But yeah, the Nazis were a bunch of leftists.
Thanks for the agreeance. I also do agree that yes the nazis and communists were at odds in Germany during that period. Now lets super impose whats happening here in America right now to what happened back then..which side in America today is doing things that more closely mimic what the nazis did in the rise to power?
Bahaha glad to see you conveniently selected my sarcastic sentence and ignored the facts in the rest of my post. But hey, I’ll play along and answer your follow-up question.
Which side in America today is doing things that more closely mimic what the nazis did in the rise to power?
Well, official documents now show that the Nazis were the ones behind the the burning of the Reichstag (Germany’s equivalent to the US Capitol) in 1933. The Nazi regime framed a Dutch Communist as a lone-wolf arsonist as an excuse to pass the Reichstagsbrandverordnung, which was the first key step in dismantling the parliamentary democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic and establishing a single-party Nazi State, with Hitler as the dictator. Establishment conservatives like President von Hindenburg had little love for a commoner like Hitler, but he went along with it because he thought Hitler was controllable and therefore less of a threat to conservative control than the SPD or Communist parties of the time. (He was also dependent on the support of Hitler’s supporters to maintain his position.) That decree was passed in February 1933, less than a few months after Hitler was elected Chancellor. Dachau Concentration Camp was established a month later to house political prisoners from the left, and it began housing German/Austrian Jews and Gypsies 2 years later upon passage of the Nuremberg Laws that institutionalized racial discrimination. Note that this was several years before the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland, the last of which precipitated the outbreak of WWII.
Fast-forward to January 6, 2021, and you had a mob of white supremacists storm the US Capitol to demand that democratic processes be set aside so that their charismatic and demagogic leader could maintain power. They literally pulled down the American flag and replaced it with a flag of said leader, all the while wearing T-shirts that said “6 million was not enough” and brandishing a battle flag of a former enemy state. (The Confederate
battle flag — not even the national flag, but then again, most of the folks in that mob probably wouldn’t recognize the actual Confederate national flag if it was sitting right in front of them.)
And all the while, some Republican lawmakers went right along with the madness, demanding that the electoral college results be set aside in favor of President Trump because their fear of the “big-bad left” and their fear of losing support from Trump-devotees exceeded their love for their country and its democratic institutions. But of course, when the public backlash came in, suddenly these same folks were blaming Antifa and far-left protesters for perpetuating a false flag operation by storming the Capitol disguised as Trump supporters. The parallels are truly unnerving.
Thankfully, though, we’re not a fledgling democracy like Germany was in 1932-33. Thankfully, our conservative establishment leaders like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell proved to have more of a backbone and more respect for their country’s constitution than Paul von Hindenburg did for his some 9 decades ago. For all that I’ve disagreed with them over the years, I applaud them for standing up against fascism and treason when it mattered most. You could draw parallels between their actions and what the British Royal Family did when they exiled former King Edward VIII — their own flesh and blood — after his collaborative plots with the Nazis were discovered. If those plots had been successful, Edward — the king who had abdicated for his brother — would have displaced his brother as king of a Nazi-friendly Britain, constitution be damned.
So yeah, there’s my answer to your question. The parallels between what President Trump and his mob of supporters attempted (and failed) to do this past week and what the Nazis attempted (and succeeded) to do with the Reichstag fire in 1933 are crystal clear to anyone who is not willfully blind, and those parallels are quite damning.