Sure, Trump’s not a Nazi. He just so happens to have positions and rhetoric that have made him beloved by Nazis and white supremacists of all flavors.
I think that’s what we call a distinction without a difference.
To the OP: I agree that you shouldn’t devalue the ACLU because they often defend folks we would consider reprehensible. That’s their job, much like a scrupulous public defender who gives every one of his clients a robust defense in court. Upholding the constitution isn’t always pleasant.
In 1930 the Nazi party had 130,000 dues paying members and received 6.4 million votes and were the second largest party in parliament. Today the neo-nazis in America managed to get a couple of hundred people together for a rally about a popular cause. Hardly the same thing. The reason they have gained attention far out of proportion to their numbers is because scare mongers like the SPLC know that is good for fundraising.
Luckily the US does not have real problem so we can afford to waste hundreds of millions fighting grumpkins and snarks.
And the other side had people who admire communist genocidal maniacs. Are they not as bad? Nazis are not the only bad people in history. Admiring communism is, at least, as bad as admiring nazism-
He also said there were bad people on both sides.
“**I think there is blame on both sides. **You look at both sides. I think there is blame object both on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You don’t have doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that the neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville. Excuse me. They didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis. You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
“Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people but **you also had troublemakers **and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too.”
*"The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. You had a lot of people in that group that **were there to innocently protest *and very legally protest. I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit."
Which thugs? Mobutu? Mugabe? Trujillo? Hitler? Which of those examples happen in anything remotely resembling the US in 2017.
It’s simply because “Nazi” has gone from being a clear political statement to “bad guy.” If you don’t hate the hammer-and-sickle as much as the swastika you are a bad person.
If you favor the building of a bridge and the local KKK group favors it too, would you stop being in favor?
Sure, guilty by association Works all the time.
The United States is currently deeply divided along ideological, sociological, and racial lines. It is racked with debt from two ineffectual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while its systems for financial support retirement and medical assistance for an increasingly aging population is increasingly uncertain. It currently has a political leadership in control of both the legislative and excutive branches which is dedicating to dismantling programs and agencies which serve to protect the public from predatory and self-serving corporate interests while the chief executive continues to demonize and marginalize ethnic groups under the premise that they represent an exaggerated threat to national security. The GOP is pressing for finance and vocational regulation ‘reform’ that would serve to further devastate the middle class while promoting increased military spending. Oh, and we have a progressively worse opioid crisis in progress, just as Germany experienced in the 1930s.
So, while the United States is not literally Germany of eighty years previous, there are a number of disturbing parallels, and while Trump is not literally a Nazi, he speaks and behaves like an putative autocrat, lavishes praise on other dictatorial strongmen while openly disrespecting the leaders of democratic nations with which the United States has long had diplomatic, economic, and military alliances, and ‘dog whistles’ to white nationalists and other racist demographics which comprise part of his base while only rarely and reluctantly speaking against racism and white supremacy.
Oh, and despite your gross mischaracterization of my statement, yes, the rise of Nazi Germany and the destructive European war that followed opened up the opportunity for the Soviet Union to wholesale annex and install puppet regimes across the nations of Eastern Europe forming a buffer zone of subservient client states under the banner of the Warsaw Pact, from which it also sustained itself by drawing goods and resources that it could not produce internally. Without the devastation of World War II, the Soviet Union would not have had the wherewithal to take over nations like Poland or Hungary, and certainly not East Germany. Similarly, the fall of the United States from an engaged global superpower to an isolationist and economically struggling former power may well embolden and encourage regional stratification, and in particular at resurgent Chinese hegemony over the Asian and South Pacific spheres of influence.
Notwithstanding the difference between infrastructure and social justice, sure. If I favor building a bridge and the local Klan began making noises about how the bridge was somehow “getting our nation back on track,” I would 100% take a step back and reevaluate my support of said bridge. Absolutely.
The Klan is basically an ethical canary. If you find yourself on the same side as them on a social issue, you stop and make sure you haven’t somehow fucked up.
I’m not going to bother with responding to the piecewise segmentation and response to my post other than to point out that you didn’t make a single substantive rebuttal to any portion of it.
Ok.
The US is not even remotely even close to become having a passing resemblance to something that had 1% of connection with 1930 Germany. Trying to push that thesis is absurd and unhistoric. You’re impossibly wrong on that issue.
Also your “poor communists they were forced to enslave Europe” is pathetic and show both a lack of respect for the facts about communism in general and Stalin in particular. Communism was THE threat in 1930s central and Eastern Europe and fascism rises against this threat. It is communism that brings about fascism, not the other way around. Trying to be saved from Stalin and a holodomor (“don’t each your children, it’s unpatriotic”) was the reason people though -amazingly incorrectly- that fascism/nazism was a solution.
The bar for being a right-wing white nationalist nazi is incredibly low now for you and people like you. You can use it and then “punch a nazi” becomes the norm and since everyone you disagree is a nazi, punch everyone.
“I’ll take your rights to save you from the totalitarians” is very old. If conservative, kippa-wearing, white-nationalist attack-victim Ben Shapiro is constantly called a white-nationalist Nazi, the term loses meaning.
Even implying that Trump is a Nazi is so leviathanically incorrect that I can’t fathom how it can be held honestly. Sure, if you’re a white nationalist you feel closer to Trump that Obama, in the same way that if you’re a black panther terrorist you feel closer to Obama than Trump, but guilty by association is the recourse of those who have no arguments.
If you keep telling good, honest people (not the tiki-torch loser white supremacist) who are worried about their values and traditions that they are vile and nazis and you can punch them, then, what options do you leave them? “All cultures are valuable except yours” is never going to bring you friends.
The US Patriot Act essentially legalized everything that the nazis did in the 1930s. The legal foundation is now in place for any future (or present) US administration to use for such purposes. Which is the only thing that lends any credence to any nazi rumblings.
The patriot act legalized taking away people’s citizenship, sterilizing the unfit, deporting Gypsys, and forbid gentile intermarriage with Jewish people?
You’ve lost the plot.