It's fair to compare Trumpism to Nazism

Snapping turtles seem to like the Feeder Canal

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Books can serve as touchstones for the deepest questions. When it comes to personal morality and collective responsibility, a book given to me by a friend about 25 years ago — “They Thought They Were Free,” By Milton Mayer — is the one I think about.

Mayer, an American, went to Marburg, in central Germany, in the early 1950s as a visiting professor at the University of Marburg. While there, he spent hours in interviews with 10 working-class German men, asking about their experiences after Hitler came to power in 1933 and their feelings about how and why German society was transformed by Nazism.

I had never heard of the book when it was given to me. These days, excerpts from it can be found across social media, republished for their resonance with the rise of national populism in the United States under Donald Trump.

“National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government — against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of ‘the rascals.’ Its motif was, ‘Throw them all out.’”

The book had a powerful effect on me, with its convincing description of the gradual corruption of good people — ordinary, hard-working, responsible men with families — who chose to look away from the growing oppression and exploitation and, finally, deportation, detention and murder of millions of their fellow Germans.

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

It is considered easy and cheap to attack political movements by drawing parallels with Germany under the Nazis, and the comparison can never be exact, because history does not play out in exactly the same way in two different places at two different times.

But the point of learning about Nazism’s rise is to understand the methods of totalitarianism so, if you notice them close to home, they can be resisted.

Many people have recognized these methods in Trumpism and expressed alarm at its scapegoating of immigrants, undermining of truth and the rule of law, official corruption and elevation of one man beyond the reach of the law or restraints of responsibility.

I experienced a moment of recognition when I read what JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, said about housing during his recent debate with Tim Walz.

“We have a lot of Americans that need homes. We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here,” Vance said.

Trump has said home prices could be lowered by deporting millions of immigrants who either came here illegally or are here legally under visa programs that he intends to revoke.

One of the motivations for German citizens to support the Nazi regime was greed, as the homes and businesses and belongings of Jews who were deported or detained in camps became available at low prices.

Before the Jews could be pushed out, they had to be stigmatized, so other German citizens could rationalize their treatment.

“Ordinary people — and ordinary Germans — cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet.”

Trump and Vance have falsely asserted that the Haitian migrants who have helped rejuvenate the city of Springfield, Ohio, have been taking people’s pets for food.

On Friday, Trump was in Aurora, Colorado, a suburban city of 386,000 people, falsely claiming its streets have been overrun by gangs from “the dungeons of the third world.”

It is not certain that, even if he’s elected, Trump would be able to accomplish his worst intentions. That uncertainty provides an excuse for inaction.

“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”

We dwell on the threats of another Trump presidency, but the damage he has already done, from his bumbling leadership of the Covid pandemic to his crybaby refusal to accept his loss in 2020, has brought the country to the brink of chaos.

Trump is open about his totalitarian intentions and his targeting of black- or brown-skinned immigrants to motivate voters. But Trump himself, the man of multiple bankruptcies, marriages, affairs and sexual assault charges; of fake blond hair and wide-ranging ignorance, is nothing but a balloon, filled with the heat of his supporters. Turn down that heat and he will collapse.

“Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.”

If a second Trump term comes to pass, whatever good or bad things result would be the responsibility of those who voted for him, although I doubt, in the end, they would accept it.

“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.”

These are members of the German SA in 1933 in Berlin at the start of the Nazi-led boycott of Jewish shops, standing in front of Israel’s Department Store, holding signs that read “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” (This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive.)

Big snapper

Here, for a change of pace, is a pretty big snapping turtle we came upon about a week ago on the Feeder Canal trail.

This snapper didn’t move as we circled around it and took photos, but when I looked back a few minutes later, it was gone.