Stop Invoking Hitler
Trump, Obama, and Bush aren’t Hitler
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches.” -Godwin’s Law
I get it. You’re young enough not to have dealt with George W. Bush as an adult. Bush v Gore was my first election, and Bush’s post-9/11 consolidation of power and socialistic tripling of the size of the federal government drew many comparisons to Hitler. Fear led the American voter to keep hawkish war profiteers in office for a second term, but democracy eventually worked in midterm elections which took away political power from King George and his cadre of industrialist puppeteers. Then voters wanted to flip the script, electing Obama while the GOP lost favor with its base due to their disastrous wars.
Then, paleo-conservatives started calling Obama Hitler because of his increased socialization of government in relation to health care (remember the “death panel” hysteria?), bail-outs, and foreign policy. The “O” symbol was compared to the Swastika, youth programs were compared to Hitler Youth, and so on.
Trump, a salesman, arguably a con artist, is now being called Hitler because of his stances on illegal immigrants and Muslims. In reality, Trump has found a demographic he thinks is large enough to elect him and pandered to their every need like a salesman would. His stance on Mexicans isn’t to put them in extermination camps, and his pandering to the sentiment that the ideology of Muslim immigrants doesn’t belong in American society is partially true (a frightening percentage support Sharia law); he is careful not to mention that no religious ideology belongs in a secular government because he is pandering to Christians (who, to be fair, had that whole enlightenment thing). Trump and his follower’s views refuse to say that the majority of Muslims aren’t radical fundamentalists, yet at the same time the (regressive) left refuses to acknowledge that the majority of terrorist attacks are by radical fundamentalists who identify as Muslims (this is why there isn’t a rational discussion on a realistic way to handle Syrian refugees in America).
Adolph Hitler rose to power after Germany’s disastrous World War 1 defeat and the resulting sanctions that left the country looking for answers in all the wrong places. Yes, he used fear to rise to power, but the United States isn’t crawling out of being crippled by defeat and/or left economically powerless, and Hillary only won the nomination by using fear of Trump. Politicians use fear as a currency.
By 1930, governance by decree made authoritarianism the norm in Germany. The Nazi Party’s platform was anti-Semitic, and members actually believed that Jews were the cause of Germany’s economic turmoil. The party grew strength from an uninformed public starving for a leader to bring Germany out of economic peril, and did it by demonizing and slandering communists, social democrats, and Jews.
Hitler, once chancellor, used the Reichstag fire (it is debated if communists or the Nazi’s started the fire) to create the Enabling Act to give the Nazi’s the ability to enact laws, including unconstitutional laws, without the Reichstag parliament’s consent, and got the two-thirds vote by arresting enough of the communists in the Reichstag to rig the vote. For comparison, Trump would have to gain full control over the House, Senate, and Supreme Court to achieve this power, which isn’t possible because of how our political system was designed. He’s an outsider to his own party who would have no interest in it.
With full dictatorial power, Hitler and the Nazi’s were able to murder anyone undesirable including 6,000,000 Jews, 3,000,000 Soviet Prisoners, 2,000,000 ethnic Poles, 270,000 disabled people, 200,000 Romani, and numerous homosexuals, Slovenes, and even Freemasons. Their ideology was partially based on the Eugenics movement (cooked up in American universities by Marxists) and a weird occult belief in a Master Race of Aryans from Tibet (?!), both of which have been thoroughly annihilated in the scientific community (although Neo-Marxists are bringing Eugenics-based ideas back, but that’s another rant).
“Why didn’t anyone stop Hitler? We have a chance to stop Trump!”
First, to the German people, the National Socialist movement brought a short period of economic prosperity through military mobilization. When this worked, they bought into the lie of racial superiority because when the Jews, disabled, and anyone else was gone, things seemed to get better. German engineering and science, built on the backs of Jewish slave labor and test subjects, soared without ethical boundaries (the US and USSR both used Nazi scientists and scientific advancements, and BMW, Volkwagen, Hugo Boss and Siemens still exist). Nazi’s also controlled the media, so there wasn’t any form of home-grown dissent through the freedom of speech.
Second, stop screaming Hillary in an echo chamber and go fucking vote, a freedom the Germans lost in 1933.
Hitler couldn’t be stopped because the German government had already caved to authoritarianism and radical political movements on both sides, whereas the vast majority of American politicians are centrists, ensuring slow change yet also disempowering radial ideologues on either side from taking the country out of the center.
If Trump was elected, he would have little ability to accomplish anything. The Republican Party is filled with his enemies, and of course he will meet nothing but resistance from the Democrats who would likely gain unprecedented power in the house and senate in 2018 if he were elected. If a Reichstag-like event occurred, power consolidation like Hitler’s isn’t even possible with our political system, and the military’s leadership would oust anyone who even hinted at gaining authoritarian control over the branches of government. The closest danger we have to a power grab is the Patriot Act, of which Bush, Obama, Clinton, and Trump all love.
Comparing Trump’s stance on Muslims to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews is a false equivalence so outrageous in it’s trivialization, so insensitive to survivors and relatives not only of the Holocaust, but of all victims of European fascism, that we can see how much of society hasn’t learned the real lessons of World War Two.
Trump is, for the lack of a better word, an asshole. An asshole businessman trying to become an asshole politician (but really an asshole trying to start a media empire for assholes). Adolph Hitler was responsible for starting a war that, not including the previously mentioned Holocaust, killed 10,000,000 Soviets, 7,000,000 Germans, and more than 500,000 Americans, not to mention the death tolls from France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Northern Africa, Italy, and Nordic Regions, who allied with Imperialist Japan who took over 20,000,000 lives in their imperialist expansion at the cost of 3,000,000 of their own. 70–85 million deaths.
Stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis. It makes you and your peers look bad.
P.S. The Nazi’s made it illegal for Jews to own, manufacture, or distribute firearms so that they’d have no reasonable defense against the Gestapo. Trump sides with the NRA, and our gun laws allow non-citizen aliens to own firearms and ammunition with the right permit. This is a favorite argument of conservatives, but I’m using it to further draw clear distinction between a racial cleansing mass murderer and someone who thinks rifles should be handed out to everyone over 8 years old.
