Sadly, no. I think he’s speaking sincerely to the subset of people who think that following the Constitution is for girls. There’s this weird masculinity subtext (or text) to Trump’s campaign, where he keeps positioning himself as the only candidate with “balls,” where listening to cooler heads or admitting you don’t have all the answers is symbolic castration. So Trump doesn’t have to be good or right to stay popular with the people who like him, he has to be ballsy.
This is leading him in increasingly bizarre and Hitlery directions as the race goes on.
Plus, obviously, separate from my weird gender analysis, he’s a giant racist.
Please don’t compare people to Hitler if you aren’t Jewish or Romani. Jewish and Romani people have been begging everyone to stop making Holocaust and Hitler comparisons for years and no one ever listens or cares about our wishes. Please stop.
…I’m Jewish. I’m a *German* Jew.
And personally, I’m just fine with people making Hitler comparisons, because this isn’t using “Hitlery” to mean “really bad,” it’s using it to mean “rightist demagogue encouraging scapegoating of minority religions and ethnicities in an extremely familiar way.”
And because learning from history is important. Avoiding Holocaust comparisons doesn’t feel respectful to me, it feels like saying “all we know for sure is it’s wrong to commit genocide in Europe in the 1940s, all other genocidal proposals should be judged on their own merits.” You can’t commit to “never again ” unless you acknowledge that it can happen again.
I am the great grandchild of Hungarian Jews who fled the precursors to what would become the Holocaust, and I endorse anyone and everyone pointing out the similarities between Trump and Hitler.
I’m Jewish – my grandmother’s ancestors fled Russia in the late 1800s for England and the United States. Some of my grandfather’s immediate family and a few cousins and aunts and uncles escaped from Germany and Poland in the 1930s. My grandmother and I sat down to work on our family tree last year and entire branches just ended. Whole families cut off. Most without official dates of death or causes or locations. Just guesses. Practically a whole section of my family simply, devastatingly ended in the 1940s.
Please, please, please continue the accurate and appropriately horrifying and upsetting comparisons of Trump to Hitler. People should be upset by him. People absolutely should be worried. As much as I want to laugh at him and imagine he could never get elected, I remember my great uncle Sol telling my sister and me how people used to laugh about Hitler too. “It could never happen. He is a joke.”
It is a responsibility to remember and to guard against. It is a responsibility to look at the horrors that were committed, not by evil or by monsters, but by men. People did that. People who had families and laughed and drank and danced and celebrated and tried to wipe out entire segments of the population. Just people.
I know it’s upsetting to be reminded. I know it’s awful and horrible and painful to think about and hear about. But we have a responsibility to not let the world forget and to not let the world imagine it could never happen again.
Trump and his jingoism, his fascism, his preying and playing on fear and ignorance and his certainty that he is never, never wrong and will never back down is exactly why we say, “Never forget.”
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has called out Trump (and his ilk), saying American has a duty to Syrian refugees. The Anti-Defamation League says Trump’s plan to seal borders against Muslims is contrary to our nation’s deepest values.
These major Jewish organizations do *not* make these comparisons lightly. But this is the point of “Never forget” – so that we can see a catastrophe coming and make sure it never arrives.
It bothers me when people who are otherwise completely silent on antisemitism (which did not begin and end with Nazi Germany) use Hitler and the Holocaust as rhetorical props.
I don’t think comparisons between Hitler and Trump are baseless, though. The idea of Trump being voted into office is fucking terrifying.
“As much as I want to laugh at [Trump] and imagine he could never get elected, I remember my [German] great uncle Sol telling my sister and me how people used to laugh about Hitler too. “It could never happen. He is a joke.”
“I think [Trump]’s speaking sincerely to the subset of people who think that following the Constitution is for girls.”
A lot of people have been frivolously compared to Hitler and the Nazis (from “grammar nazi” to “feminazi”) but as a stronly identified and practicing Jew I am raising my voice with those who feel that Trump’s idiotic populism at a time of national shame & economic distress rings all too strongly of a similar time in Weimar Germany, that I’ve been raised to know a lot about.
And remember the Big Lie? (Hitler’s ‘lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”’) If you think we’re not seeing that right now, you’d better look harder.
I get not wanting to trivialise Hitler and the Nazi Party. It’s getting to the point, though, where people so much don’t want to trivialise the atrocities they committed that neither is allowed to be used as a comparative even when it’s true. And I’m sorry, but it is. As @bordertownseries has just said, the conditions in the US are not dissimilar to those in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. So here’s this guy who captures the support of a beaten-feeling segment of the population who refuse to accept that the world has moved on by blaming that national shame and economic distress on the people against whom he is personally bigoted. Instead of, y’know, supporting the country through its time of change and helping it reintegrate into global socio-economic union with some of the rest of the place. Germany, after WWI, there was a feeling of persecution, a “them against the world”. There’s a lot of folks in the US probably feeling the same way right now. And Trump’s taking advantage of that the same way Hitler did in his day. Giving this “subset of people who think that following the Constitution is for girls” a sense of power and purpose and someone to beat on…
Stop assuming that no one knows their history. Stop assuming that everyone is engaging in hyperbole whenever they compare anyone to Hitler. Sometimes, it’s actually apt. It is frighteningly apt here.
Exactly. Using Hitler as a frivolous comparison is one thing and it absolutely does trivialize one of the darkest chapters of human history. What people are saying about Trump is a different thing in that what he is saying about Muslims is almost word for word what Hitler said about Jews. The economic and political setting is frighteningly similar, as is the fact that he’s not just demonizing a religious group or even just one racial group just as Hitler targeted multiple groups and got lots of support from people who might not have supported him on a platform of Jews are the enemy alone. Trump scares the shit out of me as a historian and as a woman and as a person with Muslim friends who studied Middle Eastern cultures in college. This is not hyperbole. This is not a drill. This is Hitler 2.0 if we don’t stop him.
Meg's Mumbles 