Frightening Historical Parallels

While Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler and no Benito Mussolini that doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist. Merriam Webster dictionary defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."

Trump most certainly exalts “white” people over all other races even though race is really just a social construct. His rhetoric and actions, such as not naming permanent leaders of numerous departments and agencies which would require Senate confirmation thus allowing him to name people as acting leaders so he can put anyone he wants in those leadership roles, show his autocratic philosophy. Under Trump the middle class has shrunk and the rich have gotten richer, especially the very richest. Trump showed his desire to forcibly suppress opposition when told Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, that they should “get rid” of journalists as they met in public at the G-20 conference of world leaders in Osaka, Japan.

Similar to Hitler who vilified Jews and other minority groups, Trump has vilified immigrants from non-northern European countries. His policy of separating children from their parents when migrants seek asylum at the border is horrendous. Keeping both parents and children in unsanitary conditions without access to showers or toothbrushes would violate the Geneva Conventions if they were prisoners of war. Japanese-Americans and Jewish-Americans, many of whom have family members who suffered in concentration camps during World War II, have protested at Trump’s camps complaining that the conditions are reminiscent of those concentration camps.

Prior to World War II the German ocean liner St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg with nearly 900 Jewish refugees seeking visas to enter the United States. They were not admitted on the grounds that they needed to wait their turn as the roughly 27,000 slots available to Germans and Austrians had already been filled and so were the slots for the next several years. By 1945, just six years later, 254 of those roughly 900 passengers had been murdered by Nazis in the Holocaust.

The Trump administration is using the same rhetoric all over again to deny entry to migrants from countries south of our border. I’m all for waiting your turn in line but when the line stretches 20 or more years as is sometimes the case I think it’s time to revisit the rules that make the line. Several former asylum seekers have already been reported as murdered after being sent back to their home countries.  We’ll probably never know just how many of the deported asylum seekers are killed by the very drug lords and criminals they were fleeing the first place.

The examples above are just some of the frightening parallels between the leadership of present day United States and Germany of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. I don’t know about you but I don’t want another stain on our nation like that of the ill-fated voyage of the St. Louis or the Japanese internment camps.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 19, 2019