How Trump Uses Hitlerian Methods to Subvert America’s Political Sanity
(Thinking of a French Priest who, during the Nazi occupation, cried to Heaven, “Our Lady, Pray for France”)
By
David Gottfried
Toward the end of the following video (About 12 minutes and 50 seconds from the beginning) we hear the voice and the melody that was Robert Kennedy reciting an old Irish poem, wistful, sad and beautiful. It makes me mourn Bobby’s passing and the passing of a musical strain so utterly defeated in today’s political discourse.
The New York Times, in its issue of November 5, 2022, distilled the germ of the Trumpian infection of American politics:
“This is the dynamic as it plays out,” said Brian Hughes, a professor at American University who studies radicalism and extremism. “The conspiracy theory prompts an act of violence; that act of violence needs to be disavowed, and it can only be disavowed by more conspiracy theories, which prompts more violence.”
The machinations of the Trump criminal syndicate recall how Hitler obtained absolute power in Germany. Shortly after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the German Reichstag was burned down. Hitler’s thugs had burned down the German legislature, and Hitler said the Communists were the culprit. Hitler used the ensuing rage, against the Communists, as a pretext to become the undisputed monarch of the German state. Trump was an astute student of Nazi propaganda and social subversion. After all, one of his ex wives testified that Trump had, on his nightstand, a copy of Hitler’s opus extraordinaire, “Mein Kampf.”
This sort of subversion has turned almost half of the American electorate into Trump supporters, or people who betray and trample on the bedrock convictions of the American experiment. Of course, these ploys would not work if the populace had the intelligence to question ludicrous conspiracy theories, the spine to resist the totalitarian demands of putative dictators and the moral compass and goodness to aspire towards Honesty and Benevolence as opposed to cynicism, subversion and a political agenda of unremitting Sadism (What is chaining and caging children from Mexico if not sadism) Of course, in this era of social media and its abominable algorithms, people are less and less apt to think like reasonable human beings and are groomed to become packs of rabid dogs.
During the Nazi Occupation of France, while the collaborationist Vichy government rounded-up Jews for the camps, a French Priest beseeched Mother Mary, crying “Our Lady, pray for France.”
We must pray for, and fight for, the better America, the better angels of our nature, the America that fought Hitler, ended the Great Depression, allowed workers to form unions and passed the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, of 1964 and 1965.