It’s really not that difficult to tell the difference if you’re not a smug self-satisfied twat.
That’ll earn you a warning. Do not insult other posters.
Wait, are they products of their time, or are they comparable to Trump in contemporary terms? I don’t think you can order that steak both ways.
Trump has an odd affinity with Putin (so far).
Hitler had an odd affinity with Stalin early on.
Some people attribute mowing down DNC staffer Seth Rich as something the DNC orchestrated…but that’s nonsense. The DNC doesn’t work via clandestine murder (or any sort of murder). They put people on trial.
Putin, however, has quite a long list of people he has removed in a timely manner and has assets far beyond the Door-Goons on Embassy Row.
That seems like an awfully long preface just to advertise for Gary Johnson.
It’s all completely true, and I totally agreed, up until the part where you tried to say voting for a third party candidate was actually a good idea.
No, for three reasons:
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Trump is nowhere as intelligent, cunning, savvy and informed as Hitler.
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The media is opposed to Trump. Hitler, on the other hand, was supported by the media, IIRC.
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Trump has to face the “He’s like Hitler” comparison barrier. Hitler didn’t have to face the “He’s just like Hitler” barrier; there was no Hitler before Hitler came along.
No, for the following reasons.
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Hitler actually wrote a best seller. Trump relied on a ghost writer.
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Hitler had a mustache. Trump has a bizarre comb-over.
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Hitler was a great dancer.
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More seriously, mass murder is much worse than ethnic cleansing. And Trump’s proposals involve roundups motivated by US nationality, though presumably some US citizens will be unjustly subject to jail time due to lack of paperwork in pocket.
Trump is fairly labelled a fascist, insofar as he pushes white nationalism. Gary Kasparov figures that if Trump isn’t a fascist, he’s doing a very good job of sounding like one. Kasparov chooses his words with some care: he applies the definition of fascism supplied by the historian Robert Paxton: [INDENT][INDENT] “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” [/INDENT][/INDENT] And here are a few of the mobilizing passions of fascism: [INDENT][INDENT]
• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.
[/INDENT][/INDENT] Love that last one. More at the link. Trump, Putin, and Real Fascism | Kasparov
They are comparable to Trump, if FDR or Ike suddenly arrived in 2016 and started campaigning. Does anyone think FDR would hesitate for a moment to just round up all the Muslims and ban Muslim immigration?
Me! I do! Me! Me! Me!
And so do you.
Not sure if serious…
Yes, I can believe that FDR would have Muslims interned or ejected from the country.
Today? Yes, FDR wouldn’t do it.
1940 was a different time.
I’m not sure I understand your point… People do rightly criticize FDR for Japanese internment, or for that matter criticize Washington and Jefferson for having slaves. But it’s true we criticize them less than we would a modern day politician for those same things. They also have many accomplishments to weigh against these major flaws.
So I guess you’re saying, “We should compare Trump to how we would feel about popular Presidents of the past, if their most offensive policies were brought forward in time to a point where they’d be completely unacceptable, and if they also didn’t have any of their major accomplishments that mitigate against those flaws”? Honestly, I’m not sure how that’s more useful than just saying “He’s kind of like a watered-down Hitler, if Hitler had been all talk and no action.” (Of course, that’s still a far cry better than being actually Hitler.)
No, Trump is not Hitler. However, if any of his followers think that if they were to suddenly find themselves transported to early 1930’s Germany they wouldn’t be loyal members of the Nazi Party they are sadly deluding themselves.
Internment started in February 1942, after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. was in a real, declared war against a nation.
Absolutely nothing today is remotely comparable. adaher’s suggestion that a modern-day FDR would “round up all the Muslims and ban Muslim immigration” to individuals that happen to share a religion with a small number of terrorists is an obscenity.
Since this is the Internet, full of insane people, I must add that the internment camps were not just wrong but one of the worst blots on the American character. That’s much easier to say today than to Californians in February 1942, of course. Total war is utterly different from a handful of terrorist attacks.
Velocity, do you understand that I am responding to adaher’s question, “does anyone think FDR would hesitate?” I think he would more than hesitate. He flat out would never do it.
What they did in their time wasn’t right, but it wasn’t motivated by demagoguery, it was based on strategic analysis tempered by what society overwhelmingly found acceptable.
If you dropped them into 2016, they would actually pick up a newspaper and correctly gauge the social and geopolitical climate. That’s one thing Trump has demonstrated he’s never going to do. So, not comparable at all.
So he just had a weird hatred for Japanese Americans?
Anyway, my point wasn’t to compare Trump to FDR and Ike’s overall record, just to point out that there’s a very American tradition here and we don’t need to cast about for foreign dictators to compare him to.
I suspect if you went back in time and told any American politician in 1942 that Islamic terrorism was an issue worldwide, they’d say, “Okay, but it’s not happening here because you stopped letting them in, right?” It would just be obvious in 1942 that that’s what you do. They banned whole peoples for a lot less back then(such as taking jobs, which they used to ban or severely limit Asian immigration, especially Japanese). There was pretty much zero debate or handwringing back then about such things. Is it in the interests of Americans to have mass Asian immigration? No? then we won’t have mass Asian immigration.
I’m sure that on your planet, Pearl Harbor did not happen, and Japan did not invade the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, and the Solomons before February 1942, so that when America declared war against them it was a complete surprise to everybody. Consequently, there was no public sentiment against Japanese-Americans and no way they could have been thought by virtually everybody to be potential spies and saboteurs. Instead, everybody merely shrugged and said, “hey, that’s just Roosevelt being weird again. No biggie.” Just as they shrugged in 1943 when the Supreme Court weirdly “held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group were constitutional when the nation was at war with the country from which that group originated” and again in 1944 when the Supreme Court weirdly “held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Fred Korematsu’s individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent.” War? What war?
There can be no other explanation for this statement.
Something that happened once, before any of us were born, is not a “tradition”*. Did you know at one time in America, Church was compulsory?
*You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it does.