Godwin’s Law is one of those Internet ‘rules’ which states the first person to compare someone or something to Hitler in a discussion/argument/flame war loses. Preventing Hitler abuse is probably a good thing in some contexts, but what happens when the comparison is apt? If you’re trying to learn from history, for example?
Hitler provides some useful lessons — for those willing to face up to them.
He showed you can take a people with a long history of intellectual achievement and culture, and get them to support barbaric acts while embracing ignorance. You can take a country where religion has a strong history, including a notable reform movement, and still get it to sink to depths of unspeakable moral depravity.
He showed you can pervert national pride into a toxic brew of jingoism for political gain. You can capitalize on dissatisfaction with government and other institutions to undermine them — especially if you supply the populace with scapegoats to blame for that and all the other ills of society. You can make control of information into a weapon, and create a belief system of ‘facts’ to support your actions. You can turn the rule of law into rule by might. You can convert legitimate popular dissatisfaction with government into mob rule.
Germany wasn’t one of ‘those countries’ where the people were barely ‘civilized’. This wasn’t a case of a society made up of poorly educated people barely out of serfdom. This was in the heart of the ‘superior’ northern European white race’s homelands.
And if Hitler could do it in Germany, where can’t you do it? The problem of Hitler is one all people should ask: how do people of good will allow such things to come to pass?
Sure, Hitler has much to answer for. Converting a semi-functioning democracy into an authoritarian regime, promoting a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense about race, engaging in territorial conquest as a prelude to larger conflict, targeting millions of people for death on the basis of religion and race, perfecting the Big Lie technique as a means to power, and so on. But he didn’t do it alone.
To use the terminology of our current president*, Hitler was a bad dude with a lot of bad dudes around him. Terrible, terrible people. But where did they come from?
If you’re wondering where the people who could make that kind of thing happen are to be found, you probably know them already. They’re your co-workers, your neighbors — even family members. We all carry the potential for monstrous acts — all we need is the right context to act on them.
Looking at the sweeps by ICE that are ripping families apart and dehumanizing people, Tom Sullivan points out some uncomfortable facts.
The Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and others show many quite ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations will follow instructions from an authority figure even if it means harming another, even cruelly. Ask Pfc. Lynndie England. Her experience was no experiment. She went to prison for what Rush Limbaugh brushed off as no worse than fraternity hazing. Others who were as guilty and higher up the chain of command went free. Federal employees as well as state and local ones should take a lesson.
We suppress this awareness because it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge it. We tell ourselves America is exceptional, yet our founding fathers didn’t think so.
They purposefully built a government with checks and balances because they’d experienced first hand what unchecked power could do — and they’d known it was people like themselves who had exercised it. They were aware that it was a gamble, that it might fail. And perhaps it is failing.
What Hitler did can be done here. It is being done here. Donald Trump is the beneficiary of decades of attacks on the fundamental principles of our government by movement conservatives who don’t want to govern by the consent of the governed — they want to rule and the public be damned.
When Trump attacks the press, when he demonizes individuals, when he attacks entire groups and peoples — he’s building on decades of the Republican politics of division, destruction, and resentment. When he seeks to overturn the rule of law, he’s attacking the foundations of our government, and he’s riding on decades of conservative claptrap about “activist judges”. If Trump was removed from office tomorrow, the Republican Party would have no shortage of people ready to step into his shoes. The only exceptional thing about Donald Trump is his ability to get people to look to him as a ‘strong leader’.
There are far too many people looking to fall in line behind any strong man who promises to protect them from a world that frightens, gives them enemies to hate and blame for their misfortunes, and tells them they’re right to think, feel, and act the way they do. All they have to give him is… everything. Follow orders, don’t question him, and do not think for themselves. The world becomes a simple place.
To be that kind of leader, you need have no conscience, no empathy, no morality. You just need to enjoy manipulating other people and exercising power.
There’s no mystery about this. We like to tell ourselves it can’t happen here, we’re not like that — but the truth is out there. Trump didn’t lie when he told Bill O’Reilly America is not so innocent. America after all is the country that was built on slavery and is still dealing with racism, largely annihilated the native populations, fought a bloody civil war, has had its share of adventures in imperialism, gave the world the KKK, and more. The “Shining City on a Hill” has some bad neighborhoods we don’t like to talk about. The difference is Trump believes that’s something that empowers him, while normal people are troubled by it.
I’m going to break this off here — there’s a lot to think about, and a lot more to say. I’m going to continue this with some resource material to enable better understanding of what we’re dealing with. There’s been some very important research into who people like Donald Trump are, and how they rise to power. I’ll follow up tomorrow with some key links in the second part of this: America and the F Word - Fascism.