Trump or Hitler, Part 3 — detailed comparison

Posted on November 29, 2020 by H.W. MacNaughton

In my other blog, I review Hitler: Ascent by Volker Ullrich. I’m now reading Downfall. I bought these books to help me understand how close to authoritarianism we in the U.S. were lurching under Trump. That may sound alarmist but the unprecedented attacks on the freedom of the press had me quite worried, as did the rampant misinfomation — disinformation to use the intelligence term — being thrown around. You might find it ludicrous to think that the first major democracy could self-destruct. It’s a rational concern. You just have to ask two questions:

1. Why not?
2. How?

The why not is easy — history has examples. Democracies have fallen. Why would America be special? Once you get past that question, which for us Americans means shedding a lot of school-learned exceptionalism, you can look rationally at the how. And early 20th century Germany provides us with an avatar and a roadmap. The avatar is Adolf Hitler, the roadmap is his method of pushing legal boundaries and forming a coalition of fear and hatred. Hitler took advantage of historical jealousies, economic angst and fear of disruptors to the “ethnic-popular” culture to forge a legal path to dictatorship.

They have many similarities (see TOH1, TOH2), but is Trump America’s Hitler? No, I think not. Trump is as narcissistic as Hitler and also a dilettante, with ridiculous delusions of exceptionalism in just about every subject he stumbles upon. Examples? “I really get it,” Trump claimed of epidemiology, after a visit to the CDC. Yeah, sure. Hitler thought he was a military expert like Frederick the Great, but his decisions on the Russian Front led to the destruction of entire army groups. Trump was and still is effecting extreme damage to the democratic conventions which hold up the American system, but his very short attention span, thematic inconsistencies and overweening shortsightedness set him apart from Hitler. Hitler, though a self-serving and in some aspects a dilettante like Trump, had a single-minded vision for a racially and culturally ‘pure’ Germany which drove him to pursue long, difficult campaigns to upend the old order. I’d compare Hitler to Sauron, capable of changing the face of the (middle) Earth, and Trump to that kid in 4th grade who figured out how to disrupt the homeroom so effectively that no teaching got done. Except instead of homeroom, it’s my country.

The part that sends shivers down my spine are the many ways in which they are similar. Thank whatever gods you pray to Trump is as ineffective as he is.

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‘Trump or Hitler’ part 2

Posted on May 12, 2018 by H.W. MacNaughton

I’ve been reading Volker Ullrich’s ‘Hitler: Ascent‘ and finding it quite illuminating.

The point of this tongue-in-cheek series is to point out Trump’s authoritarian parallels…remember, Hitler rose to power legally, while continuing his attacks on order, truth and social norms. We cannot wait until Trump gets ‘just as bad’ to start defending the conventions and norms which are the unwritten foundation of this Republic.

Our second installment of Trump or Hitler. Hint, answer to all these questions is both.

  1. Who complained his country was a ‘laughingstock’ of the world? (p. 230)
  2. Who appealed strongly in rural areas, less so in cities? (pp. 213-214, 239)
  3. Who, before coming to power, continually railed about the ‘collapse’ of the country, ignoring signs of economic progress? (p.201)
  4. Who hurled opinions in vulgar terms, ignoring facts? (p.201)
  5. Who was thought of as a social outsider, and a clown at the beginning of his political career? (pp. 126-129)
  6. Who rarely if ever drank alcohol? (p. 407)

More to come…

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‘Trump or Hitler,’ new political parlor game

Posted on April 30, 2018 by H.W. MacNaughton

I’ve been reading Volker Ullrich’s ‘Hitler: Ascent‘ and finding it quite illuminating. And it has sparked an idea – a parlor game called “Trump or Hitler?” Ask these questions of your friends and neighbors. Sure to spark some lively discourse? Oh, and the answer is always…”both.” Page references are to Ullrich’s book. Trump doesn’t get page refs, but I may get twitter links when I have some more time. BTW, regarding this well-meaning article in the NY Post which claims it is dangerous to compare Trump to Hitler. I hold it is more dangerous to not point out Trump’s authoritarian parallels…remember, Hitler rose to power legally, while continuing his attacks on order, truth and social norms. We cannot wait until Trump gets ‘just as bad’ to draw parallels.

Our first installment of Trump or Hitler. Remember, the answer to all these questions is both.

  1. Who routinely insulted and humiliated his loyal followers? (p. 161, 217).
  2. Who had trouble with grammar and spelling? (p. 26, 55)
  3. Who was an unreliable political partner, with contempt for his supporters? (p. 217, p.249)
  4. Who stumped hard about the threat to the middle class? (pp. 36, 90, 140, 245) but enjoyed luxuries, a high income, and avoided taxes? (pp. 175, 254, 303, 406-407)
  5. Who loathed bureaucracy and lagged at filling appointments? (249)

More coming soon!

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The Fall of America, Part 2: How the Republicans Flim-flammed the American Electorate

Posted on June 10, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

Yes, this is a long post. But when you are trying to illustrate how a superpower can fall, it takes some words.

In the last installment I discussed how the inevitable leveling of globalization started eroding the well-being of American workers, who had enjoyed an enviable advantage after WW2, due to a series of factors — most of which now have been reduced by globalization.

In this installment, we’ll see how the Republican party played both sides of America’s decline in the 2010’s: firstly, to lure disaffected American workers with promises of economic benefit while in reality, they sought (and succeeded) to line the pockets of the wealthy. Along the way, they helped destroy the concept of political civility which had unified the U.S. through many crises of the past and set the stage for a political disaaster.

A rising tide – but not for you: globalization’s pernicious effect on wages

The 1990s found Republicans and conservatives in general reeling from an unanticipated success by the Clinton administration: balanced budgets, falling crime rates, and economic growth. These factors weren’t all due to Clinton, who had his own problems in the personal sphere, but his leadership did well for the U.S. as a whole:

  • no ruinous wars
  • welfare reform
  • reasonable taxation (highest marginal rate just 1/2 what it was under Carter)
  • open trade (NAFTA had been signed by his predecessor, the Republican H.W. Bush)

Generally, Clinton was business-friendly. One act of Clinton’s signified his business-friendliness — and was the most fateful signing of a bill for the 21st century: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, sponsored by three prominent Republicans, which set conditions for a financial crisis to threaten the entire global banking system. (That crisis would come in 2009). Nice job, there, Bill.

Clinton did benefit from a rise in productivity which had nothing to do with is leadership. It was during his time as President that big gains in productivity through automation brought huge windfalls to U.S. corporations — but not their workers:

Government data, chart by David Dayen (@ddayen)

Government data, chart by David Dayen (@ddayen)

This chart is from an excellent post by David Dayen about wage growth here, and is notable for two salient trends:

  1. Starting in the early 1980s, we start seeing a big payoff from computers aiding office (information technology), factory automation and engineering (CAD/CAM).
  2. Worker compensation benefited very little from the rise in productivity since 1977.

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The Fall of America Part One: Winds of Economic of Change

Posted on May 14, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

Series: The inevitable weakening of American economics, the disintegration of the American political system, and the rise of a global bureaucracy.

In my Pat Hayden Jones universe, the Earth and its colonies are ruled by a bureaucracy. This structure, the Benevolency, arises from the ashes of several wars of horrific destruction: between the Caliphate and the New Russian Empire, the South Asian Nuclear apocalypse of Pakistan and India, and New Hapsburg vs. the Caliphate. These conflicts leave the Chinese Hegemony the superior economic force, especially as it had absorbed the United States and with it, the rest of North America.

Yet none of this could have happened without the world’s superpower, the U.S., having failed as a nation. Only by letting the vast military might of the US. stand by could the Caliphate and Russia have gone hammer and tongs, or India and Pakistan have been allowed to nuke each other into oblivion. How and why could the world’s number one superpower have failed so completely, and so quickly, that by the end of the 21st century it had dissolved from the world’s #1 economy and military superpower to a vassal state rules by the Chinese?

In this installment, I’ll discuss how the U.S. reached a position where economic trends critically weakened the prospects for all workers save those with highly technical skills (and the writing was on the wall for them as well).

In the next installment, I’ll look at politics: how one party in particular played both sides of America’s decline in the 2010’s: firstly, to lure disaffected American workers with a promise to ‘make America great again’ (and, presumably, bring back the Promised Land of ever-increasing standard of living); and secondly, to line the pockets of the wealthy. Along the way, they destroyed the concept of political civility which had unified the U.S. through many crises of the past. That by the way, will be all real-life history, not fiction.

It the last installment, I finally get into speculative fiction and discuss how the political cynicism resulted in the inevitable awakening of the masses to their exploitation by a jaded political party, leading to its disintegration. That political vacuum opened the path for a new, more radical reactionary party similar to the National Socialists in 1930s Germany. Finally, I’ll paint the picture of how a demagogue, an American Hitler, could be legally voted into power, leading to constitutional crises, political paralysis, drastic mistakes in handling our debt and fiscal policies, and eventual fall of the United States as an independent country.

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Dialing in on Nin, and why an SF/F guy is reading her

Posted on March 18, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

I’m reading Anaïs Nin this month, having started with Henry and June, her unexpurgated diary (review here), and now have read through more than half of the earlier (heavily edited) Diaries, Vol 1. One might wonder why a Sci Fi writer is diving back into the classics. It is to beef up my ability to deliver good characters, the lifeblood of any story, even of tech-driven genre fiction.

I’m finding in Nin a very complex character, and she fascinates with  statements like this: “I may be basically good, human, loving, but I am also more than that, imaginatively dual, complex, an illusionist.”

I love this line because it so clearly states the duality faced by all of us, between the inner being and the outer persona. In the complexity of human emotion, we find not only duality but even dichotomy, and that fascinates me as a writer. I want to be able to reflect that in my characters. Basically ‘good’ characters will be driven to do dastardly things at times, or they will react badly until they discover the good in themselves. To me, that’s what character development is all about, and what should fascinate (and raise tension for) the reader. An early beta reader never liked my MC as I took too far my depictions of his prejudices (which were wiped out by the end of the book). In the present form, I’m careful to make him sympathetic, while still flawed — and growing throughout the book. Nin says of herself: “I have done the vilest things, foulest things, but I have done them superbly.” If one can capture that elan, one can deliver to the reader the essence of a gripping character.

The clear lens into the chaos of the mind Nin gives the reader serves also to illustrate how exceptional people think. And don’t we authors want to portray exceptional people? Making heroes accessible, to me, is a high art, and Nin provides great direction. She freely admits to a nature that partakes of life like a butterfly, or maybe a bee is more appropriate. Her flowers are the people in her life, primarily men of literature who were working in and around Paris at that time. The salons through which she passed held so many luminaries. How many of us would be so blasé about sitting in with known literary greats that we’d pass up visiting someone like D. H. Lawrence, who admittedly was living ‘close by,’ and yet never visited by Nin? Yet she absorbs her broad exposure with aplomb. Nothing astonishes her, since she herself is so astonishing. Do you ever wonder how famous people feel when they get up? When they’re hungry, grouchy? Nin gives her reader a vision of how exceptional people interact with the mundane, while maintaining a state higher, more intense than us ordinary folks. Here is another great line from the Diaries:

“I too am interested in evil, and I want my Dionysian life, drunkenness and passion and chaos; and yet here I am, sitting at a kitchen table and working with Henry on the portrait of June, while Fred is making a stew.”

There you go. The divine and the absurd coincide neatly together. Sometimes the divine is held in abeyance, but it is straining at the leash, always. That balance, if depicted in fiction, would be as effective as it is in this woman’s journals.

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On Charlotte Shane

Posted on March 7, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

I wrote this a year ago. This article still gets hits so it deserves a refresh. I stopped following Ms. Shane not long after writing this and on a recent look at her Twitter stream, the issue I point out below which put me off is barely evident. Her feed is a concentrated dose of intellectual social justice — energetic, unrelenting, unabashed advocacy, leavened with occasional bits of self-revelation which humanize the energies which drive her. If you are looking for intersectional feminist shock therapy for an elitist upbringing, that’s a good place to start. Her books can be found at Tiger Bee Press .

From the magic of twitter (I have no memory how) I stumbled upon her writings. And I thought, cool, here is a hip lady who writes frankly about relationships, has a woman-aware slant but doesn’t come off as a misandrist. She seemed fairly balanced about how she considered her clients. She was proud of her emotional maturity and understanding of, even kind to, the male clients she had during her sex worker days. And she writes intelligently about issues between the (various) sexes. For example, she has pointed out in online articles, that from her perspective, men had things to work on, but she did not come across as having an axe to grind with mankind. When I saw on a Twitter post her books (N.B. and Prostitute Laundry) were at a local bookstore, I went and purchased both of them, that’s how impressed I was with her articles. I’ve posted a review of N.B. (Nightmare Brunette) at my Whisky and Words blog.

The public persona

After buying her books, I started following Shane on Twitter. The vehement and steady drip of misandry and derision towards men (particularly white men) coming from her twitter stream (@CharoShane) made evident that her published short form benefited from editorial polishing. Clearly, from the way she broadly dismisses (white) men, Shane, in her pursuit of social justice, puts off male readers — no one likes to be lumped into a group and judged. That’s just prejudice, and that level of partisanship is fine if you can afford to alienate half your potential followers. Given her popularity, she can.

Frankly, I find the ‘men are universally horrid’ meme annoying and pointless. Class warfare is class warfare no matter how you dress it up and IMO, it has no place in human relations. I don’t approach people as if they were part of a group. My philosophy is, life is hard enough, approach every person you interact with as an individual, and apply some understanding, even if they violate one of your social precepts. They might be an OK person just having a hard day. Furthermore, the older I get, the older the people I interact with, the better they’ve become. People are born without a manual and make a lot of mistakes, but some learn as they age. Some learn better than others, or just stop learning at some point. That’s humanity.

What can a writer learn from Charlotte Shane

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? I started down this road to broaden my horizons, break out of the SFF genre and tech-heavy reading I usually do and get back to foundations. I don’t have an MFA, after all — I’m a tech guy. I’ve read some books I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I’ve got a lot more books on the book list now. I highly recommend Anaïs Nin and Erica Jong for a feminine worldview, and I’ll have other, more contemporary, women authors to report on before long. I’m hoping this reading can give me better insight into how women experience emotion, how they deal with the frustrations of life and the willfulness of others who don’t do what we think they should. For the record, I’ve learned some stuff from Charlotte Shane’s N.B. even though I think Shane is a woman who is on the third standard deviation of feminine personality who had a job far from the norm for most women. I also learned some stuff reading Marquis de Sade. Not all of it is usable in your average SFF novel, but a writer’s job is to experience, and convey. The extreme writers have a place.

The art vs. the artist

Shane is very intelligent, insightful, empathetic, and vehement in her observation of social justice. She writes like ten motherfuckers, if I may regress to Army lingo. (It’s apropos.) And she’s also egotistical, channeled, ambitious, conflicted, angry, often unpleasant to ‘my kind’ and yet vulnerable. Bottom line, she was worth a read. But there are a lot of books out there, including some other good ones by former sex workers. When you’ve gotten to Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it’s time to pick up Shane. She’s the only writer I’ve come across who could have intimidated de Sade.

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Seven magnificent use cases for Android Wear

Posted on February 6, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

[Edit – I had Jerry’s “run them off the road” quote on the wrong context earlier – fixed.]

You know, I like the Android Central podcast. I drive a lot for my job, hours at a time, so I have time for their long, rambling webcasts. Phil Nickinson is an engaging, energetic host, Russell, Alex and Andrew lend different perspectives and Jerry Hildenbrand is epic in his technical insight and cagey warnings against dodgy tech.

Phil Nickinson, Authority. Android Wear Doubter.

Phil Nickinson, technologist. Android Wear doubter.

But in a recent ‘cast (I think it was 272, Rumors and Allegations) I heard Phil say, “We haven’t figured out a use for Android Wear yet.”

What?!

And in episode 263 they were all freaking that people actually called in to record their voice messages using their watches. Why not? And finally, in last Friday’s ‘cast, number 273, they mulled again about the applicability of Wear, with Jerry grumbling (38:08) “My phones in my pocket…my watch can’t do anything my phone can’t do and I can have it either vibrate on my wrist or in my pocket. I don’t have that use case where I need it yet.”

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The agony and ecstasy of online reviewing

Posted on January 25, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

Professional authors (e.g., folks who can actually live on their authorial earnings) are likely to have really good editors. The editor is known to them, there is give-and-take between author and editor, they build trust over multiple projects, and like a producer for a rock band, the editor serves as the steady hand on the tiller regarding questions of style and tone.

If you aren’t published yet, and most of us aren’t, I hear that in-person workshops are great. I can imagine having multiple people in the room at the same time arguing about the different ways I could have written a passage. Better, I can imagine arguing how some passage is right as it as, because it fits into the greater part of the whole. I’d really dig that. Especially as I’d be reading and discussing their stuff, and I’d get an idea whether their concepts for style, construction and tone were at all simpatico with my own.

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Using Twitter, a less-than-ambitious but humanistic approach

Posted on January 17, 2016 by H.W. MacNaughton

There are a lot of folks who are really working Twitter. They’re getting to 10,000, maybe 50,000 users as fast as they can….good for them. They use auto-follow and auto-unfollow tools and plan to turn that huge twitter base into cash.

Frankly I think at this point in the twitterverse, that’s a fool’s game. Twitter has stalled at about 300M users. Why? I think it’s the fact there is too much commercialism and advertising, so it’s getting harder to build a really interesting community. Meanwhile, the big followings are being gained by existing personalities (celebs, etc). I think it will be phenomenally hard to become famous based on Twitter being your marketing arm, but I see lots of folks who seem to think they can. I can only imagine their twitter feed is nothing but a machine, run by machines, and most likely, it isn’t doing a damn thing for them. The Kardashians of the world have sewn up any commercial value in Twitter.

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