Hitler for Dummies

So, let me just play along with this idea for a minute. I've heard this from the left, democrat leaders and the media for almost ten years now; Trump is just like Hitler, and republicans are just like Nazis. 

Do I have that right? I'm pretty sure that's what I have heard from protesters, and seen on their signs since 2015 when Donald Trump rode the golden elevator down at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President. The real question is, do they actually believe this? I think they do. 

Here's the problem, when asked, they can't give you any actual examples of Trump doing anything resembling the acts taken by one of the top three murderous dictators of the 20th century. Basically inside their minds, it comes down to 'I think Trump is a terrible person, and you know who else was a terrible person? Adolf Hitler." It's just that simple. 

Here's the problem with that statement; If you think Trump is just like Hitler, you may be confused about who Trump is, but you definitely don't know who Hitler was. 

Here's some quick facts from my Hitler for Dummies course. 

Hitler was never successful at anything in his younger years. He was an average German soldier who was wounded in the thigh during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, then spent the last month of the war in hospital after suffering a temporary blindness from a British mustard-gas attack in the trenches. When he got out, the war was over. He was convinced the German upper class politicians, and the Jews, sold out the soldiers and capitulated to the Allies to save whatever power and wealth they had before the war. 

That was 1918. Hitler doesn't rise to leader of Germany until 1933. That's a short time to go from a failed painter, to soldier, to Chancellor of Germany. 

(I grabbed some of this from Grok, since I don't have time to go through Winston Churchill's 'The gathering storm' here.)

After the war, Hitler was busy. With his charisma, oratory skills, and organizational skills, he became the DAP (German Workers Party) chief propagandist, delivering fiery speeches that attracted crowds and new members amid Germany's economic turmoil. 

In February 1920, he helped draft the party's 25-point program, which included revoking the Treaty of Versailles, excluding Jews from citizenship, and promoting Aryan supremacy. The party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) to broaden its appeal.

With full control of the Nazi Party, Hitler focused on expansion, using his oratory to rally supporters in beer halls and public rallies. Membership grew from a few hundred to over 50,000 by 1923, fueled by hyperinflation and resentment toward the Weimar government. 

He strengthened the SA as a private army for street violence against communists and Jews, while propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels (who joined later) amplified antisemitic messages. 

Inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, Hitler attempted a coup on November 8–9, 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. With allies like Erich Ludendorff, he marched on Munich's government buildings but was met with police gunfire; 16 Nazis were killed, and Hitler fled before being arrested for high treason.

Hitler's 1924 trial in Munich turned into a propaganda platform; he delivered defiant speeches blaming "November criminals" for Germany's woes, earning sympathy from nationalist judges. Sentenced to five years but serving only nine months in Landsberg Prison, he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), outlining his ideology of racial purity, Lebensraum (living space), and hatred of Jews and Bolshevism. 

 Released in December 1924, Hitler rebuilt the banned Nazi Party upon its legalization in February 1925, shifting toward legal electoral strategies while maintaining paramilitary elements. He created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as an elite bodyguard unit under Heinrich Himmler, which would later eclipse the SA. 

The mid-1920s saw limited success, with Nazis winning only 12 seats in the 1928 Reichstag elections. However, the 1929 Wall Street Crash and Great Depression devastated Germany, causing mass unemployment (over 6 million by 1932) and eroding faith in the Weimar Republic. 

Hitler capitalized on this, promising jobs, national revival, and scapegoating Jews and communists. In the September 1930 elections, Nazis surged to 107 seats, becoming the second-largest party. 

In the 1932 presidential race, Hitler garnered 37% of the vote against incumbent Paul von Hindenburg but lost; undeterred, the Nazis won 230 seats in July 1932 elections, making them the largest party, though a November rerun saw slight losses to 196 seats. 

Backroom deals with conservatives, who underestimated him, positioned Hitler for power.

On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in a coalition government, hoping to control him.

The February 27 Reichstag Fire, blamed on communists (likely arson by Nazis), allowed Hitler to suspend civil liberties via the Reichstag Fire Decree. 

In March 1933 elections, Nazis secured 44% of votes, and with allies, passed the Enabling Act on March 23, granting Hitler dictatorial powers to rule by decree. 

He banned other parties, unions, and opposition press, establishing a one-party state. On June 30–July 2, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives purged SA leader Ernst Röhm and rivals, killing over 85, to appease the army and consolidate SS dominance. 

Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934, let Hitler merge chancellor and president roles into Führer, with the army swearing loyalty to him personally.

In 1935, Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles by reintroducing conscription and revealing the Luftwaffe. The September Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and banned intermarriages, institutionalizing antisemitism. 

In March 1936, he remilitarized the Rhineland without Allied resistance, boosting his prestige. The 1936 Berlin Olympics showcased Nazi propaganda, while economic recovery via public works and rearmament reduced unemployment. 

By 1937, Hitler had allied with Mussolini (Rome-Berlin Axis) and, in the secret Hossbach Memorandum of November 5, outlined plans for territorial expansion through war, signaling aggressive intentions toward Austria and Czechoslovakia. 

Hitler's ascent relied on exploiting crises, masterful propaganda, violence, and alliances with elites who saw him as a tool against communism. By 1937, Germany was a totalitarian state poised for expansion, setting the stage for World War II.

A few bullet points: If you have not read up on Hitler's rise to power, maybe you think he was just voted into power like Trump was, so they must be the same, right? Um, no. Not by a long shot. 

If you back and look at that Night of the Long Knives section, Hitler and his boys went around to all the leaders of the Nazi party who weren't absolutely loyal to him personally, and murdered them. 

Let's look back at our top three murderous dictators in the 20th century...... 

Communist leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, killed around 40-60 million human beings through the purges of USSR's military, its citizens, through planned starvations, and his brutal work camps in Siberia. 

Germany's National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, killed somewhere between 14-20 million human beings, not including those in war fighting. Jews, Gypsies, Soviets prisoners, pretty much anyone he didn't like, and he didn't like anyone but the Aryans.

Communist China's Mao Zedong is our winner of the murderer of the century. He killed his own citizens by the tens of millions. Through political executions, but mainly through famine and farm collectivization. His estimate is well over 100 million human beings who were killed. 

By the way, Pol Pot and the Communist Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia, get an honorable mention in the murderous dictator category. He murdered about 3 million of his citizens in the Killing Fields in the 1970s. He may have been the worst one, he just didn't have access to enough people to murder. 

Each one of these murdering maniacs we not elected into power through a free and fair election. Even in the German elections, there was active street violence everywhere, and political assassinations. Remember that Hitler failed in a Coup d'eTat that wound up with him in prison. He became Chancellor through backroom deals, then he went on to murder dozens of people inside the Nazi Party who opposed him.

Stalin murdered any political opponent he thought may be threat to him, even in the future. He murdered bright, young army staff officers because people 'liked them' too much. 

Mao had millions of young students who led the revolution, turning in anyone who had beliefs that were not in line with whatever came down from Mao. Young students sending their own parents off to be murdered for the revolution. These same students had a rude awakening after Mao was firmly in power. He didn't have much use for a bunch of young idealist, with a taste for blood and power, so he murdered them as well.  

See the commonality in all these authoritarian dictators? They do not want any opposition. None. Zero.

Now let's look at President Trump for a bit. You might hate his orange hair, his orange spray tan (although thankfully he's backed off both of those things recently) his mean Tweets, his crude talk, and generally, just his personality. You can hate all those things. It's perfectly fine to do so. 

You can be mad that he is enforcing the laws on the books when it comes to illegal immigration. You can me mad that he is sending National Guard troops downtowns in big cities because the local police chiefs and mayors of those cities will not keep violent protestors from blocking and hindering federal ICE facilities and ICE officers. You can hate all that, but here's the real question, do any of those things make President Trump a Nazi? 

When a judge issues an order to stop doing this, or says you can't do that, Trump says, okay fine, and follows the court rulings. He may appeal the ruling, but once there is a final say, he lives with the outcome. That seems to be the opposite of an authoritarian dictator? 

I just don't get it. Hate all you want, but calling someone, who doesn't believe in what your political side believes in, the same as someone who murdered 20 million people seems more like a mental illness and less than someone who failed their history class. 

70's movies that changed America: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Being old has some benefits. Not many, but some. Having old stuff you bought 40 years ago become collector's items is one. Living long enough to compare what people, politicians, and the media promised, to what they actually delivered is another. 

I grew up as a kid in the 70s, and I loved movies. We lived on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere northern California, so going to town for a movie was a special treat. Maybe one or two times a year, mom would make time in her shopping trip to town to take us to the movies. 

When the Mt. Shasta Mall was built in 1975, it had a movie theater inside the mall! You have no idea how big of a deal this was for a town the size of Redding. We were now able to go to a movie while mom shopped. Still, movies in a theater were not a regular thing, maybe a few big movies a year. 

However, sometime around 1980 a Satellite TV salesman drove into the ranch and sold my father on buying one of those gigantic 9' satellite dishes. It was heaven for a kid going into high school. HBO had just come out, and it was subscription free on the big dish. I could watch what would become 'Cable TV' out in the hinterlands, for free. It was pretty cool. 

All these new movies, and there was no internet or Rotten Tomatoes, so you just watched whatever was on and hoped it was good. Many of the 1970s movies were the strange 'new Hollywood' type films. They were almost incompressible for a kid who grew up going to a three-room elementary school, and chased cows most of my childhood. 

The gritty New York scenes of Taxi Driver, or the Manhattan world of Annie Hall, were a world away from me. I still watched them, but I could not identify with the world they were living in, it may have been a different planet. I could barely make heads or tails of the characters as well. I would just watch them and think, well, I guess that's how things work in New York. I imagine it would be the same for someone living in the city watching a western and thinking that's how I lived.

Some folks see movies as a powerful force driving the cultural changes of the times. I think that rarely happens, but it certainly can.  Some of these 70's films changed culture in ways that very few people, if any, saw coming. 

So here are the three films I picked. Movies that have made real, measurable, and lifelong changes to the America I grew up in.

One flew over the Cuckoo's nest - 1975 

All the President's men - 1976

The China Syndrome - 1979

Why these three? Well, I've just had so many people my age whose only understanding of a topic has come from watching one of these movies.

Today, I will talk about the first: One flew over the Cuckoo's nest.

The film is based around a character named Mac, played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson. Mac is a petty convict who plays the criminal justice system by pretending to be insane to get out of long prison sentence. He is sent to mental institution instead of prison. There, he runs up against the hard and fast rules of the institution, and his nemesis, Nurse Rached. The movie shows the mental institution as a dark, oppressive place, where the patients are kept under strict rules, and receive harsh treatment if they disobey. 

If you haven't seen it, you should, so I won't give away any spoilers. My critique of the movie isn't that it showed what could be a very oppressive place for the patients, not at all. I believe that those judicially ruled insane should be given the opportunity to live as much of a well-adjusted life as they are capable of doing. My problem is what the counterculture liberal folks turned this movie into: An open door 'freedom' movement for the insane. 

There was already a lot of movement towards deinstitutionalization back then, but the movie made  regular people think they now understood the issue. They did not. Public policy shifted as the culture shifted. Normal citizens started putting pressure on policy makers to shut down mental institutions for everyone except the Charles Mansion type of inmates. 

There was also a 1975  Supreme Court case that ruled that you couldn't hold a non-dangerous person in a mental institution if they were capable of surviving independently. The problem is, and we still deal with today is, who defines non-dangerous, and what defines independently?

In the late 1970's and 80's, no one wanted to be thought of as Nurse Rached. No one wanted to say, "Yes these patients have good days, and can be quite normal, but then, they will have an episode, and become extremely violent. I think they should be kept institutionalized."

I'm sure there were people in these facilities saying this is a huge mistake we are making, but those voices were drown out by people who had seen a movie. 

So we turned hundreds of thousands, (now in the millions) of mentally challenged people into halfway houses, or just turned them out on the street. We have not been institutionalizing dangerous, mentally ill criminals for decades now. We can lock them up when they break the law, but we don't do even do that in most big-cities. 

Go ask a police officer, who are the people you have to deal with every single day? Who are the people they will get a call about today for assaulting a business owner, or a customer at a store, or screaming at people trying to walk down the city sidewalks? They will tell you it's almost always one of the mentally ill people in their town. They know them very well, and they know the nonprofits and NGOs who will go after the police officers if they do anything that could be considered excessive, or against procedures. Many of the 'people experiencing homelessness' fall into this group as well. Addiction and mental illness go hand-in-hand much of the time. Mentally ill people self medicating their way in overdose is so common now, people just ignore it. 

We need to fix this, and fast. We as a society, thought we were doing the right thing by turning the mentally ill out on the streets and giving them their 'freedom'. We are now seeing the results of those changes, everyday on our streets today. 

We need to have another conversation about this topic right now, because deinstitutionalization has obviously been a complete failure. We can't make our towns and streets safe when there is no place to put mentally ill people.  

There are only so many spots in a county jail, or a state prison, and local law enforcement and district attorneys are faced with making a terrible choice every day. Let's say there are only 100 spots available for criminals in their system. They have 200 people that should be locked up to protect the people of their city, so they have to decide who are most dangerous 100, lock them up, and release the other 100 back onto the street. They have to make the best terrible choice they can. Sometimes they get it wrong.

What can we do about this? 

I don't know, I'm not a politician, or a billionaire, so what I think should happen doesn't really matter. However, if someone gave me a magic wand, and I could be the Governor of California for a day, and the democrat supermajority would go along with it, I might try this.... 

I would take the 20 billion dollars Gavin Newsom just committed to keep the fraudulent high-speed rail project on life-support for another decade or so, and start building. Building what? Building mental facilities, treatment centers, group homes, and start moving people off the streets. 

Start moving them into a system that can evaluate them, treat them, and give them an opportunity to work their way back into society. If they are able, with treatment and medication, to move to a group home, or to move in with a relative, great. They will be supervised, and given care. If they cannot, if they are too prone to violence, or self harm, we need to move them into a humane mental facility that will keep them, and us, safe. 

I don't think it's that hard, but what do I know? 

I'm sure there are thousands of people with humanities degrees that will be yelling at me saying I'm wrong. That might be true, but I know that the current system of flooding the city, counties, and state with tax money going to nonprofits and NGOs that are supposed to helping the mentally ill isn't working. We need beds and facilities to treat these people, and for some reason, we don't want to build them. We don't want to help people in ways that might make us cringe, even a tiny bit. 

Instead, we'll go back to the 'throw more money at the problem' model, when we have more than enough evidence that model isn't working, and cannot work.