I had the same experience that Daniel Brown wrote about in his July 11 My Turn essay “Americans flirt with ‘Nazism-Lite’” in which he describes the “outrage” some Greenfield Recorder readers expressed about his comparison of President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. I received angry responses for the same comparison I made in a My Turn article entitled “It can happen here” that ran in the Recorder in March 2016.
I was prompted to write that submission after a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And then by being stunned by watching crowds of people waving signs and fervently cheering a loud, charismatic Trump while off to the side of the television screen protesters were being rounded up and dragged out of the arena.
I was stunned (and sickened) because it felt like a re-enactment of the wall-size photos I saw in the Holocaust Museum — photos of fresh-faced German youth eagerly saluting Hitler and videos of 100,000 German citizens jammed into an arena roaring “Heil (Hail) Hitler.” Meanwhile, people who were not of the Aryan race were being rounded up and worse.
Hitler promised to restore “respect” to the Germany that many of its citizens believed was unjustly taken from them by the Armistice marking the end of World War I. His message was that he would make Germany “great” again.
Trump, running for president at the time, is quoted as saying “The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it, they are all loving it. I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.”
Trump claims that he coined the phrase in March 2015. Besides ignoring the similarities to what Hitler had pronounced, Trump’s malleable grasp of facts ignores that Ronald Reagan used the same slogan 39 years ago in his 1980 campaign.
In one of the Holocaust Museum exhibits, I saw Hitler’s statement that “The Party is the Fuhrer. The Fuhrer is the Party.” What does that suggest to you about Trump and what used to be the Republican Party?
The core element in my pre-election 2016 My Turn column was the uncomfortable parallel comparisons between Hitler and Trump. It was my comparison that generated a number of angry emails to me.
Consider these comparisons:
Hitler: Anti-Jew.
Trump: Anti Muslim/Mexican/non-White.
Hitler: Blamed Jews for Germany’s problems.
Trump: Blames immigrants for America’s problems.
Hitler: Proposed mass deportations.
Trump: Proposes mass deportations.
Hitler: Used racism to rise to power.
Trump: Used racism to rise to power.
Hitler: Promised to make Germany great again.
Trump: Promises to make America great again.
The Trumpublican Party’s blatant xenophobia rises from the race baiting that was one result of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to attract support from Southern whites, who were angry about the advances made by the civil rights movement. Recall that Trump exploited this conservative message by repeating that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim.
Trump has said many bad things about the media since he started running for president two-plus years ago. He’s suggested that the press doesn’t really like America. He has said the media is the “enemy of the American people.” He has repeatedly called journalists the “most dishonest” people. And he has constantly characterized news stories he doesn’t like as “fake.”
But he’s never gone as far as he did at a White House-hosted “social media summit” populated by Trump supporters when he tweeted: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” On Twitter, he attacked the media by saying: “So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad, to me that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.”
Silencing the independent media is a tactic used by dictators to eliminate dissent.
At the same time, Trump has given voice to Americans who have been silently racist. A 2016 New York Times’ article reported exit poll data revealed that one in five Trump supporters opposed the Emancipation Proclamation; February 2016 poll data indicated 38 percent “of Trump voters say they wish the South had won the Civil War.”
Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote, “It happened. Therefore, it can happen again And it can happen everywhere.”
Looking at a list of current world dictators and authoritarian regimes validates Levi’s bleak forecast. As of today, there are 50 dictatorships in the world (19 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 12 in the Middle East and North Africa, 8 in Asia-Pacific, 7 in Eurasia, 3 in Americas and 1 in Europe).
Will America become number 51?
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls. He invites comments and dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.