In the first weeks of the Trump presidency, an inordinate amount of American actors and performers, as well as several Democrats and foreign politicians, have called Donald Trump a Fascist or a Nazi.
I’m not surprised at the word choice displayed by show-biz personalities. Most of them have made it big by reading lines written by someone else, and their knowledge of history is sketchy at best. A number of them only have grade-school English and can hardly express their own thoughts in a coherent way.
Nazi or Fascist equal “very bad”, forget about the history behind the words.
Celebs need to stay relevant and, let’s face it, the best way to do so today is to become active in the anti-Trump camp.
When politicians, however, call Donald Trump a Fascist or a Nazi, I ask myself if they know what they’re talking about.
Yes, the man is brash. And, yes, the man’s no career politician—but that’s why he got elected. Moreover, to his voters’ delight, he’s sticking to his campaign promises to a greater degree than any of his predecessors, Obama first of all.
It’s not “fascist” to secure a country’s borders (a law to this effect was passed in 2006, way before Trump’s campaign.) Mexico itself is reinforcing its southern border with Guatemala and Belize, and Obama (who was very vocal against Trump’s wall) even allocated $75 million to help Mexico achieve that goal.
So, can anyone explain why the Trump wall is “fascist” but the Mexican wall isn’t?
It’s not Nazi to enforce immigration laws. Obama himself paused immigration from Iraq for six months in 2011. I don’t recall Robert De Niro or Lady Gaga calling him a Fascist.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of Fascism is “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Nazis, in turn, were followers of their own Fascist-style ideology and their name is short for Nationalsozialist, i.e.: National Socialist.
If you’re really looking for real-life examples of Fascism or Nazism today—and not just crafting insults—you must look to Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, the Ayatollahs’ Iran or Cuba. The People’s Republic of China is a close fourth.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement toward Iran, a clearly autocratic, militaristic theocracy where women and minorities are discriminated against, did not trigger off an outcry from the liberal intelligentsia in the USA and Europe. No Tinseltown actor called Barack Hussein Obama a reckless idiot for signing the nuclear deal with “fascist” Tehran.
Several US Republicans compared him to Neville Chamberlain, but I don’t recall a single Hollywood A-lister doing so. Admittedly, not many in show business know (or care) who Chamberlain was. Madonna probably even thinks It’s some kind of chamber pot.
Do you remember when Hillary Clinton tried her soon-to-fail “reset” with Russia in 2009? Nobody called her a traitor. Yet, the moment President-Elect Donald Trump hinted at defusing tensions with Vladimir Putin, he was called a “traitor” and the magic word “impeachment” was mentioned in Democrat circles. Trump was accused of being a Putin stooge and of having “encouraged” the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Convention’s computers. In actual fact, Barack Obama had been fully aware of Russia’s ongoing hacking shenanigans for years but ignored them until Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016.
Liberals are still shell-shocked from losing an election they thought was in the bag and having to drop their death grip on America’s helm. They’ll use the words Fascist and Nazi on anyone who doesn’t think the way they do—which, ironically, is not the epitome of inclusiveness and liberalism.
This reminds me of the Fifties’ “reductio ad Hitlerum”, whereby you try to “invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.”
Also worth mentioning is the more recent Godwin’s Law that states “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches.”
A popular corollary of this law that its author, Mike Godwin, readily adopted states that whoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.
This seems to be the case with European politicians, American liberals and assorted celebrities.
You can disagree with Trump all you want (it’s called free speech) but you’re making an ass of yourself if you use shopworn and facile insults, the impact of which has been depleted by overuse. In addition, your own credibility drops below zero if your sense of outrage is so evidently selective.