Trump is Hitler? Oh, seriously?

[Ian C. Kuzushi]

Oh, I'm sorry. Were you hitting on me?

Keep in mind, it is possible to be so far behind in the race that you think you are ahead.

But, just a piece of advice: avoiding double talk, being consistent, and being honest makes one easier to understand.

[klonk]

You're not my type. I was saying that not engaging the heart of the discussion is sorta like what Aristophanes refers to as midnight solitaire.

[Ian C. Kuzushi]

Well, at least I can say I tried. I showed that people aren't really calling Trump Hitler. Then we moved to level's of government interference--to use your nomenclature. I pointed out that Trump (well, really Bannon and other Republicans) want to dismantle various gov agencies. You said that wasn't realistic because it required Congressional action. I showed that the Congress was taking such actions. You then equivocated and made strange comments about how you were a wise Greek teacher who might have sexual interest in me. Hey, is Yinapoulus a Greek name?

You also said I was emotional and you were intellectually superior, which I found to be a bit silly, and probably easy to disprove.

Anyway, Trump is not Hitler for many reasons. But, again, what is the point of the title of the thread?

[klonk]

You attempted to hijack my thread, which was (as I also tried to tell Gregz) about the culturally present trope to make Trump Hitler. It was never about you, it was never about him, if neither of you said it, Meryl Streep surely did, and so your responses are on that ground are sortable into either irrelevant or impertinent, I have never taught Greek and have never claimed otherwise.

So, again, your remarks have the air of a private discussion. Forgive me for intruding.

[Steve James]

about the culturally present trope to make Trump Hitler.

But, why did the Obama trope exist? If you're really talking about culture, it preceded Trump. If you want to talk about why Bush may have been called Hitler, that would be fairly simple to answer. If you want to point out that using Hitler as a comparison is always overstatement and usually precludes further discussion, you're right.

If you want to discuss "why" people make Hitler comparisons, ok. Presenting it just to show that they are wrong is ok too, but Trump is certainly, demonstrably (and I did it on page one) NOT the first president to be so compared. If a person was unaware of it, then that is worth discussing too.

[Steve James]

Just a reminder. Why would people do something like this 8 years ago because they feared health care.

http://theocddiaries.com/wp-content/upl ... BAMA_2.jpg

[klonk]

I suppose the obvious thing to say is that neither fellow in the above picture is Trump. If you want to talk about the Trump and Hitler comparison, then Obama is not a sensible place to start. He has nothing to do with it, being neither Hitler nor Trump (and I am sure he is pleased with that.)

Also Known as: Smoke Screen, Wild Goose Chase.

Description of Red Herring

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.

Examples of Red Herring

"We admit that this measure is popular. But we also urge you to note that there are so many bond issues on this ballot that the whole thing is getting ridiculous."
"Argument" for a tax cut:
"You know, I've begun to think that there is some merit in the Republican's tax cut plan. I suggest that you come up with something like it, because If we Democrats are going to survive as a party, we have got to show that we are as tough-minded as the Republicans, since that is what the public wants."

"Argument" for making grad school requirements stricter:
"I think there is great merit in making the requirements stricter for the graduate students. I recommend that you support it, too. After all, we are in a budget crisis and we do not want our salaries affected."

[RobP3]

Still floundering I see

[Steve James]

Yep, like a flat fish. You klonk were the one who started the thread in apparent (?) disbelief and scorn at the way Trump was being compared to Hitler. I simply pointed out that Obama was compared to Hitler too. So, the question is "why" the individuals were compared. That would be "cultural criticism" as opposed to merely criticizing certain people for making the comparison. For example: https://www.dailydot.com/via/brief-guid ... -internet/

[Steve James]

Here's something like analysis (from the link), but there are more:

Obama isn’t the first U.S. president or world leader to be compared to Hitler, and he won’t be the last. But the persistence of the Obama/Hitler comparison, the way it permeates the bottom rungs of political discussion, is unique.

Long before the partisan discourse in America had become as polarizing as it is now, people on both sides of the aisle loved to namedrop Hitler. All the way back in 2008, Rose-Anne Clermont of The Root decreed, “Comparing politicians to Adolf Hitler is a tired, cheap trick that has been used to demonize George W. Bush, John McCain, and even Barack Obama.”

As Clermont astutely notes, there was a time, pre-Obama administration, when politicians on the right were actually far more likely to be compared to Hitler than those on the left. In 2012, Joe Gandelman, editor-in-chief of The Moderate Voice observed,

Billionaire George Soros said a ‘supremacist ideology’ guided the Bush White House and: When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans. Moveon.org had an online video contest online that produced a commercial with the Hitler comparison. Some anti-Bush websites and celebrities used the comparison. Google has many images of Bush photoshopped as Hitler. A whole website is devoted to the references.

It is true that Bush was compared to Hitler a lot. In 2004, Duncan Campbell at The Guardian went so far as to make intricate links between Bush’s grandfather and the Third Reich. In fact, if Obama and Bush have one thing in common, it’s that the one way for them to escape such comparisons may be in leaving the Oval Office.

Hitler comparisons extend beyond U.S. policy, too. It was just this March that Rahul Gandhi, of India’s most famous political dynasty, likened his opponent Narendra Modi to Hitler leading up to the country’s general elections (Modi would go on to win and become Prime Minister.)

Comparing someone to Hitler also seems to have become all the easier in the age of Internet trolling, where outrageously offensive opinions have gotten that much more visible, if not more prevalent. As Viju Cherian of the Hindustan Times wisely posited, “Gandhi has made the political equivalent of an Internet truism—Godwin’s Law, which states that ‘if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.’”

None of which means that Trump is right about "the media" or anything. It's simply true that there are those who compare him to Hitler, but he's not the first one. And, like Milo, there's no reason to support him because of the way he's being treated in the press. Agreement, otoh, is another thing; and could be stated with crystal clarity.

[klonk]

[klonk]

Trying to turn the question from a comparison of Trump and Hitler into a comparison of comparisons of Obama and Hitler and Trump and Hitler is not at all to the point. It is useless complexity. It is extraneous to the question of how Trump is like or unlike Hitler in his motivations, or the motivations of those who support him.

In any case, Hitler-Obama talk was always sort of fringy and somewhere in the background noise of public debate, but Hitler-Trump has a lot more traction. It is oozing out through mainstream news organizations and popular entertainers. Sure, you can find people who called Obama or Bush II Hitler, and both presidents were compared to Mickey Mouse. So? Let's talk about Trump.

[Ian C. Kuzushi]

Of course, mentioning that Obama was compared to Hitler (or called other outrageous things like a Communist, etc.) is not a red herring. Why are all Trump supporters at the base so dimwitted? Oh wait, never mind. Or should that be, no mind.

Still haven't heard a response to the Congressional actions...

And just because you don't like what someone says (or when someone makes you look the fool) doesn't mean your thread has been hijacked.

[Steve James]

The whole point is that you seem to suggest that calling Trump Hitler is unusual, as if politicians (forget Obama) weren't compared to Hitler before. We could have agreed that the comparison (or actual equation as your thread title suggests) is an exaggeration. But, I don't think your premise has been about the act of calling someone Hitler; it was about how wrong it is to do it with Trump. Why not? It's been done before. Examples abound. What's so special here? They said the same things about Dubya.


See the source here http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/mar ... rMegan.htm

[klonk]

One case is irrelevant to another on an important formal level. The difference is that Obama, Bush and Trump are distinct persons. That means that the charge can be (and indeed must be) evaluated independently in each case. I would say it is false in each case but that does not justify a conclusion that all such accusations are equivalent. They may all be false for different reasons, or false in different degrees. Each case should be tried on its merits even if you exonerate everybody. Who knows, the charge might be true--a lot of people have said Trump is another Hitler, or sorta like Hitler, or shows (the dog whistle version) fascist tendencies that remind us of a former age.

If you have two guys charged with robbery, it may be that neither of them is guilty, but you do not lump the cases together for purposes of finding out.

In the case of Trump, a couple things stand out, the first being the idea of many of his supporters that they have altogether enough government going on around them, indeed too much in some areas of their lives. They are not looking for a dictator to straighten out Germany and assure the volk's right place in the world. Instead, they long to be let alone. So on a basic philosophical level there is a big disconnect with Hitlerian aims.

Another difference is that while Obama and Bush were compared to Hitler now and then, it did not have much audibility, and hardly anyone took such talk seriously, but there is in the Trump-Hitler comparison (or was, it seems to be dying down a bit) a loud drumbeat in the press, in entertainment circles, in academia--lots of people talking that way, even Noam Chomsky, whom one would expect to have better sense. Even Meryl Streep, who charmed us so in The Deer Hunter and other memorable roles. Even reporters who took a break from their five W's to indulge in a bit of Trump bashing.

When I raised my question here, I was hoping for something more along the lines of a reasoned examination of the matter, rather like this piece that ran in Der Speigel:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zei ... 22035.html

But as abhorrent as Trump's election campaign was, calling him a fascist at this early stage also implies that his voters stooped to the level of fascism. Half of America. Basically, it means lumping half of Americans into the same camp as Hitler and Mussolini. In Germany, especially, people should consider very carefully before making such comparisons.

That article does not exonerate Trump of the charge, but it does raise reasonable doubt. I do not think it goes far enough to uncover evidence tending to clear him, but it at least engages the question of truth or falsehood of the charge. What I got when I came here was very different--irrelevancies leavened with persiflage, mainly.