What next? Kristallnacht?

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During the past year, we have published posts describing the uncanny resemblances between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler — not their physical appearances, but their actions.

For example:

1. Astounding similarities: Of whom does this remind you? It’s happening now
2. Hitler in America. Why a bigot can win the Presidency
3. What if Trump had won

and several others making similar comparisons.

Predictably, a reader has invoked Godwin’s law, to tell me that by mentioning the name “Hitler” I had “lost” the argument. (Not sure which “argument.”)

But, so long as “laws,” are being quoted, I feel compelled to put forth Sanayana’s: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And therein lies the problem, for I feel quite certain that Trump’s backers do not remember Hitler’s history, a history that should serve as an object lesson for all people.

If you take a moment to read just #1 (above), you immediately will see the frightening historical parallels between Hitler and Trump.

Here is yet another bit of history for your comparison:

Wikipedia:  In the 1920s, most German Jews were fully integrated into German society as German citizens.

Conditions for the Jews began to change after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933

From its inception, Hitler’s régime moved quickly to introduce anti-Jewish policies.

Nazi propaganda singled out the 500,000 Jews in Germany, who accounted for only 0.86% of the overall population, as an enemy within who were responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War and for its subsequent economic disasters

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by paramilitary forces and German civilians.

German authorities looked on without intervening.

The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues had their windows smashed.

Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.

The (British) Times wrote at the time: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”

The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.

Kristallnacht was followed by additional economic and political persecution of Jews, and is viewed by historians as part of Nazi Germany’s broader racial policy, and the beginning of the Final Solution and The Holocaust.

Some key points:

1. Before Hitler, Jews lived peacefully as German citizens.
2. Jews were an infinitesimal proportion of the German population
3. Hitler’s regime introduced anti-Jewish policies
4. The excuse for these policies was a crime by a Jew.
5. Hitler’s propaganda inflamed the German people who committed atrocities on the Jews, their businesses, and their homes.
6. Not mentioned in the article was the historical fact that disabled people received harsh treatment from Hitler, who felt they could not be part of his “blond beast, master race,” and
7. Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, one of Adolf Hitler’s close associates and most devoted followers. He was known for his  deep, virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views.
8. Hitler rounded up the Jews and “deported” them to concentration camps.

Keep those points in mind as you read this:

Hate incidents spreading in wake of Trump win

On Friday, a Muslim-American high school teacher in central Georgia received a handwritten letter regarding her hijab.

“Your headscarf isn’t allowed anymore,” read the anonymous note. “Why don’t you tie it around your neck and hang yourself with it.”

On Saturday night, a church offering Spanish-language services in Silver Spring, Md., was vandalized with the message, “Trump nation. Whites only.”

And over the weekend, several college students at the New School in New York City awoke to find swastikas scrawled on their dorm-room doors.

These are just a few of the incidents of hate speech, harassment, and intimidation that have been reported in the wake of last week’s presidential election.

As of Friday evening, the Southern Poverty Law Center had counted 201 hate incidents in the first three days after the election, citing local news stories, social media posts and submissions through the SPLC’s website. By Monday, that number had more than doubled, to 437.

“We feel strongly that this outburst of hate crimes is directly related to Donald Trump’s victory,”Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow, told Yahoo News, noting that “a very large proportion” of these cases included direct references to Donald Trump, his campaign or the presidential election.

“My feeling is that Trump absolutely encouraged this,” Potok said, referring to the divisive rhetoric — including the claim that most Mexican immigrants are “rapists” and “criminals,” his promise to “build a wall” on the United States’ southern border and a proposed ban on allowing Muslims to enter the the country — that came to define Trump’s White House campaign.

“The man has spent the better part of 18 months attacking minorities of all kinds, so it should hardly be a surprise that people who despise minorities are now celebrating and acting out,” he said.

In fact, the recent outpouring of animosity seems to fall in line with what the SPLC and other anti-discrimination groups have described as a rising tide of hate over the past year or so leading up to the election.

On Monday, the FBI released its annual report on hate crimes, which showed an overall rise in the number of incidents nationwide during 2015, driven in large part by a 67 percent increase in anti-Muslim attacks since 2014.

The president-elect has already outraged anti-discrimination groups with his selection of former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon, CEO of the Trump campaign, as chief strategist to the Trump White House.

Several advocacy organizations have launched petitions urging Trump to dump Bannon, who is credited with transforming the conservative Breitbart News site into the mouthpiece of the white nationalist “alt-right” movement.

Now consider the parallels, point by point:

1. Before Trump, Muslims lived peacefully in America
2. Muslims are an infinitesimal proportion of America’s population.
3. Trump introduced anti-Muslim policies
4. The excuse for these policies is a comparatively small number of Muslim crimes
5. Trump’s propaganda has inflamed Americans, who are beginning to commit atrocities on Muslims, their businesses, and their homes.
6. Trump has mocked the disabled for their lack of “perfection.”  (He also mocks women who do not meet his standards of beauty.)
7. Trump hired Stephen Bannon, the propagandist of the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, to be his chief strategist.
8. Trump plans to round up Muslims and deport them to (concentration camps??)

The similarities cannot be doubted, nor can anyone doubt the disaster that befell Germany (and indeed all nations making bigotry a political imperative.)

Hatred is easy to sell; fools buy it.  Compassion is more difficult, which is why group hatred generally begins with the lowest-intelligent among us. (High IQs did not create the bigotries pictured above.)

Hatred also is quite contagious and difficult to control. It seeps into every pore of the population until no one is safe.

Finally, hatred tends to devolve to antisemitism. History has told that story countless times.

When things go badly for the Trump administration, you can be sure the bigotry Trump has sown will grow into a whirlwind of hatred for “that Jew, Jared Kushner, in the White House.” Ah, the irony.

So as our sad Hitlerian saga unwinds, we ask, “What next, Donald? Kristallnacht?”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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LAWS

•Any monetarily NON-sovereign government — be it city, county, state or nation — that runs an ongoing trade deficit, eventually will run out of money.

•The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes..

•No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth.

•Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.

•A growing economy requires a growing supply of money (GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)

•Deficit spending grows the supply of money

•The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control.

•The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.

•Liberals think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.

•The single most important problem in economics is the Gap between rich and the rest.

•Austerity is the government’s method for widening the Gap between rich and poor.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap between the rich and the rest..

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY