If you didn’t get the memo:
Historians today have a name for Germans who supported Hitler’s regime because they believed he would make Germany great again. They have a word for those Germans, many of whom were not antisemitic, who weren’t interested in Hitler’s Project 1939 to invade and despoil Germany’s sovereign neighbours, who only wanted economic healing from the devastation of the Great Depression. They have a special word for people who only wanted what was best for Germany and hoped that Hitler was the answer. They call them Nazis.
In other words, if you didn’t get the memo about the radical nationalism, the Holocaust, the injustice, the racism and the death camps — tough shit. You’re still a Nazi. Ignorance of the horror is no excuse.
This is not due to intellectual laziness. You get lumped in with the worst offenders and biggest fanatics because that’s how it works. We have neither the time nor the inclination to find a softer place for you. So grow up. You can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.
Same goes if you’re MAGA. If you’re MAGA, you’re a bigot. Period. I’ve frankly had it with people who are constantly applying for special consideration for some of their weaker friends and relatives. People who are “nice” but don’t know any better. They sound more and more like the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. “I was only following orders.” Besides, monsters aren’t always slavering zealots with fangs and bloodshot eyes. Sometimes they’re ordinary people, indistinguishable on the surface from you and me.
If you’re MAGA you’re an anti-democracy American turncoat. Period. You have decided to believe an obvious liar and traitor, so own it. We need to stop making excuses for these people. Sometimes they’re aunt Martha and uncle Jim. But without millions of people like aunt Martha and uncle Jim, Trump wouldn’t have been possible. Trump is so completely corrupt and evil on the surface that he couldn’t be more obvious than if he were portrayed as a villain in a 19th century melodrama. You have to be voluntarily stupid to miss it.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said of his book “Mother Night” that it was his only novel that had a moral. The moral was this: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
So if you’re only pretending to support Trump and you only half-heartedly voted for him then it’s too late for you. You’re a full blown Trump cultist and must own all the baggage that implies. You can’t get a little bit pregnant. The only thing that you can possibly do to save yourself is for you to recognise your error RIGHT NOW and join us.
This is a time of crisis for the nation and the world. This is no time for moral equivocation. Nobody is going to give a shit later that you didn’t like Trump. The point is you voted for him. The point is you continued to support him and his mollusk-spined appeasers. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.