This post isn’t about supporting Trump. I’m largely ambivalent and I don’t get a vote anyway. He doesn’t fill me with joy or terror, much as most of the Republican field. This is completely about who he’s being compared to.
Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not doing this lightly. It seems a bit early to go full Godwin here but perhaps I have to. Have you read Mein Kampf lately? Probably not. There are just a few too many people on social media dangerously throwing around the “Trump is Hitler” comparisons. It all starts with a few hands raised and it ends with gas chambers and genocide, apparently.
I haven’t yet read Trump’s magnum opus, “The Art of the Deal”. I actually will now. I’m pretty certain, based on the reviews and publicly available material that I won’t find an instruction manual on how to take over and rule first America and then the world in order to prevent the “triumph of international Judaism”.
For those of you not intimately familiar with Mein Kampf, I’m not even going to quote it directly because it’s actually a real struggle to read. I don’t speak German so I’ve only ever looked at English versions. I’ll spare you the trouble but I’ll give you the best summary of the book that anyone has ever written. Then at the end I’ll tell you who wrote the summary. The only thing changed is the formatting. There’s a long, long paragraph in the original that has been split into bullet points to make it easier to read.
The Summary of Mein Kampf
Although the German authorities had maintained order, and the German court had inflicted punishment, the feeling was widespread throughout the land that they were striking at their own flesh and blood, and were playing the foreigners’ game at the expense of Germany’s most faithful sons. Hitler’s sentence was reduced from four years to thirteen months. These months in the Landsberg fortress were, however, sufficient to enable him to complete in outline Mein Kampf, a treatise on his political philosophy inscribed to the dead of the recent Putsch. When eventually he came to power, there was no book which deserved more careful study from the rulers, political and military, of the Allied Powers. All was there –
- the programme of German resurrection;
- the technique of party propaganda;
- the plan for combating Marxism;
- the concept of a National-Socialist State;
- the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world.
Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.
The main thesis of Mein Kampf is simple.
- Man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit.
- Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is doomed to extinction.
- A country or race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the need for ridding it of foreign defilements.
- The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin; for it means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence.
- The first duty of every country is therefore to nationalise the masses; intelligence in the case of the individual is not of first importance; will and determination are the prime qualities.
- The individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate natures.
- Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race; hence the necessity for military forms.
- The race must fight; a race that rests must rust and perish. Had the German race been united in good time, it would have been already master of the globe.
- The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe.
- A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence.
- Above all things the Army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility.
- To restore the German nation, the people must be convinced that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is possible.
- The aristocratic principle is fundamentally sound. Intellectualism is undesirable.
- The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier.
- The greatest upheavals in history would have been unthinkable had it not been for the driving force of fanatical and hysterical passions.
- Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order.
- The world is now moving towards such an upheaval, and the new German State must see to it that the race is ready for the last and greatest decisions on this earth.
- Foreign policy may be unscrupulous.
- It is not the task of diplomacy to allow a nation to founder heroically, but rather to see that it can prosper and survive.
- England and Italy are the only two possible allies for Germany. No country will enter into an alliance with a cowardly pacifist state run by democrats and Marxists.
- So long as Germany does not fend for herself, nobody will fend for her.
- Her lost provinces cannot be regained by solemn appeals to Heaven or by pious hopes in the League of Nations, but only by force of arms.
- Germany must not repeat the mistake of fighting all her enemies at once.
- She must single out the most dangerous and attack him with all her forces.
- The world will only cease to be anti-German when Germany recovers equality of rights and resumes her place in the sun.
- There must be no sentimentality about Germany’s foreign policy.
- To attack France for purely sentimental reasons would be foolish.
- What Germany needs is increase of territory in Europe.
- Germany’s pre-war colonial policy was a mistake and should be abandoned.
- Germany must look for expansion to Russia and especially to the Baltic States.
- No alliance with Russia can be tolerated. To wage war together with Russia against the West would be criminal, for the aim of the Soviets is the triumph of international Judaism.
Such were the “granite pillars” of his policy
Do you know who wrote that?
It was written by Winston Churchill in the Gathering Storm, part one of his six book history of the Second World War. It was published after the war but he spoke about Mein Kampf plenty of times before Hitler became what he became. It’s just most people chose to hope that he wouldn’t be as bad as his book. They wanted to believe in the moderate Nazi and moderate Nazism myth (as I pointed out here).
I don’t care how many people raise their arms when Donald Trump asks them, clearly in full comedic schtick, to pledge that they will vote for him, there’s no way this man is going to become a genocidal dictator. Nobody “made” them raise their arms. They chose too. I don’t care, either, what yet another comedian says.
And don’t even get me started on the massive amounts of racism inherent in the demonisation I read of the wide range of people across America who are choosing to vote for Trump.
Trump may or may not make a good president if given the chance. I can’t begin to imagine him doing anything as deleterious to the health and constitution of the Republic of the United States of America as the present incumbent has done.
