Everyone is Hitler, apart from the people who enthusiastically support death squads killing Jews
The sickening hypocritical evil of the Trump is Hitler narrative and its associated historical ignorance.
In a rational world, we would all condemn and despise Nazism.
In the same rational world, we would all condemn and despise Communism.
And in this rational world, too, acting like either of these totalitarian ideologies would always be condemned and despised, no matter who did it.
You know what would also be despised? Falsely comparing people to Hitler when the comparison makes no sense.
We have 25 million reasons to despise Nazism, and 100 million reasons to despise Communism. Both systems murdered millions of people and both systems excused and demanded the most appalling atrocities where innocent men, women and children were tortured and murdered in factories of death.
These deaths require that we be determined in our vigilance against these ideologies, but also respectful of their unique evils and extremely cautious in our references to them.
There should never be a ‘competition’ between which of these we wish to condemn, and arguments about which was most evil are as entirely redundant as discussing whether Jeffrey Dahmer was worse than Jack the Ripper.
When we get to the case of deliberate mass murder of innocents we are talking about levels of suffering and malice that can never be fully quantified, even by the numbers of the dead. All genocides and all political ideologies that lead to mass murder, torture chambers, death squads, famines and gulags or concentration camps and executions, are composed of billions of moments of unnecessary suffering.
And there should never be in our own reference to these things a purely self-serving use of them as tools to silence people who aren’t possessed of these ideologies. Both complacent acceptance and false accusation become moral crimes themselves when dealing with ideologies that sponsored genocides.
A sane man condemns it all. A sane society condemns it all.
But only when it is REAL.
We do not live in that society.
We live in one where Che Guevara is on T-shirts.
We live in one where millions of our youth think that Communism is the best system to try.
We live in one where a third disastrous totalitarian ideology which has killed more people than Nazism and Communism combined and which has been killing people since the 7th century AD is protected and respected.
At least 250 million people (some estimates are much higher) have been killed through history as a direct consequence, at the command of, Islam. But that one we are told to respect as a great world religion.
Thanks to Islam, hatred of Jews has been preached directly from its holiest text for approximately 1,350 years. The first group targeted and murdered by Mohammed were Jews. The Koran is filled with instructions telling Muslims to murder Jews. There is as much if not more hate filled commentary on the Jews in the Koran as there is in Mein Kampf.
What is it that makes the Koran respectable? What is it that allows the Koran to be taught in schools and madrasah’s throughout the globe, published in western nations, praised in western nations, protected in western nations.
When Islam was only ever spread by murderous conquest (never proselytizing and persuasion) and exactly the kind of imperialism at its worst that much later and much more compassionate western European empires are condemned for, why does Islam escape censure, why is our mainstream determined to pretend that there is nothing extreme and nothing evil about Islam (so much so that they will prosecute and imprison people who tell the truth about this vile death cult).
Only two things explain the difference. Numbers, and self-hatred.
The only substantive difference that distinguishes Islam from a crazy murderous cult that the authorities would immediately label as dangerous and extreme is the number of people who follow it. Essentially, the West is too cowardly and too scared to condemn Islam. The vast numbers intimidate many into abject silence.
The second reason Islam is not condemned and all its evils are excused, both in the past and in the modern world (where Islam is the leading sponsor of terrorism globally. Most terrorism is conducted by Muslims as the authoritative Index on Terrorism shows) is because of a modern western ideology of self-hatred.
Since Islam is exotic it must be good. Since it is non-western it must be better than the West. And at its crudest, since most of the followers of Islam historically and today aren’t white, Islam must always be the victim and never the oppressor, no matter what it does or how depraved and vile the behavior of its adherents becomes.
Islam must be good and must not be criticized because darker skin tones. This is where the hypocritical Marxist-Racist ideology of wokeness has placed us. Our youth claim to understand the world while supporting the most murderous ideology in human history in the name of empathy and compassion.
Here is a secret.
True morality is not difficult. It is merely honesty on the issues that matter most. It is only the truth, and a consistent adherence to truth.
And the greatest moral truth here is that Nazism, Communism and Islam are all systems of thought that demand total obedience and total submission. This would make them loathsome enough. But they also demand that anyone who does not submit should be enslaved or murdered.
All of them demand this. The idea that Islam doesn’t is as comfortingly false as the idea that the proper type of Communism which avoids mass murder hasn’t been tried yet.
All of them have murdered Jews and Gentiles alike in numbers that should make it very, very easy to recognize their vileness, and all of them have sponsored and enacted the most hideous atrocities.
There should be no relativism on this. There is and should be no ‘nuance’ on this. Those who say that Christianity has as murderous a record as Islam, or even more absurdly that Judaism has, are simply wrong. Those who say that capitalism creates more suffering and death than Communism are simply wrong. Those who say that European imperialism or ‘whiteness’ has caused more death and suffering than these ideologies are also wildly inaccurate.
Any accurate study of history tells us the truth.
The most brutal Empire in history for example was the Mongol Empire. The Mongols (who were not white) murdered so great a proportion of the human species then alive that they changed the climate of the planet. So many cities were destroyed and so many cooking fires extinguished forever that it is thought to have impacted the temperature as once heavily populated areas became barren plains or newly sprouted forest areas.
The most brutal invasion, conquest and rule of India was not that of the British Empire, but that of the Mughal dynasty whose rulers demanded of their secondary tier of leadership that at least 100,000 Hindus a year should be murdered. Wil Durant refers to the Muslim conquest of India as “probably the bloodiest story in history”. It was certainly one of the longest lasting genocides there has ever been.
The people who have traded slaves longer than anyone else are the Arabs. Arabs were the most powerful slave traders in Africa both before and after western imperialism. No other people have as continuous and influential a history of slave trading.
The people who have murdered more of their own race and immediately neighboring races than anyone else in human history are the Han Chinese. The single greatest mass murderer in history was Mao, who did it all in the name of Communism. Innumerable Chinese Emperors before him reached the unenviable milestone of being responsible for over a million deaths.
The only thing more astonishing than Chinese fecundity over thousands of years is the capacity of Chinese rulers (imperial, nationalist and Communist) to enslave and murder their own people.
And of course Japan matched the evils of Nazi Germany stride for bloody stride including in the sphere of grotesque torture and deliberate genocide. If the Chinese had been as small in number as the Jews, or if the Japanese had possessed the resources necessary to replicate the Rape of Nanking more widely, the Japanese of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s might well have extinguished them. The experiments of Japan’s Unit 731 treated the Chinese exactly as the Nazis treated Jews, and in a little known historical anomaly treated remaining emigre White Russian exiles the same way.
Again, these are historical facts, not some sort of obscene tallying of who was the most evil.
And all of them are moral facts too. Real morality is not subjective and variable. It is not merely the product of a particular time and place, and not merely a ‘social construct’ in a way that makes every culture equal and all moral judgements purely subjective.
Real morality must surely be eternal and unchanging, given by God or by Nature and always true.
The deliberate torture of children is always evil, no matter what century it occurs in and no matter what ideology demands it. The sexual exploitation and rape of children is always evil, no matter what a law or a custom in a particular place and time allows. The murder of innocents for innate characteristics that offer no harm to anyone else is always evil. The enslavement and imprisonment of people who have committed no crime and offer no threat is always an evil (whereas the treatment of those who are a real threat rather than a merely ideological one must necessarily, rationally, differ).
A good historian might perhaps judge a culture or a person by reference to the standards of their day, might note if one culture was less or more barbaric than another and be accurate in doing so, might know that values and attitudes do shift through time and alter over decades let alone millennia, but….all the same there are fundamentals that are eternal.
There ARE moral red lines that apply through all human history, because without these we cease to be fully human, and cease to treat anyone else as fully human too.
Recognizing what these fundamental lines are, just as recognizing which ideological systems and which cultures inherently and always break them (and which do not) should be very, very easy.
And the judgement cannot be made by something as absurd as, in your mind, deciding that lighter skin tones denote guilt and darker skin tones denote innocence. The exact reverse of that is of course equally absurd. It is always action rather than identity that forms the rational basis of decision regarding whether a group, a culture, a nation, an ideology or an individual are good or evil.
This has been a long route (full of statements of the obvious that should not be necessary, but today are) to this point:
If you don’t condemn Communism the same way you condemn Nazism, you aren’t an honest voice worth listening to.
If you don’t know the vileness of ANY ideology that demands the murder of innocents, and consistently makes that demand again and again, you aren’t worth listening to.
If your OWN ideology has encompassed the murder of innocents, has excused the actions of terrorists, has funded terrorist organisations and has supported all the features of the treatment of enemies, dissidents and rivals that all totalitarian systems adopt, you are the very WORST person to listen to on the issue of who is and isn’t evil.
If you are an ignorant or educated fool who applies relativism that melts the firm bedrock of eternal morality into a swamp of excuses and justifications for evil, you aren’t in a position to judge any of these things.
If you don’t know or choose to ignore that your side or your allies are using fascist tactics and supporting Nazi ideology and methodology your labelling of others is immediately rendered obscene by the things you yourself have supported.
If you aren’t morally honest enough to include Islam in the ideologies that are extreme, dangerous and responsible for the worst crimes in history, your words on any other group or any other issue are tainted by your fundamental cowardice and dishonesty on that.
If you really are stupid or brainwashed enough to think that capitalism is worse than Communism, that a system of voluntary exchange where injustice can occur is worse than a system of forced control where injustice always occurs….if you can’t see that the first can include malign force while the second must include malign force, your judgement is hopelessly compromised by your refusal to honestly face and accept the millions of deliberate deaths for which Communism is responsible.
If you think the worst passages of the Old Testament or the actions of the Spanish Inquisition or the battles of the Crusades make Judaism or Christianity as bad as Islam, you are a historically illiterate buffoon who ignores the difference between texts and religions which can’t magically remove all evil and all hate from humanity in an instant and don’t demand the total submission that removes all human choice and texts and a religion where hate vastly predominates and where total submission of all humanity is demanded as the only condition by which ‘peace’ is possible.
It should be easy to condemn Nazism, Communism and Islam and recognize that these are all totalitarian systems that are deliberately more oppressive and evil and murderous than ‘white people’ have been collectively, or than capitalism has ever been deliberately, or than Christianity or Judaism have ever been.
Those who can’t do that for any one of them are not moral authorities on anything.
And so we come at last to the most obscene reality of modern politics.
We come to the way that in mainstream media, in Democrat Party rhetoric, and in the historically illiterate formulations of woke ideology, rhetoric and practice, people who are themselves moral retards consistently supporting totalitarian actions and terrorist organisations, assume the right to label those who disagree with them as Nazis.
According to disgusting liars like Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, Donald Trump is a Nazi. In 2016 Jeffrey Goldberg was telling us that Donald Trump is a dangerous extremist who admires totalitarian regimes. In 2024, 8 years later, the egregious Goldberg is still selling the same disgusting smears, only now he’s doing it even more blatantly. He is of course not alone in this. Robert Reich has made a second career as one of the main suppliers of the Trump is Literally Hitler narrative. Joe Biden (while serving as President) has run with the same slurs. The ‘danger to Democracy’ slur, widely used by all Democrats, is a slightly more subtle version of the same ‘argument’.
The ‘Trump said there are good Nazis’ lie is another example of this stuff. It is still being repeated again and again years later despite it being a proven lie and despite the actual words and meaning of Trump’s comments (where he specifically excluded and condemned Nazis) being available on public record.
The latest Goldberg fiction centers on the military. The smear here is particularly confused. In order to be a fascist or Nazi dictator Trump would have to be a militarist who believes in foreign conquest. He is of course the only recent President to avoid a new war and the only current Presidential candidate who wants to negotiate an end to the Ukraine War. Former Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard have joined him precisely because he offers the prospect of peace and isn’t in alignment with the perpetual wars of the military industrial complex.
All that is a direct contradiction of claims of fascism and Nazism. The war hawks who are as keen on military adventures as Hitler was all hate Trump.
At the same time the Democrat charge is that Trump is like the Nazis in wanting war, but also a person who insults the military constantly and unnecessarily. The contradiction there doesn’t register. Nor does the fact that the military (at least at the lower ranks) admire and respect Trump and that Trump has consistently shown affection and respect to them in return.
So Nazism, apparently, is not wanting war and still showing affection and respect to soldiers. Nazism is caring about your troops in a way that wants to avoid sending them to war for profit alone.
Being anti-Nazi, by this same curious logic, is demanding and supporting constant wars for your own profit where the lives of your soldiers are thrown away for no benefit to them or your nation.
The Trump is Hitler theme has repeated multiple claims of Trump disparaging US troops. The latest Goldberg claim is that Trump said that he wanted generals like Hitler had. Only everyone present when this comment was supposed to have occurred has immediately called it a lie. Goldberg’s similar prior claims were also never corroborated. The only person who has ever ‘substantiated’ them is a single former Trump official who is now working for the Democrats and of course linked to the military industrial complex. With Goldberg’s latest claim, it refers to a meeting 4 years ago and emerges just two weeks before the election.
It also demeans and exploits the death of service personnel, because the meeting was one meant to honor a fallen soldier. Her entire family have noted that Trump was nothing except incredibly supportive and decent towards them. Goldberg, by using that event as the basis of a disgusting smear contradicted by everyone who was there, has taken both gutter journalism and Trump Derangement Syndrome to new lows.
But that is where the Trump is Hitler narrative inevitably leads (as well as to assassination attempts, which have caused no pause in this insane rhetoric).
Such a narrative insults and exploits the patriotism Trump shares with US Service personnel. It demeans every occasion on which he honored them and they appreciated him. The people ready and happy to throw their lives away in wars for profit should not be speaking their names or claiming to speak for them when they lie about Trump’s attitude to the military. These lunatic journalists disrespect them as well as Trump. Now another service family have been dragged into a political controversy against their will and contrary to their recollection.
From my memory alone, I think anti Trump journalists have done this at least three times, and on each occasion the families involved backed the Trump version of his comments and not the TDS journalist version.
The same thing of course happens with Jews. They too are treated with total disrespect as political pawns. It is obscene and morally repugnant for Democrats and TDS sufferers to continually compare Trump and MAGA with Hitler and Nazism. They smear millions of decent American patriots and citizens with some of the worst crimes in history. And for what?
Can any of them name a single fascist or Nazi thing Trump did in office or elsewhere? They cannot.
What is fascism if not the silencing, imprisonment and persecution of political dissidents and rivals? Trump never did that, not once. Democrats have been doing it throughout the Biden administration.
What is Nazism if not the hatred of Jews, and the support of their murder and extermination? Trump was the strongest supporter of Jews and of Israel who has ever occupied the White House. He has Jewish immediate family. He was the first sitting US President to visit the Western Wall on his first Presidential foreign trip in 2017. He starved Iran of money and massively reduced their ability to fund terrorism against Israel and against Jews. He oversaw the defeat of ISIS. He oversaw the Abraham Accords. He recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel. There was no attack like Oct 6th during Trump’s Presidency. Every one of these things showed respect to Jews and friendship to Israel and the fact that the US under Trump was defending Jews from hate and terrorism.
That’s a Nazi? That’s Nazism now, by the insane mental gymnastics of TDS journalists like Goldberg?
Meanwhile the Biden administration was in place for October 6th. The Biden administration condemned Israel for responding to October 6th. The Biden administration released hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran which Iran gave to Hamas and Hezbollah. The Biden administration appeasement policy to Iran has allowed known Iranian spies to serve in the Democrat administration including at senior security levels. The same pro Iranian policy allowed Iran to fund October 6th. The Biden administration demanded the Israelis accept a ceasefire that favored Hamas. The Biden administration is voted for by the student fools who support Hamas. The Biden administration warned the Israelis not to go into Gaza and Rafah and threatened the Israelis for doing so. The Biden administration and the US intelligence services who despise Trump even seem to have leaked Israeli military details and planning to a pro-Iranian Telegram account, whilst the formerly close cooperation between Israeli intelligence agencies and US ones has declined.
The Israelis no longer trust the US to act as allies or to be secure custodians of sensitive information. That happened during the Biden term.
Harris meanwhile has always been a vociferous critic of Israel. Democrats turned their backs or refused to attend when Netanyahu addressed them. The Democrat Squad have of course the same kind of Hamas sympathies and Islamic terrorism and antisemitism excusing backgrounds as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn.
In other words, Trump’s record is one no Nazi could hold, whereas the Democrat record is one a Jew hating Nazi could easily possess and approve of. Note that unlike Democrats I forebear from any Biden is a Nazi or Harris is a Nazi comments. But we should note that if you actually were a Nazi its pretty obvious which side you should vote for in these choices if you are looking for policies that harm Jews.
And that real Nazi would be a fool to vote Republican.
The same contradictions apply elsewhere. It is Democrats and Trump hating Republicans who are obsessed with supporting Ukraine. Yet Ukraine was one of the strongest supporters of Nazism in World War Two. Ukraine still honours its Nazi aligned past. Stepan Bandera is still a Ukrainian national hero. The elderly Ukrainian honoured by Canada’s parliament was a Ukrainian Nazi. US Democrats have honoured and praised members of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade. It’s curious that current foreign policy belligerent obsessions should mean that the people who claim to be opposing Nazism and terrified of Nazism are closely aligning themselves with a historically Nazi nation that has never stopped praising and celebrating its WWII Nazi links.
Democrats of course overwhelmingly side with the Palestinians over the Israelis. Not only are Palestinian terror groups like Hamas the people today training death squads to murder Jews, they too were aligned with the Nazis during WWII. The people shouting Nazi at Trump have an odd habit of today supporting every group that were literally Nazis in the past and that are actually murdering Jews today.
So to use service personnel or Jews to sell your deranged and false depiction of your political opponents as Nazis is evil on so many levels. It is evil towards Trump and MAGA voters. It is evil towards US political stability and unity. It is evil towards the established facts of history. It is evil towards the idea that we have some kind of shared understanding of reality that sticks to rational and truthful interpretations of what people have said and done. It is especially evil in relation to the contempt it shows for the real victims of Jew hatred, militarism, fascism and Nazism-all of whom are deployed as tools for power rather than as lessons in evil and avoiding evil. And it is evil for the sheer hypocrisy of it all, given Democrat and hawkish Republican militarism and unwholesome links and actions.
The reality is that all of this ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric comes directly from people who are ready to label anyone as Nazis, except those who are actually cheering on Hamas death squads both when and after they murder Jewish children.
Dear Daniel,
You are amazing; you hit every point.
You are another Douglas Murray.
Excellent as always. I cannot tell you how much I empathise with your frustration. We truly are in a battle for common sense and reason, one of the few anchors of our humanity which remains. Woke ideology casts evil spells of confusion which brings to mind a quote by Thomas Sowell 'the problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling'