This Holocaust
Remembrance Day, let’s STOP COMPARING DONALD TRUMP TO HITLER!
We keep doing
this. Every politician that we don’t like is inevitably equated with Hitler.
This reductio ad Hitlerum kind of
minimizes the horribleness of what Hitler was, and I know Trump is pretty
terrible, but he’s not Hitler.
I mean, sure,
he galvanized his base by fomenting fear of a minority group wresting jobs from
erstwhile hard working Americans, just like Hitler did in demonizing Jews, but
still, Trump isn’t like Hitler.
And yes, he
made it seem like Muslim immigrants were a threat to national security, even
though Muslim immigrants were refugees of war themselves, which is something
Hitler did to Eastern European immigrants just looking for work, but come on!
Yeah, he speaks
of “religious freedom” as a cover to justify people discriminating against
LGBTQ+ people, and Hitler DID use Christianity as a cudgel, even having “Gott
mit uns” (“God with Us) emblazoned on Nazi uniform belts, but it’s not quite
the same, right?
All right, He
also signed an executive order to publish crimes committed by immigrants on a
weekly basis, which is a policy that Nazi Germany did to make Jews look more
prone to crime before floating the whole concentration camp thing, but that’s
just coincidence!
Ok, ok, Trump
keeps hammering at journalism, and keeps depicting media that says things he
doesn’t like as purveyors of false propaganda, all while pushing his own false
propaganda. And journalists who covered dissent during the inauguration were
jailed and are facing felony charges. Hitler was a pro at false propaganda and
silencing journalists he didn’t like, but that’s where the comparison ends!
Sure, you can
point to all the times Trump outright lied to the media, or claimed something
to be true even though evidence to the contrary is easily accessible and in
before everyone’s eyes, or retweeted grotesquely racist charts to demonize
others, and when he was questioned on it, he’d plead ignorance or or gloss over
it or just not acknowledge said evidence. It is kind of like when Berlin hosted
the Olympics, and Owens dominated, blowing away Hitler’s talk of white people
being superior in every way, but come on! Trump hasn’t resided while there was
an Olympic event yet!
Except…Trump’s
administration DID put a gag order on the government’s scientists and
government workers, ordering them to not tweet, publish reports, or talk to the
public in any way without his administration’s review and approval, especially
if their research goes against an idea that he has. As a practice, Nazi Germany
silenced its scientists and thinkers quite brutally for the same reason. But, I
mean, that can be seen in a LOT of countries!
So hate crimes
spiked the day after the election, and throughout the year, hate crimes have
gone up since his announcement that he was running. He has said that he would
“restore law and order” by reinstating Stop and Frisk and using federal agents
to take over a city. Yes, that is exactly like the type of rhetoric that Hitler
used to justify over-policing Jewish neighborhoods and arresting non-whites and
immigrants. But…but…
Shit…This isn’t
looking good…
OK, maybe there
ARE a lot of comparisons to Hitler that can be made, BUT…
What about all
the times the American government demonized indigenous people, or Mexican
immigrants, or WWI and WWII refugees, or Japanese people?
The Chinese
were the first immigrants that were LEGALLY banned from entering the country,
writ into law. In fact, add-ons were later put to bar Chinese people who LEFT
the US temporarily to return. So families were split apart based on government
xenophobia. China was not a military or terrorist threat in any way. The
Chinese who came here just wanted to work and get attain a better life! Sound
familiar?
Our economy was
built on the backs of people who we constitutionally deemed inferior and prone
to lechery and crime! Black people were treated like animals and forced to work
and mate like workhorses, and thanks to them, we became a superpower. The side
effect is that we’re stereotyped as lecherous war-beasts, regularly compared to
gorillas, chimpanzees, and other dark colored animals who can kill humans. And
if you were to believe Birth of a Nation
(the rapey one, not the rapey one), you’d
think that black people are going to corrupt every precious white woman and
child and then take over the entire nation! Yes, Jewish people were depicted as
controlling everything, because they usually administered banks, but that is
because back in the day, Catholics were doctrinally prohibited from taking
advantage of people from loans, and working at a bank was dangerously close to
that! Remember Circle 7 of Dante’s Inferno, where the usurers were? So the Jews
were demonized for doing work that others just would not do and then getting
shit for it, something the US had been doing since even before we were the US.
Yes, Hitler was
a master of propaganda that spewed lies throughout Germany and beyond, but we
went into the Spanish-American War based on actual fake news! That was in the
1898. In fact, we made caricatures of nearly every single person who wasn’t
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The “lazy Mexican” schtick was us. We also used
fake news, propaganda, fake science, and twisted religion to excuse taking over
Guam, the Philipines, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, yet still not
afford them all the rights of American citizens, and we used doublespeak so
that we can get away with not calling them what they are: colonies. But if we’re
talking just war propaganda...
We used
anti-Japanese propaganda to justify putting Japanese citizens in camps, and we
used all sorts of pseudoscience justify forcing hard work on black slaves and
Mexican workers, all while curtailing their freedom because they were
“dangerous”. It helped to depict them as less-than human so that we could
experiment on them without their permission.
We used twisted
interpretations of religion to justify killing and/or forcibly relocating
entire Native American nations, invading and burning down villages. We haven’t
yet had a Kristalnacht moment under Trump, but we have plenty of times when
invading Native homes and shipping them somewhere so that we could take over
their land. “Ledernacht” predates Kristalnacht. Given that officials are bulldozing
and burning tents and tipis at Standing Rock, we’re still doing it. The Germans
stopped.
See? Trump
isn’t like Hitler and Nazi Germany! Trump is just being American AF. America
has just had more times that we were like Hitler and Nazi Germany than we care
to admit! He’s making America “great” again by reliving the darkest stains in
our history of treating people like shit...so the entire history of the US. So let’s
stop pretending we were always angels!
…Let’s also use
our energy to fight against this fucktrumpetry so that we can be even less like
Nazi Germany or Old America than ever before.
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