{"id":162559,"date":"2024-10-30T08:05:46","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T12:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=162559"},"modified":"2024-10-29T15:09:11","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T19:09:11","slug":"the-atlantic-compares-donald-trump-to-hitler-stalin-and-mussolini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=162559","title":{"rendered":"The Atlantic compares Donald Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum penned an article comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini. Her thesis involved taking the language they used and compared them to what Trump used. For example, Applebaum compared Stalin’s “enemy of the people” comment with Trump’s “enemy of the people” comment. A look at the full text of their speeches presents different context and intentions. However, the article does not include the broader context supporting the use of these words. However, to many on the left, the article provides an “air tight” case that Trump “is like” the men she compared them to.<\/p>\n

From The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Sch\u00e4dlingst\u00e4tigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”<\/p>\n

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”<\/p>\n

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.<\/p>\n

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Additional Reading:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Applebaum, A. (2024, October 18). Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. The Atlantic<\/em>. Link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum penned an article comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and … The Atlantic compares Donald Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[643,469,694,6,654],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-election","category-donald-trump","category-editorial","category-media","category-op-ed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}