Is Trump a Fascist?

[PureX]

Terrible analogy in so many ways.

Especially the way that makes it look you're going to vote for a pedophile fascist wanna-be dictator.

 

[Revoltingest]

Especially the way that makes it look you're going to vote for a pedophile fascist wanna-be dictator.

I highly recommend wearing a hat when out in the sun.

 

[PureX]

Trump is too stupid to deliberately be a fascist, I very much doubt he even knows what the word means. He's more a "fascist savant".

 

[metis]

You think he's communist?

No, I don't think so, but he certainly is attracted to "strong leaders", and this may be do to his feelings of personal inadequacy. Both of his co-authors who lived with him for months while getting information for their books both said he's a "small man" with many insecurities. I can relate to that as I had much the same problem when younger.

 

[Fool]

No, I don't think so, but he certainly is attracted to "strong leaders", and this may be do to his feelings of personal inadequacy. Both of his co-authors who lived with him for months while getting information for their books both said he's a "small man" with many insecurities. I can relate to that as I had much the same problem when younger.

thanks for the insight

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Trump hasn't tried to seize dictatorial power (yet). So you don't know that is his secret desire.

Yes I do know what Trump's desire is. Why don't you?

Your political judgment includes saying that Trump was the lesser of evils in 2016. Now you're trying to minimize the folly of making such a claim. You've never said that you were wrong, so what value are your other pronouncements in defense of him, or even admitted that Trump has undemocratic tendencies? Your use of the word "yet" above suggests that you know, but feel that you cannot come clean and confess your error.

Even now, you say that Trump isn't fascist because he's unable to express his fascism (yet, if I can borrow a word from you). Does that really matter.

You also say that the system protects you from fascism. Which part is that? The part of the Constitution that allowed the Republican Senate to ignore Trump's crimes, or the cabinet and VP that won't invoke the 25th Amendment even in the face of an upcoming constitutional crisis and the likelihood of vigilante violence on the streets if they dare announce Biden the victor in an angry, armed electorate that as been primed by this non-fascist (yet) to reject a legitimate defeat ad consider it an undemocratic hoax (as if these people cared any more about democracy than their president).

But you're far from alone. Even the Republicans supporting Biden won't make such an admission of failed judgment, nor an apology to their neighbors for it. They just pretend that we should respect their judgment because at long last, they see what others saw years ago and were called deranged by these same people for saying so. Yeah, we'll take their votes, but not their hands. They were deplorables for years, and that doesn't change now.

If after the election he stages a coup to remain in power despite his loss, that would be compelling evidence. Let's wait & see.

But I thought that you were tired and bored of the topic. I suggest that you renew your interest in it very soon.

Btw, this is the exact same argument I provided to right wing acquaintances when they feared that Obama would refuse to leave the White House, & become dictator.

So what? Did you have a point? Are you implying that the conservative's attempt to tar Obama was equivalent to the very clear and present danger of the Mango Mussolini? Are you implying that if the conservatives were kying about Obama, the liberal must be lying about Trump?

It's a bad idea to get all worked up imagining the worst motives & worst case scenarios.

I think that you would be best advised to give the matter a little more credence. But that's up to you. I've already adapted. I left America. I am much less subject to the bad judgment of conservative American voters from this vantage point.

The left is notably more fascist than Trump is,

LOL.

 

[Revoltingest]

Yes I do know what Trump's desire is. Why don't you?

I have no window into his soul.

Your political judgment includes saying that Trump was the lesser of evils in 2016. Now you're trying to minimize the folly of making such a claim.

You're greatly mistaken. I don't regret my vote.
I used the info available at the time. Moreover, it's
still far from clear that Hillary would've been better.
You're deflecting from the issue of the OP.

You've never said that you were wrong, so what value are your other pronouncements in defense of him, or even admitted that Trump has undemocratic tendencies?

If you don't value my posts, you needn't read them.
Btw, I'm not going to reciprocate by challenging your
intelligence, honesty, & veracity. Pursuing your line
of thought is against the spirit of the forum.

The rest of your post won't be addressed, lest it be
seen as tacit validation. I recommend: less personal,
more interesting.

 

[Tambourine]

OTOH, his first wife, Ivana, said he loved to read NAZI material that he kept on his bed-stand and read just before turning in.

Sorry to be such a pedant, but it's spelled Nazi, in lower case. "Nazi" is not an acronym, but a shorthand for "Nationalsozialistisch".

 

[Tambourine]

I can recommend Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Detailed explanation with examples.

Most of them factually wrong, or at the very least grossly exaggerated to the point of meaninglessness, it seems.

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/printpdf/review/783

The Scholarly Flaws of "Liberal Fascism" | History News Network

Goldberg stereotypes liberals to make them abstract, uniform, robotic. The telltale phrase is “liberals say” or “liberals think” (mostly without anyone quoted or footnoted). For example, “Liberals . . . claim” that free-market economics is fascist (p. 22). Could we please have a few examples of “liberals” who say this? It is a straw man, as is the vast, ghostly “liberal mind” that sounds like a physical reality: “fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind” (p. 161). Does this liberal mind have a telephone number, as Henry Kissinger said famously of the European Union?

Having headlined the violent history of “liberalism,” Goldberg soft-pedals that of fascists, especially Mussolini. There are the ritual references to Auschwitz, but he denies that racial extermination is integral to Nazism by noting how many Progressive reformers fell for Eugenics in the early twentieth century. His Mussolini – that lifelong “man of the left – is seen largely through the eyes of his many foolish American admirers. Che Guevara killed more people than Mussolini, he asserts (p. 194). This is possible only if one leaves out of the picture the murder of over a thousand Italian citizens by the squadristi who brought Mussolini to the brink of power in 1922, or of the Italians’ use of poison gas, forced displacement into camps, and aerial strafing against the populations of Libya and Ethiopia.

Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice.

 

[PoetPhilosopher]

I don't know. But you don't have to be a full-on fascist to be politically destructive.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I have no window into his soul.

You're greatly mistaken. I don't regret my vote.
I used the info available at the time. Moreover, it's
still far from clear that Hillary would've been better.
You're deflecting from the issue of the OP.

If you don't value my posts, you needn't read them.
Btw, I'm not going to reciprocate by challenging your
intelligence, honesty, & veracity. Pursuing your line
of thought is against the spirit of the forum.

The rest of your post won't be addressed, lest it be
seen as tacit validation. I recommend: less personal,
more interesting.

Sorry. You're right.

 

[metis]

Sorry to be such a pedant, but it's spelled Nazi, in lower case. "Nazi" is not an acronym, but a shorthand for "Nationalsozialistisch".

The vast majority of time I've seen it written all letters were capitalized.

BTW, I was sponsored on a three-week study of the Holocaust that included two weeks in Poland and the third week in Israel back in 1991. I returned back to Israel in 1998 for more, and I taught a three-week unit on it in my poli sci course.

 

[Tambourine]

The vast majority of time I've seen it written all letters were capitalized.

That's odd. I'm guessing those were English language sources?

I've literally never seen it spelled in capital letters in German language sources.

BTW, I was sponsored on a three-week study of the Holocaust that included two weeks in Poland and the third week in Israel back in 1991. I returned back to Israel in 1998 for more, and I taught a three-week unit on it in my poli sci course.

I wasn't trying to question your credentials, only your orthography.
I only did a paper on pre-Anschluss Nazi propaganda in the early 2000s for a Media Studies lecture, and then another on post-Anschluss media in Austria for my History teacher training, but growing up in a Germanophone country means at least half a year of being taught about the crimes of the regime in school, and often a trip to at least one of the KZ in the vicinity (I visited Mauthausen in school).

 

[metis]

That's odd. I'm guessing those were English language sources?

Correct.

I only did a paper on pre-Anschluss Nazi propaganda in the early 2000s for a Media Studies lecture,...

We may be kindred spirits of sorts as when I finished studying in Poland & Israel in 1991, I delved into the question as to how could such a well-educated people fall victim to the likes of Hitler and the NAZI's ("Nazi's", just for you)? I went through myriads of copies of "Der Sturmer" to see a significant part of the propaganda appeal and the overall pattern I'm sure you're aware of. Goebbels said it was this propaganda that made the Third Reich.

So, what did you find in your studies?

 

[Tambourine]

Correct.

We may be kindred spirits of sorts as when I finished studying in Poland & Israel in 1991, I delved into the question as to how could such a well-educated people fall victim to the likes of Hitler and the NAZI's ("Nazi's", just for you)? I went through myriads of copies of "Der Sturmer" to see a significant part of the propaganda appeal and the overall pattern I'm sure you're aware of. Goebbels said it was this propaganda that made the Third Reich.

So, what did you find in your studies?

Well, first of all, keep in mind that my studies were focused on Austria and Austrian media, and that the political situation in Austria pre-Anschluss was a very different one than in either Weimar Germany or Nazi Germany. German nationalism had a substantial following in Austria since the 19th century, but the NSDAP didn't really attain widespread popularity until the early 1930s. Political tensions at the time were mostly about the opposition between Social Democrats and the conservative Christlichsoziale Partei (CS).

In 1933, the conservative Dollfuß government shut down the parliament in a coup, and, after an uprising by communists and radical socialists known as the Austrian Civil War that was quickly squashed, banned all parties except the CS and its related paramilitary organizations, the Landwehr, which would eventually converge into the clerical-fascist Vaterländische Front ("Fatherland's Front").

So Nazi propaganda in Austria was, for a substantial time, operating clandestinely. Nazi newspapers were often printed by German press, but for an Austrian market with the audience of these illegally operating Nazis in mind, so you would get a version of Der Stürmer printed specifically for an Austrian market of illegal Nazis. Since the Nazis were opposed to the austrofascist regime, a lot of the genuinely Austrian articles voiced far reaching criticism against the government, some actually fairly legit at first glance.

A lot of the most substantial lies of this type of Nazi propaganda were lies of omission, or outright projection like their decrying the detention camps where the regime put political dissidents, which actually existed - and of course, their propaganda completely omitted that the German Nazi regime had built its own concentration camps to imprison and brutalize its own political dissidents.

Where it gets really interesting is the substantial portion dealing with life in Nazi Germany.
Imagine that post-2016 America was split into two parts, one with Trump as a president, and then newspapers in non-Trump America would constantly print articles describing how Trump's America was "draining the swamp" and "building a wall", and claiming that he had therefore solved all of the problems in his part of America that the current non-Trump regime was struggling with.

That's about the level of "news" we are talking about here: Every problem of Austria, both imagined and real, was contrasted with how much better managed Nazi Germany was by comparison, and it is here where you also get the most virulently antisemitic rhetoric. For this reason, the Austrian Nazis were, of course, constantly harping about an Anschluss to Germany - while in OTL that annexation was carried out by German troops and military power, this was something Austrian Nazis genuinely wanted and supported.

And they were even prepared to murder for it - the first dictator of the CS regime, Engelbert Dollfuß, was murdered by Nazi terrorists during an uprising against the regime that would be largely appropriated by the NSDAP, and would go down in history as the "Nazi coup". His successor, Schuschnigg, after an initial wave of crackdowns, later on loosened restrictions on Nazi political activity under German pressure. This of course did not stop Nazis from claiming persecution by the regime, indeed the content of their propaganda did not substantially change all the way up to the Anschluss of 1938.

Interestingly, I couldn't really find calls for murder or killing of CS politicians, so the Dollfuß murder may not have been something that the Nazis felt had widespread support even among their audience. Even then, they had some stake in appearing at least superficially "respectable" as an alternative to the CS regime.

 

[metis]

Well, first of all, keep in mind that my studies were focused on Austria and Austrian media, and that the political situation in Austria pre-Anschluss was a very different one than in either Weimar Germany or Nazi Germany. German nationalism had a substantial following in Austria since the 19th century, but the NSDAP didn't really attain widespread popularity until the early 1930s. Political tensions at the time were mostly about the opposition between Social Democrats and the conservative Christlichsoziale Partei (CS).

In 1933, the conservative Dollfuß government shut down the parliament in a coup, and, after an uprising by communists and radical socialists known as the Austrian Civil War that was quickly squashed, banned all parties except the CS and its related paramilitary organizations, the Landwehr, which would eventually converge into the clerical-fascist Vaterländische Front ("Fatherland's Front").

So Nazi propaganda in Austria was, for a substantial time, operating clandestinely. Nazi newspapers were often printed by German press, but for an Austrian market with the audience of these illegally operating Nazis in mind, so you would get a version of Der Stürmer printed specifically for an Austrian market of illegal Nazis. Since the Nazis were opposed to the austrofascist regime, a lot of the genuinely Austrian articles voiced far reaching criticism against the government, some actually fairly legit at first glance.

A lot of the most substantial lies of this type of Nazi propaganda were lies of omission, or outright projection like their decrying the detention camps where the regime put political dissidents, which actually existed - and of course, their propaganda completely omitted that the German Nazi regime had built its own concentration camps to imprison and brutalize its own political dissidents.

Where it gets really interesting is the substantial portion dealing with life in Nazi Germany.
Imagine that post-2016 America was split into two parts, one with Trump as a president, and then newspapers in non-Trump America would constantly print articles describing how Trump's America was "draining the swamp" and "building a wall", and claiming that he had therefore solved all of the problems in his part of America that the current non-Trump regime was struggling with.

That's about the level of "news" we are talking about here: Every problem of Austria, both imagined and real, was contrasted with how much better managed Nazi Germany was by comparison, and it is here where you also get the most virulently antisemitic rhetoric. For this reason, the Austrian Nazis were, of course, constantly harping about an Anschluss to Germany - while in OTL that annexation was carried out by German troops and military power, this was something Austrian Nazis genuinely wanted and supported.

And they were even prepared to murder for it - the first dictator of the CS regime, Engelbert Dollfuß, was murdered by Nazi terrorists during an uprising against the regime that would be largely appropriated by the NSDAP, and would go down in history as the "Nazi coup". His successor, Schuschnigg, after an initial wave of crackdowns, later on loosened restrictions on Nazi political activity under German pressure. This of course did not stop Nazis from claiming persecution by the regime, indeed the content of their propaganda did not substantially change all the way up to the Anschluss of 1938.

Interestingly, I couldn't really find calls for murder or killing of CS politicians, so the Dollfuß murder may not have been something that the Nazis felt had widespread support even among their audience. Even then, they had some stake in appearing at least superficially "respectable" as an alternative to the CS regime.

I find the above VERY interesting, and I also agree with your "drift" that we are seeing some of this same shenanigans being used by Trump & Co.