Border Crisis- Biden's Worse Than Hitler

[Dill]

(03-25-2021, 03:56 PM)Bengalholic Wrote: FFS...can we stop comparing politicians to Hitler? I really wish people on all sides would stop doing this ignorant shit. 

A note on that, B. There is certainly an ignorant and pointless way of making such comparisons.

Children temporarily housed in cages, be they Democrat or Republican cages, are still some distance from train loads of families gassed in showers.

So far, neither Trump nor Biden, nor even Obama, has settled an internal disagreement by killing 85+ members of his own party. 

In one night.

It is an incapacity to grasp this scale of difference between the 3rd Reich and the U.S. today that leads to easy comparisons, made more for shock than the insight they afford.


That said, I think it a much bigger problem that so many Americans today have such difficulty recognizing authoritarian politics when they emerge in the U.S.  People often think of Hitler as a unique monster, one-of-a-kind, rather than a type encountered rather frequently, even today. That is also one reason for the "ignorant shit" you want to flag, why "Hitler" gets so easily thrown in every direction.  People often use the word "Hitler" to call someone a "bad person" or a "monster," absent any analysis. 

Too bad, as there are important differences between Trump and Biden which could be illuminated by reference to authoritarian politics--e.g., picking yes men as advisors, firing/punishing people who tell the truth, hostility to a free press, contempt for rule of law, gaslighting, breaching of norms regarding racial rhetoric, and misogyny. Perhaps most importantly, the type of followers and party apparatus needed to sustain him (definitely NOT people like Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger).  

As someone who has spent some time in this forum explaining, very specifically, why it is inaccurate to call Trump a "fascist," I would hate to see political analogies between U.S. leaders and well known authoritarians of any stripe blown up or sabotaged before we can see where they might legitimately go, just because people are nervous about where they could go.  I'm invoking here a principle of free inquiry (distinct from a right to free speech) which obligates people to know what they are talking about should they venture into such dangerous territory.