Trump vs. Hitler

#415

Friend of Democracy,

We can’t compare Nazi-Germany with the USA of today, can we?

Maybe we should.

Not because it’s the same. But because it could become similar.

Because people tend to be delusional. They hope things can’t go worse. They don’t recognise when things are getting worse, not when life deteriorates incrementally. Step by step.

In Germany, after the Nazi took power, most of the people thought that things would turn out well. We know it didn’t.

And in the USA of today?

Ian Buruma, author of The Colaborators, compares the situation (his father was a student in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and deported to Germany as a forced labourer) in the New York Times (gift article):

“I was told by a well-known American historian that there was really nothing to worry about, for after all, Roosevelt once had authoritarian tendencies, too. Democracy would never be shattered, a law professor assured me, for ‘Americans love freedom too much.’

Since then, one red line after another has been crossed: Undocumented immigrants are called animals; civilian boats are blown out of the water; American citizens are gunned down in the streets and then accused of being domestic terrorists; universities, news organizations and law firms are being bullied and blackmailed; and refugees are deported to countries whose languages they probably don’t even speak. And that is aside from the blatant corruption of family and cronies.

All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.

But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.”

See you in Democracy,

Johannes Eber