Trump, Hitler, and equating things that are vaguely similar in some aspects

Hitler couldn’t have done what he did without the good Germans

Likewise, look at all the people who say they don’t support Trump, but don’t oppose him either. Neutrality is just acceptance of the regime.

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No. He was one of the politicians of the day to do so. He basically cribbed from the Americans.

And they current have the presidency…

Yep. The banality of evil.

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If you put them together like that, and overlay their individual traits with Trump, they do form something that looks quite a bit like the outline of an ideal fascist… not arguing with that.

“no contest”.

Semantics are kind of important?

If that means we need large, public expressions of protest, I totally agree!

But simply being angry isn’t going to cut it, either. Believe me I have tried to change things by being angry, when I was young. Essentially, I spent a decade of my life doing nothing much except being angry. It achieved very little, if anything at all, except coming that close to ruining my life. There’s reason to be angry, but anger alone achieves very little, at a very high cost

I don’t buy into this resignation about the democratic process. It sounds like they have won, and will hold on to that victory forever, and all that’s left is to take to the streets, and nothing else can be done about it. That’s too fatalistic for me. Taking to the streets can be a powerful thing, but if you have nothing else, it’s not exactly a position of strength. There’s still a democratic process and a legal framework, and even though they’re under attack, they are not completely broken yet, and just giving up on them IMHO is a grave mistake.

I’m not resigned. I’m just not ignoring reality.

We did not have a meaningful democracy until the 1960s. And there are people who are (rather successfully) working to dismantle that. We can still save it, but not if we ignoring what is happening around us, and assume that the courts or the democratic party will save us.

That has always been a necessary component to ensuring greater freedom. That’s how we got an 8 hour work day, how women won the right to vote, and how racial minorities fought for full citizenship. It’s not “resigned” to push back against the people feverishly working to dismantle every hard fought bit of progress. No one is saying “don’t vote” or riot. Democracy isn’t just about going to the polls, it’s about actions that support the right to vote.

See above, and all the gerrymandering, and voter ID laws, and the new Jim Crow.

Mitch McConnell and the current president have been putting in their judges that have very conservative views of such things. There is a reason for that.

That doesn’t mean that we should only vote and expect things to work out, considering the very real attacks on those processes that are going on.

No one is doing that.

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Recognizing the grave, existential threat that currently faces our country is not the same as “giving up.” I just don’t think we should sugar-coat it: the fascists aren’t just at the gates, they’ve already pushed their way in and have started tearing up the place.

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rupaul-this

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IIRC “immigration judges” are not part of the judicial branch, they actually work for the Justice Department? So this isn’t lawyers foolishly insulting a judge, this is a boss harassing their employees?

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That sounds accurate. Also, it just shows how shot through with white supremacy some parts of the executive branch are getting. Another reason to be concerned about a fascist turn.

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So when we do comparative dicatorology, why not include this guy?

                    Caesar               Hitler             Trump
                    ------------------   -------------      ----------
title:              dictator for life    the Leader         POTUS
medium:             triumphs             radio              Twitter
financiers:         inherited; imperial  industrialists;    inherited;
                      looting              public funds       conservative donors                                                 
diet:               lavish for the day   vegetarian         McDonald's
sex life:           tactical             disturbed          purchased, offensive
drug:               wine                 Speed              Viagra
arch nemesis:       Pompey               Russian climate    reading, salads, Obama
military service:   highly successful    jumped all ranks   bone spurs
weakness:           vanity               bad listener       affluenza
victims:            many thousands       many millions      do we count people dying from lack of insurance?
supporting class:   Plebeians; soldiers  petty bourgeoisie  weird alliance of the 1% and parts of the working class?
ousted:             stabbed              sore loser         tbd.




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broadchurch-sad|nullxnull

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Ultimately the meta here is … poor. This discussion [is Trump “enough like Hitler” to say he is “like Hitler”] isn’t meaningfully advancing the goal of getting Trump out of office, yet I’m pretty sure 100% of the participants in this topic share that goal.

I’d say discussions like this tend to turn allies against each other, so they actually work for Trump. Think on that. Focus on the larger goal.

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I am restraining myself from posting any quibbles about whether Hitler was vegetarian or not

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The point is never about a one to one comparison of trump and hitler, it was about whether or not the historical back ground that led to events like the holocaust could possibly be repeated in the modern age to some similar effect. The point was to head it off, not wait until we see the exact same things we saw in nazi germany in the 1930s. Because we don’t live in the 1930s, though we’re still living in the shadow of those years…

But the answer to that question is a resounding yes they can rhyme, if not repeat, because human beings (the white, eurocentric establishment) have not yet learned the dehumanizing your fellow human beings is a dangerous game that can easily lead to death of people. In the case of the US, it already has. Children have been abused and died, in fact, because people insist that other people fleeing violence and oppression are here to “take our jobs” or rather the jobs of “good” white people. We still live in a world that assumes that race is real, that women are inferior, that the LBGQT+ community are abnormal, and that rich white men’s value are worth more than the teen girls they rape. As long as we live in that world, some “well meaning” people will not blame the ideology but some useful scapegoat.

Meanwhile, our planet is on fire and the two powers loaded with nuclear weapons are testing again.

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It’s really hard to take this seriously, Trump is not Hitler, but he’s definitely taking more than a few pages from his playbook.

I agree, especially when you say “anything”

Trump isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom, He will be out of office one day, the people who voted for him will still be voting. You’re off the mark when you talk about him as the problem. Meanwhile, his rhetoric, actions and policies makes one recall the Nazis all too easily.

This is just splitting hairs.

Edit: Formatting.

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Well… I think I did learn something here. Others may have benefited less, except maybe gathered that some people do oppose Trump, but have weird ideas about him? idk.

Any ideas on why Trump’s approval rating, besides averaging as the lowest ever recorded - is also the most stable? Most presidents show a steady decline over four years, many have wild swings around scandals or other events - Trump seems almost fine-tuned to 40% approval since he took office…

… at least so far. These guys seem optimistic that he’s finally bound to go down:

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I’m sorry…but you think the folks who have responded in this thread have weird ideas about Nostradumbass; as opposed to the weird way the fuck outside of reality ideas that he has about others?!

He is a god damn menace to the world, any “leader” of his ilk is. And I think @Mindysan33 really summed it up perfectly by stating…

In case that is too many characters for someone to comprehend…in short: don’t make the mistakes of the past. And if you do not see the parallels of Hitler and Nostradumbass, then you are either willingly playing dumb to it or actually on his side. Either way it is a bad faith argument on your part.

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Ah, no. I was talking about myself there. I can do that at length, don’t get me started.

Sigh… I think talking about Agent Orange is a good thing, but I’m not sure how to do that when every disagreement is confused with being an accomplice, that’s just dumb.

I generally agree with this sentiment, but I’ll also say that he seems to be working on some serious cult of personality bullshit. That was always possibility in the American system, especially since the media age.

Right? Or similar mistakes. No one expects things to look exactly the same, but that should not make us rest easy. We have in fact failed over and over again since 1945.

https://www.ajourneyintotheholocaust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Genocides_Chart_9-2-2014.html

We are doing it again on the southern border, just assuming that it will be alright, because we supposedly have laws in place - but everything going on is happening via legal means (and debates over those). So, again, the point is not to wait for a guy with a snazzy uniform and a funny mustache to take dictatorial powers in America. It’s to actually look at processes unfolding, to make some educated guesses about where that can wind up, and then take measures to stop it, via democratic processes, via protest movements, via whatever means we need to use.

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