In an interview with Rolling Stone MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said she was studying up on Hitler so she could better understand what life will be like under Donald Trump

Maddow said Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican Party has prompted her to search for historical equivalents, periods when cultures “have unexpectedly veered into dark places.” That search, she said, led her to 1930s Germany.

 

“Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor,” she said. “I am gravitating toward moments in history for subliminal reference in terms of cultures that have unexpectedly veered into dark places, because I think that’s possibly where we are.”

Nothing makes me angrier than when pundits or politicians of any party make hyperbolic comparisons to political opponents and Hitler or Nazis because it serves to diminish the horrors for which the Nazis were responsible.

Maddow isn’t the first pundit or media personality who tried to label Donald Trump with fake Shoah references (Shoah is the word Jews use for the Holocaust it’s Hebrew for disaster). They are cheapening the memory of the Holocaust horrors.

You see more important to me than politics is the fact that I am a Jew, and I’m a Jew who had many family members who suffered at the hands of the “final solution.”

In February the Huffington Post ran an article called Trump, Berlusconi, Hitler and the Populist Moment  said in part:

Hitler, calling for the golden-haired resurgence of a racially pure, nordic German Reich, was a swarthy Austrian. Das macht nichts (no problem). More importantly, Hitler was seen as the avenger of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and the economic destitution afflicting much of Germany. He vowed to make Germany great again (sound familiar?). That the particulars were an incoherent jumble didn’t matter either. He was the man of the hour.

The Washington Post’s editorial board was a bit more subtle,  their editorial on Monday reminded readers

First, you don’t have to go back to history’s most famous example, Adolf Hitler, to understand that authoritarian rulers can achieve power through the ballot box.

Back in March Comedian Louis C.K said:

Please stop it with voting for Trump,” C.K. writes. “It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the ’30s. Do you think they saw the sh-t coming? Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over who would say anything at all.”

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto compared Donald Trump to Hitler and Mussolini. At the time, Peña Nieto said that Trump’s rhetoric was “the way that Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived.”

Those are powerful words for a man who runs a government with laws against Illegal Immigration more repressive than Trump ever suggested. Heck Trump just wants to send them back whence they came, under the Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Immigrants who are deported and attempt to re-enter can be imprisoned for 10 years. Visa violators can be sentenced to six-year terms. Mexicans who help illegal immigrants are considered criminals

Each one of these references are disgusting, if you want to call Trump names, go ahead he is dealt with worse, but don’t you dare reference the Holocaust but because it cheapens the memory of the suffering the Nazi’s caused.

For those who still want to make the comparison allow me to ask some questions. Does Donald Trump make people tattoo numbers on their arms?

 

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Hitler choose that method of identifying the Jews because tattooing is prohibited in the Jewish faith (he didn’t realize that people couldn’t be punished for forced tattooing). Either way, if Trump never forced people to tattoo numbers on their arms then he probably isn’t Hitler.

I never met some of my family because the Nazis killed them and buried them in mass graves or cremated their bodies (cremation is also against Jewish Law).  Did Trump kill people, cremate their remains, and bury them in mass graves? 

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If Trump never killed, cremated, and buried people in mass graves then the Hitler comparison is probably not accurate.

Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf in which he spoke of his hatred toward Jews with comments such as:

  • The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people.
  • …the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
  • And so he [the Jew] advances on his fatal road until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer.
  • Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: ‘by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’

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According to Wikipedia Donald Trump wrote 18 books, even though I only read one (“The Art of the Deal” which contained no Antisemitism) if any of the other books had quotes such as the ones by Hitler above, I guarantee you that they would have been fodder during the primary season.

The Nazis conducted horrible painful medical experimentation in concentration camps. Perhaps the most well-known of which were the experiments that Josef Mengele conducted on twins and other victims at Auschwitz, through these experiments he hoped to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. He experimented on over 1,500 pairs of twins and other Jews and Gypsies, injecting dye into their eyes blinding them, or chloroform into their hearts killing them, sew twins together trying to create conjoined twins, forcing them into freezing water (like the picture below), and other experiments too horrible to repeat.

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Does Donald Trump authorize horrible medical experimentation on Jews like Mengele did? If he was doing that, believe me it would be on the front page of the NY Times.

After the Nazi’s gassed their victims they collected their hair, their clothes, glasses, gold teeth and even artificial limbs to be used by the Reich. Did Donald Trump ever kill people and then recycle what was usable?

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In the sick minds of the people like Rachel Maddow who make the Hitler comparisons, do they really think Donald Trump has artificial legs recycled after our victims are stripped naked and gassed?

Maybe they think that Trump gasses innocent victims, collect their gold teeth and artificial limbs while people are sleeping.

I get it, some people do not like Donald Trump, but that is no reason to obfuscate away from the real issues by claiming Trump is like Hitler. Heck, his daughter, son-in-law and three of his grandchildren are Jewish.

Truth is Donald Trump never forced people to put tattoos on their arms, crowded them in to death camps where they would suffer torture till they were gassed, shot, thrown in ice water, or died some other horrible death, followed by mutilating their corpses by taking out what can be reused. Until that happens any comparison to Hitler and/or the Nazis is not only false and inappropriate, but it cheapens the memory of the people who suffered during the Holocaust and those who try to honor their memories. Besides there is no way Trump will let that happen against Jews, Gypsies, or  any other race or gender, or ethnic group. Those who have read up on his background know that’s not how he operates.

So Rachel, or anybody else, if you want to call Donald Trump names go ahead it’s still a free country (although not as free as it was before 2008, but more it’s still more free than it will be if (God Forbid!) Hillary becomes president). But if you call him names leave the Shoah out of it.