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[RedKing]

Yeah, but those were still far in the minority, and mostly by ignorant people looking for an excuse. I remember stories of Sikhs being targeted because they have beards and turbans and dipshit rednecks thinking "all them furriners is the same".

It took a year or two for Islamophobia to become mainstream.

[Shazbot]

I was fifteen, and I had heard of him as well as Islamic terrorism. I would presume this is an indication of our teenaged political sphere more than reality. You might want to fact-check that arm-band bit before you bandy it around too. I mean, I don't like him, but that's no reason to lie about someone.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I was eight and had a pair of Muslim neighbors, the child of whom I was friends with. Relations soured quickly between our families, my friendship was outlawed on the basis that a good Muslim girl shouldn't be allowed contact with a male heathen, and they moved to Pakistan a few months later.

[Shazbot]

I've gotten the cold "you'd have to convert and be circumcised" shoulder myself.

[RedKing]

I was fifteen, and I had heard of him as well as Islamic terrorism. I would presume this is an indication of our teenaged political sphere more than reality. You might want to fact-check that arm-band bit before you bandy it around too. I mean, I don't like him, but that's no reason to lie about someone.

now he's stopping just short of making American Muslims wear a crescent armband and report to the camps.

Reading is fundamental(ist).

[Shazbot]

Why yes, that is the trick the press is employing. RedKing, you nearly murdered a schoolbus full of children driving the other day. See how easy it is to make an allegation that isn't an allegation when you snidely suggest the offended learn to read?

[Cheeetar]

Shazbot, that's a false equivalence. What you're pretending to accuse RedKing of has nothing to do with the rhetorical technique RedKing employed.

[Reelya]

It's a standard discursive technique. For example if someone says 15 things that are basically straight-up nazism, it's not "lying" to sarcastically say "so what's next on your list: gassing the jews?". It's not lying, it's drawing attention to how noxious the original comments are. Hitler himself never promised to gas any jews to death in his election campaign for example. You read between the lines when someone is talking about rounding up and monitoring some specific demographic.

For example, "more guns for everyone who isn't a muslim" was Nazi gun control policy, except replace "muslim" with "jew".

Then you have Trump wants to deport 5 million people. Well, you don't deport 5 million people without rounding them up and sticking them into camps. And these camps will have entire families in them. So you have Trump who also wants to put 5 million people into camps. Then "relocate" them. Sound Familiar? See the Madagascar Plan. After all the Nazi's were merely talking about deportation up until 1942. And how are you going to locate 5 million people. You'd need gestapo on every corner and it would cost billions plus you'd basically need a massively expanded federal surveillance network and officers on the ground to enforce it.

I'm sure these aren't the only sections of Trump/republican proposals that are 100% copies of Nazi policy, those are just the most immediately obvious ones.

[penguinofhonor]

Oh, the association between Islam and terrorism definitely existed before 9/11. I just don't think it thoroughly worked itself into popular opinion until afterward.

[RedKing]

And how are you going to locate 5 million people. You'd need gestapo on every corner and it would cost billions plus you'd basically need a massively expanded federal surveillance network and officers on the ground to enforce it.

Now, now...gestapo is such an ugly term. How about "deportation force"?

And for the record, that busload of children had it coming. They were driving, for crissakes! Public menace, I was doing my civic duty.

[Frumple]

You might want to fact-check that arm-band bit before you bandy it around too. I mean, I don't like him, but that's no reason to lie about someone.

Mate, he's specifically on record for calling for a database for muslims in america, with a parallel towards nazi practices regarding the jews so direct his response to people asking him if he was aware of the similarity was "You tell me."

He ain't being lied about, in this case.

[Shazbot]

Then you have Trump wants to deport 5 million people. Well, you don't deport 5 million people without rounding them up and sticking them into camps.

Is that so? It seems more like jumping to some convenient conclusions to further this ridiculous "Trump is practically a Nazi, but I used weasel words, so he's only a Nazi if you don't challenge me". The truth is laws already on the books, but not being enforced, are enough to drive return migration up. The Pew Research Center just recently put out a report stating net migration is at a loss; nobody rounds migrants up and deports them by the trainload now, yet they leave of their own volition when their old country sounds better than the new one. Its simple incentives. Nobody immigrated them by force, so there's no need to emigrate them by force. Police the border vigorously to cut down intake and dissuade people from starting the trip. Deport felons. Enforce proof-of-citizenship labor laws and social services fraud on one hand to make illegal immigrant life in America uncomfortable. Then pass out free one-way plane tickets to the destination of choice in Central America while offering to buy assets like houses at market rate, then Sheriff's auction them back to private ownership. People will see which way the wind is blowing, cash out, and go home to their family ties. And if the idiot news blows it up like its some anti-Latin-Catholic pogrom, they're even more likely to leave on their own. Look ma, no concentration camps.

And asking this gotcha nonsense is not "standard discursive technique", its dishonest 5th-grade "do your parents know you're retarded" loaded questions and rhetorical bullshit. It insults the population at large and cheapens political discourse. That we even consider it "standard" is evidence of this wonderfully broken democratic process we all cynically mock today. However, none of it is going to affect Trump, because everyone who supports him hates the cheap media tricks, and the more the media tries their old saw the fiercer Trump's base gets. Considering that the average American doesn't trust the media, they're practically running campaign ads for Trump. Every time someone in the press compares him to Hitler, they only discredit themselves in the eyes of their audience. Unless you already believe Trump is Hitler. In which case you can have it out with the Obama-Hitler lobby as to who's stolen the dead Austrian's soul.

In any case, Trump = Hitler GOP = Nazi comparisons show a distinct shallowness of thought. Every current thing being disagreed with does not have to be compared to something out of the gutters of history. Its a knee-jerk association that completely ignores the nuance, and often the great depth of a historical event. Trump is like Hitler because he wants to deport illegal immigrants? Seriously? Doesn't that mean Truman, Eisenhower, Clinton, practically any President since the Bracero program is like Hitler? What about the Mexican presidents who requested and assisted the repatriation programs? George S. Patton for his time posted on the border? Or Julius Caesar and the Helvetti? Are they all "like" a genocidal dictator with this guilt-by-association nonsense?

If you want to talk about how bad Trump is, just talk about how bad Trump is. All this half-baked Hitlerism only does you a disservice.

[scriver]

Caesar pretty much is Hitler though.

[Flying Dice]

Trump is literally mimicking Nazi methods for dealing with minority populations.

It's not a Godwin if the comparison is valid.

Like, I'm a leftist, I think that a lot of the GOP is way too authoritarian and xenophobic for me to be comfortable with them in office... but I don't genuinely think that most of them are outright fascists, either. Trump seems to be heading down that road voluntarily by all appearances, and it would be downright criminal to not point it out.

[Culise]

Caesar pretty much is Hitler though.

...no, not really.  He was militant, ambitious, and brutal in the suppression of dissent, but that seems to me to be about the extent of their similarities.  He was not especially racist or given to notions of Roman racial supremacy, at least no more so than the norm of the time (and arguably less so; he extended the concept of Latin rights significantly as a way to consolidate his power base).  He appealed to populist sentiments against the Senatorial aristocracy, rather than making an awkward common cause with the Junkers.  He was a big fan of land reform (albeit out of those pragmatic, populist views rather than an ideological fervor).  If you have to compare him to an Early Modern autocrat that tried to conquer Europe, Napoleon might be a better choice. 

Well, that seriousness aside, all of this talk about deporting or exterminating Jews and other so-called "sub-humans" misses the worst thing about Hitler.  I mean, he was literally Hitler.