“Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice.” – Adolf Hitler
The term “Accusations in a Mirror” is defined in international human rights law as a common technique for inciting genocide by accusing one’s intended victims of precisely the crimes that one intends to commit against them” – Kenneth Marcus, a former Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address of January 20, 2017, was a layup shot that America was not prepared for. His “American Carnage Speech” depicted a shattered country, torn apart by unchecked crime, foreign gangs, immigrants, and record unemployment. He said:
“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
None of this was true. The government that Trump had inherited was in full recovery from the historic recession of 2008. The crime rate in America had fallen sharply since 1991. In 2016, Matt Ford wrote in The Atlantic: “By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history”.
America’s “rusted out factories” are and continue to be a result of corporate off-shoring of jobs, high tech innovations in manufacturing, and the US switch from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. And to put a finer point on who is to blame for these “rusted out factories”, in 2017, the same year of Trump’s Inaugural speech, Republicans voted down the “Stop Outsourcing of American Jobs” amendment offered by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas). And while Trump depicted an America in apocalyptic terms in his American Carnage Inaugural Address – the American unemployment rate had already fallen from a high of 9.6% in 2010 to 4.9% in 2016. (In April of 2020, American unemployment reached a high of 14.80 % under his presidency- second only to the Great Depression in 1933.)
And now, 30,573 false claims later, we’re a riven nation, divided in two and staring down the barrel of record unemployment, an epidemic expected to cause over 500,000 deaths due to Donald Trump’s refusal to act, and under siege by unchecked gangs of domestic paramilitary groups comprised of white supremacists and insurrectionists intent on dismantling American democracy. Donald Trump delivered. It’s just that his Inaugural Speech of 2017 was an Accusation in a Mirror – because he delivered American Carnage to the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world.
But perhaps worst of all is that Donald Trump delivered insurrection; he delivered sedition; he delivered what Adolf Hitler brought to Germany and what Benito Mussolini brought to Italy: the architecture of fascism.
In 1936, the undisputed leader of Germany had the support of 67,000,000 people. Our biggest fear should be that, now that Donald Trump is out of office, what will he do with his 74,000,000 supporters, and what will become of the party that he continues to lead? In our relief to see him voted out of power, it would be a tragic mistake to assume that he is no longer an existential threat to our nation.
In 1943, Walter Langer, wrote: “A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend” for the Office of Strategic Services of the Federal government. In it, Langer quotes Hitler as saying:
“Do you realize that you are in the presence of the greatest German of all time?”
Gregor Strasser, a German political activist in the Nazi Party during its formative period said:
“Hitler responds to the vibrations of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph…enabling him with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and most personal revolts of a whole nation”.
Kurt Lüdecke, a zealous German nationalist and international traveler who joined the Nazi party in the early 1920s said of Hitler:
“He has a matchless instinct for taking advantage of every breeze to raise a political whirlwind. No official scandal was so petty that he could not magnify it into high treason; he could ferret out the most deviously ramified corruption in high places and plaster the town with the bad news.”
These profiles of Hitler should be very familiar to Americans who have been subject to Trump’s presidency – to his indifference to human suffering, to his contempt for democratic government, to his vicious propaganda that exhorts far-right militias to attack Congress and threaten the lives of Democratic and Republican leadership.
Donald Trump must be found guilty of Incitement of Insurrection by the Senate. Moreover, if the Republicans in the Senate refuse to convict him for this unpardonable act of treason, they must be considered accomplices in his treachery. If America fails to convict and imprison Donald Trump, and remove his voice from our national discourse entirely, then we will never be free of the malignancy of his ideas and the pernicious speech that has invaded all sectors of American life. Adolf Hitler said:
“My spirit will rise from the grave and the world will see that I was right.”
Donald Trump has brought Hitler’s spirit to America, and 74,000,000 voters are proof that Hitler was right.
image: Rafael Canogar, 1969, (Spanish Civil War)
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Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs