Is a Hitler/Trump comparison valid? Or do you lose the argument when invoking Hitler?
In Volker Ullrich’s book Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 . This biography of Hitler is the most contemporary and probably the best of many attempts at unearthing the demagogue and dictator. He describes the political rise of what many consider the great human monster of the 20th century. While this is arguable, the horror of Hitler is profound and his rise possibly preventable. On page 238 Ullrich quotes Thomas Mann, a Nobel Prize winner, in his “Appeal to Reason” speech in1933. The following is a direct quote from the book and I apologize for its length but it matters for today’s arguments.
On October 17 Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann issued an impassioned “Appeal to Reason” in Berlin’s Beethoven-Saal auditorium. The call was combined with a complex analysis of the intellectual and social preconditions for National Socialism. The Hitler movement would never have reached such a level of “mass emotional conviction,” Mann asserted, if it had not been preceded by “ the sense of the beginnings a new epoch and….a new spiritual situation for humanity.” People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society-“liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”- and faith in reason to embrace “ the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued a “a politics of the grotesque…replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.” Mann did not just excoriate the NSDAP. He also drew political conclusions. Only the Social Democrats, he said, seemed to be capable of stopping the forward march of the National Socialists. For that reason , he believed , the “political home “ of respectable, middle class German citizens had to be the SPD. Mann’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by hostile interjections, orchestrated by Arnold Bronnen, a former exponent of literary expressionism and friend of Bertolt Brecht who had converted to Nazism. “Our people spit on the head of Thomas Mann, who shamelessly insulted us in his lecture ‘Appeal to Reason’ “ noted Goebbels.
When I read this passage I was startled by the profound accuracy of what seems to be occurring today. If past is prologue, then here we go again. Trump is not a Fascist nor is he Hitler. He may be something worse, a capitalist demagogue with narcissistic ego maniacal psychopathology with the force and power of America at his fingertips.
In 1938 Time magazine proclaimed Hitler man of the year
TIME explained what was perhaps the most controversial of its choices thus: "Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today" (1/2/39).
Today Time proclaimed Trump person of the year.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...similarities, but I'm not happy with that comparison.
