news dot com dot au got worry that a ‘Nightmare scenario’ would see ‘Trump street gangs’ fight back after US election result (Rohan Smith, November 2, 2020); which — with the God Emperor’s blessing — is ah, certainly a possibility. But anyway, my attention was drawn to the following passage:
Eleanore Wells, a black woman who appeared on Q&A in September and compared the US President to Adolf Hitler, told the panel: “I’m not the first person, even if I had compared him to Hitler. You’ve seen there are dozens of articles.”
But Salvatore Babones, a political sociologist from the University of Sydney rejected the comparison.
“I did watch the show you were on last time and while I respect the sincerity of your feelings, you talked about the potential for a new rise of fascism in America and Trump as the new Hitler and whenever I hear that kind of rhetoric, forgive me, I just tend to roll my eyes at the ahistorical nature of it.
“When Mussolini in Italy seized power he marched on Rome and laid out a book on fascism, laying out his plan. When Hitler took power, he was unsuccessful and went to jail and wrote a book called Mein Kampf, laying out his history. But we don’t have that in America.”
I missed that episode of The Bad Show (September 21, 2020), but computer says:
ELEANORE WELLS
My question for the panel is, regardless of whether Trump wins or not, has he shown a much smarter autocrat how it’s done? Like, could we have another Hitler or some other horrendous… It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me. I’m worried…HAMISH MACDONALD
That’s a pretty extreme comparison to draw.ELEANORE WELLS
Is it?HAMISH MACDONALD
Well, Hitler…ELEANORE WELLS
Is it?HAMISH MACDONALD
Hitler was responsible for the death of six million Jews.ELEANORE WELLS
Is it extreme? I don’t think it’s extreme because…HAMISH MACDONALD
Trump hasn’t done anything like that.ELEANORE WELLS
Hitler didn’t start out this big. It was a small thing and it grew. So just… Let me finish. So, he… We don’t know at what point in the trajectory it is. But it doesn’t sound far-fetched to me at all.HAMISH MACDONALD
OK. Cole?COLE BROWN
Yeah, I actually… I totally agree. I mean, you know, Hitler obviously has been mentioned as a major and extreme example. But the sort of descent into fascism, the descent into chaos is a gradual one. And in the history of empires, America is not that old. So, I think that this understanding, this sort of belief that the music will keep playing forever and we’ll stay… That’s just not true. I think democracies ultimately decline when they’re not tended to. And…and…what’s happening right now, you’re seeing sort of day in and day out as precedent is violated, Donald Trump sort of dismantling that democracy.HAMISH MACDONALD
Barbara, Trump as an autocrat – do you buy that characterisation?BARBARA HEINEBACK
No. Let’s look at a couple of things. I too am an American, love America, always vote. I… There are few things that I get excited about as much as my vote. But America started on what I think of as the three big Cs – Christianity, the US Constitution and also… What’s the third one? Christianity, US Constitution…HAMISH MACDONALD
You really need to remember the third one, Barbara, you’re on live television.BARBARA HEINEBACK
…and also capitalism. I sound like Mitt Romney now, right? I’m going to get rid of these two. And the other is, you know, also the…capitalism. But even though I’m an independent, and I have been for many, many years, most of the time, I voted with the Democrats. But I feel like what the Democrat Party was many years ago, I didn’t leave those ideals and ideologies, I feel like the Democratic Party has left me. Why do we have so much black-on-black crime in these cities that Obama wouldn’t talk about? We had a Democratic convention just a couple of weeks ago. From May 25th, Black Lives Matter – that’s when George Floyd was killed and held down for 8.5 minutes – he was killed, and from May 25th, right through the Democratic Convention, not one word. That was in August, the third week in August, just a couple of weeks ago. Not one mention of the demonstrations, and all of the terror that it has caused in so many cities, was mentioned at all. And depending on what station you watch, you didn’t see a lot of the violence on CNN and other stations. You look at a few channels, and if you look around…COLE BROWN
No.BARBARA HEINEBACK
…you could see where there were killings and thugs and all.HAMISH MACDONALD
I’m just going to bring Kylie in here…
So yeah. As for Salvatore Babones, I confess to not having examined his scholarship on Trump, Hitler or Nazi Germany, but was delighted to discover that Polity, ‘The home of independent thinking’, has indeed published The New Authoritarianism, Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts. This weighty tome has its own, dedicated website and it’s been endorsed by Milo Yiannopoulos fan Janet Albrechtsen, David ‘God Save The Queen’ Flint and Some Guy writing for Quadrant.
Still, I admit to being perplexed by the notion that: a) ‘when Mussolini in Italy seized power he marched on Rome and laid out a book on fascism, laying out his plan’ and; b) ‘When Hitler took power, he was unsuccessful and went to jail and wrote a book called Mein Kampf, laying out his history’. Thus:
What was the book Benito ‘laid out’ (and how?) in October 1922? Assuming somesuch book exists, what does it mean for the claim, made by a number of historians, that Mussolini actually failed or refused to impose a rigid orthodoxy on his movement? Further, that there were, in fact, a number of leading Fascist ideologues propounding various theories as to its essential qualities?
As for the Austrian painter, as far as I’m aware, Hitler and the Nazis assumed power in 1933, not 1924, and it was in 1924, not 1933, that he wrote a li’l book about his ‘history’ — and er, political vision.
As for the God Emperor, it’s true that El Presidente had someone ghostwrite The Art of the Deal, and on that basis alone it hardly constituted much of a struggle for the very stable genius to compose. By the same token, while his New York Times bestseller doesn’t really constitute a political manifesto, I’m not sure a fascist demagogue requires such a text in order to qualify as one.
Mussolini wrote ‘My Autobiography’ years after he seized power, and later still had ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ attributed to him (it was likely written by someone else). The only other book is a quasi pornographic novel called ‘The Cardinal’s Mistress’ which he published when still a socialist.
Barbones is a kind of world systems theorist who seems to want to be Trump’s Dugin. But since Trump has no actual interest in Trumpism, it’s an isolated ideological tendency.