Can We Get It Right This Time? (article) by Mel Hathorn on AuthorsDen

Are we as a nation going to follow a would be Hitler into oblivion?

Can we get it right this time?

In the 1930s several hundred thousand people followed Hitler into the Second World War. Most of these were ordinary citizens tired of runaway inflation and a poor economy. They did not foresee the coming concentration camps or the horrors of another World War. They simply wanted what all of us want; a decent job and an adequate income.

They did not foresee gas chambers, book burnings, ethnic cleansing both by race and political beliefs. They foresaw none of this. They did not foresee the gestapo or the SS. Blindly and naively they followed a monster. This monster would destroy Germany and for many decades partition the country into East and West Germany.

Could the United States follow the same path? Consider the use of trump’s detention camps. Is the name calling of the news industry a prelude to book burnings. Has the Republican Party become a new Nationalist Socialism party? Will Nazism infect Republicans? Or has it already?

Germany followed Hitler into a horrible War. Will we follow Trump into a horrible war? Germany followed Hitler into normalizing the use of concentration camps and gas chambers. Will we follow trump and normalize the use of detention camps where children die daily of neglect and disease.

Or are we both as a nation and a world community be given a second chance to atone for the evils both of Hitler and of trump? Or will we normalize the many evil actions committed in our name by the trump regime? Can we get it right this time?

Reviewed by m j hollingshead

Reviewed on January 2, 2020

thought provoking article

Never stop writing !

m

Reviewed by Ronald Hull

Reviewed on December 30, 2019

Very early in his political rise, Hitler learned the value of grandstanding and showing fearless courage against what most Germans thought to be impossible, the aristocratic leadership that failed to negotiate a reasonable peace after World War II with reparations that brought the country economically to its knees, similar to the recession in this country from 2009-2011. The Obama administration brought the country out of that recession without much fanfare, but a scapegoat, Obamacare, was used to elevate Trump, like Hitler's use of the Jews to elevate his stature. Hitler also used the movie camera early on creating image for both himself and for his impossible ideals that almost every German worked doubly hard at and sacrificed to achieve. Like his crowning achievement, the 1936 Olympics. A grand display of Germany's great turnaround.

Trump, early on, had a tremendous media presence as the presiding boss of The Apprentice. The ballot recognition alone far surpassed any other Republican candidate even those in the news. As I view the 10 years of the show's run, with Trump browbeating and unfairly treating contestants, many celebrities in their own right, I grew distasteful of the way Trump acted. But to the general public, who may have occasionally watched the program, like Ronald Reagan before, seemed easily swayed by the power of celebrity and the Archie Bunker type behavior over the reality of what a president must do to move the country forward.

You are absolutely right in pointing out the failure of the general population to see the danger in following narcissistic leaders more interested in their own well-being that in anything or anybody else. Trump's treatment of his own, handpicked, cabinet is a good example why the man is so dangerous as commander-in-chief.

Ron