Is America Becoming a New Nazi Germany?

Today we’re going to say the quiet part out loud. 

Is America becoming a new Nazi Germany? The new Nazi Germany? When we say that “the 1930s are repeating themselves,” often, what is unsaid in that phrase has begun to speak deafening volumes.

Now. It’s not me asking this question. I would never ask such a question. I love Trump, and I adore fascism. Go ahead and chuckle. Indulge me for a moment. If you wanted to be the new Nazi Germany, then you’d be hard pressed to do better than America is at the moment. It is ticking all the boxes there are at light speed.

Authoritarianism, fascism, expansionism, shadow institutions, the evisceration of norms, putsches, purges, the antipathy to former allies, institutionalized violence, demonization, a systematic, breathtaking attack on world order, economically, geopolitically, the declaration of war, effectively, against a democratic, peaceful world. And now the killing of citizens. How many red lines are left before we raise the obvious question? 

The point remains. It isn’t me asking this question. Nor is it you. My answer is irrelevant. The world is now asking this question.

And it is the world’s answer which matters.

The events of just the few days that began the year. America’s President, now a dictator in all but name, abducted a foreign head of state. And then threatened to annex parts of Europe. While withdrawing from dozens of international agreements and treaties. While proclaiming, loudly, that his will was all that mattered now, and neither law, justice, norms, nor history would restrain him. While his deputies crowed that the world was now to be run by the strong over the weak, for the strong over the weak.

As if that wasn’t enough, then came a particularly grim obscenity. A mother of three, a poet, was shot and killed by “agents.” And an outcry went up, because she appeared to be doing nothing wrong, as if “doing something wrong” would justify being shot to begin with. And so here appear to be the beginnings of…what precisely?

The death of an American citizen. The killing of someone expressing, perhaps, in the smallest way, dissent. A very public example of punishment, to make the point that now dissent is punishable by death. How Russian. How Soviet. How…Nazi.

But that was not all. In response to this, the regime defended all this, and put in place the very principle for Americans it now wished to apply to the world. Nobody is to be safe from our violence, which is to be meted out at our will. 

No due process was to be allowed, any responsibility was instantly absolved, and investigations of the most mundane kind, which follow lethal use of force, were not to happen. All this now appears to be above the law, and it seems that there is a license to kill, precisely in order to destroy what is left of American dissent, democracy, reason, or sanity. 

Can anyone call this much but the rise of a Gestapo? Certainly, if lethal violence against citizens is permitted, and it is now extra-judicial, in the hands of shadow institutions that aren’t bound by any semblance of law, but justified instantly from the very top, then those are the beginnings of not just authoritarian but totalitarian rule.

There is a key difference here. In an authoritarian system, you must obey. But in a totalitarian system, no deviation from what the dictator wants is permitted, and any infraction may be punished at any time by any form of violence, including the lethal kind.

This road begins with the extra-judicial killings of citizens. It ends in death squads. None of these events, which are dramatic, obscene, and shattering, should be considered in isolation. They are elements in a pattern, and together, they form a picture that begins to resemble something eerily like…Nazi Germany.

It isn’t me saying this, asking this, or pointing this out. America’s descent is observed by the world, from Europe to Asia to across the America, through Canada. It is only Americans who are fully failing to grasp the gravity of this moment, and even if you do, which is good, it’s fair to say, perhaps, that America is not in any way comprehending, as a society, what role it is now beginning to play in the world.

Elements in a pattern.

In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. This was known as the Anschluss. It was legitimated by a “referendum” which delivered a result of 99.7% for Hitler.

Six months later, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, which was then part of Czechoslovakia. It was put under military rule.

Hitler promised that he would stop there. These were to be his last territorial demands over Europe.

And then, in 1939, he invaded Poland.

The rest is history. Bleak, bitter history.

You would be kidding yourself to think that the world is not seeing the parallels. And you would be fooling yourself badly to imagine that those parallels do not place America at risk of reaching a climax of implosion. 

America is now—whether Americans like it or not— a violent, expansionist nation, seeking to annex regions and nations around it, overtly, bombastically not just threatening them, but declaring that nothing matters except power, strength, and aggression. Not sovereignty, not law, not treaties, not alliances, nothing.

Let me dispense with the form of objection that some Americans will make. To say that “But America isn’t Nazi Germany” is not a valid objection anymore on the grounds of some kind of technicality. But they’re not wearing trench coats! It’s not called a Gestapo! At this point in history, being hung up on technicalities like this is only an admission of one’s ignorance of history. It’s like saying Jeff Dahmer wasn’t just a serial killer. True, but. Go ahead and chuckle if you must.

Now. The world is beginning to ask these questions. Not me, and not you. We don’t matter. What matters is a world, making a choice about what America is, and reaching a conclusion. Such are what we call the “tides of history,” sometimes. For a world-system to alter is like a tidal process, moving from the depths into the waves.

If the answer continues to be what it is becoming now, yes, then it is Americans who will pay the price. Because it is one thing to say something like: “America won’t be trusted anymore.” It’s another to understand what a world will be forced to do to a nation it is now beginning to rapidly regard as its greatest collective threat in a century. 

And that doesn’t mean, by the way, that the other failed powers aren’t threats. But it does mean that at the moment, it’s America which is violently beginning to abuse the world. It is abusing its power, and yes, if you’re on the left, you can argue that it always have, but still, this is different. This dramatic and spectacular an abuse of power, at a global scale, ripping the world apart, will have dramatic consequences. 

Those consequences will be what they always are. The world will not want to do business with, invest in, store its capital in, a nation that is the very same one now threatening to violently annex, attack, or conquer it. Instead, it will quarantine America, as the sick man of the world, and the walls will close in. It’s Americans who will be left dramatically poorer, more isolated, and ruined.

Trump’s idea is that the world will give in to his threats. But there is one key difference between now and the 1930s. The world understands what is at stake if they appease the monster, this time. 

By the way, American institutions do not. From media to corporations to banks and beyond, they have all capitulated. And the world, too, can see where that road has led.

It is very unlikely that the world will capitulate to a fascist America. The price will be too high, which includes everything from the loss of sovereignty to the seizure of resources to the ceding of financial and economic control. It is a mistake to imagine that the world, which holds America’s debt, currency, and assets, is powerless. It holds a weapon far more powerful than all the gunships and bombs in history, which is capital itself.

We are living through history now, my friends. But while history has possibilities, it also has paths. Understand the one we are on now. The world is asking itself if America is becoming obscene, unnameable, unthinkable. It knows that road ends is in self-destruction and ruin. And it will do what it must, now, to protect itself from a country which has lost not just its mind, but its moorings, its morals, and its sense of what is right and true.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)