We know that Trump, Mussolini, and Hitler could easily fill stadiums full of boisterous, enthusiastic supporters. Are we being fair when we compare Trump to Hitler and Mussolini?
In the initial version of this video, we first discussed the speeches of Mussolini and Hitler, then brought up Trump as an afterthought.
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/mussolinis-fascist-regime-and-the-catholic-church/
YouTube: https://youtu.be/LvNynEdZFuM
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-under-hitlers-german-nazi-regime/
YouTube: https://youtu.be/QP9UR8fqfvs
But in Saturday’s rally in Ohio, on September 17, 2022, Trump not only went full Q-Anon, Trump also went full Mussolini, and the crowds went WILD!!! Just like the crowds at the rallies of Hitler and Mussolini, they did the one hand forward salute, with the Where We Go One, We Go All finger Q-Anon salute!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/trump-rally-qanon-music.html
How horrifying to see something like this in America!
QAnon is a dangerous set of anti-Christian conspiracy theories that has influenced not only Trump but also Fox News and the right-wingnut media. I have Catholic friends who actually believe that Democrats in Congress and Hollywood elites have a secret child abuse ring where they abuse and murder children!
How bizarre is that!
The conspiracy theories of Q-Anon are similar to those spread by of Hitler in his screed, Mein Kampf, which spread many big lies, like the lie that the Jew is a parasite, that the Jew is a sponger, taking advantage of everyone, that the Jews are not really religious, that the Jewish religion is all about money grubbing, that the Jews seek to ruin girls and women, that the Jews are responsible for all the misfortunes that have befallen the German nation. And Hitler repeated over and over the old lie that the politicians stabbed the German nation in the back, snatching away victory in the First World War.
Anti-Semitism was widespread in the United States, especially in the State Department, whose officials showed no pity and refused to relax immigration standards to permit more immigration of Jewish refugees after Hitler and the Nazis rose to power. There was a small fascist movement in the Northeastern United States, mostly among the German American immigrants.
There are direct and indirect parallels between white supremacy and Nazi ideology.
Although America, before Trump, has not had a leader comparable to Mussolini and Hitler, not only is the Jim Crow racial segregation system before the Civil Rights Era a type of fascism, the Jim Crow legal system was used as direct legal precedent by the German lawyers who wrote the initial Nazi Race Laws soon after Hitler came to power.
And in the Jim Crow era, tens of thousands were murdered by lynchings and race riots against blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this era, blacks were denied access to justice and police protection, and indeed, often the police participated in the lynchings, and if the blacks called the police, often the black victims were arrested.
Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, compared the holocaust of black sufferings and lynchings over many decades to the Jewish holocaust during the years of World War II.
When challenged about the legacy of his regime, Trump crows: Look at my TV ratings! Look at my poll numbers among Republicans! Look at how I can fill stadiums with thousands of my cheering and enthusiastic supporters!
Trump has a real talent for whipping up the audience with racist chants like BUILD THE WALL! LOCK HER UP! SEND HER BACK! But Trump is not a masterful and spell binding orator when compared to Mussolini and Hitler.
Trump’s high polling numbers among Republicans are less relevant with each passing day, since the Republican Party is slowly bleeding membership, in particular bleeding women, teachers, young voters, college-educated voters, and informed voters who are not totally immersed in the Fox News bubble.
Hitler was the undisputed master for stuffing stadiums with tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters waving swastika flags, wildly cheering, especially after the Nazi regime gained total control over the radio, newspapers, and all public media. Those Triumph of Will newsreels of cheering Nazi supporters were not doctored, there was genuine enthusiasm when Hitler shouted out his bile against Jews, after his string of successes in taking over the Ruhr Valley, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
We have no record of Winston Churchill staging large public rallies before the start of the war. Rather, before the war Churchill was quite unpopular, Churchill truly had a moral compass, Churchill often used his oratorical skills delivering speeches telling the citizenry what they needed to know but did not want to hear.
You can compare Winston Churchill’s speech honoring the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Pericles’ Funeral Oration.
What historians remember about Mussolini’s rule was how the Italian army and navy was the laughingstock of Europe, how Italy was the soft underbelly and most tempting Axis target early in the war. Mussolini was initially the face of fascism; Mussolini was in power for over a decade when Hitler first became Chancellor of Germany.
Mussolini was the inspiration for the up-and-coming Hitler, Hitler’s unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch was trying to duplicate the success of Mussolini’s March on Rome.
Mussolini had a steely glare that look straight through you, as a speaker he was mesmerizing. Like Hitler, Mussolini served in the army in World War I, and like Hitler, was recovering from his war wounds in a hospital when the war ended.
Politics were violent in these interwar years. Fascism appealed to the nationalism of disenchanted young veterans who would band together into marauding fascist gangs that terrorized their opponents, and Trump has his crowd of Proud Boys, who he told to stand by and stand down in the Presidential debates before the election.
Hitler filled many of his speeches with anti-Semitic rants, and Mussolini really did not pass race laws persecuting the Jews until he went full-Nazi under the spell of Hitler in 1938, on the eve of World War II. Both Mussolini and Hitler spoke out against socialism and communism. We know that after the unification of Germany under Bismarck and unification of Italy under Garibaldi, the national leaders sought to increase the influence of their empires. Mussolini talked about reestablishing a new Roman Empire, fighting against the formidable kingdom of Ethiopia in Africa.
We know how the story ended with Hitler and Mussolini, Hitler committed suicide with his new wife Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker amidst the Soviet shelling of the city, and partisans caught up with Mussolini and his mistress, hanging their corpses upside-down in the same gas station where months before the fascists had hung the corpses of Italian Resistance leaders.
It appears that Trump, at the time of this video, will soon be facing many judges and juries, both state and federal, in multiple trials in the upcoming years.
FOOTNOTES: See the main source videos referenced in this blog.
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