A 1937 Journalist’s Prediction Of “Our Future Dictator” Will Frighten You

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it and unfortunately there is truth in Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. And I would extrapolate that the third time is greater tragedy still, and that is implicitly what we’ll see if Donald Trump’s third effort to become our president is successful. The story you’re about to read was written by a political historian and cites a political scientist’s findings and the musings of one of the first reporters expelled from Nazi Germany.

This is extremely sobering. Because here you’ll see all the hallmarks of Hitler’s rise happening right here in the United States. As was predicted 87 years ago. This is so spooky that it’s enough to trigger memories of that old black and white TV show, One Step Beyond. And let me repeat yet once again Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 vow, “We will take you over without firing a shot. We will take you over from within.”

In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.

By March, she notes,  the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.

Trump makes a lot of extra-judicial, extra-constitutional promises that he cannot deliver. He promised this week that he was going to eliminate transgender people participating in sports in the State of Montana. What does a president have to do with a state law? Very simply, Trump doesn’t recognize such trivialities as protocols, processes, or the rule of law. He’ll just sign an executive order and poof. Whatever, whomever he doesn’t like, all goes away, with a wave of his hand and a stroke of his Sharpie. That’s the “extreme power” he boasted of yesterday. And extreme power corrupts extremely. Listen to this journalist’s tale.

Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.

She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.

When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.

In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

Full stop. This is exactly where we are in the United States right this minute. A would-be dictator and what’s left of the Republican party are doing just that, “setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” That’s what’s on the ballot now: does America continue as a democracy or become a fascist state and install Dictator Donald and his 2025 manifesto to gut our way of life? A man of startling insignificance, a reality TV game show host, with face paint, hair plugs, shoe lifts and a girdle, proposes to topple the form of government of the greatest country on earth. Or at least what once was the greatest country on earth. We may have lost all claim to that title by putting this clown in office in 2016 already. This is why our allies and the rest of the world are looking askance at this election, wondering just who America really is.

Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.

In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

One of the boys? As in, leaning out the drive-thru window of McDonald’s, after having cooked French fries and posing for what was touted as “a Norman Rockwell painting?” Is that what we’re talking about? You see why I say that this is spooky as hell. And it’s going to get even spookier still. Read this.

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”

This Sunday, October 27, the man who admires Adolf Hitler’s generals so much is going to be speaking at Madison Square Garden. Nobody is sure why. He cannot flip New York red yet for some reason Trump insists on this rally in the last week of the campaign. And will *stormtroopers* be ejecting reporters? I don’t know. But I do expect to hear more about “enemies of the state” and “the enemy within” and “mass deportations” and “fake news” and the rest of it. I can think of no reason why we would hear anything different, can you? And here’s a preview of what you may see in our very near future, a *game* that we may be playing.

In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”

Or go MAGA. Same thing. Don’t think for a minute it’s not. Because another thing this sage writer, Dorothy Thompson said back in the ’30’s was, “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion.” At least the woman was spared the indignity of being accused of Hitler Derangement Syndrome. And she said, “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail.” And that is exactly, on the nose, what we are dealing with in this country today. A reigning cult. Will the MAGA cult prevail as the Nazi cult did? Or can we pull out of this nosedive?

Thirteen more days.

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