Friday on “Democracy Now!,” leftist political activist Noam Chomsky said President Donald Trump’s supporters at his rallies remind him of listening to the crowds at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.
Host Amy Goodman asked, “Can you talk about what he’s threatening to do right now? First, they reject the WHO tests, that would have been critical, and now saying they’re going to defund the World Health Organization.”
Chomsky said, “Well, this is typical behavior of autocrats and dictators. When you make colossal errors, which are killing thousands of people, find somebody else to blame. And in the United States, it’s, unfortunately, the case, for well over a century, century and a half, that it’s always easy to blame the ‘yellow peril.’ The yellow — ‘They’re coming after us.’ We’ve seen this all through my life, in fact, way before. So, blame the World Health Organization, blame China, claim that the World Health Organization has insidious relations with China, is practically working for them. And that sells to a population that’s been deeply indoctrinated for a long time, way back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the 19th century, to say, ‘Yeah, those yellow barbarians are coming over to destroy us.’ That’s almost instinctive. And it’s backed up by the echo chamber, so, you know, say, Rush Limbaugh. Science is one of the four corners of deceit, along with the media, academia — I forget one of the others, but they’re the four corners of deceit. They live on deceit. You keep driving that into people’s heads. They say, ‘Why should we believe anything? Why should we believe the news? It’s just fake news. They’re all trying to destroy our savior, our president, the greatest president ever.'”
He continued, “I’m old enough to remember as a child listening to Hitler’s speeches over the radio, Nuremberg rallies. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone and the reaction of the crowd, the adoring crowd, was very clear and very frightening. We know what it led to. It’s hard to — it comes to mind at once when you listen to Trump’s ravings and the crowd.”
He added, “I don’t suggest that he’s anything like Hitler. Hitler had an ideology, horrible ideology, not only massacring all the Jews and 30 million Slavs and the Roma, and conquering much of the world, but also an internal ideology: The state, under control of the Nazi Party, should control every aspect of life, should even control the business community. That’s not the world we’re in. In fact, it’s almost the opposite, business controlling the government. And as far as Trump is concerned, the only detectable ideology is pure narcissism. Me, that’s the ideology. As long as I am smart enough to keep serving the real masters, pour money into the pockets of the very wealthy and the corporate sector, and they’ll let you get away with your antics.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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