A book reveals the astounding parallels between Hitler and Trump — What every MAGA should read though none will.

Learning from history, recent or distant, is not a MAGA forte.

They believe only what Donald Trump tells them to believe today, even when it differs from what he told them yesterday, which regularly is the case.

Thus, no MAGA will read the following book or even read this post.

The book is summarized here: The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers.  (The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.) By Adam Gopnik

The book outlines how Germany’s political and financial leaders paid dearly for believing they could control a man they knew to be a psychopath.

The parallels with today’s Republican party and Trump’s wealthy backers are astounding. You repeatedly will be reminded, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”–George Santayana,

The Life of Reason, 1905. The MAGA movement allows for no memory of Hitler’s rise to power and his disastrous use of it.

Here are some excerpts from the summary article by Adam Gopnik: ©Provided by ZNetwork

Hitler created a world in which women were transported with their children for days in closed train cars and then had to watch those children die alongside them, naked, gasping for breath in a gas chamber.

Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” (Knopf), an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one.

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following.

Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him.

Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power.

The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money.

Hello, today’s wealthy people, Elon Musk, Kenny Troutt, Woody Johnson, Geoffrey Harrison, Saul Fox, Howard Lutnick, John Paulson, Mike Hodges, John Blanchard, Scott Bessent, David Frecka, George Bishop, Steven Witkoff, Tim Dunn, Diane Hendricks, Linda and Vince McMahon.

Trump doesn’t care about protecting your money. He cares only about protecting his money.

Many of you are billionaires who’ve supported Trump because he promises to eliminate regulations that protect customers.

Some of you gave to him in return for his political and/or financial support for their schemes.

If you notice any Jewish-sounding names in the bunch, you are right, which I, as a Jew, find particularly ironic and loathsome.

Trump is an undisguised bigot, and history shows that when a group supports bigotry, eventually, they themselves become targets of bigotry.

When a government supports bigotry, no one is spared, but the victims learn their lesson too late.

Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution.

The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long.

The decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader.

In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

National Socialist German Workers’ Party (its German initials were N.S.D.A.P.) had been in existence since right after the Great War, as one of many völkisch, or populist, groups; its label, by including “national” and “socialist,” was intended to appeal to both right-wing nationalists and left-wing socialists, who were thought to share a common enemy: the élite class of Jewish bankers who, they said, manipulated Germany behind the scenes and had been responsible for the German surrender.

Those American Jews who support Hitleresque Trump have conveniently forgotten that right-wingers blamed Jews Germany’s loss in WWI.

The lure of money then and now overcomes morals and sense.

The Nazis, as they were called—a put-down made into a popular label, like “Impressionists”—began as one of many fringe and populist antisemitic groups in Germany, including the Thule Society, which was filled with bizarre pre-QAnon conspiracy adepts.

It is a feature of right-wing politics to be exceptionally believing of conspiracies, and not believing of facts.

Hitler’s plans were deliberately ambiguous, but his purposes were not. Ever since his unsuccessful putsch in Munich, he had, Ryback writes, “been driven by a single ambition: to destroy the political system that he held responsible for the myriad ills plaguing the German people.”

Trump’s efforts to destroy American democracy and to install himself as dictator are clouded by his frequent changes in publicly stated goals.

Example: His repeated flip-flops about ending or not ending ACA (“Obamacare”).

These changes require his followers repeatedly to go into “What he really meant was” mode to homogenize his extremism for the voting public.

Most recently, many of his acolytes explained that “he really doesn’t intend to deport millions of men, women, and children. He just wants to strengthen the border.” (Then why did he instruct his GOP minions to vote against the bipartisan border-strengthening law created by a Republican?)

Ryback skips past the underlying mechanics of the July, 1932, election on the way to his real subject—Hitler’s manipulation of the conservative politicians and tycoons who thought that they were manipulating him—but there’s a notable academic literature on what actually happened when Germans voted that summer.

The political scientists and historians who study it tell us that the election was a “normal” one, in the sense that the behavior of groups and subgroups proceeded in the usual way, responding more to the perception of political interests than to some convulsions of apocalyptic feeling.

The popular picture of the decline of the Weimar Republic—in which hyperinflation produced mass unemployment, which produced an unstoppable wave of fascism—is far from the truth. The hyperinflation had ended in 1923, and the period right afterward, in the mid-twenties, was, in Germany as elsewhere, golden. 

Still, the results of the July, 1932, election weren’t obviously catastrophic. Both Hitler and Goebbels were bitterly disappointed by their standing.

As was Trump following the 2020 election– so disappointed he denied the results.

The unemployed actually opposed Hitler and voted en masse for the parties of the left.

What was once called the petite bourgeoisie, then, was key to his support—not people feeling the brunt of economic precarity but people feeling the possibility of it.

Having nothing to fear but fear itself is having something significant to fear.

Trump, like Hitler before him, is a fear-monger.

He sows fear of “marauding immigrant gangs and rapists.”

For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: Immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime.

Trump also promulgates the lies that immigrants don’t pay taxes and that they take jobs from native-born American workers.

Claiming that immigrants are making things worse for U.S.-born workers is often used as an intentional distraction from dynamics that are actually hurting working people—such as weak labor standards and enforcement, anti-worker deregulation, weak labor law that fails to protect workers’ rights to unions and collective bargaining in the face of coordinated and well-funded attacks, and other dynamics that result in too much power in the hands of corporations and employers.

A new study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that undocumented immigrants actually contributed almost $100 billion in taxes during 2022 while not being able to use many of the programs they thought their tax dollars funded.

More than a third of these immigrants’ taxes are earmarked for programs they cannot access: Social Security ($25.7 billion), Medicare ($6.4 billion), and unemployment insurance ($1.8 billion).

It is Trump and his wealthy backers who favor laws that weaken American workers while benefiting the rich.

The Germans were voting, in the absent-minded way of democratic voters everywhere, for easy reassurances, for stability, with classes siding against their historical enemies.

They weren’t wild-eyed nationalists voting for a millennial authoritarian regime that would rule forever and restore Germany to glory, and, certainly, they weren’t voting for an apocalyptic nightmare that would leave tens of millions of people dead and the cities of Germany destroyed.

They were voting for specific programs that they thought would benefit them, and for a year’s insurance against the people they feared.

The rich give their money and votes to Trump because they believe he will make them even richer.

The not-rich vote for Trump because they fear the imaginary dangers Trump claims immigrants and liberals pose.

Ryback, focussing on the self-entrapped German conservatives, generally avoids the question that seems most obvious to a contemporary reader: Given that Hitler had repeatedly vowed to use the democratic process in order to destroy democracy, why did the people committed to democracy let him do it?

That is the key question even today.

Given that Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost in both the electoral college and by 7 million popular votes, why would people committed to democracy now vote for him?

Many historians have jousted with this question, but perhaps the most piercing account remains an early one, written less than a decade after the war by the émigré German scholar Lewis Edinger, who had known the leaders of the Social Democrats well and consulted them directly—the ones who had survived, that is—for his study.

His conclusion was that they simply “trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters.”

Most Americans understand Trump’s faults and ambitions.

Still, they cannot believe that he actually could do what he repeatedly says he will do: Destroy the legal system that protects democracy (He calls it “draining the swamp.”) and install himself as dictator.

Most Americans have a deep faith that democracy will always survive here and that we’re not like those foreign countries.

Yet, democracy constantly teeters on the edge, and we have been remarkably fortunate so far despite our individual foolishness. Today, the election is predicted to be a close call even though:

• Trump disparages blacks as coming from “shithole countries” and being criminals
• He disparages browns as being “rapists and criminals.”
• He is supported by right-wing Christian nationalists who believe in the virtual enslavement of women and who oppose women even having voting or abortion rights.
• He openly expresses his bigotry toward all religions other than Christian nationalism.
• His followers engage in book burning and other anti-free-speech efforts.
• He disparages gays.
• He disparages women.
• He opposes unions and worker’s rights while supporting rich business owners.
• He repeatedly has tried to end ACA (Obamacare), even going so far as repeatedly to reach out to the Supreme Court.
• He admires dictators like Putin and Kim and has admitted he would be a dictator if elected.
• He has committed and been convicted by juries of many crimes, including tax fraud and other forms of fraud (for instance, Trump U., cheating his foreign workers, etc.)
• He made repeated attempts to overthrow the U.S. government and continues to claim the election was tainted despite his loss of 60+ lawsuits proving otherwise.
• His endless lying has become crazier and crazier, indicating his mental deterioration.

By any rational measure, Trump would not receive a single vote other than from the greedy rich and the Christian nationalists, none of whom seem to worry about democracy.

But these are not rational times, and sadly, history is filled with horrifying examples of what happens to a population that departs from rationality.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Source: https://mythfighter.com/2024/08/15/a-book-reveals-the-astounding-parallels-between-hitler-and-trump-what-every-maga-should-read-though-none-will/