Folks, just a brief reminder.
Is Trump a demagogue threatening violence through a sort of paramilitary of racist bullyboys? Absolutely�.
Does Trump hesitate even a moment before tactically deploying racist memes? Nope.
Has he recently taken a notable swig from the coded-anti-Semitism bottle labeled “international bankers are stabbing us in the back”? You bet.
Is his defeat essential for the health of American democracy? Yes.
But still, don’t reach for the Nazi analogy.
At the end of the day, only the Nazis are Nazis.
In my second-favorite essay, Orwell’s inexpressibly brilliant “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell notes how the word “fascist” has been thrown about so freely that it had been utterly sapped of its meaning: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
A few years back I did a couple diaries on Holocaust denial, including one about the David Irving trial. (That trial is now BTW the topic of a new movie I can’t recommend highly enough.) If you read up about the camps, you find yourself reading passages like this in the expert report Robert Jan van Pelt wrote for that trial —
There was also ample evidence that the Germans had incinerated corpses on large pyres, and the commission had found at least 18 large mass graves within the camp area, and 1,350 cubic meters of compost that consisted, among other things, of human ashes and small human bones.
This is evil. But it is not generic evil. It was a specific kind of evil, one the world has done its damnedest to keep itself from replicating. Sure, it’s tempting to draw the analogy; even Stephen Colbert did a pretty good swastika gag. But still.
No, Trump is not a Nazi. No, the GOP is not a Nazi party.
Only the Nazis are Nazis.