A must-read from Salon — How they made Germany great again: The Nazi social media campaign of 1932
Andrew O’Hehr writes:
It’s a little too easy to draw comparisons between the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1930s Germany and the shocking election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Both events took the political establishment by surprise, and seemed to defy conventional wisdom about the stability of what in Hitler’s time was known as “bourgeois democracy.”
As various commentators (including me) have observed, there are some striking similarities between Trump and Hitler as personalities and political lightning rods, which become especially clear if you read German scholar Joachim Fest’s landmark 1970s biography of Hitler. Hannah Arendt’s famous analysis of the social and psychological climate that makes totalitarianism possible, developed of course in response to the Nazi regime, can sometimes sound as if she were describing the contemporary United States.
Read it all here.
