That’s right: I’m a Hillary voter and I don’t think Donald Trump is Hitler.
In fact, it it’s one thing I can’t stomach — in addition to $100 coffee machines that break in under a year, Hollywood’s continuous green-lighting of Adam Sandler projects and people who park in the fire lane — it’s casual comparisons to Hitler simply because one disagrees with another’s political views.
Take our last and current presidents, Republican and Democrat, both likened to Hitler in a million different ways. Literally. Search Google images and you’ll find page after page after page of George W. Bush and Barack Obama with Photoshopped little moustaches. Imagine if all that creative energy had been channeled into something worthwhile. You know, like adult coloring.
Left, right, alt-right, alt-left (if there isn’t such a thing yet, there will be soon) —you’re all wrong. There’s only one Hitler; and that’s Hitler (okay, maybe Stalin, but he’s like a distant second).
Adolph Hitler specifically targeted and systematically exterminated 12 million innocent civilians — 6 million Jews (including my grandmother’s entire family at Auschwitz, except her), yes, but also another 6 million people he deemed “undesirable.”
Bush is Hitler why? Because he withdrew from a climate treaty? Obama is Hitler why? Because he tried to offer America affordable health care?
So, of all the things Donald Trump may be — narcissistic, vindictive, a little heavy-handed with the bronzer, 45th president of the United States — he’s not Hitler.
If anything, he’s Voldemort, at least around my house the latter half of this past week: “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”
Actually, that’s not a fair analogy to Voldemort either. Donald Trump is more like “He-Who-Must-Be-Named-All-the-Time-In-Fact-He-Puts-His-Name-On-Everything-In-Big-Bold-Letters-And-Now-We’re-Going-To-See-It-In-The-News-Every-Day-For-Four-Years-Unless-He-Decides-It’s-Too-Much-Work-and-Steps-Down-To-Start-His-Own-Cable-TV-Channel-And-Eat-Taco-Bowls-In-His-Gold-Plated-Airplane.”
Wait, I’ve got it. Donald Trump is Conan the Barbarian, who, when asked “what is best in life?” replied: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women!”
Yup, that’s it.
But Trump is not a Nazi. And neither are his supporters. Well, at least most of them.
To you, the non-white supremacist Trump base, I offer my disappointed but sincere congratulations on your win. Exactly like I make my son and daughter’s pee-wee soccer teams do after every game, even when we’ve received a thorough drubbing — and with me as coach, we’ve invariably received a thorough drubbing — I’ll say “good game” and shake hands. And I’ll really mean it; I won’t spit into my palm or mutter “yeah, right” under my breath or anything.
Go ahead, knock yourself out. Make America great again. But please, I beg of you: don’t let a few rotten deplorables spoil the whole basket.
Because there does exist an element among you harboring dangerous ideologies. And I don’t mean liking NAFTA or favoring cap-and-trade emissions. I’m talking about actually dangerous ideologies. Vengeful ideologies. Violent ideologies. Hateful ideologies.
Obviously, the extent to which our new commander-in-chief will continue playing to this small but vocal segment remains to be seen. I’d like to think extremists ultimately won’t exert any real influence on his administration. Again, Trump’s not Hitler. He’s not going to orchestrate a Holocaust; he has nowhere near the attention span. But he will say anything at any time — the more incendiary the better — and now those words are given legitimacy by the leader of the free world.
What concerns me is the slow, steady creep of intolerance, and its potential to create an atmosphere of socially acceptable hostility toward, well, potentially anyone at any time. Hatred isn’t the underlying essence of America; freedom is. “With liberty and justice for all” — don’t you remember pledging allegiance to that every single morning for 12 years?
No two people are the same, even within the same group of people. Everybody is a foreigner to someone else. We are all immigrants in this country — even Native Americans originally walked here from Asia 17,000 years ago. In fact, we’re all immigrants in every country outside of East Africa, the birthplace of anatomically modern humans.
I just think that bears remembering — by all of us. A wiser man than me once said, “we share the same biology, regardless of ideology.” That man was Sting.
Now, I can’t very well close with a Sting quote — Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers would be pissed, and without their help I’ll never convince him to do another Police reunion tour.
Instead, allow me to share this famous poem by German theologian Pastor Martin Niemoller, a one-time Hitler supporter, who, after later criticizing his policies as incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity, found himself imprisoned at Dachau:
“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
• Geoff Kirsch is a Juneau-based writer and humorist. “Slack Tide” appears every second and fourth Sunday in Neighbors.
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