“Q: Why Did Trump Tell His Supporters, ‘You Have Good Genes’?
A: Because He Is Taking from Hitler’s Playbook.”
| revcom.us
Letter from a reader:
This past Saturday, Trump told his fascist supporters in Minnesota, addressing an overwhelmingly white crowd, in what has historically been a state of disproportionately Northern European descent:1
You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory.2 You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler promoted near identical poison with such theories, the “master-race” of Aryans,3 and its warning to Germans. Here are some quotes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf4:
The “world [is one] where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.” And who is “nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” on whom is conferred “the master’s right”: the Aryan.
All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan ... as long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture.
But then according to Hitler, something happened, a warning to German Aryans:
The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and there, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in a racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness.
To Hitler, this was a cardinal sin, and he goes on to say:
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures .... All who are not of good race are chaff [trash].
This is what it meant in the real world, the genocidal implications for those “not of good race”:
The Holocaust and the Genocide of Millions
The Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. Under German Nazi rule, Jews were forced into walled-in ghettos rife with disease and hunger. Finally they were sent to concentration camps to be worked, starved, or tortured to death.
Hitler and his Nazi Party led German imperialism before and during World War II (1939-1945). Hitler wanted to “make Germany great again” after its defeat in the first imperialist world war (World War I, 1914-1918), and this goal was bound up in his view with making Germany a “racially pure” society—free of what the Nazis deemed “inferior races” (especially Jewish people but other groups as well). And he also wanted to “cleanse society” of people with real mental and physical disabilities and people who didn’t conform to the “norms” of German society, like gay people.
From the time they came to power in 1934, the Nazis systematically persecuted all these groups, first in Germany and then in the countries Germany conquered. Jews were demonized as “vermin” and “parasites,” even barred from swimming pools. In 1935 the Nuremberg Race Laws were enacted, officially declaring Jews as “subjects” of the state, second-class citizens, who were barred from marrying non-Jews. Then all Jews were forced into walled-in and overcrowded ghettos rife with disease and hunger. Finally they were sent to concentration camps where they were worked, starved, or tortured to death.
After 1942, the Nazis decided to kill all the Jews (and everyone in the concentration camps), gassing them in “showers” and then burning their bodies in ovens.
Approximately six million Jews—about one-third of the world’s Jewish population at that time—were murdered by the Nazis and their supporters in other countries. In 1933 there were three million Jews in Poland; in 1945 there were 45 thousand. In addition, 5.7 million Slavic people in the Soviet Union and 1.8 million in Poland, about a quarter-million Roma (Gypsy) people, a similar number of disabled people, and thousands of homosexuals were also killed.
For a much fuller explanation of the Holocaust, see Revolution Responds to Question on Nature of Holocaust at revcom.us.
Author's end note: By the time you read this, COVID deaths—which have been extremely disproportionately hitting Black and Latino people—will almost certainly have gone past 200,000. Scientists have pointed out the social roots of this horrendous rate in the fact that nonwhite peoples have much poorer health care, tend to work more in “essential industries” requiring interaction with the public, etc. When Trump brays to his largely maskless crowd about their genes, when he not only shrugs off but suppresses important scientific conclusions about preventing the spread, when he insists on “reopening the economy" in a way that will doom many more Black, Latino and other vulnerable groups—this is NAZI thinking--and that is what is “between the lines.”
Trump and Hitler: ideological twins beneath the surface.
1. While historically this has been the case, in recent decades, numbers of Hmong, Somali, and other refugees and immigrants live in Minnesota. It was also the site of a major rebellion in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, sparking the Beautiful Rising. This involved a broad multi-national crowd, including many—many—white youths.
In talking about immigration, Trump himself has termed countries like Nigeria as “shithole” countries, saying the U.S. needs more people from Northern European countries, like Norway. [back]
2. As Daily Beast noted, “The ‘racehorse theory; of genetics holds that some human beings are born genetically superior to others, and Trump has reportedly attributed his success to his genes.” [back]
3. “Aryan” originally was a term used as a self-designation by Indo-Iranian people in ancient times. As used by Hitler and the Nazis, they claimed that the “German race”—ideally, blond and blue-eyed—was an Aryan “master race” that must remain pure and take over the world. [back]
4. As recounted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany by William Shirer (Simon and Schuster Paperback Edition), pages 84-87, Hitler says in Mein Kampf, “The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization”—a sentiment echoed repeatedly by powerful advisers around Trump like Stephen Miller, and finding immediate and current expression in policies of escalated murder by police of Black and Brown people, and against immigration. [back]
Roma prisoners at Belzec labor camp, Poland,1940.
Homosexual prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp
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