Wow!!! I wish I could get my sister and her husband to read this, He really is self-made, did very well for himself. But they love the tax benefits they get from Trump, At least that is what my brother-in-law told me as he was driving me around in his golf cart showing me around their village in the Palm Springs area where they spend their winters. That was three years ago, I really don't know what their thoughts are these days. I don't converse with them all that much and just don't feel like talking politics. I like to believe that my sister is secretly a Democrat, caught up in a world of Republicans. I enjoyed reading this. I am not sure what will happen when this election is over, I just hope it's not as bad as we are thinking it's going to be.
Fear grips those willing to follow him even though they are aware at some level that he is conning them. World War I, the Great Depression, the ecological apocalypse of the Dust Bowl, WW II, the communist threat, the nuclear threat, the movements toward equal rights for women, people of color, lgbtq, and now of course the ultimate in ecological self-destruction: climate change...he sniffed it all out, their fear and his own opportunity. They are unable to think or pray themselves out of the mental trap each generation faces so they latch on to his doomsday irrationale: let’s drown our fears in blood and feel good for a minute while we take the scientists and the blacks and the Jews, the baby eating pedophiles, the intellectual elites that our golden-helmeted hero makes so unhappy, whom he owns...let’s take them all down to the level of our fear, the fear ONLY HE CAN FIX.
(I don't know if we can give him actual credit for the coronoavirus and recession, but isn't it interesting that the dismal events of 2020 are happening under his watch?!)
Back to the Future Part II | How Biff Tannen Ruined Hill Valley
I consider it a personal favor to me that you have teamed up to produce and publish this article. It speaks to me and my heritage very personally.
Of course I agree with absolutely everything Jeff has stated.
A brief treatment of my family heritage, and the connection to Nazi Germany and Donald Trump.
My parents were too young to appear in this photo which leads the article. However, they both had uncles and perhaps fathers who could have been pictured here (both my grandfathers served, but not in infantry, rather in support positions). I am in the first generation of German-Americans of my family. Nearly all my relatives and ancestors are still in Germany to this day.
My father Dieter is from Munich, the capital of Bavaria. My paternal relatives are all Bavarian. His mother Elisabeth, my grandmother, fell in love with the movement that became the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, die National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. Even in Germany that’s a mouthful, so people abbreviate to Nazi Party, or Nazis (in German, the 1st two syllables of “National” are pronounced “Nazi”), just like Americans call the Republican Party the GOP for short. My grandmother was never a Nazi Party member: like the Communist Party membership in Russia, only a fraction of the population ever officially join an authoritarian national political party. However, she joined the cause in spirit, and she transmitted that adoration to her youngest son, my dad. He supports Trump.
My father inherited from his mother’s home relics from the Hitler years, some not mentionable here, including a poster of the Bavarian Nationalism Movement which was one of the movements that Hitler rode to power in, yes, Munich. Munich is where Hitler came to power. Dachau, the first concentration camp, sits in the northwest suburbs near my father's childhood home.
Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents Friedrich Trump and Elisabeth Christ are from Kallstadt, Germany, when Kallstadt was still part of Bavaria. No plaque hangs on the modest white houses where they grew up opposite each other on Freinsheimerstrasse, in those days called Engelsgasse (Angels Lane). The citizens of Kallstadt have quite the mixed feelings about being the ancestral home of a famous delinquent.
Keiner muss hungern. Keiner muss frieren. No one has to go hungry. No one has to freeze. Those were German slogans. Germany and likely most of Europe was in serious deprivation back then, so like Putin today, Hitler promised food, heat, and economic opportunity. And Hitler delivered, that’s what made him ever more popular as time went on.
In those days, poverty was the norm and transportation was by bicycle and public transportation. So Hitler also promoted the idea of a car for everyone, a car for the people, a People's Car, a Folks Car. The Folks Wagon. The Volkswagen. Hitler recruited Ferdinand Porsche to design the Beetle.
America is not experiencing quite the same level of deprivation and scarcity and want that Germany did in the 1920s and 1930s, but don’t tell that to the Rust Belt and don’t tell that to the huge number of Americans below the poverty line and homeless.
Deprivation, not being able to pay the utility bills and the rent/mortgage, not having enough food for your children or enough money to provide for their education, those are the conditions that drive people to look for leadership, even if it’s pompous, selfish and empty leadership.
Hitler used the SA and the SS, the state-operated police and paramilitary forces filled with thugs, to enforce the persecution of the designated members of society deemed unfavorable. fyi the SS training course involves each trainee being given a dog which accompanies the trainee from the very beginning. Then, the last thing the trainee is ordered to do, is to kill the dog the trainee has just bonded with during the entire training course.
Our only saving grace with Trump is the structure of the USA and the Constitution. What prevents me from being seriously concerned about a coup d’état is that he does not have control of a state-owned police or military force. His use and abuse of the Park Police and Secret Service and the few other small police units under his command notwithstanding, there is no real support in America for him to use a major armed enforcement tool. Besides, Hitler exercised gun registration and gun control to help maintain his weapons superiority over the population. That policy would not work in America, where there are more privately-held weapons than people. I know from personal experience that it is highly unlikely that registered weapons outnumber the unregistered weapons in private armories and stockpiles in people’s homes. So private America arguably has a significant weapons superiority over public America (the police and military).
If that’s any reassurance to you.
Thank you both for your excellent work shining light on Trump and Trump-centric Republicanism and why so much of America has fallen in love with it.
In case the argument I am making linking Trump and Hitler isn’t clear, Hitler’s triumphs of will inspire the hero worship. (As Jeff says, Trump’s triumphs of will inspire that hero worship here)
He gets the economy going, gets people working and making money. FDR New Deal-like public works projects, like the autobahn. He provides govt. assistance to help people out of deprivation (food and heat). He identifies who the enemies to prosperity and to God and country are, and if you idolize him, you believe him. Those enemies are then persecuted, again all for the common good.
Hitler even, my goodness, has a plan to mass-produce an affordable car for everyone, in the days when only rich people owned cars. Can you believe it, he is going to help us own a car! Amazing!
The devotion Hitler inspired was nothing short of hero worship. Not all my grandparents and relatives were suckered into it, but as a culture, Germany went for it big-time. He convinced them they didn’t have to live with the penalties imposed on Germany after WWI, he convinced them non-Germans are inferior, and he convinced the nation to turn right around after the WWI defeat and begin invading countries until they had invaded nearly all of Europe and North Africa. Talk about megalomania. He had these people completely brainwashed into taking over the world. It’s like the arch-villain in a James Bond movie, only it’s true history.
Little-known fact, Trump studied Hitler’s 1941 self-analysis of speeches, an annotated English edition, while he was still with Ivana. So Trump and Hitler don’t just have family heritage in common: the man who has an undiagnosed learning and reading disability actually made himself read and study a book.
But don’t underestimate the effect of family heritage. Just transplanting someone into America doesn’t erase bad social conditioning. Friedrich the grandfather obviously brought all his racism and sexism with him from the old country. Why do I say that? Because he passed it down to his namesake son Fred, who then passed it right along to his son Donald. Mary Trump’s revelations have made that point clear. Fred Jr. and Donald were rabidly racist against Puerto Ricans and African-Americans who were applying as tenants in their rental properties. They didn’t get that racist value system over here. That baggage came with grandpa on his trip to the New World.
I'm so happy that this piece finds your approval. You are obviously a careful and caring student of fascism and have considered this phenomenon deeply. 53 years ago, my bride and I spent a year on a Fulbright in Strasbourg, so we did a good bit of travel in Germany. This was in the late 60's and what impressed me even then was the effort of Germans to move forward in a positive way. So I am hopeful that we will also emerge from this time when one of our parties is in the thrall of the strong man. Interestingly, I think it will be the American women who will lead us.
Your piece does a lot more than meet my approval. Except for differences in our writing styles, I could have written it. I told my wife that you could put my name on that article and never know the difference. René Girard is new to me, so I would have used some other psychological or scholastic reference. Also, I lived in Germany during my teens, 1969-76, so I'm acquainted with postwar Germany just as you are. Your discussion of amorality is right on target, I think people who are less mature and younger in spirit find that lack-of-restraint appealing, and that's exactly what you and I and Greg and subscribers here find so repulsive and unappealing. Beautiful piece, Jeff, so well written. "A once-loving church turned into a spiritual brothel," "A political party in ruins." I also adore your appeal to a return to love, that's so vital a part of any discussion of this Administration. Thanks to both you and Greg for your teamwork in publishing this article here. Should be in the op-ed section of a major American publication, no doubt about it. I have forwarded the link to this piece to my circle.
Wow!!! I wish I could get my sister and her husband to read this, He really is self-made, did very well for himself. But they love the tax benefits they get from Trump, At least that is what my brother-in-law told me as he was driving me around in his golf cart showing me around their village in the Palm Springs area where they spend their winters. That was three years ago, I really don't know what their thoughts are these days. I don't converse with them all that much and just don't feel like talking politics. I like to believe that my sister is secretly a Democrat, caught up in a world of Republicans. I enjoyed reading this. I am not sure what will happen when this election is over, I just hope it's not as bad as we are thinking it's going to be.
We can worry about after the election after the election. But I anticipate Trump throwing his enablers under the bus, blaming them.
GREED is truly the most terrible challenge of our times, and capitalism is its tool, its means to power and more greed.
Greed is a (contagious) mental illness, an unfillable hole, a hunger that denies justice, a brutal expression of broken egos.
Greed is having a million times as much as the poor and still feeling you don't have enough.
Greed consumes the earth without respite, and is a cancer on humanity.
Greed destroys us and our children and their future.
Greed is death.
But the Trumpy guy in that 80s movie told us greed was good. Was he wrong? ; )
Somehow I think that 60% of Americans were intoxicated on Tetraethyl Lead in those days. Cuts 10-20 points off kids' IQs
Most compelling explanation yet
Simple and spot-on.
Fear grips those willing to follow him even though they are aware at some level that he is conning them. World War I, the Great Depression, the ecological apocalypse of the Dust Bowl, WW II, the communist threat, the nuclear threat, the movements toward equal rights for women, people of color, lgbtq, and now of course the ultimate in ecological self-destruction: climate change...he sniffed it all out, their fear and his own opportunity. They are unable to think or pray themselves out of the mental trap each generation faces so they latch on to his doomsday irrationale: let’s drown our fears in blood and feel good for a minute while we take the scientists and the blacks and the Jews, the baby eating pedophiles, the intellectual elites that our golden-helmeted hero makes so unhappy, whom he owns...let’s take them all down to the level of our fear, the fear ONLY HE CAN FIX.
It has taken almost 4 years, and so far Hitler has been my only point of comparison.
Biff Tannen. In "Back To The Future II" where he turns Hill Valley into a horrible dystopia when he is the most corrupt man imaginable.
Donald Trump.
How Donald Trump is Ruining America
(I don't know if we can give him actual credit for the coronoavirus and recession, but isn't it interesting that the dismal events of 2020 are happening under his watch?!)
Back to the Future Part II | How Biff Tannen Ruined Hill Valley
https://youtu.be/rPVNVy9pq28
My Dear Jeff and Greg,
I consider it a personal favor to me that you have teamed up to produce and publish this article. It speaks to me and my heritage very personally.
Of course I agree with absolutely everything Jeff has stated.
A brief treatment of my family heritage, and the connection to Nazi Germany and Donald Trump.
My parents were too young to appear in this photo which leads the article. However, they both had uncles and perhaps fathers who could have been pictured here (both my grandfathers served, but not in infantry, rather in support positions). I am in the first generation of German-Americans of my family. Nearly all my relatives and ancestors are still in Germany to this day.
My father Dieter is from Munich, the capital of Bavaria. My paternal relatives are all Bavarian. His mother Elisabeth, my grandmother, fell in love with the movement that became the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, die National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. Even in Germany that’s a mouthful, so people abbreviate to Nazi Party, or Nazis (in German, the 1st two syllables of “National” are pronounced “Nazi”), just like Americans call the Republican Party the GOP for short. My grandmother was never a Nazi Party member: like the Communist Party membership in Russia, only a fraction of the population ever officially join an authoritarian national political party. However, she joined the cause in spirit, and she transmitted that adoration to her youngest son, my dad. He supports Trump.
My father inherited from his mother’s home relics from the Hitler years, some not mentionable here, including a poster of the Bavarian Nationalism Movement which was one of the movements that Hitler rode to power in, yes, Munich. Munich is where Hitler came to power. Dachau, the first concentration camp, sits in the northwest suburbs near my father's childhood home.
Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents Friedrich Trump and Elisabeth Christ are from Kallstadt, Germany, when Kallstadt was still part of Bavaria. No plaque hangs on the modest white houses where they grew up opposite each other on Freinsheimerstrasse, in those days called Engelsgasse (Angels Lane). The citizens of Kallstadt have quite the mixed feelings about being the ancestral home of a famous delinquent.
Keiner muss hungern. Keiner muss frieren. No one has to go hungry. No one has to freeze. Those were German slogans. Germany and likely most of Europe was in serious deprivation back then, so like Putin today, Hitler promised food, heat, and economic opportunity. And Hitler delivered, that’s what made him ever more popular as time went on.
In those days, poverty was the norm and transportation was by bicycle and public transportation. So Hitler also promoted the idea of a car for everyone, a car for the people, a People's Car, a Folks Car. The Folks Wagon. The Volkswagen. Hitler recruited Ferdinand Porsche to design the Beetle.
America is not experiencing quite the same level of deprivation and scarcity and want that Germany did in the 1920s and 1930s, but don’t tell that to the Rust Belt and don’t tell that to the huge number of Americans below the poverty line and homeless.
Deprivation, not being able to pay the utility bills and the rent/mortgage, not having enough food for your children or enough money to provide for their education, those are the conditions that drive people to look for leadership, even if it’s pompous, selfish and empty leadership.
Hitler used the SA and the SS, the state-operated police and paramilitary forces filled with thugs, to enforce the persecution of the designated members of society deemed unfavorable. fyi the SS training course involves each trainee being given a dog which accompanies the trainee from the very beginning. Then, the last thing the trainee is ordered to do, is to kill the dog the trainee has just bonded with during the entire training course.
Our only saving grace with Trump is the structure of the USA and the Constitution. What prevents me from being seriously concerned about a coup d’état is that he does not have control of a state-owned police or military force. His use and abuse of the Park Police and Secret Service and the few other small police units under his command notwithstanding, there is no real support in America for him to use a major armed enforcement tool. Besides, Hitler exercised gun registration and gun control to help maintain his weapons superiority over the population. That policy would not work in America, where there are more privately-held weapons than people. I know from personal experience that it is highly unlikely that registered weapons outnumber the unregistered weapons in private armories and stockpiles in people’s homes. So private America arguably has a significant weapons superiority over public America (the police and military).
If that’s any reassurance to you.
Thank you both for your excellent work shining light on Trump and Trump-centric Republicanism and why so much of America has fallen in love with it.
Roland
Trump history (grandfather's birthplace): Kallstadt, Germany
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-ancestral-german-home-of-the-trumps
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/trump-grandfather-friedrich-banished-germany-historian-royal-decree
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/29/kallstadt-germany-on-the-trail-of-the-donald-in-the-trump-ancestral-home
Photos of the ancestral Trump house in 2016, very little new information:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/donald-trump-s-ancestral-home-kallstadt-germany-sale-n682536
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-trumps-german-ancestral-home-angst--and-irritation--over-us-election/2016/04/22/a935ad44-0308-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html
(Source: https://www.thelocal.de/20160614/trumps-german-ancestral-home-sees-few-reasons-to-brag-donald-trump-german)
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/02/13/466536011/in-trumps-german-ancestral-village-the-locals-are-not-impressed
In case the argument I am making linking Trump and Hitler isn’t clear, Hitler’s triumphs of will inspire the hero worship. (As Jeff says, Trump’s triumphs of will inspire that hero worship here)
He gets the economy going, gets people working and making money. FDR New Deal-like public works projects, like the autobahn. He provides govt. assistance to help people out of deprivation (food and heat). He identifies who the enemies to prosperity and to God and country are, and if you idolize him, you believe him. Those enemies are then persecuted, again all for the common good.
Hitler even, my goodness, has a plan to mass-produce an affordable car for everyone, in the days when only rich people owned cars. Can you believe it, he is going to help us own a car! Amazing!
The devotion Hitler inspired was nothing short of hero worship. Not all my grandparents and relatives were suckered into it, but as a culture, Germany went for it big-time. He convinced them they didn’t have to live with the penalties imposed on Germany after WWI, he convinced them non-Germans are inferior, and he convinced the nation to turn right around after the WWI defeat and begin invading countries until they had invaded nearly all of Europe and North Africa. Talk about megalomania. He had these people completely brainwashed into taking over the world. It’s like the arch-villain in a James Bond movie, only it’s true history.
Little-known fact, Trump studied Hitler’s 1941 self-analysis of speeches, an annotated English edition, while he was still with Ivana. So Trump and Hitler don’t just have family heritage in common: the man who has an undiagnosed learning and reading disability actually made himself read and study a book.
But don’t underestimate the effect of family heritage. Just transplanting someone into America doesn’t erase bad social conditioning. Friedrich the grandfather obviously brought all his racism and sexism with him from the old country. Why do I say that? Because he passed it down to his namesake son Fred, who then passed it right along to his son Donald. Mary Trump’s revelations have made that point clear. Fred Jr. and Donald were rabidly racist against Puerto Ricans and African-Americans who were applying as tenants in their rental properties. They didn’t get that racist value system over here. That baggage came with grandpa on his trip to the New World.
Dear Roland,
I'm so happy that this piece finds your approval. You are obviously a careful and caring student of fascism and have considered this phenomenon deeply. 53 years ago, my bride and I spent a year on a Fulbright in Strasbourg, so we did a good bit of travel in Germany. This was in the late 60's and what impressed me even then was the effort of Germans to move forward in a positive way. So I am hopeful that we will also emerge from this time when one of our parties is in the thrall of the strong man. Interestingly, I think it will be the American women who will lead us.
Your piece does a lot more than meet my approval. Except for differences in our writing styles, I could have written it. I told my wife that you could put my name on that article and never know the difference. René Girard is new to me, so I would have used some other psychological or scholastic reference. Also, I lived in Germany during my teens, 1969-76, so I'm acquainted with postwar Germany just as you are. Your discussion of amorality is right on target, I think people who are less mature and younger in spirit find that lack-of-restraint appealing, and that's exactly what you and I and Greg and subscribers here find so repulsive and unappealing. Beautiful piece, Jeff, so well written. "A once-loving church turned into a spiritual brothel," "A political party in ruins." I also adore your appeal to a return to love, that's so vital a part of any discussion of this Administration. Thanks to both you and Greg for your teamwork in publishing this article here. Should be in the op-ed section of a major American publication, no doubt about it. I have forwarded the link to this piece to my circle.