02-07-2017, 12:04 PM
David Kaiser, with whom many of you are very familiar, was a frequent poster on this forum in the past. He has his own blog now, History Unfolding, which he periodically ties into Fourth Turning theory: http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/
Almost a year ago, he penned a column for Time magazine that is germane to this thread: "Fascism Isn't Our Problem"
It begins this way--
As Donald Trump moves nearer and nearer to the Republican nomination, history is becoming more fashionable. The media are awash with comparisons between Trump and Hitler and Trump and Mussolini, and Google searches for those pairs of names turn up 45 million and 2 million hits, respectively. Detailed analyses of Trump’s relationship to Fascism have appeared in major online publications. An anti-Trump Republican PAC is standing up an ad campaign explicitly comparing the candidate to Hitler. Even Mike Godwin, the inventor of “Godwin’s Law”—that any prolonged argument on the internet will end in a comparison of one’s opponents to Hitler—has encouraged us to go ahead and make such comparisons, provided they are carefully thought out and historically sophisticated.
The comparisons are inevitable, but Trump is not Mussolini or Hitler. And, no matter what you think of him, he is not by any stretch of the imagination a genuine Fascist...
You can read further at this link: http://time.com/4271114/2016-fascism/
So let me pose a rhetorical question to anyone on this forum who deigns to answer: Why, when it comes to Donald Trump, are people reaching as never before for historical analogues? (I'm guilty, too.)
Almost a year ago, he penned a column for Time magazine that is germane to this thread: "Fascism Isn't Our Problem"
It begins this way--
As Donald Trump moves nearer and nearer to the Republican nomination, history is becoming more fashionable. The media are awash with comparisons between Trump and Hitler and Trump and Mussolini, and Google searches for those pairs of names turn up 45 million and 2 million hits, respectively. Detailed analyses of Trump’s relationship to Fascism have appeared in major online publications. An anti-Trump Republican PAC is standing up an ad campaign explicitly comparing the candidate to Hitler. Even Mike Godwin, the inventor of “Godwin’s Law”—that any prolonged argument on the internet will end in a comparison of one’s opponents to Hitler—has encouraged us to go ahead and make such comparisons, provided they are carefully thought out and historically sophisticated.
The comparisons are inevitable, but Trump is not Mussolini or Hitler. And, no matter what you think of him, he is not by any stretch of the imagination a genuine Fascist...
You can read further at this link: http://time.com/4271114/2016-fascism/
So let me pose a rhetorical question to anyone on this forum who deigns to answer: Why, when it comes to Donald Trump, are people reaching as never before for historical analogues? (I'm guilty, too.)