As a descendant of German immigrants, from the college on the stories of the rise of fascism to understand how the cultivated and educated democracy of my great-grandparents could succumb so tragically. I never got it; I had an American complacency which made the complicity of the Germans incomprehensible. Decades later, I understand. Because it happens here.
Compare Hitler and the Nazis to Donald Trump and his Maga movement is of course busy. Trump’s world war is bloody about trade; His ladders without law of migrants and domestic enemies aim to expel, not to exterminate.
And yet the parallels are undeniable. It was considerably clear this week when I participated in an overview and a discussion of a documentary on the life of German America Hannah Arendt, the Jewish survivor of Nazi totalitarianism. (The film, “Hannah Arendt: Faceing Tyranny”, will be broadcast on PBS on June 27.)
“The beginnings of his thinking take place directly at the same time at the rise of Adolf Hitler,” said historian Lyndsey Stonebridge in the film. The writings of Arendt after fled Germany in 1933 were a warning to his adopted country. At the end of her life, at the time of President Nixon, she argued that in the United States “the greatest danger of tyranny is of course the executive”.
But his inheritance is also a positive call for individual action and personal responsibility. It would have applauded the anti-Trump demonstrations last weekend from millions nationally.
His stories on Hitler's takeover factors are eccentric. After the First World War, the defeated German population felt economically deceived, alienated, suspicious of the institutions – government, media, university, affairs, political parties. Many Americans have similar and extinguished grievances in the wake of globalization, from the Middle East, a global financial collapse, pandemic and political polarization.
Comes a highly self -proclaimed man who exploits these disorders by using lies and conspiracy theories. For Hitler, the enemies of the state were real communists and Jews; Trump targets are alleged communists – democrats – and (in the echoes of Hitler) “vermin“Immigrants “Poisoning of the blood of our country.” In Arendt's account, totalitarianism occurs when a political party, which generally restricts extremists among things, is replaced by a mass movement liable to such a leader.
In the film, Roger Berkowitz, founder and director of Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, notes that Hitler claimed to represent a majority, but he did not do it. Does that seem familiar? However, as Berkowitz explains, his coherent story of past grievance and future grandeur has persuaded a lot. He particularly attracted the support of the less educated and previously apathetic working class in Germany. Arendt theorized that Hitler gave people “the impression that they are no longer alone”, that they “are part of something really great”, as the German study professor Barbara Hahn says in the film.
We know the phenomenon.
In Arendt's first major book, “the origins of totalitarianism,” she wrote, “the ideal subject was not convinced Nazi but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed. A virtue of the most expensive is loyalty to the chief. ”
Like the old republican guard of this country, the conservative establishment of Germany initially thought that he could control Hitler, so that politicians and business leaders ostrac or condemn him. But he played them, just as Trump has mastered the Republican “leaders”, reflecting his popular attraction and his political impression in total power.
Unslapled, Hitler quickly broke the laws and institutions he had long attacked. Too familiar. Asset wrote On X last month: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
In “Origins”, Arendt argued that “totalitarianism replaces all the first -rate talents with crampons and fools, whose lack of intelligence and creativity is always the best guarantee of their loyalty”. The experienced advisers who acted as railing in Trump 1.0 have disappeared, replaced in Trump 2.0 by inexperienced tips, Conspiracists and colleagues Avengers And Economic dopes: an entire rail cabinet. It is therefore that his national security team would be caught last month Discuss military plans On an unsecured commercial channel (a violation of the federal law), with a journalist included inadvertently.
With the collusion of crampons, Trump seeks to replace the rule of law with the rule with humans. Less than three months, we are vision kidnappings legal residents by unidentified and masked agents and deportations without regular procedure. “We do not give our names,” said a plainclothes man to the very pregnant wife of the student graduated from Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, during his arrest on March 8. The administration revokes visas without notice or legal cause, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasting: “We are looking for these crazy people every day” – which means that those whose speech and political thought do not line up with that of Trump.
Congress, with a republican majority, gives in its constitutional power, in particular on federal expenses and prices. Trump reduces media access to the White House. He has targeted universities, law firms and cultural institutions with punitive decrees, and many have yielded.
Federal judges provide a few decline But at the attack of the president and the obeying party leaders. “We can eliminate an entire district court”, the president of the room Mike Johnson said journalists last month. In the meantime, the administration has ignored certain judicial ordersand the Supreme Conservative Court so far Far from a force test.
What to do? This is the question that ERENDT asked in its time.
“One of his main intellectual contributions was to renew the category of political action in response,” said Arendt's researcher Ian Rhoad, who also participated in the documentary overview of the American University.
After Hitler's takeover of 1933, “I felt responsible,” Arendt later told an interviewer. “I was no longer an opinion that we can simply be a passer -by.” She hosted Germans targeted in her Berlin apartment and cataloged anti -Semitic acts for the file – until her own arrest and, finally, escapes.
In a last speech before his death in 1975, Arendt warned that totalitarian governments are trying to rewrite or bury history to suit them. The Americans must resist, “she said,” because it was the greatness of this Republic to account, for freedom, to the best of man and the worst. “
This is how to make America great again.
