SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER
Every so often, Trump and his minions do or say something particularly odious, and horrified observers bring up the N-word – Nazi, in this case.
I’ve written before about Godwin’s law. In 1990, at the dawn of the online era, a guy named Mike Godwin observed that the longer an internet argument went on, the more likely it was that one side would compare the other to Hitler. A corollary law said that invoking Hitler meant that you automatically lost the argument.
But then Donald Trump became president, and actual Nazis began to come out of the woodwork. Most Republican politicians looked the other way, and some (e.g. Iowa Senator Steve King this past week) actually seem to approve of the American neo-Nazi movement. Nazis and Klansmen marched and rioted in Charlottesville last August, and Trump allowed as how there were some good people in their ranks.
That was too much for Mike Godwin. He surfaced after all those years to declare that it was fine to call a Nazi a Nazi. He recently gave his blessing to using the term to describe Trump’s inhumane treatment of refugees and would-be immigrants from Latin America.
Donald Trump – his executive order to the contrary notwithstanding – is doubling down on demonizing Hispanic immigrants. “My people love it,” he told his advisors. And now we’re beginning to see comparisons of the tactics Trump uses to demonize Hispanics with those Hitler used to demonize Jews.
Greg Sargent, in the Washington Post on May 25, put it this way: “Dehumanizing rhetoric works in exactly this way: It slaps the dehumanizing slur on the least sympathetic subgroup and then conflates that subgroup with the larger group that is the real target, then piously feigns innocence of any intention to tag the slur on the larger group.”
The thugs of MS-13 have become the Republican dog-whistle term for Latinos. Trump and his supporters bring them up at every opportunity. And they claim that many of the refugees and immigrants they’ve rounded up – even babies, even people who were literally fleeing MS-13 – belong to the gang. Or if they’re not members now, they’ll certainly join when they get old enough.
Are there other similarities between Nazi strategies and Trump strategies? Why yes, there are.
Hitler and his crew convinced the German people that they were victims of a vast Jewish conspiracy. If you’re a victim, you have a right to fight back. Nowadays, Trump and other Republicans, despite being the party in power – holding the presidency, with majorities in both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court – love to portray themselves as victims. Witch hunt!
Both Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, adopted the Big Lie strategy. In MEIN KAMPF, Hitler claimed that German Jews used the technique to avoid being blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I. Sixteen years later, Goebbels accused Winston Churchill of using the Big Lie strategy: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.” Fake news!
It’s a tried and true strategy. Pre-emptively accuse your opponent of doing precisely what you’re doing yourself. Lying comes naturally to Donald Trump, and it didn’t take long for the entire GOP to embrace the practice as well.
Both of those strategies are working, at least with Trump’s base. They see bogeymen everywhere, coming to take their guns, to impose Sharia law, and to force them to get gay-married. Anything that contradicts their beliefs is fake news, promulgated by MSM, the Deep State, Democrats, the Clintons, George Soros, or their latest bogeyman du jour.
Here’s a quote from Timothy Snyder’s review of a book by Benjamin Hett, called THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: HITLER’S RISE TO POWER AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (link below): “Hett’s book is implicitly addressed to conservatives. Rather than asking how the left could have acted to stop Hitler, he closes his book by considering the German conservatives who aided Hitler’s rise…. The conclusions for conservatives of today emerge clearly: Do not break the rules that hold a republic together, because one day you will need order. And do not destroy the opponents who respect those rules, because one day you will miss them.”
I suppose I’m obliged to say that I don’t believe that Donald Trump is a literal Nazi. He knows little about history and has no coherent philosophy. The shrines he keeps shrines are dedicated to himself. I’m talking about similarities in strategy and tactics.
There’s one important difference between Germany in 1932-33 and America now. For the moment, at least, we still have free elections. But the 2018 mid-terms and the 2020 presidential elections are “use it or lose it” situations. Let’s not blow this.