I have some thoughts bumping around that need to be extracted from my head. So Mamma Mia, here we go again. Another political blog post. (Or two. Turns out I had too much to say for only one.)
Today’s ramble is brought to you by the letter T, the number 4, and several different discussions on various people’s walls, wherein I was asked many times to point out the specific time and place where Trump used the exact words “I want you to invade the capitol building”.
Other similar questions include “What has Trump done that’s so bad?” and “Where did he actually specifically say to go start a riot?” and “I'm confused. What exactly did Trump say to incite violence?”
Honorable mention to “ma’am I was there!!! I’m not sure what I could send you to change your mind. I’m very sorry that you trust “reputable” news sources and the FBI who in fact lie ALL the time over people that were there.”
That last one was a follow up on directly implying that because she was there and didn’t see the capitol break in, it either didn’t happen, or was a trick by anti-trumpers in disguise. But trusting reputable news sites is now a sticking point.
So let’s dive right into this: Y’all. That’s not how language works, and it’s not how dictators rising to power works. It’s not how any of this works.
As someone who is neither a historian, nor a political expert on dictatorships, I have, nevertheless, done a fair bit of historical reading. Some of that was specifically on the rise and fall of Hilter and the third reich. So let me tell you one thing I learned: Hitler was always radically nationalist, but he didn’t always just stand on tables telling people to kill Jews. There’s evidence he wasn’t even always anti-semitic.
When he started his political career, he was a no one. Just this guy who fancied himself an artist, but couldn’t get into art school, and couldn’t work the common physical labor jobs. He was a drifter, living from Vienna hostel to Vienna hostel for several years, until WWI began. He moved to Munich and joined the German army where he was still a no one, but a fed and trained one.
And that’s where he really got started. Germany’s economy was a mess. The working class was poor, starving, and struggling to survive in post-war defeat. And the army hired Hitler as a guy to make speeches to working class people about the things they wanted the working class to hear.
Now, these things Hitler started out preaching weren’t “let’s build concentration camps today!” They were “let’s make Germany great again!”
He talked about helping the German working class regain some semblance of stability, and of bringing Germany out of the hole it fell into after losing The Great War. None of those things were inherently bad, and all of them sounded really good to the struggling people surrounding him.
He was so good at building people up, that by the time he got to the part of his speeches where he blamed Jews for the massive collapse and loss of the war, people were willing to believe it. It gave them something solid to hang on to. It made them feel better about Germany being in such a bad place. It gave them reason to feel like things could get better if they just did something about all those pesky Jews. And it didn’t sound all that crazy anymore.
“The stock market in the United States crashed on 24 October 1929. The impact in Germany was dire: millions were thrown out of work and several major banks collapsed. Hitler and the Nazi Party prepared to take advantage of the emergency to gain support for their party. They promised to repudiate the Versailles Treaty, strengthen the economy, and provide jobs.”
Long story made slightly shorter, fascism came gradually. His nationalism became extreme nationalism, which then became nazism. But it didn’t start out that way. Germany may not have accepted him as chancellor if he’d come through the door swinging that hard. In fact, he did try to stage a coup and set his party in power more suddenly, in 1923, but Germany wasn’t ready for that, and Hitler spent some time in prison instead.
Certainly much of the European appeasement may have not have happened if other world leaders saw how truly radical the guy was right from the get go. But they didn’t, because they were looking for the explicit wording, and missed red flag after red flag. (After red flag after red flag after red flag…)
This is true of a lot in life. (Not all bad.) Many people who cosplay don’t start out building complicated and beautiful sets of full fantasy armor. They start out with a simple costume, find they enjoy that, and start learning more. First it’s makeup. Then wigs. Then simple armor. And honestly, you wouldn’t get very many new people into cosplay if you taught them that they DID have to build elaborate fantasy armor on their very first costume.
You don’t start out being an avid basketball fan by knowing the stats of every player on every team. That’s something you learn as you go along. And quite a few people would avoid basketball altogether if you had to either know every stat ever from the very first day, or not watch at all. You start small and build. It’s not just sensible, but much more convincing.
Now, basketball and cosplay are not dangerous examples, of course. But Trump? Well. There are a lot of things he apparently doesn’t know. Much like Hitler, he doesn’t have a lot going for him as far as personal graces, or intellect. But also, much like Hitler, the one thing he really, truly IS good at is demagoguery. It’s astounding that the man who can barely string sentences together coherently is so good at being a firebrand, but he really is. People who are desperately looking for something to clutch onto can easily latch onto him.
And you’ll notice this principle in the whole outcry about the claims of vote fraud. Evidence and investigations have suggested that this has been one of the most secure elections in US history, but somehow a lot of people are extremely convinced that there's very deep ballot stuffing and cheating going on on the scale of millions of votes.
That didn't happen because Trump showed up on the day of the election with "hey, they might cheat today." It happened because of a line in one speech, and a mention in another, and more lines and more mentions that build up over a time period.
That's just the way rhetoric has always worked. Trump knows that. And we can see it happening. Without any evidence at all, people are convinced of mass-scale vote fraud because rhetoric was very effectively used.
The point of saying all this is that waiting to check a leader's actions until the time when they are literally saying "start a riot" is probably way, way too late. We saw it with Hitler. Appeasement after appeasement in stretches of foreign policy that seem to us, in hindsight, like the blindest a government could have possibly been. How could they not see how dangerous all this was?
But Hitler was good at demagoguery, and he knew how to use rhetoric. And it worked not just on Germany, but on the British and French government leaders as well.
Am I trying to say that Trump is basically Hitler? No.
You see, Hitler was an extreme nationalist. Trump cares about nothing at all but his image and his cash. Given totally equal dictatorial powers, both would do radically different things with them. Trump wouldn’t be a second Hitler. He’d just be a first Donald.
But their voter bases are very similar. And their rhetoric is following a very similar line. Trump even suggested not-particularly-jokingly that he might not leave, even if the election said he lost.
So no. I am not saying Trump is going to reinstate the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. But what I am saying is that we’re seeing signs. There are red flags everywhere. The man literally said, on the record, that he sexually harasses women and gets away with it because he’s rich and powerful. Nothing crazy that he has ever said or done is out of the blue. There are signs. There have always been signs.
But those signs haven’t been explicit calls for government mutiny. Not yet. If we wait until they get to that point, though… well, history is going to look on us just like it does Neville Chamberlain. And no one wants to be Neville Chamberlain.
***Addendum: Neville Chamberlain
The reason I use this reference, for those who may not be familiar, is that the years leading up to the start of World War II were filled with basically this:
Hitler: Give me the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia
France: What? No!
Neville Chamberlain (Britain): We can’t do—
Hitler: do it, or I’ll start a war!
Neville: GIVE IT TO HIM! GIVE IT TO HIM! WE CAN’T HAVE ANOTHER WAR!
France: Ugh. Fine.
Czechoslovakia: Uh… guys? This is our country.
Neville: Shhhhhhhhhh. Sudetenland belongs to Germany now.
Hitler: Now I want the rest of Czechoslovakia
France: Look, bro. We just gave you—
Neville: okay, fine! It’s yours!
Czech president: really, I think we need to—
Neville: Nope. Can’t have a war. Do what he wants.
Czech president: he’s literally carrying out terrorist attacks.
France and Britain: *shrug*
Czech president: look. We have a good military. We’ll fight back, but we can’t do it without you. Give us the signal, and we’ll take this guy down while he’s weak.
Neville: sorry, what was that? Couldn’t hear you. Must be a bad phone line. Oh no! I’m being cut off! *click*
France: Czechoslovakia… just stand here outside the door. The grown ups are talking.
(Watch Germany become stronger and harder to defeat. See it invade the rest of Czechoslovakia anyway, followed by Poland and Norway. World War II starts anyway.)
This is why we don’t want to be remembered as Neville.
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