I'm going to open this post with a quote from Bernie Sanders:
"A nation cannot be called impotent as long as it is able to produce the minds that are necessary to solve the problems crying out for solution. We can measure the greatness of a people by the minds it produces. That, too, is a value, but only when it is recognized as a value. If a nation has the ability to produce great minds a thousand times over, but has no appreciation for the value of these minds and excludes them from its political life, these great minds are of no use."
A powerful quote from a great mind, except actually it's a HITLER QUOTE! Only slightly modified to make you think Bernie might have said it! *EVIL LAUGHTER* Bernie supporters really love HITLER! I've used the power to pluck a quote entirely out of its context, tweak it, and post it to fool you mere cretins who support Senator Sanders!
This is the sort of story I see now repeatedly which, in its many forms, attempts to link Donald Trump, Trump's current voter appeal, or Trump's statements into some sort of Hitler clone. For example:
So although I'm not a "history teacher" I would like to point out that, first, slapping Trump's head on a classic Hitler pose does not a compelling image make. Furthermore I checked - Hitler is not anti-immigrant. Really, he doesn't speak on it often, because immigration was not a major issue for Germany in the 1930s. Hitler did stand in opposition to Communism, violently opposed to it, but that is a far more complex battle than the above text implies. One of the groups the Nazi party opposed in Germany was the German Communist Party, which also was the party that most often matched the Nazis in the late 1930s in seats in the German parliament. So this would be a comparable moment if you actually had in the United States some sort of "Muslim Terrorism Party" that ran against the Republicans and controlled about half the United States House of Representatives regularly.
Which of course also fails as a comparison because the German parliament was nothing like the United States Congress - being based on a Parliamentary model of organization it was closer to the British Parliament. (Variable elections based on the ability of the government to pass legislation versus fixed terms of service.)
This is Hitler - when Hitler was rising to power in the early 1930s he did it on the back of a massive economic implosion (no the recent Great Recession is not the same), and he did it leading a people still psychologically recovering from a humiliating defeat in a war and harnessing a myth that this people had been "stabbed in the back" by their government. Also, as you can see from this genuine speech of Hitler's from 1927 Hitler is obsessed with seeing the world through a racial lens. (Trump panders to racists but I highly doubt you will find he sees the world through a racial lens in any way like what Hitler sees it. Imagine if in ALL of Trump's speeches he argued that the Mexican people were a separate people, a people with inferior blood, based solely on their being Mexican. A sneaky separate people that have oppressed Anglo people around the world for generations. A people with a secret powerful connection to shadowy cabals.) See, it doesn't work, that isn't Trump's appeal.
Because Trump isn't trying to appeal to the prejudices of early 1930s Germans and he wasn't educated on a diet of really crappy anti-Semitic pamphlets while stewing in flophouses trying to be an artist. Hitler wasn't well educated (Trump is comparatively), Hitler came from lower middle class roots shifted to extreme poverty (Trump didn't and isn't), and Germany in the 1930s was dealing with a completely different set of ideological problems than the United States in the mid-2010s.
But I can hear you saying "But we need something truly EVIL to be able to compare to Trump, otherwise how can we make a fast easy set of memes to draw people to what a problem he is." You don't need to dig into the collection of 1930s European Fascists, as people of the United States we've got our own contemporary example of Trump and his dangers right here.
I give you George Wallace, 1960s politician from right here in the United States. I propose he is a perfect stand-in for Trump:
- He's unabashedly racist and you can substitute "Mexican" into many of his speeches where he says "Black" and you'll find good parallels
- He was in favor of segregation as a permanent feature of United States policy and believed strongly in state's rights
- Passionate orator who got crowds riled up and once called upon a crowd to go deal with a group of "pinkos" protesting his rally. (Unlike Trump when the crowd got up to actually kick some ass he calmed them down.)
- His 1968 independent run for the Presidency of the United States has some really eerie similarities to Trump's currently stated politics
- He was also big on lowering taxes to court business to moving to his home state of Georgia (just replace Georgia with "United States" and "north" with "China" and you'll be fine.)
Now I know, who has ever heard of George Wallace as compared with Hitler? You'll have to do more work building up the meme connection between the two, maybe get some late-night television hosts to do a snappy bit on the topic, but America we can make this stick. Let's leave the Germany's their unhappiness and tap into our own rich vein of political assholes when talking about possible evils to compare to Trump.
If nothing else do it for the children, so they can stop being taught that Hitler was some sort of mega-evil monstrosity on par with an ogre or a troll.
Sources: Wikipedia entry on George Wallace