Full disclosure about the title: I was born in 1944 and as such was born about two years before 1946 which is usually said to be the start of the Leading-Edge Boomer Generation (1946-1955) when soldiers, sailors, and airmen came home from the war and started their families. I call myself a member of this group since my father and mother got an early start.
Some of the 250 comments to Sunday’s story about Trump’s dictator tweet and if he’d encourage riots if he lost the election were about Hitler. They led me to write this article.
As I Jew I am especially sensitive when people who I know are anti-Trump and progressive want to ignore Trump and his GOP minion’s latest travesty. Thank goodness that doesn’t happen here on Daily Kos, however some people I interact with on a daily basis just are so burned out they can’t take it anymore and shush me when I try to talk about Trump’s latest outrage.
I want to shake them to open their eyes. “Don’t you see what he’s try to do?” I want to shout, “he’s a Hitler wannabe who is inciting hate among a large part of the population, and this is what der Führer did!”
Even as I write this I flash to the imagery burned into my mind from conversations at home up from growing up, and from seeing vintage photos and movie depictions of Jews being herded into cattle cars by the NAZIs as they were being told they were going to work camps.
Of course in reality resistance was futile, and when brave souls dared to stand up to the NAZI’s and risk and losing their own lives retribution was exacted on many other Jews as an object lesson.
After the war “never again” became a universal cautionary and inspirational phrase for Jews.
Whenever I interact with people who refuse to recognise the gravest of grave danger Trump presents to everyone who believes in what the Constitution represents I think of “never again.”
My father was an Army corpsman who served on hospital ships in the Atlantic. He told me how they’d go to sleep in temperate zones and wake up to see icebergs since the convoy was avoiding NAZI U-Boats overnight. I grew up hearing “never again” frequently in my home. Now we have a threat to the American of life which unless you are old enough to have lived through World War II you’ve never experienced it personally.
My grandfather lived with us and he was an air raid warden and had a white steel wide brimmed hat. I can still picture in my mind because it, like my father’s U.S. Army hat, was in our attic storeroom and I used to try them on even though the brims went over my eyes.
We should remind ourselves each and every day how Hitler came to power in the 1930’s and how he rallied people using fear and hate so they would eventually commit atrocities. Aside from his SS and gestapo who were already psychopaths he turned ordinary people into willing executioners which happens to be the title of a chilling book, “Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” They were instrumental in enabling Hitler to murder over six Jews and others. Hitler also had such a hold over the population that he convinced them that fighting a war where 70–85 million perished was a noble cause for the motherland.
Hitler’s rise was incremental and insidious and took a decade. It is incredibly different from Trump’s rise to power which happened in what seems like the blink of an eye from the time he descended down that escalator in Trump Tower to the election.
There are certainly many differences between Hitler and Trump.
The most glaring one is that while Hitler was ruthless he was not unhinged in any psychiatric sense of the word. Trump meets the definition of malignant narcissism plus has problems with impulse control, is paranoid, delusional and may have early dementia. He is the perfect manifestation of the Dark Triad (illustration) which combines extreme narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (someone who will use any means necessary to maintain political power);.
Hitler put together a cabal of ruthless sociopaths like Bormann, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, and Eichmann as he gained power and kept them. Trump put together a group of incompetents and a few referred to in the press as “the adults in the room” and lost most of them in his first year in office. (See “Trump’s ‘adults in the room’ are gone: Will other Republican leaders intervene to curb the president's worst instincts?” Think Progress, Dec. 21, 2018)
However he managed to keep his power because elected Republicans in the Senate and House enabled him to do so and despite the mountain of proof he’s leading the country down the path to authoritarianism they continue to support him.
Now we have a president who is assaulting the very rights spiritual people have to engage in whatever practices they find grounds them, gets them in touch with something greater than themselves, and/or gives them peace and solace.
The gestapo thugs aren’t knocking on our doors yet but we must never forget what happened in Germany and never let our guard down and turn a half-blind eye to what Trump and Trumpism represents to the very freedoms we cherish.