The Donald, the Adolf, The Silliness Continues

‘Well, Hitler did a lot of good things’ is not the sort of thing you’re liable to hear outside some very strange, unsavoury circles. But hearing it from the ‘leader of the free world’ can get eyebrows up. Michael Bender records Donald ‘Orange Supremacist’ Trump saying those eight words to former US chief of staff John Kelly in his forthcoming book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election. Trump, says Kelly, said it while visiting Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War 1 in 2018. Wrong context, some would argue.

Donald sympathisers — never mind those yellow starry-eyed about the bad old führer — may say that unpleasant truths are still truths. Trump, after all, is not alone in supposedly thinking Adolf did some ‘good stuff’. The man built autobahns, brought in — in today’s jargon — ‘infra’ to World War 1-devastated Germany. The usual ‘beer-mug-is-half-full’ argument is standard operating procedure for not just Hitler-endorsed Nazism, but also for colonialism, Stalinism, communalism, other -isms. Call it, ‘contrarianism’. We won’t bore you with why defending Hitler is a bad, lazy exercise. Someone can very well argue that General Reginald Dyer of Jallianwala Bagh massacre infamy ‘was not all bad’, especially at dinner tables. But Trump allegedly ‘defending’ Hitler is Making Donald Look Cuckoo Again.