Was Hitler a Christian?

[Crossless2.0]

No, you're absolutely right, Hitler is overrated. But I guess the fertile ground in which his ideas grew is less palpable, and a guy like that lends himself to easy identification. And isn't it also more comfortable and reassuring to blame one evil poster child in lieu of accepting that it was just ordinary people like you and me who fell for this ideology...

Even my father fell for it. He was the last one to have reason to do so, since he was among the ones being persecuted and had to emmigrate. But he always told me, how impressed he was by Hitler's entrance to Vienna, which he watched from the top of an advertising column. He always kept telling me how easy it is to fall for appearances alone. He was 15 back then.

Truth is, the soil was fertile. And it's fertile again. Otherwise, primitive ideologists like Trump in the USA or the rightwing figures in Europe wouldn't be such a success. And there's another part of history repeating itself. When the economy goes down the shitter and people fear for their mere existence, it's easy to present scapegoats instead of policy. The only thing being different is America starting to fall for it too. That wasn't the case back then.

There's really nothing new about ideologues in the U.S. What's different this time is the traction Trump enjoys among such a large number of people. His rhetoric isn't all that different than Pat Buchanan's was, but he has poll numbers that Buchanan could only dream about.

For all that, I think a comparison between what is happening in conservative circles in the U.S. and what Germans were going through in the '30s completely misses the mark. The U.S. is not experiencing a devastating economic depression as Germans experienced so much more acutely than was true even of their contemporaries, who also suffered. The U.S. is not rebounding from a humiliating defeat in a world war. There is no hard-Left group vying for power in the U.S. as was true in Germany when the Weimer Republic was seen as ineffective and discredited and the choices most people felt they were left with were between the Nazis and the Communists.

What we're seeing here is something more like the old Know-Nothings rearing their heads -- U.S. nativists who, in typical hysterical American fashion, are quick to whine and panic about the country's imminent collapse because most of them lack the historical perspective to understand that the sky is not falling, regardless of the challenges we face.

In short, there are a lot of chest-thumping Americans who use bluster and inflammatory rhetoric to try to disguise the fact that, deep down, they are pussies who long for a Strong Man, a Great Leader, to save them.