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Godwin Says...

They aren’t Nazis though. What they are doing is refusing entry into the US to people seeking refuge or asylum. These policies aren’t compassionate and are isolationist. Granted, I’m not certain when immigrants have ever been loved in this country. The hypocrisy is quite damning .
 
For an actual comparison, Dismal, let’s turn instead to an expert on Hitler:

Because I’d written a book called Explaining Hitler several editors had asked me, during the campaign, to see what could be said on the subject.

Until the morning after the election I had declined them. While Trump’s crusade had at times been malign, as had his vociferous supporters, he and they did not seem bent on genocide. He did not seem bent on anything but hideous, hurtful simplemindedness — a childishly vindictive buffoon trailing racist followers whose existence he had mainstreamed. When I say followers I’m thinking about the perpetrators of violence against women outlined by New York Magazine who punched women in the face and shouted racist slurs at them. Those supporters. These are the people Trump has dragged into the mainstream, and as my friend Michael Hirschorn pointed out, their hatefulness will no longer find the Obama Justice Department standing in their way.

Bad enough, but genocide is almost by definition beyond comparison with “normal” politics and everyday thuggish behavior, and to compare Trump’s feckless racism and compulsive lying was inevitably to trivialize Hitler’s crime and the victims of genocide.

But after the election, things changed. Now Trump and his minions are in the driver’s seat, attempting to pose as respectable participants in American politics, when their views come out of a playbook written in German. Now is the time for a much closer inspection of the tactics and strategy that brought off this spectacular distortion of American values.

What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought. It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media. And they’re not joking. If you’d received the threatening words and pictures I did during the campaign (one Tweet simply read “I gas Jews”), as did so many Jewish reporters and people of color, the sick bloodthirsty lust to terrify is unmistakably sincere. The playbook is Mein Kampf.

I came to this conclusion in a roundabout way. The story of Hitler’s relation to the media begins with a strange episode in Hitler’s rise to power, a clash between him and the press that looked like it might contribute to the end of his political career. But alas, it did not. In fact, it set him up for the struggle that would later bring him to power.

It was one of the crucial, almost forgotten incidents in the dark decades before World War II — the November 1923 Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” Hitler’s violent attempt to take over all of south Germany in preparation for a strike against Berlin.
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After the 1923 fiasco, Hitler served nine months of a five-year sentence for rebellion and pledged to stay out of politics. But his parliamentary party didn’t quit, and eventually Hitler had demonstrated enough neutral behavior (discounting the murders committed by the Nazi death squads not directly connected to him) that he was allowed to campaign again. Was it a mistake? Had he learned a lesson? As it turned out, Hitler used the tactics of bluff masterfully, at times giving the impression of being a feckless Chaplinesque clown, at other times a sleeping serpent, at others yet a trustworthy statesman. The Weimar establishment didn’t know what to do, so they pretended this was normal. They “normalized” him.

And so they allowed him and his party back onto the electoral lists, the beginning of the end. Democracy destroying itself democratically. By November 1932, his party had become the largest faction in the Reichstag, though not a majority. After that election though, it looked as if he’d passed his peak: his total vote had gone down. It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing him in and “normalizing” him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement.

Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed. As Sir Richard Evans, the leading British historian of the period has proven at painstaking length, the Reichstag Fire was not a Hitler plan to excuse a takeover through martial law. It had indeed been the work of a Dutch man, Marinus van der Lubbe. But Hitler, ruthlessly and savagely, took advantage of it, instituting martial law and crushing electoral democracy. There would have been another excuse. Once in power Hitler was going to go on maximizing it until the “final solution.”

And the Munich Post never stopped reporting on this ultimate aim and on Hitler’s use of murder, decrying any attempts to “normalize” the tyrant. They kept fighting until two months after his January takeover. In March 1933, when the Nazis ruled the media and the Post was “legally” shut down. There had been a few other brave journalistic souls — Konrad Heiden, Fritz Gerlich. But swiftly, oh so swiftly, the order of the day became “gleichschaltung” — “realignment,” or forced conformity, savage normalization. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists made it their crusade to get the German body politic “adjusted” to the new reign of terror. “Gleichschaltung” meant normalize or else.

Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late. At first, he pledged no territorial demands. Then he quietly rolled his tanks into the Rhineland. He had no designs on Czechoslovakia — just the Sudetenland, because so many of its German-born citizens were begging him to help shelter them from persecution. But soon came the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After Czechoslovakia, he’d be satisfied. Europe could return to normal. Lie!

There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.

And look where it got us. Perhaps we should have seen it — the way Trump’s outrageous conduct and shamelessly lying mouth seemed so ridiculous we wouldn’t have to take him seriously. Until we did.

Give him the harmless attention he seems to crave and he’ll no longer be a nuisance. The whole thing would be childish if it didn’t seem sinister in retrospect. It recalled to me a conversation I had with Alan Bullock (1914-2004), Oxford University historian and author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first substantive biography of the dictator.

Bullock, then nearing 80, told me how students of Hitler were often misled to focus on his vicious anti-Semitism. In fact, Bullock had initially argued, it was likely he had believed in nothing and just used the Jew-hatred to advance his cause with the nitwit thug segment of the German people. Just as Trump appealed to his nitwit thug racist, anti-Semite followers. Hitler was a “mountebank,” Bullock exclaimed, a con man who played the Jewish card, using it to whip up rowdy enthusiasm and give the impression of a movement. This is the comparison I’d been seeking.

Bullock, as I’ve written, would later change his mind to incorporate the vision of Hitler offered by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who found the anti-Semitic ideology to be primus inter pares in Hitler’s fevered brain. Be that as it may, he saw that this tactic of playing the fool, the Chaplinesque clown, had worked over and over again, worked like a charm. It kept the West off balance. They consistently underestimated him and were divided over his plans (“what does Hitler really want?”). The tactic became irresistible, as repeated always success does.

Few took Hitler seriously, and before anyone knew it, he had gathered up the nations of Europe like playing cards.

Cut to the current election. We had heard allegations that Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, but somehow we normalized that. We didn’t take him seriously because of all the outrageous, clownish acts and gaffes we thought would cause him to drop out of the race. Except these gaffes were designed to distract. This was his secret strategy, the essence of his success — you can’t take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all. And the tactics worked. Trump was not taken seriously, which allowed him to slip by the normal standards for an American candidate. The mountebank won. Again.

Suddenly, after the inconceivable (and, we are now beginning to realize, suspicious) Trump victory, the nation was forced to contend with what it would mean, whether the “alt-right” was a true threat or a joke to be tolerated. Did it matter that Trump had opened up a sewer pipe of racial hatred? Once again, normalization was the buzzword.

And I remembered the Munich Post, defending Weimar Germany. I reflected on how fragile democratic institutions could be in the face of organized hatred. Hitler had been tricky about his plans until he got the position and the power to enact them. Trump had been tricky, neither accepting nor rejecting the endorsement of KKK leader David Duke. David Duke! The KKK! In this century! He claimed he didn’t know who he was. He couldn’t be disqualified because of someone he didn’t know. That’s where we all went wrong, thinking he was stupid and outrageous, not canny and savvy and able to play the media like Paganini. The election demonstrated the weakness of a weak democracy, where basic liberties could be abolished by demagoguery and voter suppression.
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And it goes much deeper from there.
 
Koyaanisqatsi said:
“Actual” as in “not selectively inclusive propaganda.”
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Propaganda? What in there is propaganda? And what does that have to do with whether it is an "actual" comparison?

Do you understand what the words "propaganda" and "comparison" mean?

What are you some kind of shithead comparison Nazi?
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What are you, five?
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At least I'm not a shithead comparison Nazi.
 
dismal said:
Propaganda? What in there is propaganda? And what does that have to do with whether it is an "actual" comparison?

Do you understand what the words "propaganda" and "comparison" mean?

What are you, five?
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At least I'm not a shithead comparison Nazi.
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Done now? Or do you still need to stamp your little feet around, becuase all that’s going to happen to this pointless little derail attempt of yours is elsewhere.
 
Koyaanisqatsi said:
dismal said:
Propaganda? What in there is propaganda? And what does that have to do with whether it is an "actual" comparison?

Do you understand what the words "propaganda" and "comparison" mean?

What are you, five?
Click to expand...

At least I'm not a shithead comparison Nazi.
Click to expand...

Done now? Or do you still need to stamp your little feet around?
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Better than being a goosestepping Nazi, I guess.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
dismal said:
OK, here is a good comparison:

https://thewriterinblack.com/2018/01/19/trump-vs-hitler-a-1-year-retrospective/
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That's not a good comparison.
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Well, sure, it leaves out the partitioning of Poland, the occupation of the Sudetenland, the invasion of Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and few other European countries, and a lot of the other big reasons we think of Hitler as bad. But it was only intended to compare the first year.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
They aren’t Nazis though. What they are doing is refusing entry into the US to people seeking refuge or asylum. These policies aren’t compassionate and are isolationist. Granted, I’m not certain when immigrants have ever been loved in this country. The hypocrisy is quite damning .
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Why should we tolerate mass migration into US? And most of these "asylum" claims are bogus. Asylum was meant to be about persecution, not about economic hardship or high crime rates. Otherwise people from Detroit could seek asylum in Europe or Canada. :)
 
Derec said:
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Why should we tolerate mass migration into US? And most of these "asylum" claims are bogus.
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Asylum claims are investigated and ifthey are bogus, then the seekers are returned. So what exactly is your beef?
 
People misunderstand Godwin's law.

Godwin's law is not "whoever compares someone to Nazis loses the argument." If that were the case, then being as much like Nazis as possible would cause you to win every argument. That would be absurd.

All Godwin's law says is that if an argument goes on long enough, eventually someone will compare someone to Nazis.

Given that Republicans are openly defending actual Nazis waving actual Nazi flags using flimsy and fallacious argument, we can no longer avoid calling conservatives and libertarians Nazis just to protect their feelings. It's absurd to even suggest such a thing.
 
laughing dog said:
Asylum claims are investigated and ifthey are bogus, then the seekers are returned. So what exactly is your beef?
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1. If we practice "catch and release" they might not show for their hearings and it will be difficult to deport them. That was the reason Obama ended catch and release in 2014, but the left wants to reinstate it.
2. The actual standards for asylum are way too loose. Again, being victim of general crime is not a legit asylum reason.
 
Derec said:
laughing dog said:
Asylum claims are investigated and ifthey are bogus, then the seekers are returned. So what exactly is your beef?
Click to expand...

1. If we practice "catch and release" they might not show for their hearings and it will be difficult to deport them. That was the reason Obama ended catch and release in 2014, but the left wants to reinstate it.
2. The actual standards for asylum are way too loose. Again, being victim of general crime is not a legit asylum reason.
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So the Irish people whose ancestors came here during the potato famine, should we send them all back?
 
Underseer said:
So the Irish people whose ancestors came here during the potato famine, should we send them all back?
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Of course not. They have been here for over a century. However, very permissive immigration laws that made sense in the mid-19th century when the US population was 23 million, or even early 20th century when the population was still less than 100 million make very little sense when the US population is more than 320 million.

I am not against immigration per se, but we need a more sane immigration policy, starting with enforcement against illegal immigration.
 
Derec said:
Underseer said:
So the Irish people whose ancestors came here during the potato famine, should we send them all back?
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Of course not. They have been here for over a century. However, very permissive immigration laws that made sense in the mid-19th century when the US population was 23 million, or even early 20th century when the population was still less than 100 million make very little sense when the US population is more than 320 million.
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Why would that matter?

I am not against immigration per se, but we need a more sane immigration policy, starting with enforcement against illegal immigration.
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96% of “illegal immigration” is the heinous crime of not filling out paperwork (and those who assist people who didn’t fill out paperwork). What we’re seeing now is identical to you having your children taken away from you because you were driving without a license.

That same 96% come here to do jobs you would never do and pay billions into our Social Security fund. Upwards of $13 billion, in fact. Want to know why, when they don’t have to? Because they hope it will show their good faith towards citizenship.

They also contribute upwards of $14 billion in sales, excise, state and property taxes annually. So that’s around $27 Billion combined every year.

The vast majority of these people are poorly educated, hard working laborers who do all the shit jobs (literally) that few white boys will do. Their only “crime” is needing to take care of their families, which they can’t do in the countries they are risking their lives to leave.

So, not only do they not take jobs away from any Americans, they also contribute billions of dollars to our economy ever year. Iow, they don’t effect you or your life in any negative fashion. You don’t pay shit for any of them; they aren’t on welfare or any of the other lies the GOP keeps regurgitating. They do not in any way shape or form impact your existence at all and only improve it with their labor and taxes.

As with anything involving humanity, there is a small percentage—4% to be exact—that are involved in other forms of crime, the vast majority of which is smoking pot. Not selling it; just possessing it. From there the percentages drop to even more insifgnificant numbers, as the crimes get worse, but the breakdown is basically 97-98% of ALL “illegal immigrants” doing nothing worse than smoking a joint while adding $27 Billion into our economy.

So why exactly do you give any kind of a fuck about any of this?
 
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I think it makes sense for the government to control the borders instead of the people that want to come here.

The government is going to have to provide services to the people that come here.
 
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