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Writer's pictureHowie Klein

In Ignoring Benjamin Franklin's Warning, Did We Just Let In Too Many German Immigrants?

Like Friedrich Trump Who Spawned Nazi Psychopath Fred Trump?



In 1753, alarmed by migrants from Germany like the Trumps, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” And look what happened: they poisoned our blood. (Just kidding... about the poisoned part.)


I’ve been watching Hitler And The Nazis— Evil On Trial on Netflix. I guess it’s what inspired yesterday’s post about Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes. An IMBD review noted that the series is “eerily similar to recent American political changes.” It’s impossible to watch the documentary without thinking of MAGA and Trump’s rise. When Mike Hale reviewed the series for the NY Times last week he emphasizes the question of whether we should see our future in Germany’s past. “Hitler’s project: ‘Making Germany great again.’ The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: ‘Fake news.’ Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: ‘It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.’ Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes… But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.”


Veteran documentarian Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster): “This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale. In America, we are in the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism.”


Hale wrote that “The focus is on how the personal drives the political, and you can’t watch Evil on Trial without considering how Berlinger’s and his colleagues’ feelings about Trump and the hard right in the contemporary United States might have affected what they chose to emphasize in their portrait of Hitler and Nazi Germany. But the unspoken case they build is comprehensive. We are shown Hitler tapping into the emotions stirred by a nation’s loss of power; playing to people who feel economically exploited and alienated from a liberal, urban culture; and uniting moderate and radical conservatives in fear of the far left. We see him demanding absolute loyalty and pitting subordinates against one another in battles for his favor. We see an absence of empathy and an inability to admit defeat. [William] Shirer chimes in: ‘I began to comprehend it did not matter so much what he said, but how he said it. In such an atmosphere, every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself.’ Whether you find the case persuasive or not is probably beside the point, since the most salient feature of our current political landscape is that most Americans appear to have already made up their minds about he who— in the case of Evil on Trial, anyway— must not be named.





In her look yesterday at Trump neo-fascist Russ Vought, it’s hard to tell if Beth Reinhard had watched the series. She next uses charged words like “fascist” or “Nazi,” just “self-described Christian nationalist,” pretty much the same thing. Vought “calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails ‘radical constitutionalism.’ He has helped craft proposals for Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations— and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office. Vought, 48, is poised to steer this agenda from an influential perch in the White House, potentially as Trump’s chief of staff… Since Trump left office, Vought has led the Center for Renewing America, part of a network of [fascist] advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials. Vought’s rise is a reminder that if Trump is reelected, he has said he will surround himself with loyalists eager to carry out his wishes, even if they violate traditional norms against executive overreach. ‘We are living in a post-Constitutional time,’ Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: ‘Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.’”


Needless to say, Vought isn’t the only fascist ready to run the second Trump regime while Trump naps. Yesterday, veteran MAGA observers Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, noting that Señor T and his cronies “are preparing a radical reshaping of American government if he regains the White House, began with one of the worst and most overt Nazis in Trump’s inner-circle, ironically a Jew from Santa Monica, Stephen Miller, a rabid xenophobe and bigot. If there’s ever a Nuremberg-like trial of the Trumpists… there’ll be this when they have to decide what to do about Miller— firing squad, hanging or injection.



And speaking of irony, how ironic will it be for Latinos, other than Cubans of course, to help put Trump back into the White House? Latinos are now 15% of eligible voters and one poll the NY Times ran shows then giving 46% of their votes to Trump (and just 40% to Biden).

1 commento


barrem01
10 giu

I'd trade an end to birthright citizenship for well-funded universal healthcare, and an expansion of the asylum courts. I mean Human Resources are resources, and an innovative country like the USA should be able to make something out of them, but if our nation's job creators are not up to the task of exploiting a free resource, maybe we can get them behind ridding themselves of the responsibility to fund their worker's health care.


Mi piace
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