"Trump and Hitler" is more than a sensational headline
PLUS: I joined Adam Epstein on the "Dirty Moderate" podcast
Reading excerpts from CNN’s superb national security journalist Jim Sciutto’s new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” in which General John Kelly reminisces about Donald Trump’s awe of Adolf Hitler’s accomplishments, is sickening.
Of course, there is no doubt about their veracity or the convictions behind them. Donald Trump has molded and shaped a twisted dogma of his own with a particularly American character. Let’s examine it more closely.
I remember being jarred by watching scores of people swimming in the Atlantic Ocean on a hot summer day off the French coast. At first, it didn’t seem right that kids would be playing on the beach that was code named “Omaha” where so many died to gain a toehold for freedom through Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic wall. My French friend was wise enough to make the point that the happy children playing were the most powerful monument possible to the bravery and sacrifice of the American, British, Canadian, French and soldiers of 26 other nations who stormed the beaches. Hitler’s twisted vision did not endure. The barbed wire and landing barriers did not endure. The darkness yielded to the light after a great storm that left upwards of 100 million people dead all over the world. The death, starvation, torture, destruction and depravity are fascism’s legacy. Murder is the only monument that they left behind. The children splashing in the water had no idea it turned red with American blood one day a long time ago so all children could grow up in a world where there was laughter. It was a monumental achievement and a great gift.
John Kelly served as Donald Trump’s chief of staff after spending 45 years of service as a United States marine, and rising to the rank of general. His decision to serve the MAGA cause made John Kelly the chief operating officer of the Trump White House, and gave him command of the circus that followed.
It was a command for a rotten cause that stained Kelly’s reputation for probity, integrity, honesty and basic decency. The marine general, who was the highest ranking father to lose a son to combat during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, dishonored himself by casually lying about a Black congresswoman in defense of Trump’s obvious disrespect to the family of a fallen soldier.
Kelly was also an adherent to the mythology of the Lost Cause that holds Robert E. Lee is a hero, while US Grant is a drunken butcher who became a corrupt president. According to the myth, the American slave autocracy didn’t fight the war for slavery, but rather a high-minded concept called states rights. In fact, according to its disciples, the war was avoidable because compromise was possible. Kelly’s declaration that the war was fought by people of strong convictions trying to do the right thing is a mirage. At best, it is like a children’s blanket that imposes a thin layer of warmth and protection against the world for an infant who can’t process reality. At worst, it is a deliberate faith with a sinister motive.
There is something that must be said about the America First movement. It isn’t new, and it isn’t patriotic. Its legacy is ugly, dangerous and shameful. America First stands for appeasement and moral blindness. It stands for fascism and hatred.
America First was a slogan for a movement built on blindness and indifference towards the deadliest idea in human history.
Remember, ideas cross borders freely. They don’t need passports.
Henry Ford, like Elon Musk, was a ubiquitous figure in the American economy and culture, who was an instrument and vessel for antisemitism. Hitler kept a picture of Ford on his desk. The Nazi laws that stripped Jews of their citizenship, humanity and property were gentler versions of the American South’s anti-miscegenation laws, which were the true legacy of the Confederate cause remembered fondly by John Kelly.
What we remember matters. Ideas matter.
Why does Trump and MAGA celebrate and fetishize a Hungarian prime minister from a land-locked central European country that fought on the wrong side of both world wars? Does he have a magnetic personality? A dazzling smile? A charming accent?
Viktor Orban is deeply admired because of his faith and his singular accomplishment. Viktor Orban smothered freedom and choked democracy nearly to death in Hungary. He detests pluralism and modern freedom, and more importantly, he did something about it. He acted.
The deadliest essay in world history was written by Arthur de Gobineau, a French nobleman, in 1853. It was a scientific paper entitled “The Inequality of the Human Races.” This essay invented the word “Aryan,” and placed it atop the list. Aryans were the highest ranked. Jews were regarded as clever, and predictably, the darker the skin, the lower the ranking. This was called scientific racial theory.
The group that adopted Gobineau’s theories most enthusiastically was an obscure far-right German political party in the early 1920s. When it took power in the 1930s, it made the Frenchman’s theories law. They were called the Nuremberg Laws, and they were written to protect the purity of the “master race.”
What is it that the Nazis believed? Of what did Hitler dream for his 1,000-year Reich?
First, he dreamed of a world without Jews. They were responsible for all of the treachery in the world. Every failure was pinned on the Jews. Every crisis was caused by a Jewish conspiracy. Every grievance was blamed on the Jews. It was what held the Nazi cause together.
Hitler wanted more room for the master race, and he wanted more members of the master race. Women were given stipends and cash to have children. Taxes were postponed in return for the bearing of children to replenish the purity of the Volk.
He dreamed of an agrarian master race and a 1,000-year Reich in which peace, freedom and prosperity reigned. The conquered lands in the east would be the breadbasket of the Reich, and their enslaved populations, the labor. The world would be sorted and stratified into hygienic racial silos and ranked accordingly. The madness ended in 1945 after a global war that nearly annihilated western civilization and killed 100 million people.
That put an end to scientific racial theory nearly everywhere — except in the small closets where the white supremacists met.
The hard-right core that wants culture war mixed in with their insurrection is a big part of the MAGA power train. They are hostile to the idea of a pluralistic America. They are yearning for an American politician who will run for president on the illiberal platform of domination and control of the “pure” population against the lesser people, who are societal drags and burdens. These people are always racial or religious minorities. The threat is always the same. It is the idea that all people will have equal standing under the law and an equal voice. Hitler rejected this as a pathway to slavery. The idea that a master race would be subjugated through equality with lesser people was at the foundation of Nazi ideology and Hitlerism.
National conservatism” and “Orbanism” are one and the same. It is a political philosophy built on a conviction about civilization. It is forged on a foundation of unshakeable belief and a sense of urgency about time’s finite nature and the fear of ever-looming collapse. The collapse is ever-present because of the geographic position of Orbanism and national conservatism.
They are both grounded in “encirclement” theory. Both movements are reliant on doctrine that portrays them as surrounded, embattled and facing constant extinction at the hands of an uncivilized horde that is encroaching from all sides. Paranoia, conspiracy and danger constantly loom. They breed delusions of treachery and a vast garden of lies to maintain the fictions, explain the contradictions, and make plausible the madness.
Orbanism and national conservatism share a great hope. They have a mythical belief in the power of an individual to set things right. This individual is unequal against the movement, just as the movement and party are unequal against the whole of society. The movement is restricted and pure. It is not seeking to persuade. It seeks to impose and enforce because the stakes are so high. This is where democracy is rejected as being the enemy of freedom. Democracy is a system that shares power and grants an equal vote to citizens, who are equal under the law. This means that people from different cultures, races and religions have equal standing and that an idea is the organizing foundation of society.
Below is a speech that stakes the opposite claim. Read the words and then read the words from Viktor Orban below them. Understand that they are the same, and understand it was America First that celebrated the cause of both speeches.
The cause is evil and un-American. It always has been. Do you recognize it?
The issue has never been that Donald Trump thinks Hitler did some good things, and an entire government filled with generals, admirals, scholars, CEOs, lawyers, and other prominent people heard it and did nothing.
The issue at hand is that Hitler’s ideas have been reintroduced, and no one can recognize them. Instead, they are hailed anew as they once were. The difference is that then it was Father Coughlin spreading the word, and today it is Tucker Carlson.
Vladimir Putin employs the precise justifications that were used by Hitler for his military aggression. Yet, ignorance has erased the tether and memory of the justifications.
Here is the passage from the first speech. They are the words of Adolf Hitler:
What is Europe? There is no fitting geographical definition of our Continent, but only a national and cultural one.
Not the Urals form the frontier of our Continent, but the eternal line which divides the Eastern and Western conceptions of life. There was a time when Europe was that Greek Island into which Nordic tribes had penetrated in order to light a torch for the first time which from then onwards began slowly, but surely to brighten the world of man. When these Greeks repulsed the invasion of the Persian conquerors, they did not only defend their homeland, which was Greece, but that idea which we call Europe today. And then Europe traveled from Hellas to Rome. With the Greek spirit and Greek culture, the Roman way of thinking and Roman statesmanship were joined. An Empire was created which, to this day has not been equaled in its significance and creative power, let alone outdone. When, however, the Roman legions were defending Rome against the African onslaught of Carthage and at last gained a victory, again it was not Rome they were fighting for, but the Europe of that time, which consisted of the Greek-Roman world.
The next incursion against this homestead of European culture was carried out from the distant East. A terrible stream of barbarous, uncultured hordes sallied forth from the interior of Asia deep into the hearts of the European Continent, burning, looting, murdering-a true scourge of the Lord. In the battle of the Catalonian fields the (West?) was formed. On the ruins of Rome, the West was built, and its defence was a task, not only of the Romans, but also above all of the Teutons (Germans). In centuries to come the West, enlightened by Greek culture, built the Roman Empire and then expanded by the colonization of the Teutons was able to call itself Europe. Whether it was the German Emperor who was repelling the attacks from the East on the Field of Lech or whether Africa was being pushed back from Spain in long fighting, it was also a struggle of Europe, coming into being, against a surrounding world alien in its very essence. Once Rome had been given its due for the creative defense of this continent, Teutons took over the defense and the protection of a family of nations which might still differentiate and differ in their political structure and objective, but which nevertheless represented a cultural unity with blood ties. And it was from this Europe that a spiritual and cultural abundance went out, of which everyone must be aware who is willing to seek truth instead of denying it.
Thus it was not England who brought culture to the Continent, but the offspring of Teutonic nationhood on the Continent who went as Anglo-Saxons and Normans to that Island made possible a development in a way surely unique. In just the same way, it was not America who discovered Europe, but the other way around. And everything which America has not drawn from Europe may well appear worthy of admiration to a juda-ised, mixed race; Europe, on the other hand, sees in it a sign of cultural decay.
Deputies and Men of the German Reichstag, I had to make this survey, for the fight which, in the first months of this year, gradually began to become clear, and of which the German Reich is this time called to be the leader also far exceeds the interests of our nation and country. Just as the Greeks once faced the Persians in war, and the Romans faced the Mongolians, the Spanish heroes defended not only Spain, but the whole of Europe against Africa, just so Germany is fighting today, not for herself, but for the entire Continent. And it is a fortunate symptom that this realization is today so deep in the subconscious of most European nations that, whether by taking up their position openly or whether by the stream of volunteers, they are sharing in this struggle.
Hitler did what he did because of what he believed. That is the point. Isn’t it?
These were the words of Adolf Hitler in a speech from December 11, 1941, declaring war on the United States of America.
Like Orban, Hitler couldn’t stay out of US domestic politics. He referred to President Roosevelt as the “husband of that woman.”
Orbanism and national conservatism are Hitlerism. What Hitler believed and what he and his gangster regime did are two different things. The second built on the first.
The main difference between Hitlerism and Orbanism is that the Hitler chapter of the oldest lie in humanity has ended.
We know the decrepit Führer of the 1,000-year Reich blew his brains out after poisoning his dog and wife in a dank bunker. His half-burned body was seized by Russian troops secreted back to Moscow, where many years later it was fully turned to ash and flushed down a sewer. The ending was satisfactory – if not fully happy – because, though Hitler is gone, the madness and evil of his dream are not.
The contest is underway again because of the inability of human beings to remember the tragedies that occurred just before their existence that gave shape to every single thing around them. It is a child-like obliviousness that is shared by most of society. Hitler was an enigma and then a cartoon. He became humanity’s greatest monster, but he was a man, not Voldemort.
He was a man just like Trump and just like Orban. Men do not repeat each others’ acts so much as their beliefs. It is worth remembering that with 237 days left until the election.
The second speech contains the words of Viktor Orban. There is little difference. It is right to be afraid of this. Recognize this. Know what this is. It is here now.
The first and most important challenge, dear Friends, continues to be population, or demography. The fact is that there are still far more funerals than baptisms. Whether we like it or not, the peoples of the world can be divided into two groups: those that are capable of biologically maintaining their numbers; and those that are not, which is the group that we belong to. Our situation has improved, but there has not been a turnaround. This is the alpha and omega of everything: if there is no turnaround, sooner or later we will be displaced from Hungary, and we will be displaced from the Carpathian Basin.
The second challenge is migration, which you could call population replacement or inundation. There is an outstanding 1973 book on this issue which was written in French, and recently published in Hungary. It is called “The Camp of the Saints” [Le Camp des Saints], and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself. Migration has split Europe in two – or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples. I could also say that it is no longer the Western world, but the post-Western world. And around 2050, the laws of mathematics will lead to the final demographic shift: cities in this part of the continent – or that part – will see the proportion of residents of non-European origin rising to over 50 per cent of the total. And here we are in Central Europe – in the other half of Europe, or of the West. If it were not somewhat confusing, I could say that the West – let’s say the West in its spiritual sense – has moved to Central Europe: the West is here, and what is left over there is merely the post-West. A battle is in progress between the two halves of Europe. We made an offer to the post-Westerners which was based on tolerance or leaving one another in peace, allowing each to decide for themselves whom they want to live alongside; but they reject this and are continuing to fight against Central Europe, with the goal of making us like them. I shall leave to one side the moral commentary they attach to this – after all, this is such a lovely morning.
There is now less talk about migration, but, believe me, nothing has changed: Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us. They have also taken us to court over the Hungarian border defence system, and they have delivered a verdict against us. For a number of reasons not much can be said about this now, but we have been pronounced guilty. If it were not for the Ukrainian refugee crisis they would have started to enforce this judgment on us, and how that situation plays out will be accompanied by a great deal of suspense. But now war has broken out and we are receiving arrivals from Ukraine, and so this issue has been put aside – they have not taken it off the agenda, but just put it to one side. It is important that we understand them. It is important that we understand that these good people over there in the West, in the post-West, cannot bear to wake up every morning and find that their days – and indeed their whole lives – are poisoned by the thought that all is lost. So we do not want to confront them with this day and night. All we ask is that they do not try to impose on us a fate which we do not see as simply a fate for a nation, but as its nemesis. This is all we ask, and no more.
In such a multi-ethnic context, there is an ideological feint here that is worth talking about and focusing on. The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favourable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and – if I am not mistaken – this is why, in still older times – the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers. Today the situation is that Islamic civilisation, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realised – precisely because of the traditions of Belgrade/Nándorfehérvár – that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe. This is why Poitiers has been replayed; now the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West. This might not yet be a very important task for us, but it will be for our children, who will need to defend themselves not only from the South, but also from the West. The time will come when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us from there and integrate them into our lives. This has happened before; and those whom we do not want to let in will have to be stopped at our western borders – Schengen or no Schengen. But this is not the task of the moment, and not a task for our lifetime. Our task is solely to prepare our children to be able to do this. As [House Speaker] László Kövér has said in an interview, we must make sure that good times do not create weak men, and that those weak men do not bring hard times upon our people.
“Dirty Moderate” podcast
Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to join Adam Epstein on his “Dirty Moderate” podcast. We covered a lot, including the Biden-Trump rematch, the moral and philosophical collapse of the Republican Party into a Trump-led authoritarian cult to the Democrats’ notoriously bad communication skills. I hope you’ll watch, or take a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
Note: If you would prefer to read the transcript, instead of playing the video right on this page/email, click on “Watch on YouTube” on the video screen below. At this point, you should be on the YouTube page or YouTube app. Scroll down past “Description” (section where it describes the content of the video) to “Transcript,” and then click on “Show transcript.”
I think a lot of people in this country are poorly schooled in history — and also do not care about it when voting. A bad mix. The culture of the oblivious and the self-absorbed and the vapid.
You cannot find a better example of this than the moral degradation of North Carolina to elect a Holocaust Denier to the Office of Lieutenant Governor.
And there is a very good chance he will be elected Governor here in November.
Just like high school, elections turn in to popularity contests and it is difficult to change the minds of the people in one camp or another. They think, “He may sound like Hitler, but I don’t like Biden” and still stay true to party. Logic be dammed. History be dammed. Truth be dammed. We be damned. Vote!