Author’s Note. February 28, 2025. My blog was written before the shocking, appalling, and disgraceful public fracas between President Zelensky and President Trump and Vice President Vance that occurred today. February 28th will go down in history as the day when America gave the middle finger to Ukraine and to Europe while Trump continues to play patty-cake with Putin. This represents a seismic shift in American foreign policy that has kept us and the world safe for the last 80 years. The world is now tilting on its political axis, and as long as Trump and his allies continue in power, we will be moving into a new and frightening era of history in which we have aligned ourselves with and embraced our former adversaries.
"If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore."
-- Donald J. Trump, January 6, 2021.
To a woman who asked if we had a monarchy or a republic….
"A republic, if you can keep it."
-- Ben Franklin, September 17, 1787.
During the past few days of continuing national mayhem as our country continues its slide into a kind of absurdist form of
fascism, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing something on the subject in a new blog. I have recently read a book on fascism called
Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by a Yale professor,
Jason Stanley, who has written extensively on fascism, and, if I were to blog, I could draw some of my material from this book. But tonight, over dinner, as I was reading a very satirical piece in
The New Yorker about the latest weirdness and antic pronouncements of a demented President, who is clearly out to destroy what’s left of our democracy, and making a series of jokes and wisecracks (or should I call them dumbcracks?) about his bizarre and reckless actions, I began to wonder: Why bother? Parodies, not serious blogs, are the order of the day. Besides, things are happening at such a vertiginous rate, who knows what will be next? By the time I could craft something and post it, it would probably be passé. And how could I write something serious when the whole thing seems like a cosmic jest orchestrated by our thuggish jester-in-chief who would be king, if not emperor? After all, Trump has no interest in governing; he just wants to
rule like a dictator.
Kamala Harris and many others warned what would happen if Trump were re-elected when there would be no guard rails to restrain him. But things are far worse than we could have imagined, and they will only get worse.
Democracy is a fragile thing.
Athenian democracy lasted only 180 years.
Democracy in the United States has lasted 236 years, and is the oldest democracy in the modern world. But clearly, its days are numbered. American democracy is headed toward the abyss. Selfishly, I am glad I will be gone before it is.
That’s probably as far as I will get unless I change my mind about writing something. But, Lord, my life is hard enough as it is, and I’ve worked my whole adult life. Why not just coast while America, like
ancient Rome in Nero’s day, goes up in flames?
I had written the above to a friend of mine who shared my concern and also wondered why more people weren’t talking about the fascist elephant in the room.
But then, another good friend happened to find an article, which lately has been circulating on Facebook. She could not tell me who the author was or where it had originated. Maybe it was written by a bot, who knows?
What she sent to me was uncanny. As I wrote to her:
I just read the article you sent me about the
parallels between Hitler and Trump. It was excellent. It’s exactly what I would have blogged about, if I had been able to write the blog I had hoped to write. I would have cited most of these same points. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about this, but I’m glad that others have. I also read a somewhat similar piece last night written by The New Yorker’s political commentator
Susan Glasser. I really appreciated reading this piece, and might send it to some of my friends.
But tonight, I thought, “Well, why just send it to a few friends? Maybe I should send it to my list.” So that’s what I’ve decided to do here, thanks to my friend’s serendipitous and timely discovery – and with the unknowing kindness of the unknown author of this piece.
History repeating itself.
“In 1923
Adolf Hitler incited an insurrection against the German government. He was tried, given a slap on the wrist, and became a convicted felon. Despite being treated charitably by the judge, Hitler claimed the trial was political persecution and successfully portrayed himself as a victim of the “corrupt"
Social Democrats.
Hitler cleverly positioned himself as the voice of the "common man," railing against the "elites," cultural "degeneracy," and the establishment, who he all labeled as "
Marxists." He claimed the education system was indoctrinating children to hate Germany, and promised to return Germany to greatness.
To solidify his base, Hitler masterfully scapegoated minorities for the nation's problems, exploiting societal divisions with an "us vs. them" narrative. Many Germans took the bait. Hitler's
Nazi Party continued to gain traction, until he became Chancellor in 1933.
Hitler appointed German
oligarchs as his economic advisors. He proceeded to
privatize government run utilities, solidifying support of the economic elite.
With the working class divided along cultural and ethnic lines, the Nazis shut down workers unions and abolished strikes. Progressives and trade unionists were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. Corporate profits skyrocketed while working class Germans lived paycheck to paycheck.
Hitler, who became a billionaire while in office, knew he and his clan of oligarchs could get away with the scam if they constantly had an "enemy within" to blame while the
corporatocracy robbed the country blind.
An easy target was one of the smallest minorities. Hitler removed
birthright citizenship rights of Jews and started rounding them up for mass deportations for being "illegally" in the country. The German press under Nazi rule highlighted instances of violence by Jews to convince the public that
Jewish immigrants were a danger to the "real Germans."
Hitler wasted no time dismantling democratic institutions. Loyalty wasn't just encouraged; it was demanded. Opponents were silenced. Media that dared to questioned [sic] him were vilified as "the enemy" and "Marxists."
Hitler's Propaganda Minister,
Joseph Goebbels, bragged about how the Nazis were able to intimidate the media into giving them favorable coverage, and didn't need to give direct orders. The Nazi regime and its followers collected all books they saw as promoting "degeneracy" or what would be considered "woke" today, and burned them in large bonfires. They also burned books that promoted
class consciousness.
Berlin had a thriving
LGBTQ community in the 1920s, and even had the first transgender clinic. The Nazis burned it to the ground. LGBTQ people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges. Many were
killed in the Holocaust.”
******************
[I will interrupt this article here in order to express some of my own views and those of Stanley, which will serve to bolster the argument of the document I have been quoting by giving further examples to illustrate it.]
On May 10, 1933, some months after the fall of the
Weimar Republic, and shortly after Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, one the most heinous defining acts of the new regime took place – the
burning of many books, especially those by Jews. One of the primary targets was the entire archive of the
Institute of Sexual Science, at the time the most extensive collection of
queer theory in the world. Its director,
Magnus Hirschfeld, became a target of the Nazis and was terrorized by them afterward. His Institute was later burned to the ground.
Freud’s books were also incinerated at the same time, and five years later, Freud himself was forced to flee to England. His sisters, however, were not so lucky. They all perished in
Treblinka, a notorious death camp.
Of course, in this country, we don’t burn books; we ban them. One of the main themes of Stanley’s book is how important it is for fascist regimes to control the education of its youth. This is also taking place in America today, and perhaps the most flagrant example of this is what is happening in
Ron DeSantis’s Florida. If you haven’t been following these worrisome developments, you might want to read about them in Stanley’s book where he covers them extensively.
Particularly troubling, of course, is the kind of sexual education – or lack of it -- that young students are exposed to. “
Don’t say gay.” Pretend that it doesn’t exist and root it out and condemn it where it does.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that DeSantis himself is a fascist, but if you are familiar with the way fascist regimes are structured, you can see that he is drawing from the fascist playbook.
Only those who through school and upbringing learn to know the cultural, economic, and above all the political greatness of their own fatherland can and will achieve the inner pride in the privilege of being a member of such a people.
This is what
Hitler’s youth were taught, so that later they could become good warriors, wearing their
brown shirts and brandishing their cudgels, and later,
stormtroopers, stoking and committing violence to intimidate any opposition or resistance to the leader’s edicts.
Then there is the problem of
diversity, which is quickly becoming in our country a dirty word. Diversity, according to our President, a self-proclaimed expert on aviation, is even said to have been the cause of a recent
airline collision. In any case, as in all fascist regimes, diversity is a threat and must be stamped out.
Perhaps the most shocking and shameful example of this tendency is the
current attack on trans people that is now taking place in America, particularly by Republicans and led by Trump himself, whose recent diktats now make it impossible for trans people to pursue or continue their hormonal therapy. If you are a trans person in today’s America, you are now an un-person, if not stuck in transition. According to our President, again a
soi-disant expert in
gender studies, there are just two sexes: male and female. There is nothing in between or other. This, too, is Fascism 101.
This is how Stanley sums up this litany of horrors:
These themes are essentially different ways that fascist movements stoke grievances among the dominant group they serve in order to further their aims. In the process, they are careful to eliminate any contradiction in their narrative. This would include, for example, any scholarly research revealing flaws in national myths, any form of education that clearly reveals national guilt, any suggestion that diversity and plurality might be beneficial to society, or that more equitable gender relations might be beneficial, or that the political left is significantly less of a threat than they imagine.
[Furthermore], fascist social and political movements thrive on a sense of grievance.
Sound familiar?
*****************
[The viral post continues below.]
“The Nazis also saw manhood as under threat by independent women who didn't rely on men. In 1934, Hitler proclaimed, “A women’s world is her husband, her family, her children, her house." Laws that had protected
women's rights were repealed and new laws were introduced to restrict women to the home and in their roles as wives and mothers.
Reproductive rights were severely rolled back, and doctors who performed abortions could face the death penalty. Despite all of this, the German people didn't have a similar historical parallel to look upon as a warning. Most Germans never acted like the sky was falling.
Most just went along with their lives as usual, until many of their lives were snuffed out. By the time Hitler's reign was forced to an end by the Allied Powers, 11 million people were murdered in
the Holocaust, and 70-85 million were killed in
WW2”
****************************
America had better wake up before it is too late.
