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FASCISM NEVER DIES
Mary G. Barry, MD
Louisville Medicine Editor
[email protected]
O
ne of the most disturbing parts of
this year’s presidential campaigns
has been Donald Trump’s shouts
to his supporters to lay hands on his protestors. “Get’em out of here – get’em the hell
out!” he has yelled repeatedly from the podium. His supporters eagerly obey, pushing
and shoving the anti-Trump faction, ripping
signs from their hands, and screaming curses at them. Sometimes they are aided by
the official security teams. As I write this,
rallies have been cancelled for fear of violent
confrontations. No one on either side has
yet been killed or seriously injured, yet the
candidate stands at the podium and yells,
“These are the people who are destroying
our country!” and his crowds roar.
Mobs are fueled by many things, but hatred and revenge are the most flammable
tinder. Hitler understood how to engineer
hero-worship and a blind devotion to his
state, by making people feel exalted and
superior. They were citizens made desperate by the inflation and economic losses
after World War I and the Depression. They
wanted scapegoats, and a savior. Hitler supplied both. He told them they were the Chosen, the master race, that he would punish
the people who had cheated them. He built
a fortress of emotional superiority for them
to shelter in, a place of seeming privilege,
as he systematically destroyed all power
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to oppose him. The Chosen would be safe
from pogroms, but their Jewish neighbors
would die: 6 million, in the Holocaust, in
Europe. The Aryan people would be safe
from arrest, but not if they hid or helped
anyone, or any group, who protested; not if
they spoke out; not if they refused to walk
in lockstep. Dissent meant arrest, labor
camp, death. Many dissented, many tried
to help those marked for death, and many
died themselves. Hitler engineered religious
and ethnic mass murder by giving voice
to their xenophobia, and machine guns to
their storm troopers. Within five years his
promised Aryan utopia had become a police
state. The Museums of Documentation, in
Nuremberg and Munich particularly, trace
the day to day trajectory of the Nazis’ rise,
their specific signed orders for personal and
mass killings, and finally their ruin.
Today in Germany, the huge influx of
refugees and the constant fear of terrorists,
plus the resentment of the ordinary person
for Germany’s economic bailouts of other UH