Whatever happened to Adolf Hitler?
As Soviet troops penetrated the heart of Berlin in the Spring of 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker. No one wept for his mistress, his top officials and their families who chose death over defeat. Collaborators, like the Vichy French government, were held to account by their own people, with thousands sentenced to death in a restored French democracy. Others were not treated so humanely; Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was tortured, killed and dragged through the street by a murderous mob of his own people — and now serves as a cautionary tale for any would-be dictator.
After the war, the democracies of Europe cataloged the countless horrors of the Nazi war machine. The high-profile Nuremberg trials brought justice to those who orchestrated the regime, but in the decade that followed, tens of thousands of Germans paid for their actions during the war.
The reckoning served as a new founding for Western democracies. We had fought the war to end all wars; the promise of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations had finally been realized in the United Nations, NATO and the Council of Europe against the backdrop of Hitler’s unfathomable atrocities. Nazism and fascism were seared into our collective consciousness as the gravest sin of Western Man, and we were able to move on to a new epoch only because the perpetrators — rightly — paid the price.
What the people of Western democracies internalized is that Nazism, fascism and any dictatorial affront to democracy and human rights can only be met with an overwhelming show of force. The ballot box is not enough; whether by the hand of the State or a vigilante mob, fascists must be annihilated completely.
In our moral triumph after the war, we believed we had achieved this goal — until Democrats and their media allies chose to resurrect Nazism for their own cynical, political ends.
“It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” President Joe Biden said just five days before a would-be assassin fired several rounds at former President Donald Trump while he was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. It’s silly to construe this as anything but rhetorical hyperbole, and every bit as semantically dishonest as the Left to argue it led to the shooting. But the literal interpretation is only the logical conclusion of what the Democrat-media complex has been saying about Trump since the moment he came on the political scene.
“Trump is literally Hitler,” might be a popular meme, but it’s also been a recurring theme that’s echoed in the most respectable halls of power for nearly a decade.
In 2016, The Washington Post laid out the “theory of political leadership that Donald Trump shares with Adolf Hitler.” There was no shortage of think pieces comparing Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s vision of America, with foreign leaders, Hollywood figures and self-declared human rights activists all getting in on the action. During the campaign, it was taken as serious journalism to question Trump on how he felt about the comparison. And the rhetoric only got more unhinged from there.
“Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler,” an op-ed from The Post followed up over seven years later, this time with an artsy graphic juxtaposing the two figures. By that point, it’s hard to believe there were any skeptics left to convince — at least among the demographic of Americans who still trust outlets like The Post.
It remains to be seen what explicit political motivations Trump’s would-be assassin did or did not have. He may wind up being a figure like Mark David Chapman, the lunatic randomly inspired to kill John Lennon after reading “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the history of the post-war era teaches us one moral lesson that cannot be overlooked. What do we do with Nazis? We kill them.
Recklessly hyperbolic Hitler comparisons are not a simple matter of free speech. They cannot be disconnected from the history of the Nazi regime, and the moral role it has played in forming the modern era. Not every Democrat and news outlet that’s compared Trump to Hitler is explicitly calling for him to be murdered. But when the idea that Nazi crimes are so heinous that all perpetrators must be eradicated is followed to its logical end, assassination attempts become an inevitability. Whether they mean to or not, or whether they even know it at all, those who call Trump Hitler are implicitly condoning violence against him.
It’s too soon to tell if Trump’s would-be assassin believed he was stopping America’s descent into Nazism. But it’s long been clear that the stage is set for those who do believe the lies they’ve been told about President Trump to follow his example.
