...read Ron Rosenbaum's "Explaining Hitler", one of the great books of our time. There has always been--and still is--a school of thought that claims Hitler was a total cynic who believed in nothing but his own ego and power...even the anti-Semitism was a means to an end, not an end in itself. I'm not sure I buy this myself, but I'm not sure that Hitler "believed", say, in his racial theories any more than Trump believes his rhetoric about Muslims...

Not really a leader, more of a pretend leader follower.

Trump didn't know the quote.

But some liberal or progressive obviously had read Mussolini, at least enough to know the quote.

If reading a dictator's words implies approval, then I'd have to conclude that the liberal was the fascist and the "conservative" the moderate.

Then again, I really confused everybody in the late '70s and early '80s. I read Izvestiya and Pravda, and learned Russian partly for the ability to read said rags. I learned an "atheist" and "communist" language. My response was that in WWII we had a shortage of German translators and interpreters. Why? Because after WWI many German-Americans avoided the taint of knowing German, and German, out of reasons of faux patriotism, was dropped from high school and college curricula. In a show of loyalty and to avoid paranoid suspicion, we crippled ourselves. Sadly, few saw a connection between avoiding knowing Russian during the Cold War and avoiding knowing German during WWII.

The main point here is that often there is much to be learned from looking at things not for the purpose they're produced, but for our own purposes. So the Hitler propaganda films are works of art and worthy of study, apart from their propagandistic message. I like Socialist Realist literature not because it exalts the CPSU and Leninism-Stalinism, but often because of language usage, and because it's clear cut ... and sometimes with a bit of true artistry or even subversion thrown in, because a lot of SR lit isn't heart-and-soul SR.

He's just an opportunist who is in it for himself. He'll say pretty much anything if he thinks it will help him get ahead.

I also think that if you look past all of his posturing and bluster, he's not really all that conservative. He sounds like a lot of Democrats when he talks about free trade. He has conveniently abandoned some liberal social values he used to have before he started running for president. I think those values are still probably there.

For those reasons, I don't see Trump as the worst candidate on the Republican side. He might seem kind of scary sometimes, but he's not nearly as frightening to me as Cruz.

It was a bunch of clueless, easily led people raising their hands. Had the photo been taken in a different context, it would have been perceived differently. "Hitler" is the easiest rotten tomato to throw at Trump and his band of no-nothings.

Trump is a buffoon, but his success is the result of decades of failed educational policies, failed economics, and failed political 'solutions' from both sides of the political playground. There is a critical mass of ignorant, fearful, discouraged people out there who behave like lemmings - and he is playing them perfectly.

It's a raised hand, straight arm. Lots of people do it to signal, wave, point, etc. It is the context AND the person that is making some see it as a "Nazi Salute". You and I both know that the actual salute was much more rigid and formal than this stuff.

Trump knows that if he makes allusions to Hitler he gets lots of press, and he obviously doesn't care if the press he receives is good of bad. Perpetuating this silliness is just giving him want he wants - more attention.

I fully agree that Trump is a train wreck - I'm just not willing to further this odd and ultimately useless comparison.

Obama is a white-power fascist! Who knew? And on no less than the US' ubernationalistic holday. At a USO meeting, while greeting the White Forces of America!

Then again, WYSIATI. What you see is all there is. If you see Trump with hand up, if you see whites with hands up, it must be a Nazi salute. Race matters, ideology matters, look at all those white fascists.

Now, if you see that any time you raise your outstretched hand to greet people it looks like this. Any time you see a bunch of people with their hands raised up from behind and are told they're actually stretched out you interpret those hands as being in a kind of Nazi salute. Suddenly you realize that you're seeing what you really want to see. Sieg heil confirmation bias.




There's even a nice photo on the web of a white woman giving a hugging Barack/Michelle the white-power salute. Obviously they're in touch with his white half.

Of course, they had different reasons. They thought that his election would bring on the racial wars that they have been waiting on so they could have their "Day of the Rope" and take over the "ZOG" (Zionist Occupied Government).

Drumpf, on the other hand, has ties to Germany and the Nazis. His father was active with the Klan here... I haven't done any research into his grandfather yet to try to find ties to the Aryan Movement and the Nazis in Germany. I don't know if anyone else has, either. I haven't been on here very much at all in the past 2 weeks, I've had a LOT going on that has kept me busy in daily life.

Peace,

Ghost

The trend for the last 20 years has gotten uglier and uglier. Where it ends I don't know. I hope we crush it, but I suspect this is the stirring of another civil war in America. We are getting too big for our britches and the elite who control the money have a real need to keep us fighting each other instead of banding together to fight them.

If he leads the mob down the same path, what difference if he believes or not? Others have claimed Hitler didn't believe, either--did it make any difference to the outcome?

And can he really be expected to control the beast he is unleashing?

Their inner narrative is theirs alone.

Reactionary nativist political movements are common as dirt, and that is what Trump-ism looks like. Trump is far more likely to start a civil war here that engage in overseas mischief in the near term.

And it bears remembering that Americans are very well armed.

Hitler really did want to hurt and kill Jews, and had active programs just for that. Trump is finding convenient scapegoats, knowing this will increase his support among the bigots and fearful in the Republican electorate. Mussolini was, I think, somewhere in between - his attitude to Africans really was racist (but you can say the same about some British at the same time), but he was really about 'glory' for himself as the head of Italy.

We know the 'salute' wasn't really a salute, but it was an indication that his crowds will do whatever he says without thought.

If Trump only scores a 75% on the WWII Fascist Check List, so be it. Those photos of the crowds with their arms raised at the Trump rally are political gold for Democrats, and ought to be used accordingly. The stakes have never been higher.

He fought in a war, and the network of violent anti-intellectuals he collected were collected the old-fashioned way, at least at first.

Trump inherited, and would have done better to have invested it in the stock market than to risk it (and other people's money, mostly) in one failed scheme after another.

The labor that Hitler put into building his ghastly machine was done for Trump, for free, by the idiot TV that worships hereditary wealth and vulgarity. The idea of Trump as a "strongman" is laughable, unless we are dumbasses enough to hand power to him.