Nazis sure don’t like being called Nazis.
Transcript.
Man: Nazi.
SS: Excuse me!? Did you just call me a Nazi?
Man: Well, you are one.
SS: Gross impertinence! Just because I’m in the NSDAP and SS it doesn’t make me a Nazi. Most likely I’m also extreme right-wing or what?
Man: Yes. What else could you be?
SS: Maybe I’m a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination, But I’m not right-wing. And above all I’m not a Nazi. Hey, you there? Do I look like a Nazi?
Brownshirt: No. I wouldn’t say so.
SS: See? He must be a Nazi too then, right? Nazis, Nazis, Nazis… Nazis everywhere. When you’re running out of arguments it’s easy to play the Nazi card.
Man: That has nothing to do with a Nazi card.
SS: That makes life very easy for you! Just because someone doesn’t share the mainstream opinion he isn’t automatically a Nazi.
Man: But being a Nazi already is mainstream. You National Socialists already have the power.
SS: Oh, I forgot. In your world everyone is a Nazi. The Fuhrer probably is a Nazi too, right?
Man: Yes…!?
SS: That’s enough! Insulting the Fuhrer. Come along!
Man: But that’s…
SS: Yes, yes. I know. “Nazi methods”.
Video shared via Liam Hogan, a Irish librarian and historian
Today’s Nazis do not like being called Nazis either, but yet they are espousing the same views and acting upon them. “The white nationalist ideas of Madison Grant influenced Congress in the 1920s, leaders in Nazi Germany, and members of the Trump administration,” NPR noted.
It’s been pretty obvious since Trump began his his campaign that he was using the Nazi playbook from his white supremacists campaign to attacks on the press to NDAs and loyalty oaths:
Donald Trump dismissed comparisons of his use of loyalty oaths during recent campaign rallies to Nazi Germany and other dark chapters of history on Tuesday as "ridiculous."
"I mean, we’re having such a great time," Trump told NBC's "Today" in a pre-primary telephone interview.
Nazis rebranded themselves as the “alt-right” and had a tiki-torchlit Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, a woman protesting the Nazis, was murdered by a Nazi driving his car into a crowd. Trump described the Nazis gathered in the college town as “fine people,” just don’t lump them in with the Nazis.
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
Reporter: "George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same."
Trump: "George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?"
Reporter: "I do love Thomas Jefferson."
Trump: "Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
"Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group."
Trump is still trying to “spin” this as not giving his support to Nazis. From the Washington Post:
Hours after Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by attacking … Trump for his response to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the president began to spin a yarn.
The August 2017 demonstration was actually just a group of “neighborhood” folks from the local University of Virginia community who simply “wanted to protest the fact that they want to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin in late April.
Trump himself had merely been supporting those same purportedly peaceful protesters when he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he continued.
In fact, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — which left one woman dead and 19 injured — was explicitly organized by a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as a celebration of white nationalism. The official event was presaged by a nighttime parade in which rallygoers held tiki torches aloft while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil,” a reference to a nationalist slogan used in Nazi Germany.
“It is a misrepresentation of what was happening in Charlottesville to say it was a statue protest that went wrong,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who lives in Charlottesville and attended the rally as an observer. “Anyone who was there that day would have walked into a park of people waving Nazi flags and people who were Klansmen. It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”
Even Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of democracy, attempted to distance himself from Trump, but while he says he’s against Nazis, he still supports his Nazi leader and his party’s Nazi’s policies.
“The white supremacist, KKK, and neo-nazi groups who brought hatred and violence to Charlottesville are now planning a rally in Lexington. Their messages of hate and bigotry are not welcome in Kentucky and should not be welcome anywhere in America.
“We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis, and those who espouse their views are not supporters of American ideals and freedoms. We all have a responsibility to stand against hate and violence, wherever it raises its evil head.”
Social media platforms won’t ban Nazis and other white supremacists, because it would also mean banning Republicans. Motherboard reported:
…Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.
These white supremacists are today’s Republicans. For example, the Republicans of Kootenai County, Idaho “unanimously passed a resolution Thursday urging the federal government to reinstate travel privileges for a leader of an Austrian nationalist movement who planned to marry his fiancée, an alt-right YouTube pundit, in Idaho this summer.”
And then there were actual Nazis, carrying actual nazi flags interrupted a Holocaust Memorial Event. Some them were the same neo-Nazis, Trump described as “Jewish groups” when demanded Rep. Ilhan Omar be unseated from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Trump has been following pages from the Nazi playbook with his scapegoating migrants and rounding them up in detention camps. Instead of trains to move people from camp to camp, he’s using planes. The end game is still the same.
Trump ordered the U.S. military to build six detention camps near border for migrants to house 7,500 people. Trump’s own policies are creating a humanitarian crisis where he separates children from their families. Zero tolerance is what the Nazis call this.
Tornillo's so-called "tent city" was designed to temporarily house 450 children under the care of Health and Human Services in June, when Trump's zero tolerance policy separated over 2,500 migrant children from their parents. Now, after the vast majority of those children have been reunited, the facility still holds 1,500 children, all of whom crossed without parents. Tornillo's tent city can now hold 3,800 children and plans to stay open until the end of the year or longer if necessary.
U.S. officials aren't required to disclose such deaths to the public, and as late as Wednesday afternoon, members of the House Homeland Security Committee bombarded acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan with questions about the department's child detention policies on the assumption that five children had died.
"Congress has been more than willing to provide resources and to work with you, Mr. Secretary, to address the security and humanitarian concerns, and, at this point, with five children dead and 5,000 separated from their families, this is intentional," Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., told McAleenan on Wednesday.
McAleenan replied, "That's an appalling accusation. Our men and women fight hard to protect people in our custody every single day."
Republicans sure take offense at being called out for being Nazis.
Trump and his fellow Republicans want these children to die. Separating children from their families intentionally hurts them. Claire Boren, an 80 year old Holocaust survivor, said splitting families at US-Mexico border 'hits home for me':
“What made it possible for me to survive was I was always with my mother — I never let go of her,” she said.
“Now you read about the U.S. government separating mothers and children (at the Mexican border). Oh, how that hits home for me. I can’t imagine a child ripped away from their mother.”
It’s a point she’ll make to students who see her artwork.
“I don’t want to just tell a terrible story,” she said. “I want them to take this and learn something from it. Something about justice.”
Poetic justice would be calling Republicans the Nazis that the are. Real justice would mean long prison sentences for these Nazis now in charge.