“It lists Hitler as a fairly stable veteran of the Great War.” – Crow T. Robot
About a decade ago, I wrote a series of posts inspired by quotes from the legendary MST3K movie ‘Space Mutiny’. In the mid-00s, something about that terrible 80s movie, a rebellion on a spaceship being put down by a single muscle-bound hero, resonated with our relatively new “war on terror”. I wrote five posts about random topics – now banished to the internet memory hole – but there was supposed to be a sixth.
The post was meant to be the finale of the series – about Godwin’s Law and the mountains of shitty Hitler comparisons that passed for political discourse at the time. But it was also supposed to be about the realization that sometimes the comparison fits and we shouldn’t be afraid to make it. I never finished it…fuck that, I never really even started it. Trying to put parameters around when you can and can’t make a Hitler comparison quickly felt like an insane undertaking. And I’m a goddamn engineer, well aware that no one reads the shit I write anyway.
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A recent article in Politico about Russia has introduced me to an interesting term – “reflexive control”. The idea behind reflexive control is that you can condition people to act a certain way if you repeatedly put them on the defensive about doing the opposite. The example cited in that article is about the post-Cold War era, and how years of Russians accusing the west of wanting to revive the Cold War has caused westerners to reflexively to rule out the possibility entirely, lest they prove the Russians were correct all along.
I’m not totally convinced this happens as a matter of manipulation, but instead as a matter of hardened principle. The same thing can be said for all kinds of military undertakings right now. Many Americans have become reflexively against any kind of heavy involvement in actual ground combat anywhere in the world. The puppeteers driving that reflex aren’t any set of nefarious people who gain from our pacifism, they’re the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a belief that these regional conflicts aren’t worth the deaths of American lives. We have a similar reflex to any politician who declares a war on drugs. This reflex isn’t conditioned by advocates trying to keep us from fighting it, it’s from the grim awareness that it backfires with all sorts of unintended consequences.
There’s also some reflexive control that drives the way we regard Godwin’s Law, and the desire to point out parallels to a time when democracy collapsed. It’s seen as a form of intellectual laziness and hyperbole to draw parallels between 1930s Germany and today. But I think now more than ever, we need to look to that time to have better context over the present, to be able to draw both parallels and contrasts.
A lot of scholarly articles have pointed at that Donald Trump isn’t a Fascist. It’s true. Fascism is a movement with a very narrow definition that many scholars think *only* applies to the movements under Mussolini and Hitler. Even movements that seemed similar enough had subtle differences in culture and style that made it not quite fit the label. By that narrow definition, Trump and his rabid follows aren’t truly Fascist, but that’s not to say there aren’t some pretty strong parallels that matter.
Reading through Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler, one of the many things that jumps out is how clear Hitler was about what he believed, yet how difficult it was for people to accept that his base motivations were genuine and that he’d follow through. The nationalism that drove his movement was fueled by a growing belief that Jews and other outsiders were parasites weakening the state from the inside. Disastrous economic conditions in the 20s and 30s caused that sentiment to spiral out of control, but the base sentiment that sank German democracy and drove the world towards war was a broad sentiment that multiculturalism was a cancer making Germany weak.
Michiko Kakutani’s review of Ullrich’s biography called out a number of other striking parallels that the book makes clear – Hitler’s narcissism, his stunning dishonesty, and his ability to play to crowds and appeal to the basest instincts of his followers. Trump’s campaign was also eerily similar to early Nazi rhetoric around cultural decay and the hope for national rebirth. So was their open disdain of a so-called “liberal media”. But it’s the backlash against a multicultural, socially tolerant, America that’s the cornerstone of the entire movement and the parallel that should concern us the most.
A number of the people that Trump has pulled into his inner circle – from Bannon to Flynn to Sessions – have a long record of projecting pathological anxiety over America’s increasing diversity. And his campaign drew support from all sorts of dark corners of America’s network of hate groups. His blanket portrayals of Mexicans as criminals, black communities as dangerous hellscapes, and Muslims as an existential threat to the west might seem like clownish rhetoric. But these sentiments have broader appeal than we like to admit, and even worse, they were not seen as disqualifying by an even larger subset of voters. Just as too many people ignored Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a mere side-show, we can’t do the same with Trump and his clearly bigoted worldview. As we learned back then, the anti-Semitism wasn’t just a side-show, it ended up being the main fucking feature.
But beyond that, it’s obvious that Trump himself is no Hitler or Mussolini. They’re very different people who took very different paths to their political success. Hitler was a failed art student who was briefly homeless as a young man before signing up to fight with the German army in WWI. Mussolini was a staunch socialist before taking his ultra-nationalist turn. Trump was a man born into extreme wealth who had a long life of fame and comfort before finally getting into politics. That’s not to say that there’s no concern about what Trump will eventually do, but that it’d be foolish to expect everything over the next few years to play out in a similar fashion to what happened in Europe nearly a century ago. Other extreme nationalist movements over the years have failed miserably in other places, including the United States. America’s democratic institutions, our wealthy urban areas, our open technology, and our culture of strident individualism gives us a better set of tools for taking on this kind of threat.
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The first full week of the Trump Administration has done nothing but reinforce all of this. They’ve signed an executive order to build a pointless wall along the Mexican border and threatened tariffs as a way to pay for it. Trump continues to insist without any evidence that vote tallies in areas with large numbers of minorities are illegitimate. They’re re-orienting the State Department to deal more with Islamic terrorism. He casually threatened on Twitter to send federal troops into Chicago to deal with homicides after being triggered by a Bill O’Reilly segment. They plan to publish a regular report of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, something the Nazi’s did with Jews in the 1930s. They continue to insist that the media is dishonest and untrustworthy, as they tell outlandish lies. And yesterday, Trump signed a ban on nationals from 7 predominantly Muslim countries entering the US, even those who’ve risked their lives for American troops. This should set off alarms for anyone with even a passing knowledge of history, not just of Fascism, but of any type of nationalist authoritarian rule.
The next few years are going to be rough, but America has defeated this shit before. MLK said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I picture it more as a slowly rising sine curve, and we’re on a downslope. A large segment of this country is willing to believe that up is down and black is white merely because they hear it from powerful people who share their deepest fears about our increasingly multicultural society. It’d be extremely naive to believe that there won’t be a lot of collateral damage from all this. There will be. The Trump Administration will go after the most marginalized first and dare us to speak up for them. This compels us to stand up and be counted, and stay firm in our affirmation of the American democratic values of pluralism and tolerance.
I believe these behaviors repeat in human history because they are woven into our nature. It is a cultural reaction by people who feel cornered, and, like any cornered animal, lash out. Pitiless and pointless cruelty are very much a part of this reaction. That’s why education is so important in the fight against neo-fascism. All Muslims are not out to get you. All black people do not commit crimes. Mexicans are people like you and I. We have our humanity in common. We all benefit from mutual respect. Classic American principles of fairness, justice and equality must prevail.
Thanks for the essay, Lee; good to see you’re back to doing your usual good work.
It’s important to note that everyone makes mistakes. The English (not the British!) voted to leave the EU, even though every last bit of self-interest argued for them to stay. I was in London during part of the campaign, and never once did I hear a coherent argument for leaving; it was all vague mutterings against what we Americans call tolerance and diversity.
For the second time in sixteen years, our antiquated Electoral College system has coughed up an over-privileged, under-performing, and obviously undeserving winner from a minority of votes cast nationwide. Like W. before him, he is a long-term failure at the very thing, business, that he’s supposed to be good at. Success, by definition, comes from work, and the entire appeal of W. and Trump is that they were not successful, yet had the ultimate prize handed to them anyway.
The decaying base of our Republican Party consists entirely of old white guys, bitterly resentful that their pale skin and Y chromosomes no longer grant every last one of the privileges they believe they were due at birth. Having lost a tiny fraction of their privileges, and watching America become more diverse, they blame the latter for the former. Even to them, it is obvious that if they lose all of their privilege and thus have to compete on equal terms with minorities and women, they will lose, and lose badly, and have no one but themselves to blame for it. Therefore, they have been delaying that inevitability by electing as many of their own heroes as they can.
They love hearing “their” “man” attack minorities for voter fraud; from their perspective, “those people” should never have had any rights in the first place, and certainly not any part of making laws which white men must obey. That these charges are bogus simply heightens the appeal; the entire point is that white guys should have the privilege of deciding who does and does not vote, whose rights do and do not matter. Blatant violations of the law to deny minority voting rights is, to these white males, a well-desired feature, not a bug, and when we get outraged over it, they get more satisfied. We need to put a stop to voter suppression, not simply complain about it.
We need to put a stop to voter suppression, not simply complain about it.
The way we put a stop to housing discrimination, school segregation, and workplace discrimination?
Hillbillies gonna hillbilly. Thats just who they are.
The way we put a stop to housing discrimination, school segregation, and workplace discrimination?
Yes. A combination of legal enforcement and public shaming.
Hillbillies gonna hillbilly. Thats just who they are.
Sure, but Chumped voters were a minority. We do not need to cede anything else to them.
Drumpf refused to mention “Jews” on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and “opted instead to talk about generic suffering” because “we are inclusive.”
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/28/.....index.html
“Trump continues to insist without any evidence that vote tallies in areas with large numbers of minorities are illegitimate.”
Personally, I think this is a pre-planned setup, not a knee-jerk reaction to Hillary’s popular vote victory. I foresee it being used as a vehicle to implement, on a nationwide basis, the voter suppression tactics that have been so successful in red states. It’s not hard for me to imagine the GOP Congress passing, and Trump signing, legislation affecting federal elections that will require photo ID everywhere, elevate the proof required for initial voter registration, ban early voting, require in-person voting at polling places, and criminalize voter registration drives by private groups. It might even set voting hours on election day so that workers whose employers won’t release them from work to vote during working hours will be forced to choice between voting or their jobs. And it will all be done in the name of “securing the vote” and “combating voting fraud” after an “investigation” finds that “massive voting fraud” robbed Trump of his rightful popular vote victory in the 2016 election and gave Democrats “dozens” of seats in Congress.
A federal judge has blocked portions of Trump’s immigrant ban, which the White House has clarified applies to green card holders.
Meanwhile, an Oscar-nominated director is blocked from entering the country, and you can bet we’re going to hear about that on Oscar night, followed by the WH whining about “Hollywood liberals.”
Rightwing Think Tank Tallies Terrorist Attacks From Banned Countries
“There have been zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries President Donald Trump targeted with immigration bans on Friday, further highlighting the needlessness and cruelty of the president’s executive order. Between 1975 and 2015, foreign nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen killed exactly zero Americans on U.S. soil, according to an analysis of terror attacks by the Cato Institute.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....i&
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Been plenty of attacks by Made In USA good ol’ boys, though.
I’m not into conspiracy theories. The fact a KGB general was found dead in his car on a Moscow street has nothing to do with his role in compiling the “Trump Dossier.” It’s a clearcut case of suicide. He obviously was despondent over not getting the promotion Putin promised him. It was also well known that he had a weak heart. There’s no story here. The Daily Mail isn’t a reliable source anyway.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....chief.html
Federal Fair Housing laws were enforced in King County before 2000? I guess Kemper Freeman didnt get the memo.
Im afraid that deeeep down in the heart of their heart, even well educated progressive, Gore-tex clad, war protesting scandanavian types are still scared shitless of the blacks, etc. Its just that theres only six or seven of them in the entire PNW. That makes it a whole lot easier to believe that “the problem” is under control. Especially if you misidentify the problem to begin with.
Once again Lee jumps the shark. Puddy has to clean up the sharknado.
His blanket portrayals of [some] Mexicans as criminals, [certain] black communities as dangerous hellscapes, and [radical Islamic Jihadist] Muslims as an existential threat to the west is dead on the money. [FIXED]
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” – Donald Trump
Sometimes you have to dig out the libtard links again… http://www.slate.com/articles/.....rwise.html
Radical Islam is found all over Google.
Puddy has delivered multiple times links that contain the correct Trump quotes. Unfortunately when you live on libtard sites, you eat libtard shit! Plain and simple!
Yet Tim Kaine was so false big time libtard leaning Politifact even had to correct the record!
http://www.politifact.com/virg.....icans-are/
This is why 210 counties left Obummer in 2012 and went for Trump in 2016 instead of #CrookedHillary.
FACTS, not a DUMMOCRETIN’S best friend!
That’s why DUMMOCRETIN are SCUM!
@9 Enjoying this weeks “National Enquirer” or the “Globe”? Two of America’s most respected newspapers. The Best! Truly great journalistic work ethic! Great Newspapers!
This story will be page one soon. Maybe already been on page two.
I always preferred “The Sun” Page two and three something that even the Enquirer couldn’t do in the US, though they wanted to.
The problem is that Hitler was a socialist. He believed in state control. So did Mussolini. They are as much on the left as folks like to try to say they were on the right. Of course you have shied away from fully describing them leaving out one important word: “Totalitarian.” Stalin fits the mold as does Mao. So is Trump a Stalin or a Mao?
Franco was also a nationalist, and much in the same mold so is Trump like Franco? Would that be such a bad thing if he were? If not for WWII Hitler today would be called Germany’s greatest leader and statesman. He’s be in all the Volkswagen adds. Mussolini would be a household name and you would want to buy the wine and olive oil from his home town. We of course say these guys are evil incarnate, but it was not always that way. There is no magical thing that keeps the US from becoming a totalitarian state, and the founders knew that. Just read Plato and the normal way for a democracy to end is to become a dictatorship or oligarchy. Story older than written history.
There is a guy in the world who is very like Hitler and that guy is the current ruler of North Korea. He’s the real deal. Does Trump shape up to that? Does he have the unlimited power of the state that Kim has? Not now anyway, and I doubt he will gain that amount of power. Though he’s going to do things folks on this list are not going to like, heck he’s doing things many of the Republicans he ran against would do or said they would do. So he’s doing what he said. He is spending political capital, and that may pay him dividends in getting more political capital, something our last president did not understand the concept of, and that is a lot of the Democrats were shellacked during both congressional mid term elections.
Of course one thing has escaped the American news cycle and that is the British Supreme court ruled parliament must be consulted. ID parliament must vote to take Britain out of the EU. So Brexit is not a certain thing, and I suspect Teresa May future as Prime Minister is not looking good, as her government may not survive as she has some upset back benchers. So a new government will have to implement Brexit, and it’s likely the new government that comes in will be against Brexit.
@ Hey there was never any real evidence of white slavery, but we still got the anti prostitute regime after that scare. The truth was a lot of white women were making a very good living by being prostitutes. Us men wanted our cut of the action so in come the anti prostitution acts to keep these uppity women from voting, and having disposable income like them doves of Wyoming. So why were the marches not about supporting the legalization of prostitution? True freedom for men and women who wish to work in the sex trade.
And are there women who want their pussy grabbed? Have they had a march yet?
Cartman for President 2019! He’s a celebrity! Foul mouthed! A wild one! The Democrats must grab this candidate by his balls! He will be the candidate able to beat the Trump at all costs! Join me now in the Cartman for the Democratic nomination for President! Our only way to save the nation! We much out trump Trump! This is a tried and true method of being more Republican than the Repbulicans! The Bill Clinton strategy,