Warren Brown: Arnie, Trump, and the ‘Big Lie’ of Nazi comparisons

Donald Trump is not Hitler – but a certain ex-California governor has reminded us all of the power of propaganda, writes Warren Brown.

In a year that’s not even two weeks old but is already shaping up to be an even more spectacular sequel to 2020, it seemed hardly surprising to see former Terminator, bodybuilder and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger giving the world his views on outgoing Donald Trump via Twitter – a platform on which the now-banned POTUS probably won’t get a chance to see.

In a confronting analogy Schwarzenegger described the violent rampage through the Capitol Building last week as being the United States’ equivalent of the infamous Kristallnacht of Nov­ember 1938, the Night of Broken Glass, where across Germany and Austria violent mobs of stormtroopers and Nazi-supporting civilians firebombed and vandal­ised hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes while the authorities stood by and did nothing.

Drawing comparisons about Nazi Germany with anything is always fraught with danger. Generally speaking, when some argument is thrown up comparing something or someone with Adolf Hitler, you know the case is lost before it’s started.

While emotions are understandably running high, the comparison of last week’s disgraceful attack in Washington with the terror of the Kristallnacht is drawing something of a long bow — as a result of the rolling riot of 1938 scores of Jews were killed and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested by the Nazis and sent to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Read the article by Warren Brown in The Daily Telegraph.