This providing of work is divided into two main groups. First the private providing of work. Under this heading we are going to undertake a great work this year, a work which will bring the buildings and houses in Germany in order and thus give employment to hundreds of thousands. We wish to make at this moment and in this place our first appeal to the entire German nation. Do not think that the problem of providing work will solve itself. You must wisely and trustfully do everything you can to provide work. Everyone has the duty not to hesitate to buy what he needs and not to wait to have done for himself what eventually must be done. Every contractor, every houseowner, every business-man and every private individual must think of the German worker. …

Further, it is our intention to start in a large way the public providing of work this year. We have made a programme which we do not wish to leave to our successors, the programme of road-building, a gigantic task, which will demand millions. We will put aside all opposition and set about our task on a large scale. With this we shall begin a series of public works which will help to lower the number of unemployed more and more.

We wish to work and we shall work. But it must not be forgotten that everything depends in the end on the German people themselves. It depends on you, on the trust you put in us, on the strength with which you support the national state. Only when you all become one in the determination to save Germany can the individual in Germany be saved. …

We shall work, behave as brothers one to another and strive together until the day comes when we can stand before the Lord and say that we have become different, that the German nation is no more a nation without honour, a nation covered with shame, a nation at war within itself, a nation of little faith. That the German nation is strong again in its own will, strong in perseverance and strong to make every sacrifice. We will not let Him go until He bless our fight for our freedom and bless our German people and fatherland.

—Chancellor Adolf Hitler, before two million workers on 1 May 1933, the ‘National Labour Day’.

[Hitler, Adolf (1941) The New Germany Desires Work And Peace. Speeches By Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler The Leader Of The New Germany. With An Introduction By Dr. Joseph Goebbels. (Berlin: Liebheit & Thieson), pp. 36-37.]

In 2009, I wrote,

In the early 1930s, Germans had America to flee to. Today, with America’s government instituting more and more of the policies of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party—and for the same reasons: the individual’s mindless faith in the group and its leader, sacrifice of the individual to the group, “we are our brother’s keeper”—freedom-loving Americans have no freer nation to flee to. What can we do?

Now, in 2012, with both major Presidential candidates—especially the sitting President—and most Americans in essential agreement with Hitler’s words above, I do not know. I will continue to prepare for the worst.

“[A] nation brought up to regard the principles of duty and self-sacrifice as cardinal virtues will be helpless when confronted by a gang of thugs who demand obedience and self-sacrifice.” —Ayn Rand, referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany, in her introduction to The Ominous Parallels, a book by Leonard Peikoff.