OMNI
TRUMP AUTHORITARIAN, TOTALITARIAN, AUTOCRACY, FASCISM,
NAZISM ANTHOLOGY #2
March 27, 2025
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace,
Justice, Ecology, and the Idea of Democracy
https://omnicenter.org/donate/
What’s
at Stake: Observers were studying currents
of US authoritarianism in the 1930s as Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen
Here illustrates, long before Trump appeared in his first term Jan. 20,
2017. Defenders of the US idea of
democracy have had a long time to build its structure, yet it seems fragile
under Trump’s onslaught.
CONTENTS
2008
Myerson
and Roberto. “Fascism and the Crisis of
Pax American.”
2016
John
Broich. We Asked Sixteen Historians.
Noam
Chomsky
Heather Saul.
Noam Chomsky’s Assessment of Trump.
Josh Jones. Chomsky on Trump and Weimar Republic 1930s.
2017
Awareness
in the 1930s.
Michael Roberto. “The Origins of
American Fascism.”
Two
Articles by John Bellamy Foster.
Neofascism in the White House.”
“This Is Not Populism.”
David
Edwards. “Trump Uses Mein Kampf.”
John Diaz. Trump’s Authoritarian
Playbook.
Ron
Leighton. Study the Context of US Authoritarianism
of Last 50 Years.
2018
Benjamin
C. Hett: Interview and Review The Death of Democracy.
Robin Limeley. The Fate of the Weimar
Republic.
Timothy Snyder. Review of Hett’s
book. “How Did the Nazis Gain Power in Germany?”
Heather Gray. Intro.
to Richard Frankel. “German History and Trump's Enablers.”
Juan Cole. Trump and Erdogan.
Robert Reich. Trump
and the “Deep State”: A Second Civil War?
Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Trump
Orders More Arms.
2019
Christian
Fuchs. On Henry Giroux’s Book The
Terror of the Unforeseen.” See
articles above by Frankel, Snyder, Leighton.
Ref. Henry Giroux. “Neoliberal Fascism.”
2020
David
Renton. Fascism.
2025
Chris
Hedges. Collapse of Universities and
Suppression of Speech.
Volker
Ulrich. Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.
TEXTS
TRUMP AUTHORITARIANISM, AUTOCRACY, FASCISM, NAZISM, #2 from 2008 to 2025.
[These articles have
been placed in the chronological order of their publication, beginning in 2008. The opening poem
serves as a general introduction.]
2007
“PITY THE NATION” by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the
co-founder of the iconic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He wrote this
poem in 2007.
Pity
The Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Forwarded by Bob Billig 6-17-18
2008
Gregory Meyerson and Michael J. Roberto. “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax
Americana.” Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (2008).
I was unable to copy/paste
this article. Here is my typed copy of
the final half of the opening paragraph:
“. . .the terrorist attacks in September, 2001 and the [Bush admin.] invasion
of Iraq 18 months later turned a protracted crisis into an acute stage, thereby
setting into motion an intensification of fascist processes, which
could, in time, become the basis for a distinct fascist trajectory” (My
emphasis of their careful choice of terms.
This heavily footnoted article shows how widely this tendency was already being
criticized by 2008. See #3 on Naomi
Wolf’s The End of America (2007) and several other publications.
The authors also connect with Sinclair Lewis’ 1930s prediction that fascism would come to the United States
wrapped not with swastika or in brown shirts, but in the American flag and
bearing a Christian cross,)
2016
“We Asked 16 Historians
If They Think Trump Is a Fascist. This Is What They Said” by John Broich. 2016.
[I
conclude from this essay that labeling Trumpism as Fascism is flawed, because
significant exceptions exist, but Trump and Hitler--and Mussolini, Duterte, and
other dictators--resemble each other in many ways. –Dick.]
John Broich is an associate professor in the history department at
Case Western Reserve University where he teaches WWII history from the British
Empire perspective.
Related Link The
Führer and the Donald: The Ghost of a Resemblance By Nicholas O’Shaughnessy.
.
. .I raised the issue with sixteen historians of fascist-era Germany, Italy,
Japan, and Spain, asking whether they would define Trump as a fascist and
leaving them to decide how broadly they defined the term.
The vast majority did not consider Trump a fascist, with the most
common specific objection that Trump does not lead a coherent movement with a
specific ethos. “He has no normal political organization as distinct from a
publicity team,” responded Stanley Payne, a noted authority on fascism history.
“The major fascist movements certainly did, almost by definition.”
The second most common objection was that Trump is not undergirded
by a paramilitary or that he does not advocate more political violence, granting his comments about “Second Amendment people.”
A
few scholars said the definition of fascism is so limited that it cannot be
applied outside the context of the 1920s-1940s. “As I see it,” David D. Roberts
wrote, “fascism was a trajectory or process that exhausted itself.”
Most
of the historians I asked named many similarities between Trump and Hitler, as
Kakutani seemed to do, but almost all qualified them as particulars or matters
of rhetorical style rather than sufficient proof of fascism.
About half thought a comparison with Mussolini was more apt. They cited Trump’s “I
and I alone” demagoguery, his “exaggerated masculinity,”
his attempt to synthesize notions of the left and right, his stress on leading
a movement instead of a party, and his claim to be uniquely outside the
system.
Instead
of finding the similarities between Trump and Hitler convincing, many of the
respondents found it far more compelling to compare the historical moments in
which fascism and Trump arose. Academic historians’ focus on context
should not be surprising since they are masters at analyzing the contexts for
past events, trends, and people. It’s how they explain how things came to be.
Harvard
historian of modern Japan, Andrew Gordon, told me that he thinks there are “overlaps”
in “the contexts that in the past are understood to have generated fascism
or support for it and in the context of the US today.”
“Trump
has tapped into some impulses or segments of American society that resemble fascist
impulses and constituencies,” wrote Michael Ebner, an expert on Mussolini’s
Italy at Syracuse, like, “Xenophobia, focus on internal enemies of the
nation, … protectionism.”
Professor
Marla Stone, author of The Fascist Revolution in Italy, responded
that she is struck by comparisons to the German and Italian contexts in
which so many were “willing to support a candidate who clearly states his
intention to rule outside the confines of democracy. The loss of faith in
democratic institutions and the democratic process is a striking
similarity. . . .” MORE
Two Articles on Noam Chomsky 2016
Heather Saul. “Noam
Chomsky dismisses 'megalomaniac' Donald Trump.” The Independent,Thursday
01 December 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/noam-chomsky-dismisses-megalomaniac-donald-trump-a7449151.html
Noam Chomsky has branded Donald Trump an
“ignorant, megalomaniac” with no clear positions whose election has energised
neo-Nazis around the world.
Speaking to Al-Jazeera, the
celebrated American philosopher and linguist delivered a scathing assessment of
Mr Trump’s ability to lead America and gave a bleak outlook on the turbulence
and instability the future will hold after his ascendency to power. . . .
But there were aspects of the US
election Chomsky does feel encouraged by. Bernie Sanders has an
overwhelming majority among young people which he says could be a “positive
portent” for the future, he continued.
Chomsky has been a vocal critic of Mr Trump and declared the
Republican party “the most dangerous organisation in world history” with him at
the helm. “The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to
destruction of organised human life," he said in October. "There is
no historical precedent for such a stand."
in History, Politics| May 30th, 2016 26 Comments
http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/noam-chomsky-on-whether-the-rise-of-trump-resembles-the-rise-of-fascism-in-1930s-germany.html
. . . Comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini may have worn out
their usefulness in elections past—frivolous as they often were—but the Trump
campaign’s overt demagoguery, vicious misogyny, racism, violent
speech, actual violence, complete disregard for truth, threats to free speech, and
simplistic, macho cult of personality have prompted plausible shouts of
fascism from every corner. . . .
At the top of the post, Noam Chomsky (MIT professor and author of the new book, Who Rules the World?) weighs
in, with his analysis of the “generalized rage” of “mainly working class,
middle class, and poor white males” and their “traditional families” coalescing
around Trump. (Anyone who objects to Chomsky’s characterization of Trump as a
circus clown should take a moment to revisit his reality show career and performance in the WWE ring, not to
mention those debates.)
In Chomsky’s assessment, we need only look to U.S. history to
find the kind of “strong” racialized nativism Trump espouses, from Benjamin
Franklin’s aversion to German and Swedish immigrants, who were “not pure
Anglo-Saxons like us,” to later parties like the 19th century Know Nothings. Perhaps, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker last year, that’s what Trump
represents.
The history of nativism, Chomsky goes on, “continues into
the 20th century.
There’s a myth of Anglo-Saxonism. We’re pure Anglo-Saxons. (If you look around,
it’s a joke.)” Now, there’s “the picture of us being overwhelmed by Muslims and
Mexicans and the Chinese. Somehow, they’ve taken our country away.” This notion
(which people like David Duke call “white genocide”) is based on something
objective. The white population is pretty soon going to become a minority
(whatever ‘white’ means)…. The response to this is generalized anger at
everything. So every time Trump makes a nasty comment about whoever, his
popularity goes up. Because it’s based on hate, you know. Hate and fear. And
it’s unfortunately kind of reminiscent of something unpleasant: Germany, not
many years ago.
Chomsky discusses Germany’s plummet from its cultural
and political heights in the 20s—when Hitler received 3% of the vote—to
the decay of the 30s, when the Nazis rose to power. Though the situations
are “not identical,” they are similar enough, he says, to warrant concern. Likewise,
the economic destruction of Greece, says Chomsky may (and indeed has) lead
to the rise of a fascist party, a phenomenon we’ve witnessed all over Europe.
The fall of the Weimar Republic has
a complicated history whose general outlines most of us know well enough.
Germany’s defeat in WWI and the punitive, post-Treaty of Versailles’
reparations that contributed to hyperinflation and total economic
collapse do not parallel the current state of affairs in the U.S.—anxious
and agitated as the country may be. But Hitler’s rise to power is instructive.
Initially dismissed as a clown, he struggled for political power for many
years, and his party barely managed to hold a majority in the Reichstag in
the early 30s. The historical question of why few—in Germany or in the U.S.—took
Hitler seriously as a threat has become a commonplace. (Partly answered by the
amount of tacit support both there and here.)
Hitler’s struggle for dominance truly catalyzed when he allied
with the country’s conservatives (and Christians), who
made him Chancellor. Thus began his program of Gleichschaltung—“synchronization”
or “bringing into line”—during which all former opposition was made to fully
endorse his plans. In similar fashion, Trump has fought for political
relevance on the right for years, using xenophobic bigotry as his primary
weapon. It worked. Now that he has taken over the Republican Party—and
the religious right—. . . .
https://www.openculture.com/2016/05/noam-chomsky-on-whether-the-rise-of-trump-resembles-the-rise-of-fascism-in-1930s-germany.html
TRUMP’S FIRST TERM BEGAN JAN. 20, 2017
AND ENDED Jan. 20, 2021.
2017
Roberto, Michael Joseph. “The Origins of American Fascism.” Monthly
Review (June 2017). Home › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 02 (June 2017) › Cover photo
from David Renton's Fascism: Theory and Practice.
What can a class analysis tell us about fascism’s national particularities and
early forms? Why was there no mass movement for a separate fascist party in the
United States? The lessons of several now-forgotten works of scholarship
from the 1930s are critical to our understanding of American fascism—not
only for what they tell us about its history, but also about how to fight it
today.… | more… https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/
Two Essays by John Bellamy Foster
“Neofascism in the White House.” Monthly
Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017).
“This Is Not Populism.” Monthly
Review 69 no. 2 (June 2017).
The Process of Encroaching
Fascism
There is a shadow of something
colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call
it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare
approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted
to say was this: You are in a perilous position. Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907).
Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken
up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain
ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with
historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of
the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This
neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest
advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2 From a broader
sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class constituencies
and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump
into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now evident every
day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ
people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been accompanied by a
sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military
and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology and
political reality. (Continued: https://monthlyreview.org/2017/04/01/neofascism-in-the-white-house/)
“Explaining Hitler author breaks silence: Trump uses ‘Mein Kampf
playbook’ to normalize tyranny” by DAVID EDWARDS 08 FEB 2017.
Historian Ron Rosenbaum spoke out this week
about how President Donald Trump is using Adolf
Hitler’s “playbook” from Mein Kampf for
undermining democracy.
In a recent column for Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of Explaining Hitler breaks his silence about
the recent U.S. election, and about how the “normalization” of Trump is
strikingly similar to the Nazi Party’s march to power.
“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler
that deserves thought,” he writes. “It’s what you might call the secret
technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used
on their opponents, especially the media.”
According to Rosenbaum,
Trump is using the Mein Kampf “playbook” to throw the media off balance and to normalize
actions and statements that would have been unthinkable just months ago.
“It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in
bringing [Hitler] in and ‘normalizing’ him, making him a figurehead for their
own advancement,” Rosenbaum notes. “Instead, it was truly the stupidest move
made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months
for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.”
“Hitler’s method was
to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late,” the
column continues. “There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of
scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible
figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But
this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up
a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default,
seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.”
Rosenbaum suggests that the signs were there before Trump took
office: “The way Trump’s outrageous conduct and shamelessly lying mouth seemed
so ridiculous we wouldn’t have to take him seriously. Until we did.”
We had heard allegations that Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by
his bedside, but somehow we normalized that. We didn’t take him seriously
because of all the outrageous, clownish acts and gaffes we thought would cause
him to drop out of the race. Except these gaffes were designed to distract.
This was his secret strategy, the essence of his success — you can’t
take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You
can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all. And the tactics
worked. Trump was not taken seriously, which allowed him to slip by the normal
standards for an American candidate. The mountebank won. Again.
Suddenly, after the inconceivable (and, we are now beginning to
realize, suspicious) Trump victory, the nation was forced to contend with what
it would mean, whether the “alt-right” was a true threat or a joke to be
tolerated. Did it matter that Trump had opened up a sewer pipe of racial
hatred? Once again, normalization was the buzzword. . . .
Trump’s Authoritarian Methods
“Trump draws from
authoritarian playbook” By John Diaz. The San Francisco Chronicle. March 10, 2017, Updated:
March 11, 2017
As a candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has displayed
an authoritarian streak unrivaled in American history. His dystopian
description of the state of the nation and his declaration that “I, alone, can
fix it” at the Republican convention in July evoked the fearmongering and
narcissism of many strongmen before him. The “lock her up” chants he
savored and stoked at campaign rallies raised unsettling reminders of regimes
where jailing a vanquished opponent is step one in a transition of power.
Any hope that the
assumption of the presidency would somehow temper Trump, and heighten his
appreciation of its covenant with our democracy, vanished soon after his taking
the oath of office. His most insidious
tirade to date — and there is no shortage of contenders for that distinction —
was his March 4 series of early morning tweets that accused his predecessor,
Barack Obama, of ordering the wiretapping of Trump Tower while Trump was a candidate.
The seriousness of this allegation cannot be overstated. . . .
This episode cannot be
separated from the larger context of Trump’s continuing attacks that
undermine public confidence in the pillars of our democracy. He has
challenged the notion that this nation has fair elections (warning beforehand
that they would be rigged for Hillary Clinton, then complaining afterward that
illegal voting gave her the popular vote), an impartial judiciary (once
questioning whether an American-born judge of Mexican descent could fairly hear
the lawsuit against Trump University, then disparaging a Republican-appointed
judge who rejected his administration’s travel ban from seven Muslim-majority
nations), an independent media (trashing respected organizations as “fake
news,” belittling protesters of his inauguration and disparaging the U.S.
intelligence apparatus (and then suggesting the media cooked up the controversy
he clearly initiated).
Trump’s serial
untruths, sowing fear and
confusion, and attempts to delegitimize critical oversight — whether from the
judiciary or the media — are right out of an autocrat’s starter kit. Trump is
hardly the first leader to attach the words “enemy of the people” to real or
perceived adversaries (Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin invoked the phrase) or
refer to the press as “the opposition” (Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner and
Uruguay’s Tabaré Ramón Vázquez beat the White House to the punch on that one).
Trump’s allies are
quick to excuse his provably false declarations and caustic disparagement of
those who are dedicated to exposing or restraining executive overreach as
“Donald being Donald,” the new norm of an unorthodox presidency. But this
recklessness comes at a cost. No democracy is invincible; self-governance
depends on the citizenry’s faith in the probity of the systems that support it.
“Donald Trump’s whole
narrative has been to foster distrust of government institutions,” said Jessica
Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law and
governance issues. His message, she said, is “you can’t trust anyone but him.” .
. . .
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor.
Email: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron
Know US History to Answer the
Question
“Trump is Not Hitler: How the Misuse of History
Distorts the Present as Well as the Past” by RON
LEIGHTON. Counterpunch
(1-18-2017)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/18/trump-is-not-hitler-how-the-misuse-of-history-distorts-the-present-as-well-as-the-past/
This essay tosses and tumbles a dozen or more reasons why Trump
is not a new Hitler. And we should
remember the author is assessing Trump’s first administration.
“If we want to pay attention to history, rather than merely virtue-signal that
we are, why not give some attention first to the history of the United
States, particularly the history, say, of the last fifty years when
neoliberalism went from swear word to virtual watchword (if not
explicitly)? This period tells us more about Trump and his rise than do grainy
images of goose-stepping Nazis. As my historian friend, Evangelos points out,
assuming for the moment Trump’s personality matches Hitler’s, “It’s more important
that the U.S. in 2016 is not at all like Germany in 1932, than whether or not a
particular personality type has come to power.” That is what it looks like to
understand the past and the present.”
As an example he cites Obama: “Arguably,
US leaders that are decidedly not considered new Hitlers have
and are carrying out or implementing actual, substantively fascist-like actions
and policies. For instance, the Obama Administration has repeatedly
reaffirmed a law allowing for the “indefinite
detention [of Americans] without charge or trial.” How might Trump use that? Additionally, the
Obama Administration, when Clinton was Secretary of State, leveraged fake
news about imminent massacres by the Libyan government to destroy the country, overthrow its
leader, and leave it at the mercy of rightwing terrorists. Nazis were hanged
for doing similar things. In general, in fact, Obama
helped to expand the power of the executive in war making through actions related to Libya and
Syria at the expense Congress’s prerogative and responsibility. Obama has now
bequeathed this arguably Hitlerian power to Trump, too.” -Dick
2018
Benjamin Carter Hett, Interview and Review
Robin Lindley Interviews Benjamin C. Hett
Jim O'Brien via H-PAD <h-pad@lists.historiansforpeace.org> Nov 12, 2018. "The
Sudden Death of a Democracy: Historian Benjamin Carter Hett on the Fall of the Weimar
Republic." Interview conducted by Robin Lindley, History
News Network, posted November 2.
Benjamin Carter
Hett teaches history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center
and is the author of a new book on Hitler's rise to power, 1930-33, The
Death of Democracy.
“How Did the Nazis
Gain Power in Germany?” A Review by Timothy Snyder. NY Times Book Review. 2018.
THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall
of the Weimar Republic By Benjamin Carter Hett. Henry
Holt, 2018. 280pp.
We
ask about the rise of the Nazis from what we think is a great distance. We take
for granted that the Germans of the 1930s were quite different from ourselves,
and that our consideration of their errors will only confirm our superiority.
The opposite is the case. Although Benjamin
Carter Hett makes no
comparisons between Germany then and the United States now in “The Death of
Democracy,” his extremely fine study of
the end of constitutional rule in Germany, he dissolves those comforting
assumptions. He is not discussing a war in which Germans were enemies or
describing atrocities that we are sure we could never commit. He presents
Hitler’s rise as an element of the collapse of a republic confronting dilemmas
of globalization with imperfect instruments and flawed leaders. With careful
prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and
concise discussions of institutions and economics, he brings these events close
to us.
The
Nazis, in Hett’s account, were above all “a
nationalist protest movement against globalization.” Even before the Great
Depression brought huge unemployment to Germany, the caprice of the global
economy offered an opportunity to politicians who had simple answers. In their
1920 program, the Nazis proclaimed that “members of foreign nations (noncitizens)
are to be expelled from Germany.” Next would come autarky: Germans would
conquer the territory they needed to be self-sufficient, and then create their
own economy in isolation from that of the rest of the world. As Goebbels put
it, “We want to build a wall, a
protective wall.” Hitler maintained that the vicissitudes of globalization were
not the result of economic forces but of a Jewish international conspiracy.
Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, sensitively
describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe. If Jews were held
responsible for what happened in Germany, then Germans were victims and their
actions always defensive. Political irresponsibility flowed from the
unfortunate example of President Paul von Hindenburg. He was famous as the victor in a battle on
the Eastern Front of World War I, even though the credit was not fully
deserved. Hindenburg could not face the reality of defeat on the Western Front
in 1918, and so spread the lie that the German Army had been “stabbed in the
back” by Jews and Socialists. This moral weakness of one man radiated outward.
Once Hindenburg won the presidential elections of 1925, Germany was trapped by
his oversensitivity about a reputation that would not withstand scrutiny. He believed
that only he could save Germany, but would not put himself forward to do so,
for fear of damaging his image. Without Hindenburg’s founding fiction and odd
posturing, it is unlikely that Hitler would have come to power.
As
Hett capably shows, the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction.
Hitler, who had served with German Jews in the war, spread the idea that Jews
had been the enemy within, proposing that the German Army would have won had
some of them been gassed to death. Goebbels had Nazi storm troopers attack
leftists precisely so that he could claim that the Nazis were victims of
Communist violence. Hitler believed in telling lies so big that their very scale left some residue of credibility.
The Nazi program foresaw that newspapers would serve the “general good” rather
than reporting, and promised “legal warfare” against opponents who spread
information they did not like. They opposed what they called “the system” by
rejecting its basis in the factual world. Germans were not rational individuals
with interests, the reasoning went, but members of a tribe that wanted to
follow a leader (Führer).
Much
of this was familiar from Italian Fascism, but Hitler’s attempt to
imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome failed. When Hitler tried a coup d’état
in 1923, he and the Nazis were easily defeated and he was sentenced to prison,
where he wrote “Mein Kampf.” In Hett’s account, the electoral rise of the Nazis
in the late 1920s and early 1930s had less to do with his particular ideas and
more to do with an opening on the political spectrum. The Nazis filled a void
between the Catholic electorate of the Center Party and a working class that
voted Socialist or Communist. Their core constituents, Hett indicates, were Protestants
from the countryside or small towns who felt themselves to be the victims of
globalization.
Did the Nazis come to power through democratic
elections? In Germany in the
1930s, as elsewhere, elections continued even as their meaning changed. The
fact that the Nazis used violence to intimidate others meant that elections
were not free in the normal sense. And the system was rigged in their favor by
men in power who had no use for democracy or for democrats. The Nazis were by
no means the handmaidens of German
industry or the German military but, as Hett argues, both businessmen and
officers formed lobbies in the late 1920s that aimed to break the republic and
its bastion, the Social Democrats. They tended to confuse their particular
interests in lower wages and higher military spending with those of the German
nation as a whole. This made it easy to see the Social Democrats as foreign and
hostile.
In a similarly titled book, “How Democracies Die,”
the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have recently argued that the killers of
democracy begin by using the law against itself. Constitutions break when
ill-motivated leaders deliberately expose their vulnerabilities. Certainly this
was the case in Germany in 1930. President Hindenburg was technically within his rights to
dissolve the Reichstag, name a new chancellor and rule by decree. By turning
what was meant to be an exceptional situation into the rule, however, he
transformed the German government into a feuding clique disconnected from society.
Governments dependent upon the president had no reason to think creatively
about policy, despite the Great Depression. Voters flowed to both extremes, to
the Communists and even more to the Nazis. The Nazis took advantage of an
opportunity created by people who could destroy a republic while lacking the
imagination to see what comes next.
When
elections were called in 1932, the
purpose was not to confirm democracy but to bring down the republic. Hindenburg
and his advisers saw the Nazis as a group capable of creating a majority for
the right. The elections were a “solution” to a fake crisis that had been, as
Hett puts it, “manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude
more than half the population from political representation and refused even
the mildest compromise.” It did not occur to the president’s camp that the
Nazis would do as well as they did, or that their leader would escape their
control. And so the feckless schemes of the conservatives realized the violent dreams of the Nazis. The Nazis won 37 percent of the
vote in July, 33 percent in a November election, and Hitler became chancellor
in January 1933. A few weeks later, he used the pretext of the arson of the
Reichstag to pass an enabling act that in effect replaced the constitution.
Hindenburg
died in 1934 believing that he had saved Germany and his own reputation. In
fact, he had created the conditions for the great horror of modern times.
Hett’s book is implicitly addressed to conservatives. Rather than asking how
the left could have acted to stop Hitler, he closes his book by considering the
German conservatives who aided Hitler’s rise, then changed their minds and
plotted against him. Following the recent work of Rainer Orth, Hett says that the Night of the Long Knives, the blood purge
of June 1934, was directed mainly against these right-wing opponents.
The conclusions for conservatives of today emerge clearly: Do not break the rules that
hold a republic together, because one day you will need order. And do not
destroy the opponents who respect those rules, because one day you will miss
them.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University. His latest
book is The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
Forwarded to me by Bob Billig 6-17-18
It Can Happen Here: German History and Trump's
Enablers by Heather Gray. Justice Initiative. October
6, 2018. 
Note: As one who is a student of history, and of the Nazi era in Europe,
I can't help but see parallel's with what we are now witnessing in the United
States as referred to by Professor Richard Frankel in the article below. I have
also noted that Trump and those around him are using tactics similar to
Hitler. Hitler violently and through propaganda negated Jews and others
considered non-German. Trump is also "targeting the other"
and/or "blaming the other" as a rallying strategy such against
immigrants, Muslims, children, and more recently, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, to
give but a few examples.
As is also noted repeatedly during the Nazi era,
those in the United States and in other parts of Europe did not take the early
Nazi actions seriously. Nor did they take time to both understand and analyze
the dynamics of it all. As Dr. Frankel notes, we do so at our peril as
at the end of this article, he notes: No
one can know what's just beyond the horizon. But what we do know is that once
that window of opportunity closes, it's too late. That's why the time to speak,
the time to resist, is now. We've already had more time than the
Germans did in 1933. Let's not squander what remains in the misplaced hope that
it can't happen here.
“German History and Trump's Enablers.”
One of the most important lessons that German
history has to offer is less about Hitler than about those around him, many of
whom were not even Nazis. The enablers also bear responsibility. Richard E. Frankel. HISTORY NEWS NETWORK. Portside October 5, 2018.
Over the next few days, millions of Americans
will be anxiously watching and waiting to see whether a few undecided
Republican Senators will vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as our next Supreme
Court Justice. Their vote will help shape the Court for a generation. More
importantly, their vote holds the potential to help Donald Trump further
transform this country into an authoritarian, exclusionary democracy.
As I watch all this unfold, I'm reminded of one
of the most important lessons that German history has to offer us. And
interestingly enough, this lesson is much less about Hitler himself than about
those around him, many of whom were not even Nazis.
Adolf Hitler did not seize power in a coup.
There were no violent clashes between Storm Troopers and government forces, no
storming of government buildings. He did not take the Chancellorship.
It was given to him. On January 30, 1933, the German President and
hero of the First World War, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler Chancellor
in a Cabinet with just two other Nazis. The rest were nationalists of various
kinds, but not National Socialists.
Why is this important for us to understand
today, in Donald Trump's America? Because, among other things, it teaches us
that the would-be autocrat cannot succeed alone. He needs help, and not
just at the point of coming to power. Hitler--originally the most
improbable candidate to lead a country like Germany--became possible because
much of the ground had already been prepared by others, many of whom were
not friends of Adolf Hitler.
People attacked the democratic republic from the
very beginning, before it even had a
chance to prove what it could do. . . .
Fortunately for him, there were people
willing to provide assistance. There were those like Ernst
"Putzi" von Hanfstaengel, who helped make the "Bohemian
corporal" socially acceptable in elite circles. There were those like the
radical nationalist media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who legitimized Hitler by
including him in a major nationalist campaign.
There were those who wore down Hindenburg's
resistance and convinced him to appoint Hitler. And there were those in
parliament-all but the Social Democrats-who voted for the Enabling Act in March
1933 that gave him dictatorial powers.
What we see in America, unfortunately, is
something rather similar. As
was the case in Germany, there've been all too many people ready and willing to
provide the necessary assistance to make Donald Trump-not long ago one of the
most improbable candidates to lead a country like America-President of the
United States.
There were those who helped make Trump's job of
destroying liberal democracy that much easier before he'd even entered the
political arena. Following Senate leader Mitch McConnell's determination to
make Barack Obama a one-term president, congressional
Republicans committed
themselves to pure and unadulterated opposition, working to block every single
initiative he put forward. This involved the use of the filibuster with
unprecedented frequency and the blocking of judicial appointments up to and
including the theft of a Supreme Court nomination that was rightfully Obama's
to make.
That level of obstruction-to the point where government looks
increasingly ineffective, unable to deliver on its promises-helps break down
people's faith in institutions, makes people willing to consider alternatives,
including perhaps a strong leader who can break through the impediments,
who can get things moving again even if it's at the expense of democracy.
Then there was the undermining of the
opposition party and in particular, its leader, Barack Obama. There
was the extreme rhetoric used to attack him, including of course, the whole
Birther movement-cultivated within the Republican Party-that claimed America's
first black President was not born in the United States and was therefore an
illegitimate ruler. . . .
Unfortunately there's more than just the
rhetoric and actions that have made Trump's presidency a real possibility.
There's the astonishing lack of any serious criticism of him by
members of his own party. . . . .
Of course it's true, no one knew just how little
time they would have. No one knew if Hitler would be Chancellor for long. No
one knew that the Reichstag would burn. No one knew all the horrors that were
still to come. Nobody could know. But that's precisely the point. No
one can know what's just beyond the horizon. But what we do know is that once
that window of opportunity closes, it's too late. That's why the time to speak,
the time to resist, is now. We've already had more time than the Germans
did in 1933. Let's not squander what remains in the misplaced hope that it
can't happen here.
Richard E. Frankel is an Associate
Professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Juan Cole. “Warning to US: Erdogan Has Used Same
Techniques as Trump to De-Democratize Turkey.”
Informed Comment . Reader
Supported News (26
June 18).
Cole writes: "Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the
president of Turkey, began his legitimate political career at the turn of this
century with a push for more political pluralism in a Turkey that had long been
dominated by an elite, secular military." READ MORE [Access is forbidden. –D]
“Reich on Trump.” [A Second Civil War? Trump With? Or Against the “Deep State”? Depends on how you define it.]
(I think this was
published in 2018. Google Reich on
Trump, where another statement with the same title appears in Feb. 21,
2025. Reich’s been studying Trump for a
decade or more. --D)
Imagine that an
impeachment resolution against Donald Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s
the work of the “deep state.” Sean Hannity of Fox News demands that every
honest patriot take to the streets. Right-wing social media call for war. As
insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed forces to side with the
“patriots.” Or, it’s November 2020 and
Trump has lost the election. He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep
state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and
says he has an obligation not to step down. Demonstrations and riots ensue.
Trump commands the armed forces to put them down. If these sound far-fetched, consider Trump’s
torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his offhand jokes about
being “president for life,” and his increasing invocation of a “deep state”
plot against him.
The United States is premised on an agreement about how to deal with our
disagreements. It’s called the Constitution. We trust our system of government
enough that we abide by its outcomes even though we may disagree with them.
Only once in our history — in 1861 — did enough of us distrust the system so
much we succumbed to civil war.
[Trump embraces the billionaires and bankers and creates a “deep state” of enemy
scapegoats of everyone who opposes him. –D]
But what happens if a president claims
our system is no longer trustworthy?
Last month, Trump accused the “deep state” of embedding a spy in his
campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon unraveled after Republican
House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it, but truth has never silenced
Trump for long. Trump’s immediate goal is to discredit Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond that. In tweets
and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly described as a “war on the
deep state.” In his 2013 novel “A
Delicate Truth,” John le Carre describes the “deep state” as a moneyed elite
— “nongovernmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce” who rule in
secret. America already may be close to
that sort of deep state. As Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and
Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page found after analyzing 1,799 policy
issues that came before Congress, “the preferences of the average American
appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy.” Instead, Gilens
and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy
individuals and moneyed business interests.
The data Gilens and Page
used come from the period from 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court
opened the floodgates to big money in its Citizens United vs. Federal
Election Commission decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.
So when Trump says the
political system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said
the same thing. A Monmouth University
poll released in March found that a bipartisan majority of Americans already
believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating national policy.
But here’s the crucial distinction. [To]Trump [the] “deep state” isn’t the moneyed
interests. It’s a supposed cabal of government workers, intelligence personnel,
researchers, experts, scientists, professors and journalists — the people who
make, advise about, analyze or report on public policy. In the real world, they’re supposed to be
truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy, they’re out to get him. . . .
A second civil war?
Probably not. But the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd
to imagine serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us. © 2018 Robert Reich, a former Secretary
of Labor, is a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. To comment, submit
your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.
Trump: More Military
and Armaments
D-G Staff.
“Trump’s Budget Sustains Deficit.
$4.4 Trillion Plan Boosts Spending.” NADG
(Feb. 13, 2018), 1A. ‘’We’re going to have the strongest military
we’ve ever had, by far,’ Trump said. ‘In this budget we took care of the
military like it’s never been taken care of before.’ It would continue to markedly increase
military spending and set aside money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
2019
Christian Fuchs.
“Henry
A. Giroux and the Culture of Neoliberal Fascism.” mronline.org (8-25-19).
HENRY
A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the
Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald
Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an
authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that
holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and
democracy […] Source
Christian Fuchs (Posted Aug 24, 2019)
Originally published: Los Angeles Review of Books on August 12, 2019 (more
by Los
Angeles Review of Books). Fascism, ImperialismGlobalReview.
2020
Fascism: History and Theory by David Renton. Pluto
P, 2020.
The classic text on the history and theory of fascism, revised for the
twentieth anniversary of its first publication
Across Europe and the world, far right parties
have been enjoying greater electoral success than at any time since 1945.
Right-wing street movements draw huge supporters and terrorist attacks on Jews
and Muslims proliferate. It sometimes seems we are returning to the age of
fascism.
To explain this disturbing trend, David Renton
surveys the history of fascism in Europe from its pre-war origins to the
present day, examining Marxist responses to fascism in the age of Hitler and
Mussolini, the writings of Trotsky and Gramsci and contemporary theorists.
Renton theorises that fascism was driven by the chaotic and unstable balance
between reactionary ambitions and the mass character of its support. This
approach will arm a new generation of anti-fascists to resist those who seek to
re-enact fascism.
Rewritten and revised for the twentieth
anniversary of its first publication, Renton's classic book synthesises the
Marxist theory of fascism and updates it for our own times.
TRUMP’S
FIRST TERM BEGAN JAN. 20, 2017 AND ENDED Jan. 20, 2021.
TRUMP’S 2ND TERM BEGAN JANUARY 20, 2025.
2025
“Surrendering to Authoritarianism.” The Chris Hedges Report (3-24-25).
Liberal institutions, including universities,
traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are
no exception.
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s
interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to
the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in
academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City
Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them
when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic
departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new
senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East,
South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton,
Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are
not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or
hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of
moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic
power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall
headlong into authoritarianism.
Armstrong, like most of the heads of our
universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily
make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president.
But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no
appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal
elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will
be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded
throughout the Trump administration.
The Department of
Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face
“potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil
rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or
nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying
to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults
against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The
so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to
achieve that end.
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia
University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their
demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab
Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI
investigation against him, that the university adopt the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism,
which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the
university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty. . . .
Universities and
colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They
have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and
students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times —
to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of
their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for
Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when
both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests
and encampments began. . . .
And this is where we are. None of the liberal
institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the
Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles
and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists
for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and
accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before
Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the
state.
2025
Volker Ulrich.
Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.
HITLER’S
SPEECH TO HIS ARMY COMMANDERS FEBRUARY 10, 1939: German Hyper-Nationalism, Exceptionalism,
Hitler’s Megalomania, Destiny/Predestination of Germany and Hitler.
On
this day Hitler spoke to his officer corps in Berlin about his easy triumphs
over Austria and Czechoslovakia and about his plans for the future (his top
military leaders were already aware).
The 85 million, “highly civilized race” of Germans “’were the strongest
people not just in Europe but practically the entire world.’” They “had a right to greater living space in
order to preserve their standard of living,” a right and future that had been
“preordained.” And he was the individual
predetermined to carry out that destiny.
This goal “’will dominate my entire existence,’” and he would “’never
shrink back from the most extreme measures.’”
Soon afterward he “set about capturing what had escaped his clutches in
the autumn of 1938,” the rest of Czechoslovakia. Conquest of Poland and western Europe
followed. Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (p. 749).
[ Successful conquests
usually do not repeat the patterns of earlier invasions. Imperialists know that leaders and
populations on both sides must be surprised, one to be compliant to their
leaders’ massive violence, the other to be unaware and overwhelmed by the new
arrangement and symbols of violence.
The United States military at present has a new total budget of a
trillion dollars, some 800 military bases in some 70 countries, and ten
aircraft carrier groups with a new carrier doing sea trials. And it all happened gradually, after having
been jump-started by WWII. The Reagan
administration gave its full support to counterrevolutionary forces in Central
America, and developed plans for martial law at home, giving sole power to the
president and authority to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round
up dissidents, aliens, enemies, etc., and place them in detention centers. One morning we all woke up and found ourselves living in a
heavily militarized empire.
But
Reagan was not Hitler; nor is Trump. Hitler yearned for living space for his fellow
exceptional Germans, and mobilized highly visible tanks and planes and marching
troops to gain his predestined goal. He
needed to use none of it against Austria and Czechoslovakia so intimidating was
such power. Our presidents since WWII
at first followed this model, until, responding to public uneasiness, they
turned increasingly to less visible war— volunteer troops, world-best
technology, drones, proxies, contractors.
But the cause is similar: dictatorship’s territorial domination for
resources, today for fossil fuels especially, with confidence in the unique,
exceptional nation under divine providence.
–Dick.]
CONTENTS of TRUMP AUTHORITARIANISM, AUTOCRACY, FASCISM, NAZISM ANTHOLOGY #1(originally The
Insurrection)
PBS Frontline, American
Insurrection
NYT, “The Politics of Menace.”
NPR, Fresh Air, Trump’s
Strategy, Next Time
Robert Costa and Bob Woodward, Peril
Alfred McCoy, To
Govern the Globe and “An American Coup”
Karen Greenberg, Subtle
Tools
Robert Kagan, “Our Constant Crisis Is Already Here”
Kate Woodsome, “How the Capitol Attack Unfolded,” Washington Post
Jeremy
Kuzmarov, “Was the January 6th a Dress Rehearsal for a Coup
d’État”?
Dick, Trump’s Ongoing Attempted Coup Increasingly Autocratic
Joshua Cho, US Media and Trump’s Coup Attempt
Gregory Krieg, CNN, “Trump’s Attempt to Steal the Election”
Ezra Klein, “Trump is Attempting a Coup in Plain Sight”
Two Books Recommended by George Paulson:
Mazower, Hitler’s Empire
Childers, The Third Reich
Painter and Golenbock,
American Nero, rev. by Dahlia Lithwick
Dick, Benjamin Hett’s The
Death of Democracy
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/01/omni-insurrection-anthology-january-2.html
