Showing posts with label NAZIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NAZIS. Show all posts

February 15, 2025

It's not hyperbole to invoke Hitler, albeit with qualifications, anymore, by Hal M. Brown

When we compare Trump with Hitler, we aren’t comparing him to Hitler in the 1940’s. We compare him to Hitler when he was coming into power in the 1930’s. It is never a literal comparison. Both were psychopaths. Both didn’t value all human lives equally. Both demonized certain groups of people including regular people and their enemies. Trump has plans to deport people and makes veiled threats to imprision enemies and not exterminate them. 

It is chilling that reasonable people like us, who avoid using hyperbole just for the sake of using hyperbole, say things like "what they will do when Trump starts ordering Putin-style assassinations? Some will try to thwart him and some will pull the trigger, as they have throughout centuries." This is from a Sabrina Haake reply to a comment I made on one of her Substacks.

I think the "Putin the assassin” analogy is appropriate. So are many Nazi analogies as long as they are qualified and explained.

It isn't just the wrtten word where Nazi comparisons are made. Sometimes we just post photos. Do a Google Image search for Stephen Miller and Joseph Goebels:

Some of us, me for example, put Hitler moustaches on Trump and Tom Homan on BlueSky:

There may be a time when even mockery like mine, above, isn’t remotely amusing. If things get as deadly serious as they might become so dire that even those desperate to find something to smile about will realize that they are trying to fiddle while the country burns. For example, two weeks ago I wrote that it was time for Rachel Maddow to stop chuckling and get deadly serious. Now things have gotten so much worse that even smiling over a major Trump failure or faux pas is, at least to me, disquieting.

Part of my sensitivity to this is being Jewish and growing hearing my partent talk about the Holocaust. I think about a Jewish family in Nazi German listening to a comedy show on Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (Nazi radio)) while they see that down the street the Gestopo is dragging their neighbor’s family into a van.

As for the “Morning Joe” show, I see a time when they will eliminate their sports chatter and show biz coverage. 

While on the topic of MSNBC I found something I approved of. Joy Reid had Nayyera Haq on this morning. She was a senior advisor in the State Department and also worked in the White House ( Here's her website bio: https://www.nayyera.com/about The panel was discussing how Vance met with the far-right German party leader and not the chancelor. What I found gratifying and noteworthy is when another panelist asked her what she made of this, she said it was an embrace of Nazis and Nazism. This is the first time I've heard the word Nazi on an MSNBC show.

Here in our Substack-sphere many of us don't hesitate to say, basically, that if someone walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, and acts like a Nazi, they are Nazi.

Obviously, I don’t mean one of those wackos like Hitler loving Holocaust denying Kanye West. I mean small “n” nazi:

From my online dictionary here’s the defintion of Nazi “Not a member of the far-right National Socialist German Workers' Party, rather a person with extreme racist or authoritarian views. or a person who seeks to impose their views on others in a very autocratic or inflexible way.”

Because most people aren't that familiar with the abbreviations for the agencies that replaced the KGB - the SVR, FSB, FSO, and GRU, I always use the term Gestapo to describe the personal enforcement group of thugs Trump wants at his command to carry out his psychopathic orders.

Hitler had Himmler, Göring, and lesser known names, to run his Gestapo and SS. We will have Thom Homan and, if he is approved, will have Kash Patel.

Hardly a week goes by that I don't replay the final scene of "Apocalypse Now" in my mind with a dying h Brando saying "the horror, the horror."

Addendum:

There is a place for finely honed satire and humor devised to send a message to a population which is being propagandized by a despotic regime. Here’s an article about how the British did this during World War II.

Excerpts:

The BBC’s German Service used satire to reach ordinary Germans in World War Two. Its aim was to break the Nazi monopoly on news within the Third Reich.

It’s a late night in London in 1940, and Austrian exile Robert Lucas is writing at his desk. Bombs are raining down on the city every night, Hitler’s army is winning throughout Europe and the invasion of England has become a genuine prospect. In spite of the air-raid sirens and, as he put it “the hell’s noise of the war machinery" going off all around him, Lucas is focused on the job at hand: to “fight for the souls of the Germans”. He is composing a radio broadcast aimed at citizens of the Third Reich. But this is not a passionate plea for them to come to their senses. This is an attempt to make them laugh.

Example:

The quirky content of the programmes should be understood in the context of this curious alliance. Adolf Hirnschal is a series of fictitious letters written by a German corporal on the front line to his wife. The protagonist reads the letters to his fighting comrade before they are posted. On the surface Adolf Hirnschal is devoted to his “beloved Führer”. Yet so far-fetched are his exclamations of loyalty that the intention is clear: to expose the shallowness and mendacity of Nazi proclamations. In his first letter after war is declared on Russia in 1941 he tells his wife how he welcomed the news from his lieutenant that they are being transferred to the Russian border:

I jump up in joy and say: ‘Mr Lieutenant, kindly asking for permission to express that I am tremendously pleased that we are now fraternising with the Russians. Did not our beloved Führer already say in 1939 that our friendship with the Russians is irrevocable and irreversible?’

Thus Hirnschal exposes the hypocrisy of Hitler’s policy towards Russia, all under the cover of absolute loyalty.

August 2, 2023

Trump wants to be the American Hitler and many voters want him to achieve this goal

 



By Hal Brown
 
“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes” is what was posted attributed to the Trump campaign. I don't know whether Trump wrote part or all or a of this statement. It is relevant that Trump has long history of accusing others of the wrongdoing he is doing himself. If you change that sentence to read "the lawlessness of these persecutions of Joe and Hunter Biden are reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes” it is accurate.

I woke up at 2:15 AM and was - call me obsessed if you like - thinking about a topic for my blog and all I could come up with was writing about Trump from a psychological perspective (again) and asking whether he was a kind of delusional Hitler.

Hitler wasn't a preening grandiose narcisist like Trump, though he did seem to thrive on giving speeches to enormous cheering and NAZI saluting crowds. He was, like Trump, a psychopath.  Hitler was not only responsible for the deaths in the Holocaust but also in World War II where the minimum estimate of total deaths is 35 million. Hitler never literally held a gun to anyone's head and enjoyed pulling the trigger and I don't know whether or not he had a sadistic personality disorder and enjoyed knowing about the suffering he was causing. 

The evidence that Trump did enjoy thoughts about the suffering was causing is clear. For example, his ideas about securing the southern border reflect this.

Remember, he wanted to shoot migrants in the legs, put flesh-piercing spikes atop an electrified border wall, and dig a moat.and fill it with snakes and alligators. He had no problem with separating families and putting children in cages. (Reference)

 As others have noted, the cruelty was the point.

While considering this in the wee hours I thought all this I thought that invoking Hitler was demontrating Godwin's Law and I wanted to avoid this. Then I read what one of my favorite columnists, Chauncey DeVega, wrote in Salon today in Criminal indictments are not enough: Donald Trump must be defeated at the ballot box

DeVega wrote:

Donald Trump has made Hitler-like threats to crush his and the MAGA movement's perceived "enemies" in a campaign of revenge and terror targeting the Democrats, liberals, progressives, and others once he is back in power. As outlined in Trump's "Agenda 47" plan, he will become a type of de facto dictator if he takes power again

In reaction to his latest criminal indictment, his third handed down just this year, Trump's campaign released a statement likening his prosecution to "Nazi Germany in the 1930s."

What the hell!?!

Did Trump's campaign really make this comparison? It beggered the imagination. I found confirmation that the Trump campagin did this in Rupert Murdoch's NY Daily Post here:

Trump campaign compares indictment over 2020 election interference to Nazi Germany

They published an image of the Trump campaign statement I used to illustrate this blog. 

Here's an excerpt from the NY Post article:

“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” Trump’s 2024 campaign said in a statement.

The comparison shocked and disgusted many.

“Comparing this indictment to Nazi Germany in the 1930s is factually incorrect, completely inappropriate and flat-out offensive,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement posted to social media. “As we have said time and again, such comparisons have no place in politics and are shameful.”

The Daily Post article included this photo without ellaborating on what it was:

Foundation of the Harzburg Front (see below).
 Bad Harzburg Oct. 11, 1931-Wilhelm Frick,
 Adolf Hitler, Alfred Hugenberg,
Otto Schmidt-Hanover, Theodor Duesterberg.
 Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe  Public domain

The Harzburg Front (GermanHarzburger Front) was a short-lived radical right-wing, anti-democratic political alliance in Weimar Germany, formed in 1931 as an attempt to present a unified opposition to the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. It was a coalition of the national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) under millionaire press-baron Alfred Hugenberg with Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), the leadership of Der Stahlhelm paramilitary veterans' association, the Agricultural League and the Pan-German League organizations. Wikipedia

What those of us with a clear mind and a love of democracy see when we look at what happened in 1930's Germany is how many Germans enthusiastically supported Hitler as their savior. About 89 years ago Hitler, who was already chancellor, was also elected president of Germany. 

A referendum on merging the posts of Chancellor and President was held in Nazi Germany on 19 August 1934, seventeen days after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg. The German leadership sought to gain approval for Adolf Hitler's assumption of supreme power. The referendum was associated with widespread intimidation of voters, and Hitler used the resultant large "yes" vote to claim public support for his activities as the de facto head of state of Germany. In fact, he had assumed these offices and powers immediately upon Hindenburg's death and used the referendum to legitimise that move and take the title Führer und Reichskanzler (Führerand Reich Chancellor). (Wikipedia)

When Trump ran for president in 2016 not enough people could see he was a Hitler in the making. 

Now we see not only that he was, but more terrifying, that there is a considerable support for him becoming the American Hitler in the next election.

Addendum:

These are the two tabloid front pages New Yorkers see when they head out today. On top is the Murdoch N.Y. Post and on bottom the anti-Trump N.Y.Daily News:


The Post plays the news straight and reports the news of the indictment without editorializing. The Daily News sums their opinion up in three words: crimes against democracy with the inserted photo of the Jan. 6th insurrection.


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It's not hyperbole to invoke Hitler, albeit with qualifications, anymore, by Hal M. Brown

When we compare Trump with Hitler, we aren’t comparing him to Hitler in the 1940’s. We compare him to Hitler when he was coming into power i...