4/9/2019 -
Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
During an Iowa town hall last week, "Beto"
O'Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted
President Donald Trump's rhetoric as right out of Nazi Germany.
Trump "describes immigrants as 'rapists' and
'criminals'" and as "'animals' and 'an infestation,'" said Beto.
"Now, I might expect someone to describe another human
being as 'an infestation' in the Third Reich. I would not expect it in the
United States of America." The crowd lustily cheered the analogy.
By week's end, Beto's Third Reich comparison had been
matched in nastiness by Bernie Sanders' description of the president to the
cheering activists of Al Sharpton's National Action Network:
"It gives me no pleasure to say this but today we have
a president who is a racist, sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious
bigot."
Sanders managed to appeal to almost all elements of the
Democrats' coalition by accusing Trump of hating blacks, women, gays,
foreigners and Muslims.
Sanders' outline of Trump calls to mind Hillary Clinton's
now-famous attack on the white working-class folks who would give Trump his
victory:
"(Y)ou could put half of Trump's supporters into what I
call the basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamophobic -- you name it ... he has lifted them up."
Where Hillary's slander of the Donald's MAGA constituents as
a thoroughly rotten crowd of Americans came two months before the 2016
election, Bernie's assault on Trump's character comes fully 20 months before
the 2020 election.
If this is the level of discourse from Beto and Bernie, two
of the leading candidates for the nomination, two years from Election Day, 2020
looks to be one of the ugliest campaigns in American history.
And what does it say about democracy if this is the
character of politics at the highest level in the world's leading democracy?
When such language is deployed without admonition from the
major media, what does that say about the sincerity of the media's calls to
unite and heal the country?
And if Democratic leaders are openly massaging the hatreds
of the party base with such slanders, what does it tell us about those leaders?
If they believe such charges -- "It is the truth and we
need to confront that," said Sanders -- why do Democrats not impeach and
remove such an ogre? Why has Nancy Pelosi ruled that out?
At the end of a week where he withdrew his nominee to head
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and saw the departure of his Secretary of
Homeland Security, Trump, referring to the 175,000 migrants apprehended
crossing the U.S. border in February and March, protested repeatedly, "Our
country is full."
Echoes of Hitler's Germany, said The Washington Post:
"Adolf Hitler promised 'living space' for Germans as
the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the
Third Reich from today's xenophobic governments. Still, experts found
parallels.
"'The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period,
unfortunately,' John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University
of California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
"'The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit
is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper
space -- this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the
1930s.'
"The president's words became even more freighted when
he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish coalition in Las
Vegas, saying, 'Our country is full, can't come. I'm sorry.'"
Trump's actions and words last week do seem to portend
tougher action on illegal immigration, but one need not look to Nazi Germany
for precedents. They may be found in our own history.
The 1924 immigration act restricted legal immigration into
the U.S. and imposed ethnic quotas. That was American, not Nazi, law and was
enforced by Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Eisenhower, who led the Allies to victory over Germany, sent
Gen. Joseph Swing to the U.S. border to remove a million people who had entered
Texas illegally from Mexico, which the general proceeded to do.
Ike had crushed fascism and understood that securing the
homeland against illegal mass migration is fascism only in the minds of those
who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what a country is.
From his words and actions, Trump clearly senses that this
may be the existential issue of his presidency: Can he secure the border
against what seems to be an unstoppable invasion from the global south?
Nor is this only an American issue. In the capitals of
Europe -- Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, Madrid -- the gnawing fear is
not of Vladimir Putin leading a mighty Russian army back to the Elbe to
recreate Stalin's empire, but of the African and Muslim hundreds of millions looking
hungrily north to the pleasant lands of the former mother countries.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White
House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America
Forever."
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