We’ve heard a lot about Hitler this election – mostly thanks to Donald Drumpf.
Maybe you’ve seen what I’m talking about. “If the Germans had stood up to the Nazis like Chicago stood up to Drumpf, they’d’ve prevented the Holocaust!”
Or maybe you’ve seen the questionable quotes like this one, supposedly from 1920s Germany: “the rise of this blusterous man bewilders the educated among us, conjoins opposing politicians, agonizes our international allies, threatens minorities, spits on the disabled, and touches the hearts of those who just don’t know any better. Let us stop propounding how mad this all is, but instead, do something” (with admittedly questionable truth value, as is so often the case with memes).
An assassinated Drumpf is the most dangerous prospect for America today
But it’s not just the Democrats and lefties on your newsfeed making the comparison.
Remember when that Jeb Bush said he’d go back in time and murder baby Hitler? How about that time Glenn Beck compared Drumpf to Hitler? Apparently the Washington Post said it, too.
So, if Drumpf is a modern Hitler, and conventional wisdom is that the best use of time travel would be to kill Hitler, it makes sense that people are starting to ask why this hatemonger receives taxpayer-supported Secret Service protection. It makes sense, too, that others are starting to say “someone needs to take this guy out”.
So that’s a thing that needs to be nipped in the bud, ok? And it’s not just for the basic “this is a democracy, every voice gets to be heard” crap we hear every time. No, it’s because, as dangerous as Drumpf’s hate speech and his supporters’ violence may be, an assassinated Drumpf is the most dangerous prospect for America today. Seriously, ISIS has nothing on that.
Playing With Fire
No matter how many pretty soundbites and tweets compare Drumpf and Hitler, it’s a faulty comparison. Ignoring the problems of saying that every oppressive regime is “like the Nazis” (why would you limit yourself when there’s Maoism, Stalinism, British or Dutch or Spanish Imperialism and so many others to choose from?), there is a practical need to avoid generalizing. As Secretary Clinton put it, “if you play with matches, you’re going to start a fire you can’t control”.
As anyone who has played with fire can tell you, you create a massive fireball if you try to fight an oil fire with water. It matters that the comparison is faulty, because you don’t fight Drumpf the way you’d fight Hitler. You don’t fight Qaddafi the way you’d fight Milosevic. Hell, look what happened when people tried to fight Assad the way they’d fought Mubarak. You need to get your parallels right regarding the rise to power and the mechanisms of repression if you are to stand a chance of fighting either.
Balkan Parallels
I’ve broken down previously how Drumpf’s nationalist rise mirrors Milosevic’s and Tudjman’s in the fall of Yugoslavia. tl;dr? Here’s the money quote: “To give a Western parallel, quoting Chris Bennett, assistant high representative and head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, “If David Duke were given a monopoly on media and standard of living were to fall 40% in a decade, America would have its Milosevic.””
Milosevic and Tudjman rose to power on racist rhetoric after a period of economic decline. Here, that monopoly on media manifests itself by Fox News’ near-total dominance of the Republican base and a “compelled journalistic ‘neutrality'” (quoting Glenn Greenwald) by other major news outlets that should have challenged the right wing narrative.
Milosevic’s racism targeted Croats and especially Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, and Tudjman’s targeted Serbs and especially Bosnian Muslims. Drumpf’s targets Muslims and Mexicans, but, although the targets here are different, both Drumpf and the ex-Yugoslavs call for the expulsion of the Other through means both violently personal and coldly statist. And in both cases the Other represents a sizeable percentage of the population: Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans make up 45 million, and Muslims another 3.3 million, a total of around 15% of the population of the US. Interestingly, this is much closer to the percentage of Muslims living in Serbia at the time Milosevic rose to power (17%) than the percentage of Jews in Germany as Hitler rose (less than 1%).
More Hutu Power than Hitler
The Holocaust had to be a state act because the Germans could not allow themselves to believe that they would personally commit such an act, and even those who would have condoned it were not particularly well-armed. Hitler spent years laying the groundwork for his atrocities, both in the public consciousness and the apparatus of the state. Weimar Germany was desperate, but in no way ripe for the Holocaust at the start of the Nazis. Hitler’s singular focus on eliminating the Jews means that killing him could have prevented the Holocaust, as the military resources spent on the Holocaust made no strategic sense and any other top-level Nazi would not have made that as high a priority as Hitler did.
Even though obvious Nazis support his campaign, and even though many of his supporters feel as desperate as Weimar Germans, Drumpf has no major institutional plans focused on the general goal of getting rid of Mexicans and Muslims. So far, he merely possesses the rhetorical capacity to rile up his heavily-armed racist followers into a frenzy of violent xenophobia. Just like Slobodan Milosevic did as he told the Serbs of Kosovo that the Albanians “will not beat you again” or Hutu Power Radio of Rwanda did as they told their listeners:
Neither Milosevic nor the leadership of Hutu Power had to focus the apparatus of the state so solely on the act of genocide, as citizens were happy to do it themselves and had the weaponry to make it happen
“Good listeners, there have been reports that some of you have not joined your brothers in the fight to squish the cockroaches that plague or country. … Have you forgotten everything they have done to us? It was them who collaborated with the Belgians and stole our land and treated us like dogs. … These invaders, these murderers are here once again to do to us what they did in the past. They tricked our president with their false claims of a peace agreement and then shot his plane out of the sky. We must wipe out the rebels and crush the rebellion. They have shown us their intentions by killing President Habyarimana, and now it is time for us to show them we will not fall victim to their tyranny once more. Rwanda is a Hutu land. We are the majority and they are a treasonous, murderous minority. We will not let them take power out of Hutu hands and into their own so they may oppress us once again.’”
Unlike Hitler’s anti-semitic Nazism, neither Milosevic nor the leadership of Hutu Power had to focus the apparatus of the state so solely on the act of genocide, as citizens were happy to do it themselves and had the weaponry to make it happen. Killing Milosevic would not have stopped the bloodshed in Bosnia or Kosovo any more than killing an individual leader of the Interahamwe would have stopped the Rwandan genocide.
And in fact it is the Hutu Power radio broadcast that we must examine to see exactly what would happen were Drumpf to be assassinated. “We are the majority and they are a treasonous, murderous minority. We will not let them take power out of [our] hands and into their own so they may oppress us once again.” These are words direct from Hutu Power, but they read like a Drumpf supporter’s.
Drumpf supporters feel like an oppressed minority in their own land, however illegitimate the reasoning may be. They feel like the Mexicans have invaded and stolen their jobs and their neighborhoods. They feel that the Muslims have invaded and their leaders tell them that those Muslims seek to subjugate them under Sharia law. They feel like these “invaders” have torn up their constitution and repressed their freedoms of speech and threaten their freedom to own guns or any other right they hold dear. They feel like the Hutus felt before the genocide.
The federal government will not be a part of any right wing slaughter fest
In every possible case, the assassination of Drumpf would make those feelings seem even more legitimate to their holders. The death of Rwanda’s Hutu President Habyarimana, despite no one knowing who truly shot down his plane, was the starting point of the Rwandan genocide, as Hutu militias set up roadblocks and went about murdering every Tutsi they could find, the end result being one million dead in just a hundred days.
Bringing It Home
It won’t descend to such madness in America. Not that America doesn’t have a history of racist political violence, it’s just that the factors here are different. We’re not in the midst of an active civil war, and the federal government will not be a part of the slaughter, both of which were necessary factors for the speed with which it turned into a genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. But in both cases the militias acted both outside of the government and with government support, as could easily be the case in certain Drumpf-supporting states in the US as they seek to force out or reduce their Mexican and Muslim populations.
Drumpf’s death would create the kind of violence that would make Kristallnacht look like a bunch of dumb college kids after a football game
Remember when Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood in front of buses to avoid integrating schools in the civil rights era? Or the repression of civil rights protestors from Birmingham to Chicago in the 1960s? Or the murder of Kent State students protesting the Vietnam War by the National Guard? It doesn’t have to be federal action that supports paramilitary repression. In fact, the recent Bundy Militia occupation in Oregon proves the point, supported as it was by state lawmakers.
These are not the kind of followers who would simply mourn peacefully, nor are they the type to simply destroy their own communities when they choose to riot, which they’ve suggested they might do if he were merely denied the Republican nomination. No, Donald Drumpf’s death would create the kind of vicious targeted-but-leaderless campaign of paramilitary violence that would make Kristallnacht look like a bunch of dumb college kids after a football game. And in the era of social media and cell phones and 24-hour news cycles, it would be just as fast as it if were coordinated from the top. At this point, the only way to beat Drumpf is at the polls. His followers still may not be entirely peaceful when he loses in November, but their frustration will be nothing in comparison to what would happen were the Golden Don to be martyred.
