They Don't Know Jack

The definition of gross historical ignorance: One hundred forty-four progressives...

Professor of Hitler Studies Hillary R. Clinton

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Presumably because America just can’t get enough of The Most Qualified Presidential Candiate Ever to Lose to Donald Trump, Hillary Rodham Clinton popped up on The View to warn America about the threat of MAGA Fascism: “You could see it in countries where, well, Hitler was duly elected, right? And so all of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, so dictatorial authoritarian tendencies, would be like, OK, we’re going to shut this down.”

There are a couple of things to notice about this remark. The first is that The Pants-Suited One has been reading the polls and recognizes that what happened to her in 2016 could well happen to Joe Biden in 2023. The second is that she doesn’t know jack about history.

The claim that Hitler was “duly elected” has often been deployed against Trump and MAGA. Sure, the American people might be fooled into voting for the Donald. Sure, he might win fair and square. But so did Hitler! Therefore, resistance—by any means necessary!—is not only permissible but mandatory.

There’s one problem with this formulation: It’s not true.

By the time that Hitler was appointed chancellor (prime minister) by Reich President von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, German democracy was already kaput. The Reichstag (legislature) was hopelessly deadlocked: Though the National Socialists held a plurality of seats, they did not command a majority. Together, the Social Democrats and the Communists constituted a majority, but the latter, on orders from Moscow, rejected proposals for a coalition government of the Left.

It was thus impossible to pass legislation or form a government based on majority parliamentary support, and the two governments preceding Hitler’s had ruled by presidential decree. The new Hitler government would be a coalition of parties of the Right, with only three ministerial portfolios in the hands of the Nazis. The idea was to co-opt the Nazi Party on behalf of a traditional conservative/authoritarian program. Hindenburg, who up to then had rejected suggestions that he appoint Hitler as chancellor, acquiesced in this arrangement. But Hitler, of course, had other ideas, and once in office he lost no time in reducing his coalition partners to impotence, concentrating all political power in his own person.

In short, Hitler was “duly elected” to nothing. In fact, he was not even a member of the Reichstag at the time of his appointment as chancellor. So it goes when Democrats, progressives and the rest of them appeal to history in support of their politics and policies.

Take Nicole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. From start to finish it distorts and falsifies American history in an attempt to prove that the institution of slavery was the foundation stone of American nationhood. From this ur-claim are derived a long list of subsidiary claims: that the Constitution was framed explicitly to protect slavery, that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights for the same reason, that slaves built American capitalism, etc., etc., all if which is twaddle.

The wave of antisemitism currently surging over the United States is similarly based on gross ignorance of history and malicious historical distortion. Few of the progressive activists shouting for pogroms and genocide have even a cursory knowledge of the long history behind the Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, there exists a initiative similar in spirit to the 1619 Project, rewriting history to show that the Jews have no real connection to “Palestine.” This is, so to speak, a program of historical genocide, and it goes like this: Jesus was a Palestinian and Moses was a Muslim. The First and Second Temples in Jerusalem either never existed or were mosques. It was the Palestinians, not the Jews, who made the Negev bloom. Uh-huh…

Even progressives who should know better lapse into protective ignorance when their ideology demands it of them. A case in point is Michael Beschloss, supposedly a distinguished historian of the American presidency. But when he talks about Trump, Beschloss sounds as crazy as Naomi Wolfe—who, be it recalled, wrote a book purporting to prove that George W. Bush and his associates were actual, flesh-and-blood Nazis.

The Left gets away with this crap because all too many Americans are historically illiterate—another of public education’s gifts to the nation. The teaching of history and civics, as older Americans remember it, is practically defunct today. Instead, students are bombarded with left-wing propaganda, such as critical race theory and Howard Zinn’s embarrassingly distorted A People’s History of the United States.

Now, I can hear the comrades protesting: What about MAGA? What about the Right? Fair point! Historical ignorance and malicious distortion of history span the ideological spectrum. The national conservative (natcon) opposition to US aid to Ukraine is based mostly on fake history and general historical illiteracy. As a matter of fact, I’ve written quite a lot about that phenomenon—here, for instance. But the issue currently under discussion is the abuse and distortion of history by the Left—which is, in a word, egregious.

Since the comrades have fascism on the brain and see it everywhere, they might be helped back to sanity by this article, in which I outlined the relevant history. Don’t bother to thank me, ladies and gentlemen of the Left—I am here to serve.