William Shirer’s thirteen hundred page historical masterpiece - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - is a must-read for any serious student of history or political science, but Shirer’s in-depth portrait of Adolf Hitler’s relationship with the German people can still leave a reader scratching his or her head with a gnawing question. How could such a large and intelligent populace fall victim to the spell of an utterly despicable sociopath and acquiesce to the murder of six million fellow human beings?
It’s a question worth considering as Americans today are faced with a Donald Trump candidacy that in many ways mimics Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to power. While it is true that Hitler did not begin his political career by publicly calling for the extermination of six million Jews, signs of his maniacal future were plain to see for anyone wise enough to put two and two together. He surrounded himself with violent thugs, angrily threatened political opponents using language steeped in violence, vilified the German press, demonized Jews and immigrants as the source of Germany’s economic distress and preached a gospel of nationalism called Aryan supremacy. He alone would make Germany powerful again, a boastful Hitler proclaimed to crowds of eager followers looking to satisfy their thirst for national domination. To his growing list of admirers, the nuts and bolts of Hitler’s plan no longer mattered, even when it eventually lead to the murder of six million Jews.
Speed the tape forward ninety years, where another sociopath takes to the stage, and a golden haired Donald Trump delivers a remarkably similar performance for a modern-day populace filled with disaffected people and cynical voters. He surrounds himself with angry followers, threatens political opponents using language steeped in violence, vilifies the American press, demonizes Muslim and immigrants as the source of America’s distress and preaches a gospel of nationalism that demands the rest of the world genuflect before American supremacy. He alone will make America great again, Trump proclaims, and promises to jail his political opponent and summarily kill all relatives of those who would threaten the American way of life. When a man like Trump boasts that because of his status and power he can sexually violate women with impunity and kill somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and nothing would happen, such talk cannot be dismissed as locker room bravado. Only the worst of the worst brag about their cruelty!
Many good and decent people honestly believe that Hitler’s brand of carnage could not happen here in the United States, but history paints a different picture of what is truly possible in this land of the free and home of the brave. Historians on the subject of slavery estimate that over 1.8 million Africans were killed in the slave trade with America. During the gold rush years from 1849 to 1852, tens of thousands of Native Indians in California were slaughtered for their land and the mineral rights below while the federal government and the State of California acquiesced to the genocide. During World War II, American citizens of Japanese descent were summarily rounded up and interred in prison camps for no crime other than their ethnicity. Between 1882 and 1968, three thousand four hundred and forty-six (3,446) blacks were lynched in this country, many for nothing more than the color of their skin. Clearly, Americans are not immune to the self-destructive forces of evil and social injustice.
That is why a man like Trump must never be handed the reins of power. It is also why many influential conservatives in this country have publicly acknowledged that a Trump presidency represents an existential threat to our republic and they cannot in good conscience support him. Those conservatives recognize, as do many liberals, that Donald Trump displays all the markings of a third-world dictator who would cause irreparable damage to the principles upon which this Nation was founded.
Let’s hope that ninety years from now our great-grandchildren are not scratching their heads wondering why we ignored the warnings about Donald Trump. There are certainly plenty out there.
