Nancy Braus, until recently an independent bookseller, is a longtime activist who contributes often to these pages.
GUILFORD-For those of us baby boomers who grew up with dads (and a few moms) who fought in the European theater of World War II, or even those who fought in the Pacific, Nazis were always the unmentionables, the very embodiment of evil.
Many of us had family who were in Nazi concentration camps themselves - I had a relative who survived Auschwitz. Or there were the survivors themselves, telling the stories of being tortured and starved.
In the immediate post-war period in the United States, there were very small numbers of Nazi supporters, but before and during the war, the Hitler government recruited dedicated agents, including senators and representatives, to take over the United States government.
In 2023, Rachel Maddow expanded on the research she did for the powerful podcast Ultra and published a book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.
Maddow writes about an amazing plot: the German government recruited such traitors as Philip Johnson, a famous architect and socialite, and Hamilton Fish III, a congressman from New York. They paid for Nazi summer camps and junior Nazi regiments in places like Long Island.
As soon as Hitler was defeated, these men suddenly were no longer Nazis. Among them, Johnson became the head of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, hiding his Nazi past.
Is it a coincidence that we are looking at a terrifying revival of the Nazis and Hitler in the United States at just the time when the generation who fought in World War II has mostly died or is largely too old to be a political force?
Racism and antisemitism have been a large part of the Republican party identity since its "Southern strategy," with such men as Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon appealing to the worst of the Southern white supremacists.
The Republican party has never backed down from hatemongering, but it had not been overtly pro-Nazi since the defeat of Hitler in 1945.
Until now.
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According to the late Ivana Trump, her ex-husband, Donald Trump, kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed and read them periodically.
The Republican party is bringing Hitler back. Some of Trump's longtime aides have, by some accounts, overtly identified as Nazis - the closest being Sebastian Gorka, who appeared in 2017 at the Trump inaugural ball wearing the symbol of a Hungarian neo-Nazi party.
Hitler still is controversial enough that the Trumpers do an interesting thing: They quote Hitler, they talk about a "unified reich," yet they walk it back as if they didn't intend to quote the monster.
These wannabe fascists are moving toward total acceptance, but know they aren't quite there yet. ("It was an aide who posted this.")
But for anyone who has been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this is exactly how Hitler got the German people to accept the mass murder of millions of Jews, Roma, socialists and communists, and others.
Gradually.
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One of the features of the far right that seems to be embraced by Trump is Holocaust denial. He very publicly dined at trashy Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and with Ye (formerly Kanye West), also famous for his amazingly graphic antisemitism.
Is the cruelty and pure evil of the gassing and starvation of millions in the camps something these people relish? They love Ayn Rand, a person who based her "philosophy" on the concept that selfishness is great, and the person she cites as an inspiration for the characters in her books is a young man who committed a cold-blooded murder.
The current crop of Republicans, the Trump cult, has taken to Hitler because they are sadistic. They express joy when asylum-seeking families are sliced up on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's razor wire. They complain about the conviction and sentencing to prison of the creepy guy who banged Paul Pelosi's head with a hammer repeatedly after breaking into his home.
Whenever they do something that makes no sense to me I realize that, yet again, the cruelty is the point (to use the phrase coined by writer Adam Serwer).
Another writer, Timothy Snyder, has coined a very appropriate term for the current crop of Republicans: "sadopopulists."
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As the Trump cult continues to try to dehumanize pretty much anyone who is not a white, right-wing Christian, the already-endemic racism in this country is escalating every day. Many statements by Republicans are so racist that even as recently as 10 years ago, they would have been scandalous.
If anyone made the ridiculous assertion that nobody is as oppressed as white men - something we hear an awful lot from these creeps - they would have been laughed out of the room.
If anyone tried to publicly cite the great replacement theory - as a crowd did in the tiki-torch march on Charlottesville, Virginia ("Jews will not replace us") - they likely would also been told to keep it to themselves.
Trump and his merry band of haters is working to keep the majority of white Americans unified as Christian nationalists, and if you look at the voting numbers it is - sadly - working: 57% of the white vote went to Trump in 2020.
I expect that we will be hearing a lot more about the wonders of Adolf Hitler. When Donald Trump posts the desire for a unified reich on his sorry excuse for a social media account, things are getting real.
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