Summations Only

Thanks for finding this. Boy do I ever want to comment on this one.First, about the columnist, Michael Bradley, he's the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum, which is an ABC News outlet in Australia.Very little in the piece is about the comparison to Hitler. It's near the beginning, and I'll just focus on that portion. The rest of the piece was about the anger of the Trump constituency at being abandoned by the American Dream, and about the psychology of mobs. I don't differ with it enough for it to be worth taking issue with.

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In 1932, Germany had an unemployment rate of about 30 per cent. It had been bankrupted by the First World War, the reparations bill imposed by the Allies, and then the Great Depression.

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It had suffered ridiculous hyperinflation - the Reichsmark collapsed to 4.2 trillion per US$1 in 1923, wiping out everyone's savings. These statistics, stacked on 2-3 million war deaths, bear no comparison with America's recent history.

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This is both true and untrue. The second paragraph about hyperinflation and the Reichsmark collapse and the loss of savings is true, but by 1932 Germany was well on the road back to recovery, no matter what Bradley claims the unemployment rate was. The 30% unemployment rate might be the official statistic, but it doesn't include the large underground economy that arose during the hyperinflation and economic displacement of the previous decade.The Germany of 1932 also had a disaffected class that had been left behind economically, just like the America of today. Trump and Hitler took advantage of similar circumstances.

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It's equally obvious that Trump is not Hitler.

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Fine, he's stating his conclusion up front, but he's wrong except in a literal sense.

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He is equivalently irresponsible and narcissistic,...

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Hitler was not irresponsible. Rash and brash and consumed by his own goals , but not irresponsible. I agree that Trump is irresponsible, mostly due to, as far as can be told, ignorance. He's right about Trump and Hitler's narcissism.

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...but he has no discernible personal ideology beyond the sheer delight of being the centre of attention.

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This is wrong. Trump has a very "discernible personal ideology." True, he also demands being the center of attention, but his ideology is clear. He believes in small government, autocracy, minimal regulation, unrestrained capitalism, and exploitation of resources. He doesn't understand science and hence rejects its findings, such as environmental concerns and climate change.

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He is not a buffoon;...

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He *is* a buffoon and many other things besides, such as racist, nativist, misogynistic, ignorant, bullying, childish, lying, manipulative, insulting...well, I've got better things to do with my time than enumerate the full list of appropriate adjectives. Hitler possessed some of the same qualities, such as racism, nativism, lying, manipulative, insulting, but he was also ruthless, murderous and traitorous.

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...he knows exactly what he's doing,...

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This is true, and it was true of Hitler, too. Hitler didn't know what he was doing militarily during WWII, but that was later. Hitler's rise to power and his consolidation of that power is similar to Trump's: compromise and intimidate the instruments of government to his own purposes. We can already see the weakening of American institutions in the face of the Trump onslaught. The FBI has reopened the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and it won't be a surprise if the investigation into the Clinton emails is reopened, and a couple Senators just released a letter demanding an investigation of Daniel Steele for lying to the FBI, he of the Trump dossier requested by the Clinton campaign. This use of governmental power to pursue political enemies is precisely what Hitler did.Trump also knows what he is doing, and goes beyond Hitler, in using the powers of his office to enrich both himself and his cronies.But there are ways in which Trump, unlike Hitler, does not know what he is doing. Regarding carrying out the duties of the office of the president and working with the other branches of government to manage the country's business responsibly, Trump has not a clue what he's doing. On this point Bradley is correct, Trump is not like Hitler. Hitler successfully embarked upon a program of rebuilding and improving German infrastructure and its military, and within a few years of taking the reins of power was enormously successful and popular (those with concerns about his means of taking and maintaining the reins of power were silenced). Yes, both Trump and Hitler were populists.

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But his motivation and goals are completely different.

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This is true, too. Trump doesn't want to rule the world - he just wants to be the richest and most admired man in the world. The details of government don't interest him, even those details that would enrich him. He relies upon others to manage the details - Trump just sets the goals, like protecting him from the Russia investigation, raising taxes, eliminating regulations, etc.

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Commentators persistently misunderstand everything about the Trump phenomenon, and this final resort to doomsday fatalism, concluding that fascism is once again nigh, is just the natural end point of their failure to look behind what's playing out on TV.

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Trump's constant complaint as president is that he isn't all powerful. He bemoans that there are things he cannot do. "Where's my Roy Cohn?" he laments (Roy Cohn was McCarthy's chief lawyer. McCarthy and McCarthyism shouldn't need to be explained, but I've linked to the Wikipedia article). Paraphrasing, "My Attorney General should protect me the same way Bobby Kennedy protected John Kennedy and Eric Holder protected Obama," as if Attorneys General's responsibility is to protect a president's illegal activities rather than protect and defend the constitution and the country. John Dean serves as an example, even though he served as White House Counsel (president's personal legal adviser), not Attorney General. He was sentenced to 1-4 years for his efforts to protect Nixon during Watergate.Trump wishes to be an autocrat, and he is moving in that direction, hopefully slowly enough that he neither achieves his goal nor irredeemably damages our institutions. He is merging the goals of government and business, and his efforts to exclude and marginalize Muslims, his racism, his attempts to shape society, his disregard for the rule of law, his belief that he is president for only some of the people, make him far more a fascist than a legitimate president.But I should mention one other significant difference between Trump and Hitler, that Hitler believed war or at least conflict was the natural state of affairs for a nation, that a nation not so engaged was growing weaker instead of stronger, both economically and militarily.This is the point at which Bradley ceases the comparison between Trump and Hitler and goes off in another direction, but I can't help commenting on this:

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For one thing, they miss Karl Marx's point: if it can be said that history is repeating, then it is as farce.

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History does not in fact repeat, ever.

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This is monstrously untrue. The entirety of human history is the same thing over and over. Probably the most common repetition is war. Genocide is another. Economic boom/busts are another. The rise and fall of civilizations is another.I'll comment about one more thing:

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There is nothing inevitable about Trump or the death of democracy which his rise is said to portend. We are not captive to history, but it has much to teach us. The historical lessons here are that the unthinkable is always possible, and that a political vacuum will always be filled by opportunists.

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All true, and this is a lesson of history we ignore at our own peril.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Formatting.

Apropos of nothing, here's another political Chad Mitchell Trio song I liked. Still have the record. "Barry" is Barry Goldwater for you younger folk. Though the year was 1964, a lot of it sounds eerily familiar: --Percy

What folk need to remember is that politically Barry was closer to Hubert than to Ronald.

Is it true that the John Birch Society was founded by the father of the Koch Brothers?

Of course not. The John Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch. The Koch family are Texas Oil folk who also developed a new more efficient was of cracking.

No.
It was founded by Robert W. Welch jr.

Despite hints that he may be delusional, Trump crowns himself as a genius.
A Very Stable Genius': Trump Responds To Renewed Criticism Of His Mental StateHe commented

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"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," Trump tweeted, noting: "I went from VERY successful businessman to top T.V. Star ... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius ... and a very stable genius at that!"

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I guess that nobody can defend us better than ourselves....nor indict us!

And he immediately proves how delusional he is. Typical Trump.

We're getting very tangential to the topic here, but I couldn't let this pass without comment since you stated it so firmly. In a sense Bradley is entirely correct and your response is pretty meaningless. Your categories of repeating events are so broad as to have little meaning. Sure, there's been more than one war, but many of these wars are fundamentally different from one another, especially when we're looking over longer time periods.Saying that wars repeat is like saying history is the same because it's just people doing things over and over. Well yes, but the things are different. One of the things we can learn from history is that similar situations play out extraordinarily differently when the social, technological, economic and political background in which it takes place has changed.

Santyana, who said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," often comes up in discussions like this, but I don't believe that's true, either. I believe history repeating itself, like war, is inevitable. There's no meaningful difference in a war between Cro-Magnons beating each other over the heads with clubs over prime hunting grounds and modern armies clashing over oil fields. The specifics and details are inconsequential compared to the overriding repeating patterns. Are they really so different? Is assassination with a fire-hardened stick all that different than with a ricin-coated pellet jabbed into a leg using an umbrella? Are the human motivations that different. Not really. At heart it's really just human nature playing itself out in front of different backdrops.I think the most accurate saying is, "There is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9.--Percy

Gee, check the news at halftime and you never know what will pop up. In this case it's an editorial by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post: The ‘stable genius’ isn’t even functioning as president. She cuts through all the excuses and nonsense to deny even Trump zealots any notion of shutting their eyes to the obvious. Here's the first sentence:

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Like clockwork, on Saturday around 7 a.m., no doubt feeling the sting of widespread discussion that he is as his own advisers described to Michael Wolff for his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House a dope, a moron, a man-child, a semi-illiterate, President Trump confirmed it all with a tweet.

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What can you say about someone who, when they're charged with mental instability, responds, in effect, "Am not, nah nah"?--Percy

Halftime's over so this has to be short, don't miss this editorial from the New York Times: Trump’s Petticoat Government"Petticoat Government" refers to when Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was the de facto president of the United States for several months in 1920 while her husband lay ill after a serious stroke. No one in a position of sufficient responsibility was willing to point out the obvious, that the president was incapable of carrying out the duties of his office. In essence the cabinet ran the country while Mrs. Wilson acted as go-between between the cabinet and her bedridden husband.--Percy

The Huffington Post is running the story Trump Says U.S. ‘Not Going To Look Foolish As Long As I’m Here’The obvious retort? "The US can't help but look foolish as long as you're here."--Percy

I personally prefer the version that says: "Those who fail to learn the lessons of science fiction are doomed to live them." Part of that is because we keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. In the documentary, Boom Bust Boom, on Netflix, one economist described the cycle in which we have an economic crash, we figure out what caused it and create laws and regulations to keep that from happening again, but then the next generation decides that they're too smart to make those mistakes again so they get rid of those laws and regulations and then actually have the unmitigated gall to look surprised with the next crash happens because all those safeguards had been removed.Sound familiar? Like what the Republicans have been doing this past year? And we have historians telling us that Republicans are now doing the same things that had brought on the Great Depression (eg, on YouTube a clip from CNN in which a Depression historian goes into detail of how the tax bill (now law) is a blast from the past). And we have the recent history of how trickle-down economics was enacted in Kansas and devastated their economy, yet Republicans still want to do the same thing to the entire country.We keep refusing to learn lessons from our previous mistakes, so we keep making those very same mistakes.About 4 or 5 years ago, I read something in a 1945 history book, The Course of German History by British historian A.J.P. Taylor, that sounded exactly like what the Republicans were pushing for and which we are now seeing them doing.The following passages are from pages 195-197 of that book in which he covers the devastating economics of early Weimar. Years ago, a history graduate student explained the Weimar hyperinflation and its causes as he had learned them. Germany wasn't making its reparation payments to France's satisfaction, so France sent in its troops to occupy the Ruhr, the very heart of German industry, in order to take the profits directly. The government declared a general strike, telling everybody to refuse to work for the French. Faced with unemployment payments and no income, the government started printing money without any backing. An issue of Das III. Reich magazine from either 1973 or 1974 has an article on that with both confirmed what I had been told and also showed a series of postcard stamps as the price rose from 10 Pfennig (0.1 Marks) to about 5 Milliarden Marks (5 billion to Yanks and younger Brits).Then Taylor's book filled in more of the blanks. Basically, Germany had entered into the Great War, AKA WWI, without any way to finance it. They expected to pay for the war with the spoils of war from their defeated opponents -- that would explain their absolutely ridiculous demands on Russia in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which my Russian history professor blamed for the extreme demands made on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Most notable is that Germany never did tax the industrialists who profited immensely from war production.From pages 195-197 (note that a milliard is a thousand millions, since at the time in the UK a billion was a million millions which is still the case on the Continent):

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The failure of the Kapp putsch was evidence that the results of 1918 could not yet be openly undone; and the following three years were dominated by the fact that Germany, having failed to plunder Europe, would have to bear the belated burden of the war. The war had cost the Reich 164 milliard marks. Of this sum 93 milliards had been raised by war loans, 29 milliards had been met by treasury bills, the rest by increasing the issue of paper money. Not a penny had been raised by taxation. Republican Germany might have been expected to reform the finances of the Reich and to impose taxation on the rich; but the "national" classes were ready for this emergency -- they alleged that taxes were needed solely to pay reparations to the French. To oppose taxes became a patriotic act; and in 1921 direct taxes were actually reduced. In reality the claims of reparations were trifling compare to the needs of Germany's internal budget; and in 1921-3 hardly any reparations were paid. The inflation which were raged at an ever-advancing pace until the end of 1923 was solely due to the failure to balance revenue and expenditure. There was no connection between reparations and inflation, except for purposes of propaganda. Instead of taxing the rich, Germany paid her way and paid off all the costs of the war by destroying the savings of the poor and middle classes. Inflation had a profound political effect: it left Germany in 1924 as free from debt as it had been in 1871, that is to say, in as favorable a financial position at the end of a lost war as it had been at the end of a victorious war. It had a profound economic effect: it enabled German heavy industry to write off all its prior charges and so be free to carry out a new process of rationalizing its procedure almost as sweeping as the original "industrial revolution" in the eighteen-seventies. Most of all it had a profound social effect: it stripped the middle classes of their savings and made the industrial magnates absolute dictators of German economic life. The saving, investing middle class, everywhere the pillar of stability and respectability, was in any case newer in Germany than in France and England -- hence the instability of German policy even before 1914 --; it was now utterly destroyed, and Germany thus deprived of are solid, cautious keel. The former rentiers, who had lost their all, ceased to impose a brake: they became resentful of the republic, to whom they attributed their disaster; violet and irresponsible; and ready to follow the first demagogic savior, not lately from the industrial working class. The inflation, more than any other single factor, doomed the republic; its cause was not the policy of the Allies, but the failure to impose direct taxes on the rich.

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But inflation had, too, an affect on foreign affairs. To sustain the connection between inflation and reparations, it was necessary to cheat and defy the French and to conduct a steady campaign against Versailles, a campaign which gradually convinced even its authors. Once more Germans began to lose caution and to believe that the war had been won. There was new agitation on the eastern frontiers; open refusal to reduce the German army to the prescribed size; and in the reparations negotiations an insolent, almost jeering, contempt. So long as Versailles could be blamed for all the ills of Germany, no one would demand an account of their stewardship from the old "governing classes" who had brought Germany to this plight and who even now were exploiting her weaknesses and confusion to consolidate their power. For once, German policy had counted without the French. Poincar, the French Prime Minister, actually thought that Versailles ought to be enforced and that the victory of 1918 should be safeguarded. In January 1923, wearied of the refusal to disarm, of the nationalistic agitation, of the failure to pay reparations, Poincar, backed by the Belgians and Italians, decreed the occupation of the Ruhr, seat of Germany's industrial power. Even now the Germans did not appreciate the position. They still thought there was some mistake, some misunderstanding. Ever since 1870 they had regarded France as decadent and weak, and they could not suppose the French really capable of invading German soil. Moreover, being themselves willing to forget all the abuse and hostility they had directed against England, they supposed, rightly, that this will to forget was reciprocated. Thus, even though the German army could not turn the French out of the Ruhr, the English friends of Germany, anxious to save Germany from "Bolshevism" and chaos, would do it for them. The German government therefore ordered "passive resistance," a great demonstration of national unity against the invader. Factories, mines, banks, offices, in the occupied zone, were everywhere closed. The workers starved in patriotic devotion; the capitalist also suffered in their feelings, though they arranged a sell coal and steel to the French at a high profit. The war, suspended by the armistice of 1918, was renewed.

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It was renewed, and lost. The occupation of the Ruhr, far more than the last campaign of 1918, brought home to the Germans the fact of defeat. Until then did had passed unnoticed. Even though fighting had ceased, the Germans had expected the "peril of Bolshevism" to do the trick. Successive German governments had threatened to ruin Germany unless the treaty of Versailles was torn up. Poincar called the German bluff: if the Germans wished to ruin Germany rather than acknowledge defeat, they should be allowed to do so. In August 1923, the German industrialists and generals realize that the bluff had not succeeded. Germany had lost the war. The governments of fulfillment was formed under Stresemann, leader of the former National Liberals, the "party of the folk." The currency was stabilized, as it could have been stabilized at any moment by a government determined to make revenue and expenditure balance; reparations were paid punctually and without difficulty; even the process of rearmament was temporarily slowed down. The occupation of the Ruhr had been the cold douche that brings a hysteric to her senses. It ended, for the moment, the campaign against Versailles.

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Just as we're now doing with this new tax law, they didn't tax the rich and forced the poor and middle-class to bear the tax burden, thus destroying the middle class.

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The Peter principle is a concept in management theory formulated by educator Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969. It states that the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence". wiki

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He should have quit while he was ahead.