Historical Comparisons at Home and Abroad
By Jennifer Sims, Ph.D., Contributing Writer
Even before he described Neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” public discourse murmured with comparisons of Trump to Hitler. The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are now writing newspaper articles and OpEds about how the president’s rhetoric and policies give them déjà vu. Increasingly, however, other people draw the comparison as well. It makes me uneasy when it comes from the latter group, though, because it feels like a combination of Eurocentrism and collective amnesia.
Those of us in the US seem to forget that we have historical figures who committed civil atrocities right here at home. For example, I’m from Tennessee, a state which boasts producing three US presidents, the most famous of whom is Andrew Jackson. As a candidate and president in the early 1800s, Jackson promised voters—back then just white men-that he would implement “Indian Removal,” that is “rid” the southeastern states of Native Americans. As a candidate and president in the early 2000s, Trump promises to “build the wall” on the US/Mexico border and roll back anti-discrimination legislation in order to keep “suburban housewives” “safe” from “low-income housing.” Jackson ignored the Supreme Court and allowed southern governors to murder over 15,000 Cherokee on the Trail of Tears to steal their land and build profitable plantations that enslaved hundreds of thousands of Black Americans. Trump ignores the Centers for Disease Control and encourages governors nation-wide to adopt inadequate responses to COVID-19. As I write this, 164,000 Americans, disproportionately racial minorities, are dead because—like US presidents before him—our current president values doing what is profitable for the businesses of the white majority more than he values black and brown human lives.
In addition to Trump individually being compared to Hitler, despite having just as many similarities with previous US leaders, disturbing current events are also being likened to events in Nazi Germany, again despite there being just as much precedent in US history. For example, another notable thing about Tennessee is that the city of Pulaski is the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. There are elders in the Black community who can still remember the Klan and other white supremacist vigilantes driving up and snatching Black people off the streets or dragging them from their homes to take them off to who knows where. So why, then, when reports came out of Portland, Oregon, revealing that federal officers were driving up in unmarked cars to grab people off the streets and whisk them away to unknown locations was that decried as “Gestapo Tactics” and not “Klan Tactics?”
What comparisons we make tells a lot about our collective view of history. Excepting those who are drawing on personal or familial experience during the Holocaust, the continued default to Hitler/Nazi comparisons in the present moment betrays both a Eurocentric view of history and collective amnesia to the state-sanctioned brutality in our own nation’s past. As we move forward in these troubling times, let us remember that history rhymes and repeats with the past at home and not just abroad.
Jennifer Sims, Ph.D., is a sociologist specializing in the ways persons of mixed-race navigate societies. She has published several academic articles and edited volumes. Dr. Sims is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
