What happened in Minneapolis is a terrifying horror show, but we have to come to terms with the fact that on world-historic terms, this is a pebble in the pool.
If Trump is brought down, many many more people have to be willing to give their liv*s and not back down from the ultimate sacrifice. That's not to say the people putting themselves in harm's way are not heroes to whom we owe so much, but we need a sense of proportion.
The Trump administration is not H*tler. As I've said before, if you think Trump's record on civil liberties is bad, within a month H*tler suspended all civil liberties for the entire country and imprisoned 30,000 people in the first six months of 1933 just for criticizing the government population wise. That's equivalent to more than 200,000 political dissenters in our country. Within two months, he claimed emergency powers and completely disenfranchised voters and Germany's entire legislative body. Within three months, he purged Jews from the civil service. Within four, there were massive public book bonfires in every major city of books deemed 'un-German.' Within six, he had banned all political parties from the Nazi party. And if you think January 6th was bad, within a month, Hitler may have outright burned down Germany's longstanding legislative building. Imagine the Capitol burning down to the ground, THAT is what H*tler's Germany is.
Ten years ago, I was exploding with alarm that all Trump would swerve this country authoritarian while 80% of people I knew just pretended Trump was just another terrible presidential candidate. Twenty years ago, I predicted America's authoritarian turn and reminded everybody I knew it could get much worse than W. And now I'm telling you, that road is so much steeper. However bad things are, TRUMP IS NOT H*TLER!
However, an administration may be coming..., we don't know who or from what direction, but in the age of planetary burning and artificial intelligence, all it takes is one wrong decision, and a billion or more lives go up in smoke, followed by a century where a once secure and free region of the world kisses democracy goodbye. So realistically speaking, the second Trump adminstration is probably either nowhere near as bad as H*tler, or it's much much worse. So get serious, which are you willing to bet on?
What happened to Renee Nicole Good is a horror show. But get realistic, that horror show happens multiple times every day. Well over a thousand people in America are killed by police every year vs. 100 policemen. I'm sure some of the people killed are imminent threats to policemen, but if there is no way a large plurailty of civilians killed by police are imminent threats, possibly even a majority. What do you think the main reason we heard about Renee Nicole Good? Imagine that she was not caught on film, imagine that she wasn't white. Would we have heard a thing about it? How many civillians may ICE have killed that we never hear about?
And even with those civilian deaths, it is nowhere near H*tler. It is nowhere near even your average Latin American banana republic. I studied Latin America during my brief sojourn as a poli-sci grad school dropout, and holy shit you have no idea how bad it was... In the first three years of Chile's Pinochet regime, it's estimated that 130,000 dissenting civillians were arrested. That would be equivalent to 4.5 MILLION dissenters arrested here. In those first Pinochet years, Chile converted an entire football stadium into a torture center. In the first two years of Argentina's junta, nearly 9000 people simply disappeared and were never heard from again (the 'desparacitos'), not deported, disappeared. Rumor has it that they were simply thrown from helicopters into the ocean alive. That's roughly equivalent to if 120,000 dissenters were secretly m*rdered here in the first two years of this administration.
Meanwhile, in one week of protests in Iran, 2,000 protestors were executed (note from seven hours later: now it's 12,000!). Renee Nicole Good happened 12,000 times in a single week! However bad things are here, they could be SO MUCH WORSE.
If you want to fight Trump properly, you have to maintain perspective. If you want to win over moderates who are ambivalent about Trump, you cannot exaggerate Trump's crimes. Just because the right wing is lying worse does not give you license to exaggerate. If you want to earn the trust of moderates, you have to tell them what Trump did and not tell him things he didn't do that can be easily confirmed.
But Trump, or whoever follows him, in ten or twenty-five years, has capacity to be still much worse than H*tler, Stal*n, M*o, King Leop*ld, whomever you want to mention. We have to warn about that, and LOUDLY, but we have to acknowledge that what's happened so far is so far distant from that cataclysm that people who make the comparison are not being serious people.
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