Trump = Hitler Watch: A Very Misleading Article By Anne Frank's Stepsister
I saw a reference to this, and scurried over to read it. Damn, I thought. I've been deriding the assertions that Trump = LiterallyHitler...but...here's someone who's basically an authority on the subject...here's someone with expertise. This is something like actual data... also sounds like I've been wrong about this...
Instead, the article seems to be bullshit.
Ms. Schloss doesn't give us anything similar to expert testimony (e.g. I lived through both times; Trump has clear and identifiable similarities to Hitler). She's just mouthing the standard current assertions of the farther left: we should take in more Syrian refugees, Trump incites racism. Oh and my personal favorite: a border fence is like the Berlin Wall. She asserts that she thinks that Trump is acting like Hitler by inciting racism...which means she seems to believe what a large number of Trump critics believe...and, more importantly, she believes it on the same type of grounds. She is not telling us that she saw Hitler and Trump is like Hitler...nothing of the kind. (After all, she was just a kid at the beginning of WWII...so any hope that we'd be getting something like expert testimony was silly.) And, of course: anyone who's ever incited racism is like Hitler in that respect. So, again, the headline here is not: person with personal experience of 1930's Germany judges there to be striking similarity between Trump and Hitler. The headline is: popular anti-Trump arguments accepted by person who survived Holocaust as a child/teen. I mean it's not nothing...but it's not much either.
In all honestly, Ms. Schloss's article, as it turns out, adds nothing to the discussion.
Should we take in more Syrian refugees? Well...I think so...but let's be clear that we're talking about refugees, not the economic immigrants mixed in with them. I've long argued that the U.S. should grant asylum and admission to more political refugees and victims of mass violence from across the world. That's one reason we should be more concerned about illegal immigration driven by economics: we have to start building down the population sometime, and that means that we can't allow unchecked floods of immigrants legal or illegal. It's extremely un-PC to be concerned about the population these days, but that's idiotic. Population is a major problem. (It's weird, isn't it, that global warming panic hasn't undermined the PC dogma that one mustn't worry about population?) We don't have to solve that problem immediately--and we can't. But the sooner we start doing something the better. The more illegal economic immigration we allow, the fewer asylum-seekers we can take in. I favor a fairly liberal policy with respect to asylum and acceptance of refugees. But, unlike everybody else, I haven't stuck my head in the sand about the population. And I don't expect us to radically reduce the birth rate any time soon... So...some choices have to be made. Not necessarily this instant. But not never either.
Is Trump a racist? Well...that's not clear. I have my concerns...but what we mostly have is Trump flinging around his characteristic half-baked bullshit, some of which makes bigotry hypotheses pretty tempting... (Though much of what's being called racism isn't clearly about race. Muslim, for example, is not a race.) On the other side, you've got liberals and leftists doing their thing--flinging charges of racism everywhere at every opportunity against anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky... (And also just making shit up, e.g. "Trump said Mexicans are rapists!") So...I don't know what to say on that score.
Would a border fence be in any significant respect similar to the Berlin Wall? That question is so embarrassingly facepalmerific that I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.
Anyway, I was all ready to change my mind on this one...but...false alarm.
Instead, the article seems to be bullshit.
Ms. Schloss doesn't give us anything similar to expert testimony (e.g. I lived through both times; Trump has clear and identifiable similarities to Hitler). She's just mouthing the standard current assertions of the farther left: we should take in more Syrian refugees, Trump incites racism. Oh and my personal favorite: a border fence is like the Berlin Wall. She asserts that she thinks that Trump is acting like Hitler by inciting racism...which means she seems to believe what a large number of Trump critics believe...and, more importantly, she believes it on the same type of grounds. She is not telling us that she saw Hitler and Trump is like Hitler...nothing of the kind. (After all, she was just a kid at the beginning of WWII...so any hope that we'd be getting something like expert testimony was silly.) And, of course: anyone who's ever incited racism is like Hitler in that respect. So, again, the headline here is not: person with personal experience of 1930's Germany judges there to be striking similarity between Trump and Hitler. The headline is: popular anti-Trump arguments accepted by person who survived Holocaust as a child/teen. I mean it's not nothing...but it's not much either.
In all honestly, Ms. Schloss's article, as it turns out, adds nothing to the discussion.
Should we take in more Syrian refugees? Well...I think so...but let's be clear that we're talking about refugees, not the economic immigrants mixed in with them. I've long argued that the U.S. should grant asylum and admission to more political refugees and victims of mass violence from across the world. That's one reason we should be more concerned about illegal immigration driven by economics: we have to start building down the population sometime, and that means that we can't allow unchecked floods of immigrants legal or illegal. It's extremely un-PC to be concerned about the population these days, but that's idiotic. Population is a major problem. (It's weird, isn't it, that global warming panic hasn't undermined the PC dogma that one mustn't worry about population?) We don't have to solve that problem immediately--and we can't. But the sooner we start doing something the better. The more illegal economic immigration we allow, the fewer asylum-seekers we can take in. I favor a fairly liberal policy with respect to asylum and acceptance of refugees. But, unlike everybody else, I haven't stuck my head in the sand about the population. And I don't expect us to radically reduce the birth rate any time soon... So...some choices have to be made. Not necessarily this instant. But not never either.
Is Trump a racist? Well...that's not clear. I have my concerns...but what we mostly have is Trump flinging around his characteristic half-baked bullshit, some of which makes bigotry hypotheses pretty tempting... (Though much of what's being called racism isn't clearly about race. Muslim, for example, is not a race.) On the other side, you've got liberals and leftists doing their thing--flinging charges of racism everywhere at every opportunity against anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky... (And also just making shit up, e.g. "Trump said Mexicans are rapists!") So...I don't know what to say on that score.
Would a border fence be in any significant respect similar to the Berlin Wall? That question is so embarrassingly facepalmerific that I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.
Anyway, I was all ready to change my mind on this one...but...false alarm.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:47 AM
1 Comments:
I just ran across this, and though the reporter's portions bear many of the problems you've pointed out before, the person is at least doing something more akin to what you were expecting from Anne Rank's sister.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/28/japanese-american-internment-survivor-donald-trump-rhetoric
I wish they had more quotes from her - as it stands, it looks like she might not have said exactly what the reporter wanted her to say, so he did a whole lot of dot connecting himself, but Trump DID seem to indicate he'd "hate for it to come to that, but..." in regards to internment camps for Muslims, and she certainly lived that one out.
For what it's worth, I think her point about everyone's lack of knowledge and/or remembrance is the obvious right one. I seriously doubt more than 10% of Americans understand that America has actually rounded up its own citizens utterly irrationally (she had never even visited Japan, for example) and ruined their lives in reaction to a perceived threat.
And, of course, an embarrassingly large percentage of Americans probably believe it was the right thing to do and would support another such venture.
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