Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) December 13, 2024: I was born in March 1944 in Ossining, New York, my father's hometown. However, at the time of my birth, my father (1916-2007) was in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Dover, England, as part of the troop buildup there for D-Day. In any event, he returned home to Ossining and his family in 1945 when I was eighteen months old.
Therefore, the entire history of World War II (1939-1945), including the emergence of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and the rise of Nazis to power in Germany, has been part of the large cultural matrix surrounding my birth in March 1944. It has long been important to me to learn about cultural and historical events that happened before I was born in March 1944.
Briefly, technologically advanced Germany was defeated in World War I (1914-1918) after the United States entered the war. Subsequently, the technologically advanced Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s, was again defeated in World War II after the United States entered the war. Hitler rose to power in Germany on a wave of resentment and conspiracy theories.
American Culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Yes, in the twenty-first century in the United States, Donald Trump also rose to power on a wave of resentment and conspiracy theories. As a result, the term Nazis has been widely and wildly bandied about. However, in the present essay, I am here referring to the historical Nazis in Germany.
For a psychological analysis of Donald Trump, see the American Jewish psychiatrist Justin A. Frank's insightful book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Avery/ Penguin Random House, 2018).
But also see my 3,300-word essay titled "Thomas B. Edsall on the Convicted Felon Trump, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" and my 4,000-word piece titled "Probe: Trump's Ardent Male MAGA Supporters, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" in the online journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, volume 4, number 2 (2024):
.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj/issue/view/2872
Now, the distinguished Jewish op-ed columnist Paul Krugman (born in 1953; B.A. in economics, Yale University, 1974; Ph.D. in economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977; Nobel Prize in Economics, 2008), op-ed columnist at The New York Times since January 2000, highlights the relatively recent rise of resentment in our contemporary American political culture in his final op-ed column titled "My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment" (dated December 9, 2024) in The New York Times:
In it, Paul Krugman says, "What strikes me, looking back [to January 2000], is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment."
As an aside, I want to say here that as the author of now more than 650 op-ed commentaries published at OEN since September 2009, I admire Paul Krugman as a weekly op-ed columnist for The New York Times. I write my intermittent op-ed commentaries at OEN as the spirit moves me. But I could not write a new op-ed commentary once a week. It takes a certain creativity that I do not have to write an op-ed commentary once a week.
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