"Your use of extreme analogies, Fitzsimmons, do not serve your cause well."

They detract from your arguments say some

I often compare today’s republican party to the Nazis of Germany in the late thirties or to American radical terrorists like Tim McVeigh. The argument that such similes are extreme grows more absurd as time passes and the radicalism of the American right grows more violent, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and repugnant. I can easily envision a future when the world is crashing down on Donald Trump and his few remaining minions when, rather than accepting any responsibility for the apocalyptic future their blend of theocratic fascism with their nihilism has wrought, they will blame their supporters for the failure of their movement just as Hitler and Goebbels blamed the people of Germany for the collapse of the German state before the advance of the Russians in the east and the allies in the west.

For me what really drives home the analogy of the rise of the Nazis was reading Rachel Maddow's history of the rise of the American Nazi movement in the thirties and reading the journal excerpts written by the young German martyr Sophie Scholl, one of the leading voices of the resistance to the rise of the Nazis. Reading her diary accounts of feeling isolated and perplexed by her friends parents who are caught up in the cult of Hitler one cannot smell the stench of the MAGA madness sweeping our nation.

Memes

This brings me to my avocation of creating memes for my own amusement, memes that are rooted in the graphic imagery found in the fascist art, photgrpahy and typography of the thirties and forties. The Germans were masters of the graphic arts and Hitler made good use of thier cutting edge design.

As have I, when the sentiments feel eerily resonant, as with the book banners and the “deviant hunters”.

I admire the patriotic art from that period as well.

The chilling language of the MAGA movement is too familair for those of us addicted to history. This is a perilous age. Too similar to Europe in the late thirties. By 1945 50,000,000 men, women and children were dead, murdered by irrational madness, gassed, burned to death or shot because nations of the “civilized” world got freely caught up in absurd beliefs in racial superiority, blending native religious superstitions with mythological supremacy.

In Japan, Germany and Italy the free people blindly followed deranged narcissistic cult leaders into their own fascist Armegeddons, led by remorseless and cruel mentally ill radicals who all abandoned their citizens at the end and blamed them, everyone but themsleves, for their nation’s defeat by the forces of freedom.

I used to wrongly believe we American were morally superior to the peoples of these other nations, ignorant of the forces of their powerful native bigotries coupled with the poltical and economic chaos that drove them to blame conspiracies and peoples beyond their borders for their problems and to seek retibution.

Feel free to share these memes.