For a long time, people wondered how a nation as civilized as Germany went for Hitler. The United States is spiraling into disaster, but it won’t be a mystery to anyone how or why we got there.
To Be Honest, Trump Was A Logical Next Step
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Desperate people adopt desperate measures, whether in the United States or in Germany. The difference is that the former now possesses weapons of a type that the former could only – and did ! – dream of. The future seems bleak….
Henri
In Anbetracht des zeitlichen Rahmens der Existenz des Landes haben die Vereinigten Staaten die Tiefe der Verderbtheit viel früher als Deutschland getroffen.
🙁
Wenn ich sehe, wie wenig Amerikaner durch die Schrecken, die sie in der ganzen Welt verursachen, erschrecken, finde ich es leicht zu glauben, dass die Deutschen nur so blind waren wie wir.
I know I screwed this up even with the help of Google translate.
I’ve been reading some German for a few weeks and able to put but few words zusammen that look like a Satz to me.
When it comes to the depths of depravity a people can plumb, mein verehrter Lehrer, I doubt that any significant differences exist ; if one scares them enough, there are no bounds. Or as a master of the art famously put it :
«”Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land.”»
Note the final sentence above….
Henri
Most Americans will not recognize that the recent victorious election campaign based on Blut und Boden has an historical precedent.
“Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.”—Albert Camus
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera
The most perfect state is now at liberty to further purify itself, believing that the human species in this Exceptional State, upon which God has shed His Grace, had reached perfection, and that no effort to conserve that state is beyond the pale, and that extremism in the defense of liberty [limited only to the self-declared and perfected sovereign] is no vice.
American Exceptionalism:
The belief that no matter how many foreign governments and their elections the US subverts; no matter how many baseless wars devastate no matter how many millions; no matter how many are tortured and imprisoned without cause for no matter how long; no matter how many American minorities populate the extreme lower economic classes and its prisons: The Government of the USA would NEVER do anything so cruel, underhanded and deceptive to its own exceptional people.
Amercan Exceptionalism means that (most Americans think) the US is the Greatest Force for Good in the World, sacrificing billions of dollars and thousands of brave, American servicepersons to protect the innocent from the evil dictators and terrorists. If the US puts electrodes to someone’s genitals, that is NOT torture, it’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ and it has saved millions of innocent lives.
Because America is Always Good, whatever it does to protect innocents is NOT torture (although, if an evil power did the exact same thing to American servicepersons, it IS torture, and the US always track down someone — who might or might not be the actual perpetrator — and try, convict, and execute them).
“People couldn’t accept that Germans voted for Hitler.”
I call it “the Nixon Effect” – if you asked people in ’74 who they voted for in ’72, you’d find that the majority wouldn’t admit voting for the guy who won by a far larger margin than Trump. (520 electoral votes)
So that’s my prediction here, within two years very few people will admit to having voted for Trumkopf.
CarzyH, you could instead ask them if they voted for Michael Richard Pence…. 😉
Henri
CarzyH → CrazyH….
So it can go….
Henri
Actually, I’m more of a motorcycle guy. 😉
I was brought up reading history books and watching films that proved the Germans have always been evil war mongers who were so powerful and evil that only the US could stop them, and had to save Europe. Twice. Hitler was a natural.
Of course, when I got older, I foolishly read Kafka, who portrayed the Germans as the world’s most civilised people, with much more progressive laws than the US/UK/France.
Hitler is much easier to understand if you don’t read any writers like Kafka, and stick to good, US middle and secondary school history books (don’t read any decent university text, they have stuff that, fortunately, the prof never gets to in class, but it’s in there, even if won’t be on the exam so most students never look at it).
Not even funny or facetious – How long are you going to ignore that many of the average americans are completely ignorant and will not respond to your comments or observations, However long they are, and backed up by many facts and articles that they will never check if they are true? A lot of people try, but the simple fact is that you are dealing with a huge amount of stupid, ignorant people who will hate and hurt anyone they are directed towards as targets. The best first step you could make is to stop thinking that anyone can understand your comments -they have to be stone-age, to be understood.
Years ago – like 25 years ago, a boy who grew up in Afghanistan told me that we shoud never go near these people, because they don’t even have a cultural or world view like us, and we were banging on a beehive.
“Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land.”
What worked to control mass consciousness and compliance in Germany works just as well in America.
This is not a feature of any specific nation but is a feature of humans under similarly organized conditions.
But America is the land beyond memory, where each day is an ahistorical now for the many, where in desperation only a blind contrived optimism caries the way forward; and in failing to achieve that, Americans have become greatest consumers of psychoactive drugs for use in the maintenance of optimism.
«But America is the land beyond memory, where each day is an ahistorical now for the many, …» Not so certain that the issue is one of ahistoricity ; I suspect that rather it is one of a false historicity. The totally illusory myth of the good old days seem to be alive and well in the United States today….
Henri
The thing is, Trump isn’t Hitler. Even Hitler wasn’t “Hitler.” Hitler has been through the “schools” of thought. So now there’s “feminist” Hitler, “Hegelian” Hitler, “Marxist” Hitler, “Communist” Hitler (yes, let that one sink in). There’s “Gay” Hitler. There’s “Syphilitic” Hitler. There’s “Hogan’s Heroes” Hitler. There’s “BDSM” Hitler. Every group goes through and finds Hitler this or Hitler that, and each school of thought finds, surprisingly, that Hitler’s behavior can be defined and explained much more gooder from their school’s perspective than any other.
Hitler wasn’t the problem. Hitler was one angry man, and he had a lot to be angry about. That describes at least 1/4 of the people in the U.S. The problem was the German people, who’d been beaten so badly in WWI, so badly hobbled by the terms of surrender, that they were all too happy to find someone else to blame for their misfortunes. Put the economic screws to someone for long enough, and yes, they will become a monster.
Trump says that the media is the enemy of the American people. He’s right, you know.
Hey, Ted, how many New York Times reporters have been in touch with you about your upcoming lawsuit? You’d think that would be important for a paper that represented the American people, don’t you think? To describe how the police control the press?
While we’re thumbing through the New York Times, let’s check the housing section, where they tell us about people who are “struggling” to find a place to live that’s in their “range” of about $800,000.
Don’t forget all those wedding announcements, which are always about how a member of the 1% is inbreeding a little further with another member of the 1%.
What’s that? Spotted a mistake? Good luck getting them to run a correction. I had to fight them for over two months once on a simply mistake.
What’s that? The unemployment stats are vague and misleading? No, no, honey. You don’t understand is all.
Trump is right. The press (as it is now) is an enemy to the American public, unless you are very wealthy. And we forget that at our peril.
The implication of this cartoon is that Hitler was elected.
He wasn’t.
To make a long story short:
The Nazi Party bullied their way–through intimidation and violence–to majority control of the Reichstag:
“From 1931 to 1933, the Nazis combined terror tactics with conventional campaigning – Hitler criss-crossed the nation by air, while SA troops paraded in the streets, beat up opponents, and broke up their meetings.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_rise_to_power
“Two successive federal elections left the Nazis as the largest party in the Reichstag and anti-democratic parties in control of a majority of its seats. Under this political climate, Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_presidential_election,_1932
Hitler did not rise to full dictator until after Hindenburg’s death in 1934.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_rise_to_power#Chancellor_to_dictator
This was a long process, essentially dating back to 1918.
These things don’t happen suddenly and there are numerous and complicated variables at work throughout.
Glossing over the truth of that time–by implication if not assertion–with alternative facts does not help us today.
«The implication of this cartoon is that Hitler was elected.
He wasn’t.»
The NSDAP won a plurality of votes both in the general election of 31 July 1932 (37.27 %), in which 84.1 % of those eligible cast their votes, and that of 6 November 1932 (33.09 %), in which 80.58 % voted. In a parliamentary system, it is hardly strange that Herr Hitler, as party leader, was invited to form a government….
Glossing over the fact that a democratic electoral system – I submit that that of the Weimar Republic was far more democratic than the first-past-the-post electoral system of today’s United States – is not a guarantee against tyranny is not helpful today….
Henri