Impeachment of Trump and Inauguration of Biden (#120)

[Roussette]

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4130520-On-our-way-to-Bidens-Inauguration-Trump-119?watched=1&msgid=103593277#103593277

So fast moving. Here we go again....

I still can't believe there are posters on this thread who genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a worse individual than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Would you include Hitler and Mussolini in that list too?

Scary AF.

The GOP have a long term problem here which I'm not sure how they resolve.

Which makes for desperate men.

Remember how it's pretty much accepted fact that Boris' entire premiership has been focused on his delivering promises to some very scary men over Brexit ?

@Dongdingdong what makes him any better exactly? Be very specific.

@Dongdingdong

I still can't believe there are posters on this thread who genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a worse individual than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Would you include Hitler and Mussolini in that list too?

Scary AF.

You can have a fun debate as to whether Hitler was any more evil than the people that he either surrounded himself with, or that gravitated towards him. Heydrich, for example, had he lived ("The Man In The High Castle") would probably have gone on to oust Hitler as being far too much of a pansy liberal.

@Dongdingdong what makes him any better exactly? Be very specific.

Hmmmmm, let me think. Well, you might want to read up on Saddam Hussein here for starters: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein%27s_Iraq

And surely I don't need to explain to you why Trump is not a worse person than Adolf Hitler.

@DGRossetti

The GOP have a long term problem here which I'm not sure how they resolve.

Which makes for desperate men.

Remember how it's pretty much accepted fact that Boris' entire premiership has been focused on his delivering promises to some very scary men over Brexit ?

Tax, Corruption and Party Donations.

Common theme here.

You can have a fun debate as to whether Hitler was any more evil than the people that he either surrounded himself with, or that gravitated towards him

Either way, he was a fucking evil bastard!

Watching the hearings, there are some very very angry Democrats. Don't blame them.

Ah but you've got mixed up between the person and their actions. We know Saddam and Hitler were awful because of what they ended up doing. Do we sit back and wait for Trump to match them before saying "oh yes, guess he is evil" or do we analyse politics and who he is standing with, extrapolate his likely route, and preempt him?

Meanwhile the US COVID stats for yesterday, recorded a third of the worlds cases and quarter of the worlds deaths.

Do we sit back and wait for Trump to match them before saying "oh yes, guess he is evil" or do we analyse politics and who he is standing with, extrapolate his likely route, and preempt him?

@HoneysuckIejasmine Trump's been alive for 74 years and he's spent 4 years as the most powerful man on the planet. If he was going to attempt anything close to what Saddam and Hitler "ended up doing", you'd think he would have done it by now!

@Roussette

Watching the hearings, there are some very very angry Democrats. Don't blame them.

Agree. Just listening to Rep. Al Green (D) Texas He's in tears.

[quote Dongdingdong]**@Dongdingdong what makes him any better exactly? Be very specific.

Hmmmmm, let me think. Well, you might want to read up on Saddam Hussein here for starters: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein%27s_Iraq

And surely I don't need to explain to you why Trump is not a worse person than Adolf Hitler.[/quote]
I think it depends on how you view it.

I certainly think Trump has the potential to be worse than them with free reign and all accountability removed.

Which is what he has tried to aim for.

There is the whole scifi debate about if you'd had the opportunity to kill off Hitler as a baby whether this would have spared 6 million Jews or whether you'd end up with more dead in an alternate reality where no warning from history existed.

I think the problem here is ultimately that you can only truly make that type of comparison after the fact when Trump is gone and his full legacy can be examined retrospectively.

When you are sitting in the moment, you have to consider whether such comparisons with say Hitler in 1929 or 1945 are the same and whether this is what we should fear.

Bottom line. In order to prevent tyranny you have to identify the warning signs of it and those key individuals who are demostrating the potential to be the next 'evil dictator' responsible for the murder of millions. Those individuals are the product of years in the making. And they all come from remarkably similar same sets of conditions. Whether they are on the right or the left of the political spectrum.

If you can get hold of the small, but hugely relevant 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder cheaply, its worth getting.

Interesting post @RedToothBrush, but with respect, this is just speculation:

"I certainly think Trump has the potential to be worse than them with free reign and all accountability removed."

The fact is he wasn't and isn't.

@Dongdingdong

You can have a fun debate as to whether Hitler was any more evil than the people that he either surrounded himself with, or that gravitated towards him

Either way, he was a fucking evil bastard!

Of course he was.

But he was also once an innocent child too. And he didn't spring from nowhere or in isolation.

You have to identify the conditions and the person with the ability to carry through the momentum of such a movement by sheer force of personality.

Trump has that, he has economic issues that have created political instability and the moment of some sort of change being sort.

Its all about exploiting senses of injustice for personal power and gain rather than to fix those problems.

This never changes.

I still can't believe there are posters on this thread who genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a worse individual than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Would you include Hitler and Mussolini in that list too?

The only real difference is that Trump hasn't had the opportunity to be as bad as Hitler and Mussolini (and what about Stalin and Pol Pot?). Because he hasn't succeeded in becoming a dictator, has he?

He's shown what he'd be capable of, though, with his callous indifference about going on for 400,000 people dying of Covid (4,000 in a single day recently). And also with his disgraceful response to the George Floyd murder and the BLM protests. And the federal executions.

So I think there's reason to suspect he could be equally as bad.

If you can get hold of the small, but hugely relevant 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder cheaply, its worth getting.
Excellent book, as is " Our Malady" same author.

And 'evil' is a notion that prevent us from identifying the problems.

When you read up about how the Nazis and how they could possibly do such awful things you find that SS troops were rarely exceptional in this sense. What makes it so scary is their extraordinary ordinaryness. How things are normalised, how groups of fanatics egg each other on, how when no one says anything about how someone has taken something too far (and are instead rewarded for it) etc etc.

You get perfect storms, which are difficult to put the brakes on and stop dead.

All involve extreme nationalism and profit though.

Well the orange one has done more damage to the republic than osama ever did - arguably osama even united the republic - so yes Trump is easily worse than bin laden.

As for the deaths attributable to bin laden - either in the US or in Afghanistan/Iraq - rump''s mishandling of Covid has easily beaten that.

Bigly PMK (PlaceMarKing)

I follow this thread but have never posted before. Sorry to fill with a PMK but I think it's going to move fast. Roll on the 21st and let us hope it is a peaceful transition.

@Dongdingdong

I still can't believe there are posters on this thread who genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a worse individual than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Would you include Hitler and Mussolini in that list too?

Scary AF.

Oh, we all believe it really, and include any and all oppressors. Maybe find a thread with nicer people on it. I recommend the Royal Style discussions, which are ever so nice, and don’t feature low-born dictators and parvenus.

Don't forget he happily seperated children from their parents

@Dongdingdong

Interesting post *@RedToothBrush*, but with respect, this is just speculation:

"I certainly think Trump has the potential to be worse than them with free reign and all accountability removed."

The fact is he wasn't and isn't.

Learn the difference between opinion and fact.

He wasn't worse than them. Correct. That is a fact. We know this retrospectively. So far.

Does he have the potential to be worse? You think he doesn't. Others do. This is opinion. We have no way of knowing at this point and the fact he didn't win election may mean he doesn't have that opportunity either.

BUT we still have various possibility to happen. No one knows how the rest of his life will pan out.

What is very concerning, is how far he has been enabled to this point by various other individuals, groups and businesses. They were able to benefit, often at the expense of those at the bottom of society, and through the use of violent and dehumanising language.

We CAN list and tick off a lot of 'warning' signs of tyranny. We can these as evidence that there is a real problem that we need to address one way or another.

Its about Trump as an individual as well as the circumstances around Trump.

What we can definitely say with a degree of confidence unfortunately, is that the awakening of a lot of this extreme right wing nationalism and how its has been mobilised and activated is highly likely to be something that is going to cause problems - including loss of life - for some considerable time. Trump has played a very central role in that.

We can debate how big the problem is all we like but it doesn't change the material reality of the situation and the ultimate question we all need to be asking now:

How do we defuse the bomb he has lit the fuse on?

Not sure why this thread has turned into an Olympics of evil people? I'm not inclined to bite.

As well as not feeling the need to award medals, I agree with RTB that 'evil' is a notion that prevent us from identifying the problems.

@Dongdingdong

I still can't believe there are posters on this thread who genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a worse individual than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Would you include Hitler and Mussolini in that list too?

Scary AF.

Trump was more dangerous because unlike Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, he was the figurehead for the Free World and possibly (it's still possible) the most powerful man in the world.

Each of the other two could, and did, mess up their own countries and threaten to do limited harm to other countries in and around the rest of the world; Trump was capable of destroying the world, and may actually have succeeded in that aim by repudiating any attempt to get climate change under control, thus keeping it going until it is quite possibly too late -- and incidentally harming more people than either Saddam Hussein or Osama bin laden could have hoped to do.

So yes, I do believe that Trump is a worse individual.

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had the capability to wreak such wholesale destruction for so little actual reason.

Also, I don't think any of the others you mention were doing what they did entirely for their own monetary gain, which is the most despicable of all motives.