In liberal and even some conservative Internet circles, anti-Trump sentiment is rising.There’s a strain of anti-Trump memes that gives me pause: direct comparisons of the Republican front-runner to Hitler.
Godwin’s law tells us that, as Wikipedia puts it, “if an online discussion… goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.” This is likely because in modern history there is no more iconic representation of pure evil than the Third Reich. My personal corollary to Godwin’s law is that in 99.9 percent of cases, Hitler comparisons may be unwarranted, but in 0.1 percent they’re right on the money.
Still, the vast majority of Hitler references in social media not only weaken the writer’s argument but may trivialize or even insult the experience of Holocaust survivors and victims. All of this led me to wonder how much validity there is in the growing mass of Trump-is-the-new-Hitler memes. Exhibit A:
Some Trump-Hitler memes are quite simple. They don’t engage in subtlety; their message is that Trump is more or less Hitler in a toupee. Facebook groups such as “Dump on Trump” present an array of Trump-Hitler memes that range from the basic and crude to the thoughtful and fairly authoritative. A prime example of the latter kind is the following:
It’s a lot harder to argue with a meme like this. Chomsky chooses his words carefully: He says Trump’s ascent “evokes some memories of the rise of European fascism” (emphasis mine). He doesn’t say Trump is Hitler reincarnate, or that Trump would put American Muslims in concentration camps if elected.
Yet the Donald has danced closely around the idea of an all-encompassing registry of Muslim Americans without ever making an irrevocable statement. Considering his recent, seemingly half-hearted “disavowal” of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, walking the line between endorsing and decrying fascist concepts is practically Trump’s M.O. at this point.
I finally realized the Trump-Hitler parallels are more accurate than inaccurate when I stumbled upon an opinion piece written for Newsweek by Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s stepsister. Schloss doesn’t mince words. About Trump, she writes: “I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.” She goes on to say:
The situation today is worse than it was under Hitler because at that time all the Allies—the U.S., Russia and Britain—worked together to combat the terrible threat of [Nazism]. If we don’t work together, the world will never be able to resolve the threats it faces today.
Strong words from someone who should know. Maybe some Trump-Hitler memes are stretching it a bit. Collectively, I think they’re the rational response of an increasingly alarmed populace that stands against everything Trump says, does, and represents.
If you have 20 minutes to spare, watch Sean Dunne’s chilling phone-cam documentary “Trump Rally” on Vimeo.
It’s nothing fancy, just 20 lightly edited minutes of Trump supporters expressing tremendous, and largely inarticulate, enthusiasm for their idol. It’s a sad, scary window into Trump’s formidable cult of personality and his reliance on the loyalty of poorly informed, desperate people. As David Brooks pointed out:
Trump’s supporters aren’t looking for a political process to address their needs. They are looking for a superhero. As the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, the one trait that best predicts whether you’re a Trump supporter is how high you score on tests that measure authoritarianism.
For a while I wavered in my opinion of Trump-Hitler memes. Now that I’ve watched “Trump Rally,” I think Schloss has it right.
His rhetoric is very similar to the rhetoric of the Balkan war criminals Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. I know they aren’t household names in most of the world, but their policies focused on nationalism and ethnic supremacy. In their mind they were protecting Serbian interests from the existential “Muslim” threat. It was hate speech that demonized the minorities in Bosnia that convinced Serbs to imprison or kill their neighbors.
The Serbs in my village in Bosnia were neighbors with Muslims for decades, yet they were convinced that Muslims were dangerous based on their religious identity. They imprisoned my father and my uncles. Trump’s reckless speech is very dangerous because, as history teaches us, something terrible will happen to the minorities he is demonizing unless he walks back most of his comments. I’m not saying it will be genocide or concentration camps, but it will become socially acceptable to mistreat others.