Kane View

United States And Weimar: Two Republics, One Failed One Failing

One week after Election Day 2020, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley took a call from “an old friend” warning him that Trump and his cadre of sycophants were trying to “overturn the [newly elected] government”. The old friend was deadly serious.

Already on alert over Trump’s firing of the Secretary of Defense a day earlier, Milley responded to his friend’s threat assessment with what might be called his own DEFCON-1 warning: “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

In the midst of increasing chaos in November, with supporters fueled by Trump’s weaponised lies about a stolen election getting more threatening and violent, Milley was becoming more uneasy. A student of history, Milley could recognised the similarities between what he was seeing on the ground in the U.S. and what happened to Germany in the early 1930s.

Milley called Trump’s radicalised supporters “Brownshirts in the streets” and warned that the United States was having its own “Reichstag moment” – he was referring to the Nazi- supporting Brownshirts’ arson attack on Germany’s Parliament that Hitler used as a pretext to destroy the Weimar Republic’s attempt at democracy and assume absolute power.

Is the United States facing its own Weimar moment? General Milley, having the requisite eyes and ears to make a judgment, said Trump has preached the “Gospel of the Führer”. If one remembers 6 January and sees what’s going on in Republican-led state legislatures around the country with support of federal congressional members, then the answer is clear. The Hitler playbook is in play…