The Mirror We Refuse to Look Into and the Old Script of War in New Mouths
How Leaders Teach a Public to Call Aggression Defense
Part one of “The Mirror We Refuse to Look Into” series can be found at the link below:
When people hear a comparison between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, they often reach for the quickest escape hatch, which is to assume the comparison is saying the two men are identical, or that history repeats with perfect photocopy fidelity, or that the only legitimate use of the past is a museum plaque that ends with “never again” and asks nothing further of us.
The argument worth making, is narrower and more unsettling than that, because it lives at the level where politics becomes permission. It is about how a public is taught to accept what it would have rejected a year earlier, and how leaders who hunger for dominance learn to convert confusion into loyalty, grievance into mandate, and violence into virtue, even when the uniforms, technologies, and centuries differ. War is the clearest place to see that alchemy, because war demands consent, or at least acquiescence, and consent is built from words before it is enforced by weapons.
Look at Trump’s statement announcing major combat operations in Iran, and look at Hitler’s Reichstag address on September 1, 1939, given after German forces had already crossed into Poland in the early hours of that morning.
