Jason Stanley: ‘It’s Not Extreme to Compare This Time in the U.S. to the Early ’30s in Nazi Germany’

EXCERPT:

STANLEY: “This was inevitable in U.S. politics because you can point out — because it’s so obvious that the kind of politics we’re seeing, the vilification of immigrants as vermin, as rats, as somehow an existential threat to white Christian dominance, the vilification of LGBT, the book bannings, these are all reminiscent of Nazi policies in the 1930s. And remember, it's not extreme to compare this time in the United States to the early ’30s in Nazi Germany. That's well before the Holocaust. So what we’re seeing, we see these clear parallels. It is inevitable that people will go back right now and say, 'Oh, maybe the Nazis weren’t so bad,' because they’re employing these Nazi tactics, they’re employing these Nazi tactics against the targets of the Nazis, against our national minorities, against immigrants principally, which was a central target of the Nazis, as well as their national minorities, and against LGBT people and perspectives who are being represented as obscene and pornographic, LGBT perspectives. These are the targets of the Nazis. So it's now necessary to go back and revise the history and say the people whose targets and whose tactics are now being imitated were not so bad as you thought."