Whoever White House Brief is, asking this question of "leftists": Gaza is Israel's Warsaw Ghetto. Influential advisors to One-State-Solution proponent Benjamin Netanyahu like the bloodthirsty Ayelet Shaked want Israel to "not leave stone on stone." 1.7 million Gazans are living in about 89 still livable square miles, the rest having been rendered unlivable by Israeli bombing.
The Likud has passed a non-binding resolution endorsing annexation of the West Bank. Trump's ambassador to Israel is one of the greatest single conflicts of interest in the entire panoply of Trumpian conflicts of interest: David M. Friedman, Trump's former bankruptcy attorney, is a multi-millionaire investor in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. We are being misruled by cheats, opportunists and criminals, and in no area or facet of United States foreign policy are we being more blatantly misruled and misdirected than this one.
Is Trump a Nazi? Do many people consider him to be that? His backing of the unjust goals of Eretz Israel and of their most rapacious proponents does not disqualify him. And he certainly has certain personality traits and established behaviors that remind one of Herr Hitler, including a lust for revenge when he is criticized. Hitler was in fact less ignorant than this silver-spoon racist wannabe-mobster who has never read a full book in his life is.
But Trump is dangerous to the nation and the planet in a whole complex of existential ways that Hitler never posed, in large part because the technologies that make the threats Trump represents effective did not exist in the pre-Hiroshima Era.
And not just the various ballistic and explosive technologies that mean that with the wrong decisions, human beings can end life on the planet in one great paroxysm.
Hitler never considered the environment. Nobody much did in his day. Trump actively wants to open the last unclaimed areas to catch-as-catch-can plundering of all non-renewable natural resources.
It is, to use the title of Michael T. Klare's crucial book, "The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources." And his cabinet appointments-- Pruitt, Perry, Zinke-- his pulling the US out of the Paris Accords, his action on the Dakota Access Pipeline within 8 days of being inaugurated, all say he wants it all done NOW.
Hitler was a nationalist. Trump is a nationalist. Now, the degree to which either or both actually felt sincere love for country, or used the position that they did in cynical ways to aggrandize themselves and arrogate power to themselves, can be debated. Personally, I figure Hitler had more reason to have become the nationalist leader of Germany, he was a decorated and wounded (gas) combat veteran, than Trump, who has never done anything more serious than a "Reality" Show, and never did jack diddly for his country.
Hitler was way more real than Trump is. Trump has not really shown yet that he is willing to outright countenance or do murder in his own country, as Hitler did, and today Kim Jong-Un has done, in order to maintain and enhance his political power. And Josef Goebbels was in his own league as an advisor, though John Bolton has not done his worst, I fear.
And I maintain that America is not really ready, not the fertile ground, for full-scale dictatorship that Depression-Era Weimar Germany was. Shelves aren't empty enough. And there is an inherent democratic spirit in the US that wasn't truly present in a Germany that had only unified in the previous 50 years from a collection of Kings and Dukes, and was still ruled by a King (Kaiser Wilhelm) until he abdicated at the end of The Great War.
So, no, Trump isn't a Nazi, if you like. But his insane ambitions are more dangerous to the world today than Hitler's were to the world then, bad as those were. And given the current Israel, which, regardless of its plural-party political culture and system, is actively working toward the ethnic cleansing of the "Jewish Homeland" (including the West Bank) of Palestinians, "Trump supports expansionist ends at the expense of other peoples that the Nazis would support" fits pretty well for me.
(Article changed on May 17, 2018 at 20:12)
