One of the shocking things I’ve felt compelled to do since Donald Trump’s unexpected election to be the next president of the United States is to bone up on my history by reading Joseph Goebbels Wikipedia page. I did that last night, and I noted many disturbing parallels between Goebbels early career and the career of Trump’s new chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Still, I was feeling vaguely guilty about even doing this research, as if I’m bordering on the paranoid and letting my fears get the better of me.
The problem is, I am hardly alone in thinking along these lines. I woke up this morning and the first article I read opened with the following graf.
PARIS—Never mind that the French cable television report on Stephen Bannon made him look like one of the winos living on grates in Paris, or that it compared Bannon, Donald Trump’s grizzled éminence grise and newly-named White House chief strategist, to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.
Former special assistant to the president David “Axis of Evil” Frum has been on a Twitter warpath warning about the real threat of fascism coming from this administration, but the appointment of Steven Bannon has sent him over the edge.
Some bold staffing choices at the Trump White House pic.twitter.com/n56CFyiSrD
— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 14, 2016
Co-Chair of John McCain’s Hispanic Advisory Council, Ana Navarro, isn’t shy about making these kinds of comparisons.
Oh, hell! White supremacist, anti gay, anti Semite, vindictive, scary-ass dude named Senior Strategist. After vomiting, be afraid, America. https://t.co/cZvP3vccjS
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) November 13, 2016
Former McCain campaign manager John Weaver who worked for John Kasich’s presidential campaign isn’t shy about it, either.
Just to be clear news media, the next president named a racist, anti-semite as the co-equal of the chief of staff. #NotNormal
— John Weaver (@JWGOP) November 13, 2016
These are not knee-jerk liberal reactions, although you can find many example of normally even keel “establishment” Democrats comparing to Bannon to Goebbels and the Nazis.
Maybe a lot of people are overwrought since they weren’t emotionally or intellectually prepared to deal with a Trump presidency, but there really are a lot of commonalities between Bannon and Goebbels. Given how much Nazi graffiti is cropping up everywhere, there must be a lot of neo-Nazis (or whatever you want to call them) who are seeing the same parallels.
I spent the morning brainstorming a Chrome extension or iPhone app (like Drumpfinator) that would take one tiny step toward fixing the milquetoast media’s normalization of hate.
Any instance of ‘Steve Bannon’ would be replaced with ‘notorious antisemite Steve Bannon’ or ‘white supremacist Steven Bannon.’
‘Donald Trump’ would be replaced with ‘race-baiting Donald Trump’ or ‘serial sexual assaulter Donald Trump,’ ‘President Trump’ with ‘KKK-endorsed President Trump.’
‘Alt-right’ with ‘White Power’ or ‘Neo Nazi.’
Like that. Then when you read the news, it’d make much more sense.
white supremacists in the bay area suburbs…
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Confederate-flags-shock-viewers-at-Petaluma-10610556.php
Former special assistant to the president David “Axis of Evil” Frum has been on a Twitter warpath warning about the real threat of fascism coming from this administration, ….
Considering Frum’s record, that’s rich. While Frum is right, stopped clock and all that, no one should redeem that asshole or let him anywhere near power.
We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing.
Like I said before, we’re all liberals now. LOL.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-wolfowitz-donald-trump_us_57c1b121e4b04193420f69b9
Yes, let’s be petty and dismiss possible allies. Allies who may have more power to do something about Trump than any of us do.
LOL!! Frum isn’t going to do shit about Trump. Frum is just pissed because Trump pissed all over Dubya and Jeb!
Let’s let the bigots with no boundaries duke it out with the bigots that had carefully constructed boundaries in which to profit from their bigotry. Perhaps both bigot factions will mutually self-destruct. If one survives that’s when we re-engage with the enemy.
There is talk of Breitbart News setting up shop in Paris, Berlin, and Cairo. Don’t know where all this is headed. I may regret sending in my DNA to Ancestry.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/14/trumps-white-house-bannon-bolster-global-alt-right-movem
ent
Whatever your ancestry is, be proud of it. You come from a long line of survivors.
You gotta admit, though, The Trumpster has stirred up quite a broad opposition. We’re all liberals now, I guess.
Just to be completely stupid, but wasn’t the time for this before the voting? If you’re seeing the Nazi parallels, you’re probably realizing that it’s already too late.
if anything is clear it’s that demonizing Trump and his followers was inadequate to win the election, since we got plenty of that as it was.
There’s a difference between an accurate analysis of a situation and demonizing Trump and his followers.
They might be offended by my saying so, but they are in fact the popular support for a continuation of racist attitudes and institutions. They do think an era of slavery, Jim Crow, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was a Golden Age when we were free as the Soviet Union was sending people to Siberia without due process.
cosigned
To be precise, I think a lot of them did see it before the vote. These folks didn’t vote for Trump, you know.
The problem is, they should have seen it 20-30 years ago, when they set their little monster in motion.
Your true neocon, of course, was never into right-wing populism. Although there were some far-seeing individuals who could see how well they could go together for the Republican Party. Just not far-enough seeing.
The role of Dr Frankenstein was played by Irving Kristol, with Billy Kristol (one of my favorite comedians …) as Frankenstein, Jr.
“But intellectuals like Kristol didn’t worry when media demagogues–Limbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, Coulter, Hannity–came on the scene with all the viciousness of the nineteen-thirties radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin. They didn’t worry when Republican officeholders deployed every available weapon–investigation, impeachment, Supreme Court majority, filibuster, government shutdown, conspiracy theories, implied threats of violence–to destroy their political enemies. In 2007, Kristol’s son, William, the editor of the Weekly Standard, sailed to Juneau and met the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Kristol thought he’d found just what the Party needed to win the next election: a telegenic product of the white working class, an authentic populist. Throughout 2008, Kristol promoted Palin as the ideal running mate for John McCain. When McCain selected her, Kristol exulted in the Times, “A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, `No problem.’ And some–perhaps a decisive number–will say, `It’s about time.’ “
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt
Farage, LePen, Petry, Putin. Isn’t it obvious that there is a global religious nationalist movement in the acendant. And that the Cairo office of Breitbart is to ally with the relgious nationalist movements there. As all the Talibans come together to keep out the foriegners and infidels. And lock down enclosed spaces for culture again.
It moves the global autocratic reaction to the US. The only question is whether autocratic succession is hereditary in form or the usual scrambles for raw power take place without the worry about an real heir.
As some feared, we sacrificed democracy very early in our history. Now the tyrant must get the loyalty of the aristocracy having gotten the “consent” of the people.
The media barons were already there, which explains what this was the inevitable result of a marketing campaign that relied on the media. All that media money from Democrats that used lobbyist and special interest money and took voters for granted–flushed down the drain.
No need to be overwrought. The coming tyranny will seem completely normal and unchanged except for targeted people or political activists.
And of course everybody will put their heads down–no different from the McCarthy era.
The scrambling and still affluent enough workers who made it to houses and a middle-class lifestyle are resentful of those from the working class who did much better and are now their supervisors and the professional staff that tells them what to do, the physicians who are marketers for pharmaceuticals, and the politicians in hock to lobbyists. Some of them, having sent their kids to “good” colleges, now hate their own kids’ success and arrogance at trying to change dear old mom and dad. They never wanted to change from how they grew up–not in any way. That’s why regardless of policy positions, they call themselves conservatives, creatures of old routines and habits.
They are everywhere and particularly resent being ignored in blue states as people like me resent being ignored in my native state and current state of residence.
They don’t like being told that some elements of their “common sense” don’t actually work the way they think it does.
Yes, Bush 43 blew the wad on tax cuts, two wars, and deregulation that blew up huge. Democrats (not Obama, the dead weight around him) missed their best chance in 28 years. And the media created an environment in which no one can govern.
Not even Donald J. Trump with the immense domestic and military power that the US has built for the President over 70 years.
Well, Bannon as Goebbels was so obvious that even I had resolved to make that comparison today, but the world beat me to it. There was a wonderful documentary about Goebbels that came out 5 or so years ago, amazing just how much 1920s and 30s film footage survived the last days of the regime, highly recommended! But I wonder if Bannon isn’t really more like the chief Nazi newspaper head Julius Streicher? Or chief party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg? I suppose since no Trump ass-licker is higher up than Bannon in our new American Fascist Party the analogy to Goebbels is the most apt.
There was a lot of division of power in Hitler’s government, with all sorts of absurd, inefficient overlap, because Hitler always liked to play one courtier off another. It seemed to me that that was what Der Trumper was aiming at in his crazily organized campaign staff, but what the hell, he “won”.
Anyway, certainly the denizens of BT had thrown around the alarming parallels of Der Trumper and 1930s Germany for some time now, so you can’t claim that we are surprised by any of this, that’s for sure. The study of all authoritarian regimes is going to soar once again.
The big question now is how much Minister Bannon believes the insane conspiracy stories his Streicherian shitrags vomit out. Some of the stuff is so stupid only a low education white voter could possibly fall for it. Hitler’s lieutenants all clearly believed in the infallibility of Der Fuhrer, but Goebbels was very clear eyed about what was really going on in many, many areas, whether some policy was a success or a failure. He was one of the first high Nazis to understand that the Russian campaign has failed, for example. So I wonder if Bannon has his head completely up his ass, or if he has some tangible connection to reality?
Time will tell, I suppose, we have many years to watch this all play out. And where in hell is the new party symbol? They can’t just go with the swastica, for God’s sake! Are the “Make America Great!” armbands available yet? (Since this is America, perhaps we will go with the billed cap, worn backwards, of course!) Or perhaps Minister Bannon has decided that the roll-out of all these signifiers is going to be “incremental”… Heil Trump!
One summer during college I was bored and found “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” on my Dad’s bookshelf and started reading.
There is a Chapter in the book about the origins of the Third Reich. It went through Neitzche and other antecedents in German history.
And by the end I was scared to death. Was Ed Meese another Goebells.
There are few books I have re-read as frequently.
I was wrong then and this is wrong now.
As my Jewish wife said this week: these attempts at comparison are done with little understanding of what real evil is. Because if you understood that distinction, you would understand why.
A guy with a kid who married a Jew isn’t a NAZI.
He doesn’t need to be a nazi. There are many shades of awful between here and there.
Oh I agree very much.
But if you start with the NAZI’s it says to me you don’t know who they were.
My parents remember the original, and they’re more shaken than I’ve seen them.
Look for the banality.
Reagan was worse in just about every way.
He took power with the US and the Soviets at each others throats.
The World was a far more dangerous place then.
Reagan wasn’t a NAZI.
Neither is Trump..
You understand that nobody’s arguing that they’re actual members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, right?
Yea.
I am saying he isn’t close.
Other than inciting racism and exploiting fear and paranoia, taking control via flawed democratic mechanism of the government by using Big Lies and naked appeals to xenophobia and resentment, utter disdain for democratic norms, appealing to Herrenvolk ideology, attacking the media, denouncing ‘foreigners’, wanting to exclude an entire religious group from the country, spreading bizarre conspiracy theories, encouraging violence at his rallies, promising amorphous greatness, and being seen as a clownish figure (at first), nothing really springs to mind after 30 seconds of thought.
Does Trump have a political philosophy other than ‘personal aggrandizement’? I doubt it. Does that matter? No. I don’t think the large majority of Trump and Trumpism are actually Nazi (though some influential elements overtly self-identify that way); but they’re very much on the spectrum.
Been that way most of the country’s history.
He didn’t disregard democratic norms.
He won an election. That is actually the opposite.
This is what it all reminds me of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLtRHN7fsgY
As we all know, the US is a Republic tethered to the Constitution which is starting to look like a suicide pact, since we never did the maintenance of Constitutional Conventions every generation like they envisioned.
He did disregard national norms like paying taxes, releasing his tax returns, and potentially exploiting help from internal government agencies and foreign interests, to mention a few. At some point, you really should explain to your wife your relationship with your ever present straw man.
Well, what’s the level of evil in denouncing NASA climate scientists as charlatans, foreclosing the Paris Accords and undoing the last hope for reining in fossil fuel Bizness as Usual–thus ensuring the irreversible mass die-off of millions of innocent species and altering the earth beyond all recognition?
It’s not Zyklon B pellets in phony showers or lining up hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews over trenches and starting the machine guns, but where is it? It’s some level of evil, of that I’m confident.
No, most of them aren’t “Nazis”, but they are a new American Fascist and Corpocratic Party. It will not retrace the steps of Adolph Hitler, obviously, and there will be several new elements: a fully compliant bribed “Congress”, for example, and a phony pious rhetoric of “liberty” and “limited gub’mint” out of the mouths of a complicit judiciary, along with a phalanx of CEOs who will have a whole lotta say. The expansive militarism of the Third Reich will also not (likely) be part of the program (although Der Trumper professes not to know “why we left the oil!”), but the increased military spending is certain.
White nationalists of one stripe allow Jews to be considered white, especially after the Kristols were loyal Republicans.
It is the extreme of Trump supporters who are anti-Semite.
So you have within the Trump movement anti-Semite and pro-Zionist pro-Israel right-wingers, and Dominionists (pro-Zionist pro-Israel apocalyptic End Tim Christians of the Jews for Jesus variety).
For Trump, they are not beliefs but instruments for his use.
It’s been written many times over during the campaign, BT included, by persons with a more visionary view on society and culture. There are parallels with the 20th century: capitalism, deregulation, global war, liberal movement, feminism, 1929 crash, economic depression, isolationism and the rise of fascism.
Never fear but fear itself.
I’ve mentioned the same line-up of nationalists, racists and anti-immigration proponents. Except for Putin the authoritarian as the Soviet Union has suffered dearly from fascism and Nazis in WWII.
BT has shown it’s intolerance by members troll rating opposing views for many months now. It has become an ugly, daily habit by a few wearing too big trousers.
May I suggest Martin get rid of of the “1” rating … it just doesn’t work with adolescents blogging at the pond. Lots of irritation… 🙂
I think I have 1 rated only bad behavior not bad thought. Perhaps I have done it in retaliation when the other person fired first. I have 0 rated actual trolls, i.e. commercial spam.
I’ve been the recipient of quite a few myself as my thoughts crossing the purity line.
If anyone feels I have 1 rated them except as in the two first sentences, I will review and remove same as appropriate. If I have done so in a fit of anger, I will apologize for my uncivil behavior.
It might just be a case of selective memory by me, but until recently I don’t remember a whole lot of 1 ratings, with the exception of obvious spam and overt trolls, which are not hard to glean. The application of 1 ratings simply for vehement disagreement seems to me to be a relatively new development here at BT. I have been around here for a number of years, and I remember some heated arguments taking place, and occasionally someone would toss out a 1 in a fit of pique, but it was the exception rather than the rule. More often than not, an inappropriate application of the 1 rating would earn someone a chastisment by fellow commenters.
I guess times have changed. There are a lot more fish in the Pond. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the sword of choice more often than is probably useful. Maybe it’s just a sign of the overall state of our discourse.
It was when the Hilbots came.
Prime Example.
Yes indeed.
Next to prime example marduk – http://www.boomantribune.com/user/marduk/ratings
Beahmont, nalbar, bazzz, rover27, MSPollard and maythirteenth
So sad … trolling at BT, see the guidelines.
Beahmont – Beahmont – Beahmont – fucking around again! What an adolescent … yr crowd included. :-((
Rich. Bloody hypocrite. Read the guidelines, indeed.
Oh goodie, we’re back to attacking “Hillbots”.
Why not? You’re attacking BernieBros.
Oh bullshit. I’m a “berniebro”, or at least so Hillary’s biggest supporters were always telling me. Trolling and shitposting gets you troll mods. Substantive argument doesn’t.
“…wearing too big trousers.” Or none at all!
I hope you meant short pants rather than skirts.
Ready to reset relations between the two global powers …
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53255
Didn’t Hitler invade Russia? Doesn’t look like like Trump wants to.
Hillary in contrast kept threatening Russia with war and blaming it for all sorts of things. Using it as a scapegoat, one might say.
Also, according to Hillary, Trump is Putin’s puppet. I wonder if she knows that Putin, like all Russians, don’t like Hitler, because Hitler invaded their country, killing 30 million of them? (But that didn’t stop her calling Putin Hitler.)
–Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, one of the Alien[s] movies.
A shame*, really, that not enough people were able to grasp that and act accordingly when it really mattered most.
*yes, I fully realize how insanely that understates the actuality.