XEqualsHitler
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context : AmericanFascism
The thing about "GeorgeBush == Hitler" or "DonaldTrump == Hitler" claims is that people always sneer at them, thinking that they're some kind of playground taunt : "Your guy is so bad he's worse than Hitler!"
But the real point is, Hitler didn't look to the Germans in the 30s the way he does to us now. They didn't really know what was going to happen. They didn't know he was going to orchestrate world war and genocide. Only that they'd suffered some kind of attack. And they were a freaked. And insulted. And here was this guy, who may have been a bit of a loon but at least he was finally sticking up for them. Standing up to the French and other foreigners ...
Anyway, I always thought of writing a page like this, I didn't really think I knew enough history to make it stick.
Fortunately, this guy has ...
UmairHaque has a lot of disturbing warnings of coming AmericanFascism
Transcluded from AmericanFascism
WilliamLind discusses whether there's a "constituency" for fascism in the Bush government : https://web.archive.org/web/20050204172005/www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_2_01_05.htm
Similarity of propaganda : http://billmon.org/archives/002545.html
Discussion on UmbertoEco's essay on fascism : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10710.htm
Compare : FantasyIdeology
Bush == Hitler
Re : ongoing torture of detainees, legal advice from Nazi Germany : http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/11/return-of-carl-schmitt.html
- Republican judge warns of dictatorship following political attacks on judiciary : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/13/comment.usa
Bush illegally going beyond constitutional powers in the US, justified in terms of military position (commander-in-chief) :
- This http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/thesecurityth_1.html This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don't use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law.''
AndrewSullivan : http://time.blogs.com/dailydish/2006/05/thepermanent_e.html
So from now for the indefinite future, the government has "emergency" powers to violate your private property without a warrant, tap phones without a warrant, jail suspects indefinitely without due process, and even torture them? Eveyone concedes that some surrender of liberty is necessary in this new world. But the glee with which some conservatives greet the expansion of unlimited government power is truly remarkable.
- end of habeus corpus : http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sicsempertyrannis/2006/10/godsavethe_ki.html
I make a similar comment here : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/johnrobb/2006/02/american_taliba.html#comment-13750648
Counter
Trump is opposite of fascism: https://jewishcurrents.org/almost-the-complete-opposite-of-fascism/
Quora Answer : Do people overrate Adolf Hitler as the most evil person ever?
I do think there was something very unusual about Hitler (see Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to Why is it acceptable for Mongolia to name its main airport after Genghis Khan, but it is not acceptable for Germany to name its main airport after Adolf Hitler? )
Nevertheless, I think we've not quite got our heads around the great question raised by the Nazis : was the spectacular harm they caused the result of spectacular evil? Or was it merely the result of a common, everyday evil, amplified by "modernity" (ie. modern bureaucracies and industrial technologies) which enabled the execution of that evil on hitherto unknown scale?
I think it's important to be open to the second possibility. Not least because otherwise we tend towards a certain "smugness". That we and our neighbours are nothing like the Germans of the 30s and 40s. We would never fall for politicians stirring up hate against a minority they told us was secretly plotting against our society. We would never believe brazen false-flag operations like the burning of the Reichstag. We would never let the freedoms of our society be dismantled for the greater interests and security of our nation. We could never become unquestioning cogs in a machine designed to repress, imprison and exterminate.
The real problem with building up the idea of Hitler's evil is that he becomes a kind of James Bond villain. Someone mysteriously crazy and all powerful. As many people have noted, what's truly terrifying about Nazi Germany was NOT the magnitude of Hitler's evil. But that the entire country (of ordinary, not-evil people,) went along with it.
To the extent that people focus on Hitler, and not on the complex of social forces and ordinary psychology in Germany, then they're certainly "overrating" him.