(There will be a Part II to the review of potential Democratic Party candidates for president. It was to be next but this is immediately more pertinent to the next presidential election as well as the one Nov. 6.)
We are told always to be so very careful with analogies to Third Reich Germany. Time to abandon that rule. Today in this country it is the unvarnished, most compelling analogy because Trump has now given his new party a name. It is the right analogy to where Germany stood Jan. 30, 1933. I debated with myself whether to say it, but finally decided it must be said).
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Trump has now declared his own party, The Nationalist Party. People at his rallies are not Republicans. They are, like him, Nationalists, with an ideology based in national hatred aimed at others because that is what nationalism has been through history. What did the Afrikaners, who imposed Apartheid in South Africa for 50 years called their party – yes, the Nationalist Party.
To be a nationalist anywhere in any nation is to be a majoritarian hater and persecutor of others because of race, religion, gender or any other thing characteristic that enables the nationalist to make the other wear his/her difference and suffer for it in fear.
In declaring himself a Nationalist, Trump mocks those he calls “Globalists”, his code word for Black people, Latinos, Jews, Muslims — anyone who is not a white American, anyone who is not a Christian. Like Nazism, Trump’s American nationalism is first and foremost about and only about race and religion and bringing hated of other people to a boil.
Nationalism is an ism, something we have never, ever liked in this country and managed, until now, to avoid. Think about that.
NAZI is an acronym for the Nazionalizsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — the National Socialist German Workers Party: Put the absolute emphasis on Nationalist.
What is the difference between the dozens of lies Trump tells every day, every single day now to stir hate against anyone he chooses to identify as the other — and the lies told by Adolph Hitler first in “Mein Kampf”, in which in 1923, he proposed using gas to eliminate Jews, and then screamed out during his rallies across Germany over and over until it led to — until it led to the ovens? What is the difference here right now except so far for the element of degree?
Hitler became chancellor of Germany on Jan. 30,1933. If that day you had been able to show any German, even the most committed Nazi, a film documenting the ensuring 12 years; showing his or her nation on May 8, 1945 in ruins physically and morally, above all morally; showing the nightmare of the camps would he have believed it. Would he have believed from Germany’s own records that 12 million had died in the camps?
Would he have accepted that Germany, which with Austria and the Sudetenland had 80 million population in 1939, by May 1945 counted nearly 9 million military and civilian war dead?
Would that German have believed all this or told you it was crazy, you were crazy and it could never, would never happen, not in Germany, never in Germany? He would have said so no, we are not going there, who does such things, who would do such things, do not be absurd.
But they did. Deplorably, they followed and cheered for it like craven fools, like sheep until every last one of them shared the entire guilt of a nation.
Then, where are we going America?
Do Trump people have the stomach for where this heads, where it could go? And isn’t it a certainty we are on the way there already when thousands of children are living in concentration camps, locked away from their parents?
That is what those places are where our nation has locked up helpless children — THEY ARE CONCENTRATION CAMPS– in German Konzentrationslager.
Why “concentration”, why that word? Why that word?
You concentrate your enemies, especially the most vulnerable among them, in places from which there is no escape and no return; places where you can harm them and any who love them by putting them there and keeping them there and, in the end, if you choose, by …
Perhaps ultimately that Donald Trump is a degenerate physical and moral coward, and let us emphasize degenerate, stands in the way of next steps on that road. He may not have the stomach for it. But people close to him would take this to the limit.
Hitler did not say murder the Jews. He directed Heinrich Himmler, Herman Goering and Reinhard Heydrich to produce “a final solution” to the Jewish problem. Are there among the crowds at Trump rallies some of those the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning called “Ordinary Men”? Of course there are. Such horrors require human hands to make them happen.
There are among us, there are always, such “ordinary men” and women too. They are, for sure, in the crowds you see on television at Trump rallies. They don’t even know they would do such things because no one has yet asked, ordered or allowed them. to, but they would.
Make no mistake, Trump’s words, his lies, his racist rants at the rallies, expressed also in what one pundit is calling his “helicopter chats” — the designed media opportunities he gives lately as Marine One’s rotors whirl and whir to make reporters seem a shouting, unruly crowd of antagonists — they signal it is not a matter of whether it will start. It has.
Republicans face a stark choice in this election campaign and the next in 2020, for the present and the future. Will they follow this? Whether they rename their party Nationalist or not, can they live with it? Will they risk having to say one day, “And then they came for me”? Can they find a way to salvage their political party and bring it back to the sensible center right from raging out at the right edge of the world?
Think about what would have happened to me, to you, yes to a traditional Republican in Germany in 1935, for posting a handbill saying such things as these about that country and its then degenerate leader. How much longer do we have before we cannot speak, how much longer before they come for any of us?
Are we headed there? That there is even the question makes this one of the most profoundly terrible moments in our American experience.
If ever there has been a time in the history of the post-war United States to employ legitimately the forbidden German analogy it has arrived.
By declaring himself “a Nationalist” Donald Trump gives permission to the mob at Charlottesville to emerge into the open to join his racist crusade. He gives the mobs at his rallies permission to cross-over into Charlottesville — the antithesis of crossing over into Jordan.
If the shoe fits wear it. If the analogy fits, the United States must wear it.
It fits.
Peeling the Onion 
Good, Carl. Maybe condense as a NYTimes letter to ed?
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Thanks Alex, have to trim 400 words but they would never publish it.
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Alex, thanks again. So I will trim and sent it the Times tho I expect no response or publication. But nothing ventured…
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