Listen, I feel you America.
Donald J Trump is a crazy man who shouldn’t even be in charge of peeling a grapefruit, let alone the free world. He is a callous, non-politician who wants to water-board the world. Scary.
But we have to stop comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
It’s easy to see similarities. From his domineering, “Let's Make America Great Again,” slogan that insinuates unsavory methods, to the fact that he stood up at a podium and made everyone in the crowd raise their right hand and swear to vote for him; he is using our country's vulnerability to immaturely stomp on others to claw his way to the top, and unfortunately, people are buying into it. Yes, like Hitler.
The last of the Holocaust survivors are dying, and the Holocaust itself is rapidly becoming just another event for the history textbooks. Our children won’t be able to witness the pain in a death camp survivor's eyes as they share the horrors they saw. They won’t be able to see the numbers the Nazis tattooed on arms to keep track of human beings like cattle. Our children might reach a point of apathy when learning of the horrors of Adolf Hitler.
When you call Trump “the new” or “the next Hitler," your statement implies that Hitler is gone. Now I’m not a ridiculous conspiracy theorist, I know Hitler is dead. But he is not gone.
We don’t need a new Hitler when we are still painfully reaping the effects of Adolf Hitler himself. He is responsible for massacring 6,000,000 Jews and 5,000,000 non-Jews. That’s 11,000,000 people he brutally slaughtered. The world will never "recover" from those loses.
To compare Trump to Hitler is not only completely downgrading of the horror Hitler inflicted on the world but also states that what Hitler did is essentially irrelevant. You can only have a new version of something if the old one is gone, and someone is only really gone if their actions have ceased to have an effect.
When we start comparing anyone to Hitler, we are minimizing him- placing him in the irrelevant history, the past. He is reduced to a few pages in a textbook, just another painless story to be told.
They say that history repeats itself. The world lets too much time pass and forgets how horrible something was the first time and then allows it to happen again. Well, history will not repeat itself this time.
We will make America great, but we cannot do that with Trump as our leader. And when we do make it great, it certainly won't be "again," held to the same standards of greatness that it was in the past. We are a different, evolved people now. We are advanced enough that we won't need to repress any group of citizens or take away anyone's rights to be great in the way America was in the past.
So yes: if Trump gets elected, it seems that he wants to return to such behavior, but then he will do it as Donald Trump, 21st-century monster, not as "the next Adolf Hitler." Because comparing the two isn't fair to anyone; not to the American people now, and certainly not to any of the people massacred in the Holocaust.
