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The response is genuine. I’m Jewish and I feel that comparing someone to Hitler who isn’t a genocidal dictator that started a World War normalizes extremist be

The response is genuine. I’m Jewish and I feel that comparing someone to Hitler who isn’t a genocidal dictator that started a World War normalizes extremist behavior and white washes the horrors of the Nazi regime. By comparing him to a broadly popular democratically elected American president, you are underplaying how terrible Hitler actually was. Whatever Trump is, he’s not Hitler. Just like Obama wasn’t Stalin.

archagon 2y ago
What normalizes extremist behavior is ignoring it while it happens and accelerates. The hateful, extremist policies and rhetoric I linked to — only a small subset, by the way — are highly unusual in mainstream American politics. As a reminder, the man proclaimed that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country"[1] and ran on the promise of putting swaths of them (and other undesirables) into actual concentration camps. Can you seriously not see the comparison? It's not even a dog whistle anymore. Repeating myself, Hitler did not campaign on war and genocide. (In fact, the war was propagandized in Germany as a defensive act.) But by the time a 1933 Hitler becomes a 1939 Hitler, it’s too late to do anything about it. Incidentally, here's what an actual Holocaust survivor[2] has to say on the matter: > The woman who was forced to listen daily to Adolf Hitler’s lunatic rants on the radio for seven years in the 1930s was blunt: “When I hear Trump speak, I hear Hitler again. When I see his rallies, it’s like what I saw in Nazi Germany”. [1]: https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2024/01/29/trump-knows-exactly-what-poisoning-the-blood-or-our-country-meant/ https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2024/01/29/trump-knows-exactly... [2]: https://forward.com/community/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-survivor-compares-trump-to-hitler/ https://forward.com/community/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-...

archagon 2y ago

What normalizes extremist behavior is ignoring it while it happens and accelerates. The hateful, extremist policies and rhetoric I linked to — only a small subset, by the way — are highly unusual in mainstream American politics. As a reminder, the man proclaimed that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country"[1] and ran on the promise of putting swaths of them (and other undesirables) into actual concentration camps. Can you seriously not see the comparison? It's not even a dog whistle anymore. Repeating myself, Hitler did not campaign on war and genocide. (In fact, the war was propagandized in Germany as a defensive act.) But by the time a 1933 Hitler becomes a 1939 Hitler, it’s too late to do anything about it. Incidentally, here's what an actual Holocaust survivor[2] has to say on the matter: > The woman who was forced to listen daily to Adolf Hitler’s lunatic rants on the radio for seven years in the 1930s was blunt: “When I hear Trump speak, I hear Hitler again. When I see his rallies, it’s like what I saw in Nazi Germany”. [1]: https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2024/01/29/trump-knows-exactly-what-poisoning-the-blood-or-our-country-meant/ https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2024/01/29/trump-knows-exactly... [2]: https://forward.com/community/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-survivor-compares-trump-to-hitler/ https://forward.com/community/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-...