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Showing posts with label Adolph Hitler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adolph Hitler. Show all posts

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Monday, December 19, 2016

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

Smithsonian magazine has a great piece up reminding us how journalists in the past covered the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan. 

Hmmm...sound familiar....

Sunday, March 06, 2016

Trump As Hitler?

As Donald Trump continues to lead in the GOP primary, comparisons to Adolph Hitler's populist nationalism are creeping in to the mainstream conversation. I've thought of about ten different ways to talk about it but today DJ Tice said it the best in this editorial. Donald Trump, like Ross Perot before him, is essentially Hitler's act but in a different dialect. Further...

Another discomforting vision of demagoguery from its heyday was authored by Minnesota’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. In “It Can’t Happen Here,” in 1935, before the full horrors of Nazism were revealed, Lewis conjured a satire in which U.S. Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip — “an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like” — imposes fascism on America. Windrip gets himself elected president with promises one admirer calls “molasses for the cockroaches,” including: “that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything … very low; that he was 100 percent for Labor, but 100 percent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World … and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America … take it over and run it properly.”

In short, buyers beware...


Wednesday, December 09, 2015