Speak Its Name: Yes, This Is Naziism

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Speak Its Name: Yes, This Is Naziism

from the indeed-we-are-the-baddies dept
Thu, Jan 29th 2026 12:18pm - Cathy Gellis

History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it’s the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. As they are here, which is why it’s time to recognize: for all intents and purposes, how the government of the United States of America is behaving is just like how the German Nazis behaved. It is doing to the people within its national embrace exactly what the Nazis did to theirs. The comparison to 20th Century Nazi Germany is not something that 21st Century America is still working up to; it’s where we have already arrived.

That we have not (yet) set up an Auschwitz-Birkenau, replete with crematoria, is not evidence to the contrary. After all, the German Nazis didn’t just suddenly start killing millions in the 1940s; their crimes against humanity began years earlier, in the 1930s. Even Hitler himself referred to the mass murder Auschwitz facilitated as the “final solution,” because it was the tactic deployed only after he had already committed plenty of other atrocities first—atrocities that look an awful lot like the ones we are inflicting now upon the human beings in our own national midst.

In the case of both nations the atrocities began, as such horrors often do, with the “othering” of people, as if there were those who, by virtue of something about their own humanity, were somehow disqualified from being part of our national community. While the Trump Administration may have begun by ostensibly focusing on “illegal immigrants”—which itself is a grotesquely deceptive label (an immigrant cannot be illegal; an immigrant can only immigrate illegally, and, for the most part, such illegality is but a civil or misdemeanor offense and not the heinously lawless act the administration paints it as)—like the German Nazis it has also stigmatized racial, religious, and ethnic groups comprising America’s cultural tapestry, as well as LGBTQ+ people. The rhetoric it espouses is all about conditioning the public to believe that there are some people who belong in America, and some who need to be expunged from it, so that the public will get on board aiding, supporting, and even celebrating the expunging that will soon follow.

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