Paris, June 2, 2025 by S.G.Kazolias

Many, more learned than I, have demonstrated this well, from Jason Stanley to Chris Hedges. (click Stanley here & Hedges here)

Nazi is also a word I don’t use lightly. In my opinion, “National Socialism,” and its racist, supremacist, ideology, is not restricted to any one nationality, race, ethnicity, nor religion. “Suivez mon regard,” as the French say.

So, I don’t make comparisons to Hitler easily when talking of Trump. Mostly, because Hitler, for all his many faults, was much more intelligent, knew where he wanted to go and had a clear end-game and a methodology on how to get there.

Hitler said a lot of true things to win people over to his authoritarian and destructive ideology. Like a broken clock is exact twice a day, Trump also says true things to win people over to his bad ideas.

Where I compare Trump to Hitler, like with so many fascists, is he thinks he knows better than the experts, won’t listen to advice which goes against his conception of reality and will punish those (fire, deport, exclude in Trump’s case) who challenge his world view, decisions and methodology. He promotes those who caress his wounded ego.

In Hitler’s case, had he listened to the experts around him, his “Thousand Year Reich” may well have lasted a few more decades. He would have waited, because experts told him that the logistics to attack Russia were not in place; the economy needed further development and could have expanded through trade as the world was willing to do business with Hitler; a few more years would have given him an improved Pz IV tank and the jet engine was ready by December 1944, which would have kept German skies clear;  his Atomic scientists, working on their own atom bomb, could have made a break through (Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge, claimed he was delaying progress because he didn’t think man should make such a destructive weapon¹).

Both men put their ego first at the risk of even annihilating their country and its people. Both men used racism to scapegoat a category of people to build “patriotic” support behind them and their openly stated purpose of destroying democratic institutions and safeguards to make the nation “great again.” German right wing politician Björn Höcke was condemned in court for using the expression “Germany First” which is a slogan the Nazis used and is illegal.

Just like countries around the world enabled Hitler to rise to power despite his stated goals, so do many countries today enable Trump by caving into his Blackmail on tariffs, on defense, on visas, and in some cases, even on his demand that companies doing business in the US stop practicing inclusion policies within their own borders.

Trump is not a national socialist. He is an oligarch and an autocrat, out for himself first and his buddies second. I don’t have to go into his psychological makeup. There are enough professionals who have weighed in on that, including his niece Mary Trump, a psychologist, and the holocaust survivor Gabor Maté: worth listening to.

“I don’t think Trump is lying consciously most of the time,” Doctor Maté said. “This man, if he wants something, he’ll believe it.” Maté points out that the other category of person who believes his fantasies are true because he believes them, are children; ergo, the US is being run by a preadolescent brat. 

Like other autocrats and neocons, Trump tolerates no challenge to his world view and believes he can force reality to conform to his vision of it. And people around him play along. Ok, he’s not going to invade Poland tomorrow, nor march on Moscow, but he is going to cause much more pain and damage before reality comes and bites him in the ass.

Let us be clear. If Trump is in office, it is because the Democrats are corrupt, led by oligarchs themselves, undemocratically choose the worst candidates possible, and manage to kill more people than Trump, as Genocide Joe’s term demonstrated in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Yes, there are a lot of “stupid people” who listen to Trump and vote for him and then there are the corrupt politicians and judges on the take. Before you go ape on my calling tens of millions of Americans “stupid,” go back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity (1943). Or Wilhelm Reich’s theory of fascism (1933). 

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out that it is easier to fight evil than to fight stupidity because you can use arguments and facts against evil. “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Bonhoeffer wrote shortly before the Nazis executed him. “Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”

Hannah Arendt’s paper in The New Yorker on the Eichmann trial (1963) underlines how authoritarians give pathetic people power to commit evil.² Democrats, working hand-in-glove with Wall Street, Zionists, their own Oligarchs, never came through with their promise to give the little guy his worth. Trump has promised them worth through violence against the perceived cause of their poverty and suffering.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” –Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s take on conceding to the demagogues and authoritarians, is not stupidly, unlike Bonhoeffer: “absence of thought is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and a wicked heart is not its cause; it is probably the other way round, that wickedness may be caused by absence of thought.” However, I believe both are speaking of the same thing under different names.

This is a sad day indeed when the stupid have put an abused, sociopathic, child in the White House.

There! I have said it. They already fired me anyway.

1. WERNER HEISENBERG claimed he prevented the Nazis from getting the bomb. In one message to a friend, which was passed to scientific leaders of the American atomic bomb project, Heisenberg said the Germans had begun a bomb project and he was trying to delay it as much as possible. Heisenberg believed his western physicist colleagues would also see the folly of such a weapon and he understood Hitler would use it. In the end, the Americans did. So much for being the good guys. Saboteur or Nazi. ↩︎
2. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think ↩︎

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