Posted on 07/13/2018 10:09:48 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last month Donny Deutsch, former host of his own CNBC show and a frequent contributor to MSNBC, was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” discussing the blossoming crisis of family separation on the Mexican border. At one point Deutsch observed, “If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going ‘you here, you here.’”
That scummy comment — disparaging more than 60 million Americans, including a majority of Polk County voters in the 2016 presidential election, as akin to the pure evil of Adolf Hitler’s murderous regime — slid by the hosts and other guests without reproach or correction. Not surprising. Such remarks have become common in the Trump era.
Breitbart News has compiled a list of 401 (and counting) smears and incidents of harassment or violence against President Donald Trump, his family, cabinet, staff and supporters back to November 2015. It contains recurring references to Hitler, the Nazis, or fascism. Consider just the past month: Cher compared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Gestapo. The comedienne Kathy Griffin called the administration “pro-Nazi.” Actor Adam Scott tweeted that Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who regularly supports Trump, was “doing the work of (Joseph) Goebbels,” Hitler’s propaganda minister. A “fact-checker” for New Yorker magazine referred to ICE employee Justin Gaertner, a disabled Marine from Pasco County whose legs were blown off in Afghanistan, as a Nazi. “Morning Joe” Scarborough himself called Border Patrol agents Nazis. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accused the administration of setting up “concentration camps for kids” on the border. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former National Security Agency director, commented on the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy with a tweet featuring a photo of the Birkenau death camp.
As far as we know none of these people has suffered any personal or professional consequences.
But we say: Enough.
No matter how much you may dislike or disagree with Trump, the warped practice of casually comparing him and other U.S. officials to the ruthless, merciless ghouls who executed 6 million souls and tortured and persecuted countless more simply for being Jewish or something else they despised is a disgrace and demonstrates massive, willful historical ignorance.
Criticizing the president is an all-American pastime, and a First Amendment right. That should not stop.
But those who resort to dimwitted Hitler references to denounce Trump embarrass themselves. Additionally, repeat a lie often enough and people begin to believe it. In a volatile age, no one knows where that might lead.
Yet the worst sin one commits with Trump-Nazi references is cheapening and trivializing the ghastly horror of Hitler’s “Final Solution” — the systematic, industrial-scale dehumanization and butchery of millions of people, the worst crime against humanity the modern world has ever seen. In case you’ve forgotten or don’t know what that is, check out the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.
Within 12 years Hitler and his barbarous minions annihilated two of every three Jews living in Europe. But it didn’t stop there. The Nazis — the real ones, not the figments of Deutsch’s or Cher’s imagination — also slaughtered Slavs, Gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals, the disabled (including children), communists, socialists, union members, even Jehovah’s Witnesses and later Soviet Army prisoners.
According to the museum, Hitler operated a network of 40,000 prisons to murder, torture, or punish his regime’s enemies. The most notorious of these were the “killing centers,” such as Auschwitz. To illuminate their hatred and violence the museum reports that the Nazis at one point fatally gassed as many as 6,000 Jews each day at Birkenau, the facility Hayden so blithely tweeted about.
The Nazis gassed their victims at death camps or with mobile vans, executed them with firing squads, overdosed them with drugs, or imprisoned them in camps where they were worked to death, starved to death, or died of disease or maltreatment. The lifeless bodies were loaded into crematoriums, which polluted the air above the killing centers with the soot of victims’ remains and the smell of burning flesh.
It was hell on Earth.
And it’s not happening here.
Bruce Anderson, a political science professor at Florida Southern College and a Ledger columnist, is a student of German politics and history. Each spring he tours Germany with some students. The most solemn and powerful part of the excursion is the visit to the death camps.
Anderson is not a Trump fan by any stretch. Yet he tells us in an email that “comparing the current president — or anyone, for that matter — to Adolf Hitler is ludicrous.” “Trump is not only not Hitler,” Anderson adds, “he has none of the characteristics of Hitler. Equating the two is silly.”
Anderson provides several reasons for this, but they all boil down to Hitler’s unbridled power grab — something no U.S. president, including Trump, has ever attempted nor achieved.
Hitler or his Nazi Party seized control of most major German institutions — the legislature, military, police, courts, media. Hitler also tore up his nation’s constitution, implemented a state policy of overt racism and discrimination, outlawed rival political parties, arrested dissidents and established a “political-economic cartel” that allowed him to dictate national economic policy, Anderson notes.
Beyond all that, though, was the plan, which Hitler had articulated in 1923, a decade before he took power, to facilitate the ”‘cleansing’ of the German state and all of Europe of Jews,” Anderson writes.
“Comparing ANY politician who did not include, in his or her final program, the destruction and murder of an entire community of people — citizens and non-citizens alike — in their millions, using the machinery of the state to do it, with the willing participation of thousands of co-perpetrators, is not only wrong, but does material damage to the memory of the victims,” Anderson points out. “To associate Trump — or any other American politician — with these unimaginable horrors is a travesty.”
“The very fact that people in the U.S. can call our system fascist, and accuse Trump of ‘being just like Hitler’ and walk around free to do so, without losing their jobs, their rights, their freedom and their liberty” — we would add their lives — “is the very best argument for this judgment being totally false.”
Well said.
The president at times is guilty of this nonsense too, comparing deep-state bureaucrats investigating Russian election meddling to Nazi Germany. But his critics do so far more routinely, far more nonchalantly and with far more malice — and with zero consequences.
To reiterate, Trump is not Hitler. America is not Nazi Germany. And this rhetorical overkill by Trump’s critics ruefully depreciates the slaughter of Hitler’s innocent victims — a tragedy on an unimaginable scale. This must stop.
Breitbart News has compiled a list of 401 (and counting) smears and incidents of harassment or violence against President Donald Trump, his family, cabinet, staff and supporters back to November 2015.
Every single American election (since 1789), has had consequences. One ‘regime’ leaves, and another arrives. Ambassadors are lifted, and new folks are appointed. Life goes on.
This childish behavior starting on 9 Nov 2016? I think the news media did a serious irresponsible thing for eleven months....openly telling the public that only Hillary Clinton could win, and then after the defeat...yanking on everyone’s chain about the outcome. Even today, the outcome is still debated. The election really has not come to an end.
The sad thing here....it’s very possible that they will drive two-million-plus Democrats out of the voting pattern, and a historic number of blacks and Latinos will vote GOP this November. Someone in the Democratic Party needs to accept blame.
The First Photos of Trump’s ‘Tent Cities’ Are Here (Air conditioned, of course)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3665196/posts
US military plans migrant tent camps amid Trump crackdown (Cost $233 million every six months)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3665663/posts
I would say the liberals trivialize tragedy. They latch onto this Trump is Hitler meme, and it becomes a big lie. Repeated often enough, the liberals believe it’s true .
casually comparing him and other U.S. officials to the ruthless, merciless ghouls who executed 6 million souls
The Nezi’s were directly responsible for about 13 million “souls”, the six million number counts only the Jews Hitler wanted liquidated.
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Shh! you can’t say this or you might get called a Nazi! I mean how dare you say there were others in Nazi concentration camps other than the Jews. How dare you point out that the Jews were not the only ones put into the ovens, had their property seized and treated like cattle when put into railroad cars bound for these concentration camps. Doncha know, it was only the Jews who were the only ones that survived the Holocaust. How dare you! /s
Thirty years ago I would have been mortified to be called a “Nazi” in public.
Now I just don’t care.
America is treating NON-American children better than most homeless, Veterans and foster children. America also aborts 3,500 babies a day. I hate the left as much as America’s biggest enemies in its history.
The “Trivialization of Tragedy” was codified with Roe V Wade
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