Well, yes, it did happen here, as evidenced by the video below and to a lesser extent, by our current administration, though Nazis (pretty much real ones) didn’t get much purchase on American sentiments. (For a nightmare scenario in which Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindberg defeats Franklin Roosevelt for President in 1940, and America turns strongly anti-Semitic, read Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America.)
But to show how anti-war and pro-Germany many Americans were right before World War II began, here’s a 2017 documentary called “A Night at the Garden“, showing a rally of the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden on February 28, 1939 (Hitler invaded Poland on September 1 of that year, and had already annexed Austria and the Sudetenland). 20,000 Hitler supporters rallied in New York, and you can see how scary the whole thing is.
A bit from Wikipedia:
The film was directed by Marshall Curry and was produced by Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook with Field of Vision. The seven-minute film is composed entirely of archival footage and features a speech from Fritz Julius Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund, in which anti-Semitic and pro white-Christian sentiments are espoused. The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated for the 91st Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short.
. . . The documentary was produced using footage of the rally originally intended for newsreels that had never been widely issued due to its controversial content. Many film exhibitors avoided footage of Hitler and Nazism due to strongly negative reactions and even disorderly conduct from audiences. News of the Day never released its footage, while RKO-Pathé News quickly withdrew a newsreel incorporating the footage after deeming it “too inflammatory.” As a result, the rally was widely forgotten after the end of World War II. After viewing the footage and expressing surprise at the event’s obscurity, Curry was inspired to produce the documentary by the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The footage was retrieved and edited from the National Archives, the Grinberg Film Library, Streamline Films, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Be sure to watch this, and enlarge it to full screen. I may have posted it before, but it’s always worth watching. This kind of sentiment may never be acceptable in America again, but remember that Trump and his ideology had so many supporters that a narcissistic megalomaniac was elected President of the United States.
For more on the making of this movie, and a personal take, read the article by Jon Schwarz at The Intercept.
Similar to a Trump rally today. Seeing the large picture of George Washington up there on the stage, I’m sure he was spinning in the grave during this one. Lindberg became a very bigoted follower of Nazi Germany but the idea of defeating FDR is a laugh, thankfully.
Trump’s “America First” slogan was popular among the Nazi-symps before the War, like radio-host Father Coughlin (the Rush Limbaugh of his day).
It was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary short.
I recall seeing it in a showing of all the nominees for shorts that year at the local arthouse (though I can’t remember which one won).
It happening here referred to a fascist take-over of America, not just fascists existing here. There were fascists in American, although 20,000 attendance in New York doesn’t seem like a lot. When Dempsey fought Tunney in 1927 in Chicago, over 100,000 people were in attendance. As for Trump, His election was as much about the Democrats and Hillary, as it was about him. The fact that he is unprincipled makes him seem like a thoughtful enemy of democracy, but that, combined with his laziness and ignorance, has also kept him from doing any of the practical things a fascist or even the leader of a banana republic would do to consolidate power.
If ignorance has kept Trump from doing any of those practical things, let us thank ignorance then. He has control of the party he pretends to lead, control of the justice department and control of the courts. I would say because he lacks any bit of leadership qualities and is mentally unbalanced is the only reason he has not made it. When I think of the opposite of Trump I think of Lincoln.
In many respects yes, Lincoln was Trump’s opposite except in one way – his relationship to the press. Lincoln hated them too and it’s worth mentioning, he suspended habeus corpus mainly because of that hate. A very Trumpian thing to do.
Trump likely does not know what habeus corpus is and even if he did, would not care. He has his own media plus his rant against whatever he does not like. Lincoln was in a war, the worst one in history. So the actions Lincoln took were within his authority. Even his personally written executive order known as the Emancipation, was within his war time authority.
The aim of the Emancipation was to confiscate enemy property, which was within the wartime power of the president, and not, officially at least, to free an enslaved people.
Lincoln had no constitutional authority to end slavery himself but he did have constitutional authority to take the property of those engaged in rebellion against legitimate federal authority and the Emancipation Proclamation was written exactly for that purpose. Also recall that the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court as of January 1, 1863, was Roger B. Taney, author of the infamous Dred Scott Decision that held that no black person, free or slave, had any rights that any white person had to respect. The E. R. was also written to withstand any legal challenge it might well have faced if had gone to the USSC. Lincoln detested slavery and did urge passage of the 13th Amendment that did outlaw slavery throughout the nation and its territories. Neo-Confederates still insist that Lincoln had no problem with slavery and didn’t care at all about black people but that has been thoroughly refuted by historical evidence. True, by today’s standards Lincoln had some racist attitudes but certainly not by the standards of his own lifetime when he was lambasted in the South and the North for feeling too kindly towards blacks (except they didn’t phrase it that civilly). I only bring this up because there are still too many people who buy into the distortions written by the Confederate losers after the war — just one example that many times the losers do write history right alongside the winners and sometimes the losers’ version is accepted by the masses and even otherwise intelligent people despite plenty of evidence refuting their version.
The “old” Madison Square Garden on 8th Ave. between 49th and 50th Streets had a maximum capacity of about 18,500, so the Nazi rally drew an SRO, overflow crowd. Any larger forum would’ve had to have been outdoors and, given that it was held in February, someplace like Yankee stadium would’ve been a might chilly.
I agree that Trump is much too buffoonish and incompetent to make much of an aspiring dictator. Plus, he has no real interest in wielding political power for political power’s sake; he’s motivated by solely by greed and fame (or, as he thinks of them, “winning”).
What’s frightening about Trump is that somewhere around a third of the US population has so easily fallen into a cult-of-personality in which the clown can do no wrong.
Why do I think of the New York equivalent of malevolent Beverly Hillbillies who’ve taken over the White House?
Because that is an appropriate description of the tRumpglodytes. Particularly malevolent Hillbillies.
Except in this version Ol’ Don and his kinfolk are the “bubblin’ crude” that came “up through the ground.”
Plus, Jethro was smarter than Don Jr., and Elly May better taste than Ivanka.
It is fortunate indeed that tRump is a clown rather than a totalitarian. The secondary thing that has kept us from a nightmare scenario is that he has not been under the influence of a totalitarian from behind the curtains. At least not yet.
You seem to forget he has 40% of voters following him blindly. The idea that it can’t happen here is naive. The Nazis came to power after experienced economic problems much worse than our great depression. I’m still amazed that someone with Trump’s awful, well documented record was elected when conditions were not bad. I didn’t like Hilary, but there was no comparison with Trump. If the Democrats win in 2020, they will have to deal with the mess he leaves behind and will take the blame for much of the long-term problems.
Personally, I hope for a very deep recession before the next election. That would probably wake the electorate with a well earned dope slap as it did in the great depression.
Trump is like a bungling would-be Mussolini. A Mussolini without the intelligence or charisma.
Chilling! This could have been filmed in Nazi-Germany.
I always ask myself how I would have fared in the 1930s in Germany. Would I have stood up against the Nazis? Or would I have done the same my family did, simply living on and ignoring the signs of the time?
It’s always easy in hindsight.
“I always ask myself how I would have fared in the 1930s in Germany. Would I have stood up against the Nazis? Or would I have done the same my family did, simply living on and ignoring the signs of the time?”
I’ve always though that if there was a central question of the 20th century, it is that. It is in the background every time I watch a war film, or read historical fiction or listen to Gorecki. ‘What would you have done?’
In public I may have pretended to either ignore it or follow along, but in private I would have been part of the ‘resistance’.
We’ve seen, recently, many white supremacists who convert away from their bigotry and it always comes from understanding and education. Educate people and they are less like to turn to prejudice and fear.
As a research assistant, I spent a couple of years interviewing people about their wartime experiences in Europe. The research was about how wartime shortages led to material innovation, but the conversations tended to cover more territory than was strictly required by the research needs.
But it was impossible to participate in those interviews and not ask myself “what would I have done?”. So this is a topic I have been thinking about for decades.
The answer that I have come up with is that nobody can really predict what they would have done. If they had been living in those times, they would have been exposed to the experiences and stresses typical of a person living then and there, and not privy to either the modern views on the period or the knowledge of how things would turn out.
The AV meeting that is the subject of the post was attended by people who had absolutely not seen Schindler’s list. The rally was held at a time when, as far as was commonly known, camps such as Dachau were built to house communist revolutionaries and terrorists.
At the time of the rally, there were three times as many communist party members in the USA than there were AV members.
I know for a fact that many of the people at the MSG rally grew to regret their association with the AV, and went on to serve their country honorably once the sides and issues were more clearly defined a few years later.
But I still think the “Trump is a fascist dictator” business is pretty silly. Fascists rarely try to limit the size and power of government. Nazis are unlikely to celebrate Purim with their Jewish children and grandchildren.
Most importantly, the truth is that we live in a society where a popular entertainer can broadcast publicly an obscenity-laced rant denouncing the president, and have no fear whatever of hearing the knock of the secret police at their door later that night, or that the administration would pull strings to have the FCC come down on the show or network.
I can see why the AntiFa folks need to believe that we are living in a Nazi dictatorship, because that belief serves to justify their violence. But people with a nuanced and more comprehensive knowledge of history should not be deluding themselves that way.
I am not a Trump supporter at all, but all this hysteria about him seems sort of cult-like to me. Perhaps if I was in an environment where I was more continuously inundated with leftist rhetoric, I might feel differently. It king of circles back to the original question.
Trump (or rather some of his followers, since I don’t think he has the brains for a coherent ideology) can be fascist but not Nazi (and similarly for other world leaders).
In Erik Larsen’s “In the Garden of Beasts” we get the perspective of an American diplomat watching how the German people struggled with that very issue. That so many made the wrong choice* was stunning to him and tragic for the world. Today everyone would say that they’d be on the right side, but in reality it’s rarely so starkly put and most people just slide into it, hardly noticing what they’ve become. But if 1930s Germany is any lesson – if nothing else, evil is banal and sneaky and it starts out small.
*well….they’d didn’t really have one, did they? 🙂
Yes, that’s my sense of it too. I would swear blind that if you transposed me to 1930s Germany I’d be part of the resistance. There’s no way I can imagine myself not being part of it.
But I would think that wouldn’t I?
The reason that question has so much weight is because we really don’t know how we would have behaved. We don’t know how we would react in that situation. Not really. We just know how we’re reacting to it NOW.
Resistance comes in degrees, too. The greatest German mathematician of the age, David Hilbert, was asked by his Nazi overseers at the end of his life what he thought of what they’d done for mathematics at his university. He couragely told them that they had destroyed it.
It was certainly THE central question for a couple generations of Europeans in the War’s immediate aftermath — Resistance fighters vs. Collaborationists.
I’m just now reading Black Edelweiss, a book that addresses this very question with an enthusiastic Jahwoll!. It’s the wartime memoir of a young man who served in the Waffen-SS in WWII. A young teenager when the war began, he had no doubt that it was a heroic struggle to defend European culture against the menace of Stalinist communism, and he believed that young men from all over Europe were thronging to Germany to join the cause. Once in a while he would catch a glimpse of a boxcar filled with starving Jews, and wonder what was going on, but that didn’t seem to register as a sign of anything amiss with his native country or his adored Fuhrer.
It makes me wonder, as I do about people who adhere to authoritarian religions, what would I believe if I had only ever been lied to?
But first, let’s divvy up Poland.
…But what if he’d lived in an essentially free and democratic country, but it had some kind of telecommunications system that allowed him to only listen to, watch and read sources that told him what he wanted to hear?
Wouldn’t that be something like the microcosm of an authoritarian state itself?
And isn’t that basically America right now?
Interesting to hear the pledge of allegiance being said without “under god”. I just wonder how they justified saying that pledge when they were trying to remove rights from so many citizens (not forgetting of course that black citizens didn’t have those rights to be taken away anyway).
Pretty much along the lines of Chief Justice Taney; “the [non-Aryan] has no rights that the [Aryan] must recognize..”
I read Roth’s book a couple of years ago. It was captivating and rather frightening. Fiction can be so real!!
Can it happen here? Sure it can. I don’t think a fascist takeover is the most likely scenario, but it is far from inconceivable. The new fuhrer may not be Trump, but someone else who is not crazy or suffering mental decline. In times of great social change, as is the case now, people who fear social and/or economic decline look to a savior if the current government does not protect them. Hence, we see the rise of white nationalism and right-wing militias. Will Trump leave voluntarily the White House by losing the next election or by other means? Will he try to provoke a civil war or at least widespread violence? These questions would have been absurd for any other president. But, now they are taken seriously. Tom Edsall at the NYT devoted recently a column to these questions as he solicited the opinion of academics and others. He is not at all sure there will be a peaceful transition. Democracy is fragile. A significant minority if not majority of people would have no problem jettisoning it if a charismatic strongman promises to remedy their grievances, real or imagined. I think democracy will survive Trump and what comes after, but I am not nearly as confident in its survival as I was pre-Trump, if for no other reason that Republican Party’s obsequiousness to Trump is sad and disturbing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/opinion/trump-leave-white-house.html
We’re probably lucky that a couple mainstream candidates like Obama and McCain had already been nominated by the major parties (and that there wasn’t time enough for a third-party candidate to emerge) when the Great Recession of 2008 hit.
As it was, look at the ugliness that GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin (the Trump before Trump) stirred up among her followers (the Trump base before there was a Trump base).
Palin was an awful candidate — so smug and uninformed — but she didn’t have Trump’s vindictiveness. But I do see how she kind of paved the way for Trump.
If Trump refuses to leave office, everything will depend on whether the police and military remain loyal to the democratic process. I’ve heard that Trump has a pretty big following in the military, so this whole issue makes me a bit nervous.
Trump has claimed to a big following in the military, but I’ve seen no evidence of it. The three respected generals that served in Trump’s administration — Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly — all left on bad terms.
And Trump’s incoherence on military policy has eroded morale in the Pentagon. Trump has committed to withdrawing troops from the Middle East one moment, committed to sending additional troops there the next. He’s invited the Taliban to Camp David, while deploying an aircraft carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf and committing troops to Saudi Arabia. He’s threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation with his “big button,” then turned around and ignored Kim Jong-un’s build up of fissile material, manufacture of additional nuclear weapons, and testing of missiles — for no better reason than that Kim Jong-un sends him euphuistic love letters.
Plus, Trump is himself a draft-dodger, having gotten himself exempted from service during the Vietnam War on the basis of spurious bone spurs attested to by his daddy’s doctor. I think our military brass takes seriously its oath to uphold our constitution, rather than any allegiance to Dear Leader.
I’m not sure about the active military and what the percentage is, for and against but his following was with the retired military. They are republican base, almost a cult. Even the one termers such as myself who are now old, mostly republican. Makes me sick. However, if so-called patriotic lifers and retired can still go for this bastard now, they have swallowed a lot of Kool-aid.
Interesting timing, since just last night I watched “Downfall” (2004), about the last days of Hitler. Bruno Ganz performance is by far the most accurate portrayal of Der Fuehrer that you’ll find anywhere. It’s in German with subtitles and excellent in every way (IMDB gives it an 8.2).
Incidentally, I tend to agree with Ken Kukec’s assessment of Trump as more clown and buffoon than evil dictator and with JP415’s suggestion that Trump resembles Mussolini more than he does Hitler. In almost any context, comparisons to Hitler always strike me as more inflammatory than accurate.
Trump is a clown and a buffoon, all right. But I don’t think that alone prevent him from being a would-be dictator, Gary. Lord knows, history is rife with dictators who’ve been clownish and Buffoonish.
What holds him back is an utter lack of interest in wielding political power. Heretofore, prior to his entry into to 2016 presidential race, Trump’s primary interest in politics has been in greasing the palms of certain politicians, from borough ward-healers to US senators, with campaign contributions — to keep something on deposit in (as they used to call it in the days of Tammany Hall) the “favor bank,” something to draw down upon if he needed help with a building project or business scam. That, and making occasional forays to Howard Stern’s radio show, where his uninformed pontifications on current events were greeted as pearls of wisdom falling from the mouth of a savant.
That’s not to say Trump doesn’t have a particular skill set, limited and crude though may be. He has a low cunning for separating marks from their money (see, e.g., Trump University) and an animal instinct for wielding leverage and clout to their maximum benefit, for bending weaker men to his will.
But Trump lacks any burning desire for remaking American public policy, foreign or domestic, according to his own grand design. Trump entered the 2016 presidential race as a public-relations lark, due to waning ratings on The Apprentice and because journalists had begun calling out his continual feints at the White House for the publicity stunts they were. Trump was as surprised as the rest of us (and, as a result, completely unprepared) when he actually won.
Trump’s real interests are limited to self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement — to a pathological need to feed his unslakeable ego. These alone do not a dictator make.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Ken. In fewer words maybe, but not better. 😊
Well, you poets do tend to be a laconic clan, what with brevity being the soul of wit. 🙂
It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn is as president of the United States for the next four years…And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or a heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Swine of the Week
Hunter S. Thompson September 14, 1987
As bad as you make that sound, my big fear it that a governmental contribution to fight global warming will be delayed. The rest you can likely recover from. Carbon? Maybe not.
“Lord knows, history is rife with dictators who’ve been clownish and Buffoonish.”
Yes, I had somewhat personal experience with one—namely Georgios Papadopoulos, who held dictatorial power in Greece from 1967-1974. I was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Athens from ’70 to ’73. When my students began disappearing for criticizing the government, I wrote a letter to the Athens News defending them. Instead of being published as a letter-to-the-editor, it appeared an the front page under the headline “OPEN LETTER TO DEAN AND STUDENTS—U.S. LECTURER PROTESTS”
(https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/3h272Z3n1J0E301d1v3Y/AthensNews.jpg).
The next time I went to class there were two gov’t flunkies in black suits telling my students that they should avoid any political activity whatsoever. When the students saw me, however, they burst into such applause that the flunkies had to leave. Also, unbeknownst to me, the American Embassy chargé d’affaires wrote a letter to the university apologizing for my letter and saying that I would soon be leaving Greece. When I found this out, I wrote a much angrier letter to the chargé d’affaires, informing him that I would leave Greece when I was ready to leave Greece.
In the meantime, future Fulbrighters were informed that there was to be no repetition of “The Miranda Affair.” But when I returned to the States in October of ’74 I received a letter from Senator Fulbright himself stating that he approved my actions and considered the American Embassy’s stance to be shortsighted. This turned out to be true, as Papadopoulos was ousted a month later after sending tanks to evacuate the Technical University of Athens, resulting in several deaths.
Believe me, I don’t underestimate the evil potential of clownish and buffoonish dictators.
Great story.
I don’t have anything to compare to your experience, Gary, but I did see Costa-Gravas’s movie Z when I was in college — so I guess that makes us kinda even? 🙂
Ironically, Z was the movie that I watched on Olympic Airlines as I was going to Greece in 1970. I have assume that Papadopoulos’ minister of propaganda neglected to vet the programming.
I will now take this opportunity to say that Z is one of the greatest films ever made.
I’ll check it out. Looks interesting.
What a wild episode. It could be made into a movie. Or a book. Congratulations for your principled stance.
‘The Miranda Affair’ – perfect title already.
“The Miranda Remonstration” has a Robert Ludlum ring to it. Bigger box office.
👍 for that. Great story.
“Trump as more clown and buffoon than evil dictator”
The former is exactly what they called Hitler, down to the choice of words. A clown and a buffoon. Then he went on and did unspeakable things and he wasn’t quite so funny anymore.
I don’t think Trump is going to do anything like that, but the comparison seems valid, even unavoidable.
…comparison with Hitler I mean.
Well, I think if Trump were 30 years younger and not seemingly a dotard, it would be more plausible.
(That’s the weird thing: until I stopped to think about it, and despite all the pictures, I for the longest time thought of Hitler as an old man.)
Saw that movie myself, and having previously read several accounts of life in the Bunker and in Berlin during those last few weeks and just after the downfall of Nazi Germany, I concur that it is excellent and to my knowledge one of the most accurate depictions of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels and others in that bunker. Some critics have accused Ganz of having made Hitler appear too sympathetic, which is utterly ridiculous. We have to remember that Hitler was human, not some otherworldly demon, and his actions were those of a human and might yet occur again, and unfortunately already have, albeit in smaller scale. Sadly, humans have proven again and again our capacity for inhumanity against our own species. Fortunately, we also have a capacity for immense kindness and empathy, but we should never forget the hideousness that also lurks within humanity at its worst.
In the context of this discussion, I again would like to recommend that you watch “The Great Hack” on Netflix about Cambridge Analytica (and, peripherally, Facebook). The collection of data on millions of us gleaned from Facebook permitted Cambridge Analytica to manipulate elements of the populace in whatever direction they thought best suited the goals of whichever candidate (such as Trump) or political aim of certain organizations (such as Brexit). Now, more than ever, we need to be exceedingly judicious about sharing personal information (as well as that of our family and friends) with Facebook and its’ ilk. As has happened, it can be used against us to manipulate us without our knowledge.
I myself finally dumped Facebook because of Cambridge Analytica and other scandals. I feel out of the loop sometimes without Facebook, but I’m staying the course. At some point, I just reached my breaking point with Mark Zuckerberg and his endless stream of unctuous fake apologies. He keeps pleading forgiveness and crying crocodile tears while he’s pilfering our private information. In some ways I find him more repugnant than Trump.
MZ is fucked up as far as I’m concerned. Also freaked at Warren for proposing breaking his and et al.’s information Monopoly. Sick man. Don’t know if he’s more dangerous than “Prez”, very much smarter and richer though, ouch for us voters.
20,000 people out of the population of America at the time — or even have the population of New York — is trivial. This is just an early example of the power of media to distort the significance of whatever it focuses on.
*have = of.
It is pointed out up-thread that this is an overflow crowd at the venue in question. Does that not suggest there could have been many more wanting to?
It’s hard to imagine, how far the 3. Reich is reaching into present everyday german living reality, after such a long time. D. Trump should not have such an impact on the lives of the people in the U.S.
My grandmother was an unskilled worker at a paper mill in the mid 1920’s. Like many of her colleagues, she was a social democrat (SPD) and suffered from the bad politics of the Weimarer Republik. No chance for adequate housing, fair working conditions and so on. After 1933, she was immediately offered a “Firmenwohnung” by the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO) – an organisation inside the company, managed by the NSDAP. She married und gave birth to my father etc.
In the 70’s, when I was politically woke and a strong Antifaschist, she always told me of her gratitude with the Führer, whom even I owe my existence. She said, 15 years where not enough for leftists and labor unions, to show engagement for the working people; the “Reichskanzler” did that over night. Nevertheless, she seemed to be a reliable voter for the left after the war. There are still many descendants like me, who struggle with the nexus of the amalgamation with the killer regime.
I don’t think, that anything Trump does, might be discussed in 70 years in this way.
I wonder if that attack was staged, like Hitler’s border crises.
Otherwise, it was news to me, probably sometime in the later ’70s, that the Bund ever existed. My great-great grandfather was a German immigrant, and I asked my father if the Bund had been visible in the Pittsburgh area back then. He said there was a German guy they used to buy their cheese from, who was a Bund sympathizer, and that after they learned of that they “decided his cheese didn’t taste so good after all.”