It almost seems the level of editorial slams and investigative reporting at the WaPo is conjuring the ghost of regime-changing Republican Presidential scandals past.
It is a tide that has been rising at the WaPo for some months now, and perhaps they are trending towards a “Trumpgate” tsunami.
And today we have an interesting example that foreshadows a dark place where MSM angels have heretofore feared to tread. What ever has gotten into the WaPo editorial staff we may ask.
An OpEd editorial by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post is headlined: “Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth.”
“The Economist, a fine British newsmagazine, is rarely wrong, but it was recently in strongly suggesting that the casual disregard for truth that is the very soul of Donald Trump’s campaign is something new under the sun. The technology — tweets and such — certainly is, but his cascade of immense lies certainly is not. I’d like to familiarize the Economist with Adolf Hitler.
Considering the recent very thoughtful diary by linkage, that cited Mike Godwin, entitled “Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about” it seems that Mr. Cohen has done just that.
“I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is.”
Cohen then goes on to make his case:
“Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced that the Jews had declared war on Germany. It was a preposterous statement because Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population and had neither the numbers nor the power to make war on anything. In fact, in sheer preposterousness, it compares to Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — a position he tenaciously held even after Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate.
“At the time, people tried to make sense of Hitler’s statements by saying he was seeking a scapegoat and had settled on the Jews. Not so. From my readings, I know of no instance in which Hitler confided to an intimate that, of course, his statements about Jews were, as we might now say, over the top. In fact, he remained consistently deranged on the topic. He was not lying. For him, it was the truth.”
It seems that the unthinkable is being not only thought, but wrote about and seriously argued by those who “buy ink by the barrel” and “bandwidth by the terabyte.”
It is telling that the MSM talking point regarding Trump today is a single word: Liar.
Mr. Cohen picks this up and adds another damning dimension to the simpler definition.
There is no lie that cannot be believed. Even after Germany had murdered most of Europe’s Jews, allied investigators at the end of World War II found that many Germans believed, as historian Nicholas Stargardt put it, that their country’s defeat only “confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry.’ ”
As Sinclair Lewis warned in his distopian cautionary tale, “It Can’t Happen Here”…
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis
Will that “cross” Lewis speaks of be less religious fundamentalist and more the specter of a cross burning just behind America’s white picket fence?
Or will it be a virtual burning cross: a Mexican border version of the Berlin Wall?
“Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.”
I’m nor sure I necessarily agree with the hyperbole of the OpEd. But that this passed through the hands of the Editor in Chief and was published is interesting.
A personal anecdote that impressed me deeply regarding fascism:
My childhood caretaker, Charlotte (or for short, Lotte) was a German woman who lived through the Third Reich. One day at home at lunch when I was in the elementary grades she seriously schooled me on the realities of WWII and the destructive wildfire of fascism.
After telling me the why of her still saving potato peels that can be charred and ground into ersatz coffee, the conversation began to turn to Berlin after the war.
She had survivor’s guilt due to the devastating situation where her Jewish friends were deported to concentration camps. She spoke of how after the war she returned to Berlin and squatted in a bombed-out house that retained roof to just the living room and kitchen.
And she slowly became more serious.
Then, there, in our peaceful 1960’s kitchen Lotte paused and came close to me and made the deaths of 60 million people real as she whispered:
"Germany before the war was much like America. Why am I telling you all this, Mein Eine Kleine? You must always watch for the earliest signs. Because it can happen here."
I know that the deportation of any of my brilliant and wonderful friends as the first business of the Trump Administration would be a moral impossibility for which I would have to stand up and stand on my conscience. Lotte’s survivor’s guilt at seeing the deportations of her Jewish friends was a devastating fable I intend to never forget.
Remembering her warning to me, I wonder what Charlotte would say today about Godwin, Trump and America.