Deportation: Just the Beginning?
Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler shouldn’t be sharing political rhetoric. I mean, honestly, no one wants a modern Presidential Candidate sharing a similar line of thought with one of the world’s most hated dictators. But, the line Donald Trump is walking on is thin. Donald Trump wants to purge America of illegal Mexican immigrants and their children, most of whom would be considered American Citizens by birth. Donald Trump has a plan of massive deportation, clearing out all illegal immigrants in the short time span of 18 months to 2 years. Realistic logistics aside, this would create a nation wide man hunt, turning people on each other in order to essentially keep America clean. Even Trump’s own website, describing his deportation plan, paints Mexican immigrants as criminals/rapist/thieves/. The plan even details how cities who do not cooperate in returning their Mexican immigrants will be cut off from Federal Funding.Trump will be initiating an “us against them” policy for all Americans, and it’s already working. With this political platform, Donald Trump is rallying those who are prejudice against Mexican people, people who fear that Mexican immigrants are stealing their jobs and those who simply don’t like people of a different color.
Widespread racism is also what guided Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. It’s hard to not draw a connection between Trump’s view of Mexican’s to Hitler’s view of the Jews. While being antisemitic was not new in Germany, ( or Austria, where Hitler was raised), and they provided an easy scapegoat for Germany’s problems. Most of the blame was placed on the Jews for the economic state of Germany, while there was no factual base behind this. Hitler rallied the nation’s racism of the Jewish people and catered to this ideology, gaining him popularity. In June, 1940 the German Government created the Madagascar Plan, which detailed how Germany would deport all of it’s Jewish citizens to the island of Madagascar. It eventually become clear to the German Government how this plan wouldn’t be as simple as previously hoped, and was tabled. The plan was replaced by the Final Solution, which was the extermination of the Jewish population by mass genocide.
While I’m aware that Donald Trump is not proposing the mass extinction of illegal Mexican immigrants, neither was Adolf Hitler at first for the Jews. Perhaps the fact that Donald Trump is proposing an action that is frighteningly close to Hitler’s initial deportation of the Jews should scare us as is. Both Trump and Hitler proposed these plans in order to make their countries “great again”, believing this extermination would resolllve their countries issues. Too close for comfort yet? What is further disturbing is that Donald Trump didn’t stop his race war with Mexican immigrants, he continued on to attack Muslim Americans, in a similar Nazi fashion.
First and for most, Donald Trump is rather bad at giving direction answers (Hitler had him beat there, the man was direct). Trump has a habit of mentioning ideas, and then dancing around questions that are posed later about that idea. He was done this sort of behavior with the idea of keeping track of Muslim Americans and Syrian Refugees (who are mostly Muslim). Donald Trump mentioned the idea of having a data base, to keep track of refugees and Muslims. Since saying that, Trump has been questioned by numerous reporters, asking for clarification. Trump dances around the answers, but addresses it in his rally in Birmingham, Ala (if you watch the rally, you’ll see that on this topic he largely makes no sense, continuing the dance around any certainties, but the crowd digs it), he says that he does want a database of Muslims/Refugees coming in, and surveillance on some American mosques. He concludes this statement with saying that “database is okay”, so in a grand fumble of words, he did side with a database on Muslim Americans. Keeping track of certain races does fall into line with Hitler’s ideology, considering he registered Jews and made them wear self identifiers.
Donald Trump would still have a ways to go to completely emulate Hitler’s political ideology. Although, the extremist behavior in Donald Trump’s campaign cannot be ignored. Even though the likelihood of Donald Trump being the next American President is slim to none (We can only hope), the fact that his racist and extremist ideology has following is disturbing. What does this say about a chunk of the American population? Would we be swayed into cruel politics against our fellow man as the German citizens once were, in the name of “Making America Great Again”? Could we start to scapegoat Mexicans/Muslims for all of America’s problems, as the Jewish people were to Germany? Perhaps in the 2016 election, our biggest fear in our candidates shouldn’t be if they share rhetoric with Adolf Hitler.
