Woke up this morning to hear news anchors who should know better say that in addressing a Veterans Day audience, former Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump – our notorious 45th President – “echoed” the term “vermin” to refer to those who oppose him politically.
These well paid “journalists” read their prompters and said Trump was “echoing” the language of “dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.” I have since seen headlines “echoing” the term “echoing.”
Make no mistake. This is no echo. This is a word used most deliberately by Adolf Hitler to label those he considered the “undesirables” he felt stood in the way of his vision of a 1,000 year Arayan reign.
It. Is. The. Literal. Word. used by a megalomaniac who wanted to exterminate any person who did not match his vision of a white, blue-eyed, blond/blonde Germanic person committed to his fanaticism and ideology of a “pure” race.
A man determined to subjugate other countries to steal land and its resources to geographically expand his elaborate architectural vision and use the people of those countries as slave labor; or to let those unhealthy or too old to be his conquered slaves to die of starvation and communicable diseases as he did before his “Final Solution” to terminate Jews in the gas chambers was ratified at the 1942 Wannsee Conference near Berlin.
In point of fact, the term “vermin” was enshrined in Nazi law.
Per the *Holocaust Encyclopedia: “The Decree against Public Enemies (Volksschädlingsverordnung; literally, “Folk Pest Law”) was enacted on September 5, 1939, just four days after Germany invaded Poland and began World War II. It was an elastic clause that dramatically expanded the possibilities for criminal prosecution in Nazi Germany.”
“In the Nazi approach to law, offenses and legal determinations were deliberately defined in the vaguest possible terms. This enabled judges to retain the pretense of judicial independence while issuing verdicts that met the desires of the Nazi authorities,” the citation continues.
“It is worth noting that Volksschädlinge, the key term in the law’s title, is translated as “folk pests” or “vermin.” “As such, the law equates those exploiting the special conditions of war to carry out crimes with the type of agricultural pests that are destructive and generally outside the sphere of moral responsibility. Just as a gardener attacks the bugs and vermin that threaten his plants, so too, the Nazis believed, the national community had to eliminate those who compromised the health and well-being of the body politic.”
“The Decree Against Public Enemies was perhaps the most frequently used legal basis for the approximately 15,000 death sentences handed down by the courts from 1941 to 1945.”
So, when Trump uses the word “vermin,” he is not echoing “rhetoric.” He is using a term legally enshrined into German law during Hitler’s reign as German Chancellor of the Third Reich.
Trump isn’t using the word “vermin” as rhetoric, but as a legal basis for utilizing the power of the judiciary to not just punish his political opponents (which he will do), but to rid this country of ANY persons or groups he deems “unworthy” to live here, no matter how long that has been or what their contributions to this country have been.
He has promised to expel anyone in this country who is not a legally documented citizen of the United States. He has promised to build encampments to hold such people until they can be deported. He WILL use the U.S. military to achieve this goal.
Again, per the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”
When the Nazis started building what has become the generically accepted term “concentration camp,” it was not for the purpose of annihilating Jews using gas chambers.
The entry continues:
“Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:
- To incarcerate people whom the Nazi regime perceived to be a security threat. These people were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.
- To eliminate individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals by murder, away from the public and judicial review.
- To exploit forced labor of the prisoner population. This purpose grew out of a labor shortage.”
It was after the SS gained total control of the administration of camps in 1934 and then with the out break of World War II that extrajudicial killings began to be carried out.
They would come to call these encampments “killing centers.” They were built “exclusively or primarily for the mass murder of human beings. Nazi officials employed assembly-line methods of murder in these facilities,” per a Holocaust Encyclopedia citation. Their names would include Chelmno, Belzic, Sobibor and Treblinka, as well as Auschwitz-Dachau.
In the interim, the Nazis used the legal system to institute a series of laws like the one already mentioned above.
Then there is the famous “Führer Oath,” which all military personnel swore directly to Hitler himself, rather than to the Constitution of the Weimar Republic created after World War I.
There was also a special oath that all civil service employees were required to swear. Again, rather than loyalty to a Constitution, it was a loyalty to be sworn to Hitler himself.
So when Trump uses words like “vermin” in his speeches, he is echoing nothing.
He is saying EXACTLY what he means, and the exactness of such words is a description of what a second Trump Presidency will be like. It should be taken both LITERALLY and SERIOUSLY as a clear and present danger, not an “echo” more than a century old.
Everyone should be made aware of this. It is not hyperbole on Trump’s part.
By everyone, I mean every voter who believes in the founding of our Republic, underpinned in democratic ideals and values; and the Constitution which is both established and alterable as injustices, inequalities and inequities in the social compact are addressed. This includes a media that seems not to have “gotten it” the first go round with Trump as President.
For many among them will be the first “vermin” to be incarcerated as political enemies should Trump win re-election.
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P.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) hold on military promotions has far less to do with abortion and more to do with holding open key leadership spots in the military to be filled by pro-Trumpists should Democrats split the Biden vote over what is happening today between Israel and Palestine, as well as being attracted in this moment to other political figures running against him outside the Democratic party structure. Trump will need the military domestically to carry out his planned deportations. Trump’s only foreign affairs interests are economic ones, especially as they benefit him personally.
So please…criticize Bibi Netanyahu all you want. It is well deserved. But give President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken some respect for what they have tried to accomplish in terms of humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as to push for Palestinian statehood when hostilities cease.
Still, there is good historical and moral reason for U.S. alliance with Israel, as should be self-evident in all that I have just conveyed about the Third Reich (a mere smidgen of its history).
I am as much a humanist as one can find: I deplore war and the tragedy it visits on anyone.
If anyone craves a world filled with a peace that “surpasses all understanding,” it is I.
But Palestinians are being killed for the provocation of October 7th that was a bloody massacre of innocents celebrated on social media by Hamas and radicalized Islamists of other Arab nations.
If ordinary Palestinians are dying right now, it is because of the tunnels Hamas has dug beneath them in which they hide and which keep ordinary Palestinians as much hostages as the Israelis and Jews of other nations Hamas took as prisoners of war that October day.
Be angry at the death and destruction happening in Gaza. Just be angry at the right groups and country (Iran) that has precipitated all this. For it has once again forestalled peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, just as serious movement in that direction began.
It IS the reason October 7th happened, along with a vow to eliminate the nation of Israel and the Jews living there.
It makes Hamas no better than the Nazis and the alliance with them that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni , sought for Arabs as early as 1933.
*The Holocaust Encyclopedia is maintained on-line by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
*(Philippians 4:7)
Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and Thrace interned in the “Monopol” tobacco factory, which was was used as a transit camp. They were ultimately deported to the Treblinka killing center. Skopje, Macedonia, March 11-31, 1943.
Central Zionist Archives
(As shown in the Holocaust Encyclopedia maintained on line by the Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.)
A Senior Moment 