The Nightmare Begins

One month after Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany (January 1933) there was a fire in the Reichstag building (probably started by the Nazis), the home of the German Parliament. This led to the “Enabling Act for the Protection of People and State.” It was, in effect, a “declaration of national emergency” such as Trump intends to enact after(?) his inauguration in January of 2025–almost exactly 92 years to the date after Hitler became chancellor. Trump’s intention is to play the same card as did Hitler: Round up the Unerwünschte or “undesirables” who are “poisoning America’s blood.” To carry out his heinous plans Trump intends to use the US Army, who exist, of course, to defend the United States against its enemies foreign and domestic. (You know, like the people who invaded the capital on 6 January 2021 with the intention of overturning the election.) The army is not trained in immigration law, so should they comply, they will become a very broad brush sweeping up those with the “wrong” surnames, skin colour, voting record, etc. It is worth noting that the very first concentration camp (Dachau) opened in 1933. It imprisoned not just Jews, but dissident clergy, lawyers, teachers, intellectuals and those from other political parties.

Over fifty years ago, when America was still anti-fascist, my college German professor–knowing my interest in 20th century history, set me the task of translating ALL of Hitler’s broadcast speeches from the time he became chancellor to the outbreak of war in 1939. It was a sobering and informative endeavour. (My professor had served as a translator at the Nuremburg Trials.) If you should think I am overreacting in the paragraphs above, note that there have been public neo-nazi marches in Ohio in the past two days. As the German philosopher, Hegel, once wrote: “The thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” (Emphasis added.)

As night begins to fall over the American experiment in democracy, mark well the unqualified buffoons in the photo above–and there are more, such as JD Vance or whatever his name really is. (How often have you changed your name?) The common threads are that they are very wealthy, white, and anti-democratic, but do have the insidious genius of getting people to vote in their own worst interests, just as Hitler, Goebbels and Goering did in the 1930s. The populace, of course, will only realise their error when it is far too late, just as Germany was brought to smouldering ruins after 12 years of nazism. Sadly, as history has shown, the innocent will suffer with the guilty–including the remaining Western democracies.