A TALE OF TWO FASCISTS

Hitler's Statements

"There is living among us a non-German foreign race"

            -- Letter, September 16. 1916.

"The feelings of the Jew are concerns with purely material things . . . From this feeling emerges that concern and striving for money and for power which can protect it, which makes the Jew unscrupulous in his means, ruthless in his use of them to achieve his aim.

             -- Id.

"The final aim  . . . must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether [and is] possible only under a government of national strength, never under a government of national impotence."

            -- Id.

"If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world . . . the planet will move through the ether devoid of men."

            -- Mein Kampf, 1925.

"[The] Jew is not the attacked but the attacker . . . The means by which he seeks to break . . . upright souls is not honest warfare, but lies and slander."

            --  Id.

"The personification of the devil as the symbol of evil assumes the living shape of the Jew."

            -- Id.

"With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundation of the people always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race."

            -- Id.

"The time seemed to have arrived for proceeding against the whole Jewish gang of public pests . . . [I]t ought to have been the duty of any  government which had the care of the people in its keeping . . . to exterminate this vermin."

            -- Id.

"We shall exterminate the Jews."

            -- To Czech foreign minister, January 21, 1939.

"We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country of a strange people which are capable of snatching for itself all the leading positions of the land, and to oust it . . . Above all, German culture is . . . German and not Jewish."

            -- Speech, January 30, 1939.

"The criminal race had two million dead of the [First] World War on their conscience."

              -- To Command Headquarters,  October 25, 1941.

"The sole German objective in the region will be to liquidate all the Jews who live in the Arab countries, under the patronage of Great Britain."

            --  To the Mufti of Jerusalem, November 28,1941

Trump's Statements

 Migrants commit violent acts because being "a murderer -- I believe -- it's in their genes."

            -- To Hugh Hewitt, October 9, 2024.

"It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. But reckless migration policy can change it very quickly and destroy everything in its way."

            --  Id.

"And you see how bad it's getting. With the migrants attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest in particular right now, but it's all over."

            -- Campaign Rally, September 21, 2024.

"A vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 more illegal aliens . . .  stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life."

            -- Id.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs . . . They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people who live there. And this is what's happening in our country."

            -- Debate, September 1, 2024

"On Day 1 of my new administration, I will seal the border and send [11 million] illegal aliens back home where they belong."

            -- Wildwood, New Jersey, May 2024.

Migrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and are being sent from "prisons, jails, mental institutions [and] insane asylums."

            -- Campaign, 2024.

"No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals."

            -- Green Bay, Wisconsin, 4/2/24.

"They're coming in as terrorists. Many . . . are coming in with very contagious disease. You know, like all of a sudden there's a run on tuberculosis."

            -- WABC Interview, May 22, 2024.

"The ones in South America are sending all of their criminals and their prisoners and their gangs."

            --  To National Rifle Association, May 18, 2024.

"[The] conduct on our border is a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America. [They] want to nullify the will of actual American voters and establish a base of power that gives them control for generations."

            -- Greensboro, North Carolina, March 2, 2024.

"It's a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing you can have."

            -- New Hampshire Rally, December 2023.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out."

            -- Oval Office, January 2018.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best . . . They're sending people that have lots of problems . . . They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

            -- Opening Campaign Speech at Trump Tower, 2015.

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On November 11, 2023, at a Veterans Day speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump said "We will root out . . . the vermin within the confines of our country."

This, said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works, "doesn't echo Mein Kampf; it is textbook Mein Kampf."

Last week, the following exchange between Howard Kurtz and Trump took place in an interview on FOX News:

KURTZ: "You call Americans who don't support you 'the enemy within.' That is a pretty ominous phrase to use about other Americans".

TRUMP:  "I think that's accurate. These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. [W]hen you look at . . . Schiff and some of the others, yeah,they are to me the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within."

Hearing Trump's claims, Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die, called it "classic authoritarian discourse." 

In Europe in the 1930s and Latin America in the 1960s, Levitsky explained, "[A]utocrats used exactly this language: there's an enemy within that's more dangerous than our external enemies and that justifies the use of extra-constitutional measures."

"How many times," he asked,  "does Trump have to use this rhetoric before we realize that this is not a normal election."

In The New York Times today, John Kelly, Trump's longest serving chief of staff and his first Secretary of Homeland Security, explicitly stated that Trump is a fascist. 

"[L]ooking at the definition of fascism," Kelly explained, "It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, [and] belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"[C]ertainly, in my experience," he concluded, "those are the kind of things [Trump] thinks would work better in terms of running America. Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators ".

"So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Textbook Mein Kampf.

Classic authoritarian.

Fascist, for sure.

To all those who think they will or might still vote for Trump, it's not too late.

If you want . . .

There's still time . . .

To smell the coffee.

POETRY AS PROPHECY -- SLOUCHING TOWARD NOVEMBER

"Who says poets can't be prophets? He had the whole 20th century figured out in advance. Wow."

So wrote my law school roommate on Facebook three days ago.

The "he" was William Butler Yeats.

The prophecy was The Second Coming.

So I re-read the poem.

And wrote back to my roommate . . .

"Maybe he had this one figured out too."

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre," wrote Yeats in 1919, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer".

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned

By the time he wrote these words, Yeats himself was an accomplished Irish poet and playwright. In the years thereafter, he also became a politician, serving in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928. In that capacity, he combined the Irish nationalism to which he became committed with the Protestant Ascendency in which he had been raised to warn his newly created Free State brethren that "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the north . . . You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation." He was right about this but the Free State did not listen.

In 1919, Yeats obviously could not know that Nazis would overrun middle Europe twenty years later or that Stalin and Mao would, along with Hitler, kill millions in the service of either a false historic materialism (Stalin and Mao) or a xenophobic racism (Hitler). He did, however, understand that for any civilization to survive, the "centre" had to hold.  This was true for his Ireland and for Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century, just as it would be true for Germany in the 1930s and '40s and for China thereafter. 

Yeats also recognized the sign that presages any collapse of the centre:

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

For Yeats, a mystic and lover of Irish mythology, the centre had a spiritual element to it.  In holding, it keeps things together. But it isn't glue. It is more like gravity. Though it does not bind the surrounding parts forever to each other, it at least creates a field in which they tend to stick together. In politics, it makes pluralism possible because it creates space for negotiation and compromise.  Like gravity, however, it can be disrupted.  And also like gravity, when it is disrupted the consequences can be cataclysmic.

The rest of the poem is a meditation on the nature of that cataclysm.

It could be the promised "Second Coming".

Or, more likely, the "blank and pitiless" sphinx.

A little more than a month before the Presidential election on November 5, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance engaged in a ninety-minute Vice Presidential Debate last night sponsored by CBS News.  Because neither one of them is Donald Trump, the debate had all the trappings of a normal pre-Trump political contest. No one screamed or yelled. No insults were levelled. The back and forth was polite. Both candidates answered (or didn't) the questions put to them and confined their responses to the agreed upon time limits. 

To the experts, the pundits, the commentators and the sundry and various who make their living fly specking these things, there weren't a lot of surprises.  A CNN instant poll had Vance narrowly exceeding expectations, unsurprising in view of how bad his roll out has been since the GOP convention in July. And because he in particular is not Trump, a number of his jaw dropping inventions -- that Trump "salvaged Obamacare" (he tried to kill it) or that Vance himself did not support a national abortion ban (he did, and more than once) or that illegal firearms are coming into the US from Mexico (they aren't) or that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio are not there legally (they are) -- could have been easily lost on anyone who does not make a living paying attention.

The most jaw-dropping moment came at the end when the debate turned to the issue of democracy, Trump's election denialism and the violence of January 6.  

One after another, Vance either soft peddled Trump's lies, invented new ones of his own, or just refused to answer.

Asked point blank whether he would "seek to challenge this year's election results" even if -- as was the case in 2020 -- "every Governor certifies the results", Vance falsely claimed that "all" he and Trump have "said is there were problems in 2020" and  "we should debate those issues peacefully". Accused point blank of "deny[ing] what happened on January 6" when his running mate became "the first . . . President [who] tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power", he resorted to phony outrage. "Yeah, well, look Tim," he complained, "it's really rich for Democratic leaders to say Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20th, as we have done for 250 years".

Finally there was this:

"Walz: Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?

Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future . . .

Walz:  That is a damning non-answer." 

For me in those final moments, all of Vance's polished prose evaporated. Instead, he stood on America's stage exposed as no better than the fraud at the top of the GOP ticket and maybe even worse.  

The problem here is that Vance knows better.  He knows Trump lost the 2020 election.  He knows there was no significant fraud. He knows Trump can't pretend to have advocated peaceful protest on January 6 when for hours he refused to stop the violence.  He knows Vice President Pence did the right thing when he refused to deny the certified vote count or pretend that fake electors were legitimate. And he knows that, in saying he would have done what Pence refused to do, he is enabling Trump's continuing lie and undermining the sine qua non of American democracy.

This last flaw is his saddest.

Vance is the child of a recovering addict.  As the child of a recovered alcoholic myself, I empathize with him. Because the one trait we share, other than having graduated from Yale Law School, is that we were both enablers. It doesn't work.  It makes any addictive dysfunction worse, not better. Trump is addicted to himself.  Like all drunks and druggies, he is in denial. Helping him stay there is not good for him.  And making him President (again) will be worse for us.

Whether any of this will change the minds of those who say they will vote for Trump is anyone's guess.  

Sadly, however, probably not is more likely than maybe so. 

Because . . .

Vance is not alone in his "passionate intensity".

The Republican Party that embraces Trump and excommunicates any critics; the Supreme Court that left him on the ballot and then clothed him with immunity; the Senate that refused to convict him; the right- wing media that supports him; even the establishment media that "sanewashes" him or sacrifices truth for some false notion of objectivity . . .

All helped orchestrate the centre's collapse.

What comes next?

In 1919, Yeats did not know.

But he did not think it would be pretty.

    The darkness drops again, but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    What rough beast, its hour come round at last

    Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Neither should we.