> Just because a leader wants order doesn't mean they're like a dictator.

Trump wants anything but. He doesn't even want the corset of having to form coherent thoughts.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/2...

> As the Boston Globe reported on Wednesday, brothers Scott and Steve Leader, two men with long criminal records from South Boston, were returning home from a Red Sox game when they a found a 58-year-old man — not named in reports — sleeping outside a subway station. In what Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Andrew Kettlewell called a “vicious and unprovoked” attack, police said the Leaders brutally attacked the man, breaking his nose and urinating on him.

[..]

> Trump was asked about the alleged assault at a news conference on Wednesday.

> “I haven’t heard about that,” Trump said. “It would be a shame, but I haven’t heard about that.”

> He then added: “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate. I will say that, and everybody here has reported it.”

He does not want order. He wants "passion". He wants it for the same reason marketing wants it for the same reasons the Nazis wanted it.

> Trump is not like Hitler. The theory that he is is propaganda. Yes, I lived through some of Nazi Germany, but all you have to do is read some books about that period to see how wrong that theory is."

"The theory that he is is propaganda" is wrong? That doesn't make any sense, and it's not reiterated or elaborated on.

I did read books about the period, from people who lived through that time, from people who survived concentration camps. One theme is commoon in all of them, how the Nazis despised rational thought or any accountability, loved being "dynamic" and chauvinistic and brutal in all sorts of ways, and were attracting those who felt resentful and uprooted, who could not feel strong without degrading others and/or identifying with those who did with others as they pleased. I see that in Trump, and I see that in the identity politics mob, too.

The error is to think there is just one instance, as if "Hitler" was some kind of phantom that went around to only ever inhabit one person or school of thought, so that when you spotted it elsewhere, you can just assume it's nowhere except where you spotted it.

I'm certainly not impressed by the "testimony" of someone born in 1940, who doesn't mention any authors, and who, as far as I know, knows nothing about the Nazis. Try someone like Sebastian Haffner. That would require actually reading books though, not just talking about the idea of reading books.

Of course Trump isn't Hitler, he is way too low energy for that. He just wants to get through his day with his big ego and fugly mug, not caring about the damage he caues, but he doesn't want to tear the world asunder like Hitler essentially did. And it was Bush was the one who paved the way for mass surveillance and excusing everything with "war on terrorism", who started a war of aggression, it was Obama who didn't really undo the important things that were the reason people cried over the "hope & change" they expected when he won. The hysteria about Trump is just something to keep the "other side" from, you know, talking about Bernie Sanders, and generally where to go from here. They're frozen in place by "OMG TRUMP!!1".

That, too, is circus; and generally a lot, not just the US, is way over the "too Nazi" line, if you actually read some books written during that time. The internet is full of people arguing "might is right" in so many words... permitted is what works, what results in the most leverage or money. People exploiting or deceiving others on behalf of their companies is "rational", it may not make sense but it makes "business sense". As George Carlin said, Germany lost WW2, fascism won it.

And of course, if we don't make sure to be the first to disarm and control the others, the others will. Which is exactly what these others are saying about us, and which is also what the Nazis said about, say, Russia. Gotta attack first, or otherwise the smoking gun is going to be a mushroom cloud, in the words of Bush, before he paved the fucking way for ISIS. If you don't see the naked face of the SS in photographs of soldiers posing with naked people in Abu Ghraib, where will you recognize it? And I'm not trying to single out the US here, at all, it's just that the article is about that. There's so much to say about the US alone, but the US compared to the rest of the world is still just a drop in the bucket. But that's more reason to be serious about it, less excuse to be flabby.

At any rate, the ship "X can't be Hitler because Y is Hitler" has sailed, for good, "Hitler" metastasized. As for the amount of alienation and abuse, not the uniforms or ideologies it comes in.