Similarities ?????

I was born in one country, raised in another.

My father was born in another country.

I was not his only child.

He fathered several children with numerous women.

I became very close to my mother, as my father showed no interest in me.

My mother died at an early age from cancer.

Although my father deserted me and my mother raised me, I later wrote a book idolizing my father not my mother.

Later in life, questions arose over my real name.

My birth records were sketchy.

No one was able to produce a legitimate, reliable birth certificate.

I grew up practicing one faith but converted to Christianity, as it was widely accepted in my new country, but I practiced non-traditional beliefs and didn't follow Christianity, except in the public eye under scrutiny.

I worked and lived among lower-class people as a young adult, disguising myself as someone who really cared about them.

That was before I decided it was time to get serious about my life and embarked on a new career.

I wrote a book about my struggles growing up.

It was clear to those who read my memoirs, that I had difficulties accepting that my father abandoned me as a child.

I became active in local politics in my 30's then, with help behind the scenes, I literally burst onto the scene as a candidate for national office in my 40's.

They said I had a golden tongue and could talk anyone into anything.

I had a virtually non-existent resume, little work history, and no experience in leading a single organization.

Yet I was a powerful speaker and citizens were drawn to me, as though I were a magnet and they were small roofing tacks.

I drew incredibly large crowds during my public appearances.

This bolstered my ego.

At first, my political campaign focused on my country's foreign policy...

I was very critical of my country in the last war, and seized every opportunity to bash my country.

But what launched my rise to national prominence were my views on the country's economy.

I pretended to have a really good plan on how we could do better, and every poor person would be fed and housed for free.

I knew which group was responsible for getting us into this mess.

It was the free market, banks and corporations.

I decided to start making citizens hate them and, if they became envious of others who did well, the plan was clinched tight.

I called mine "A People's Campaign".

That sounded good to all people.

I was the surprise candidate because I emerged from outside the traditional path of politics and was able to gain widespread popular support.

I knew that, if I merely offered the people 'hope', together we could change our country and the world.

So, I started to make my speeches sound like they were on behalf of the downtrodden, poor, ignorant to include "persecuted minorities."

My true views were not widely known and I kept them unknown, until after I became my nation's leader.

I had to carefully guard reality, as anybody could have easily found out what I really believed, if they had simply read my writings and examined those people I associated with. I'm glad they didn't.

Then I became the most powerful man in the world.

And then the world learned the truth.

Who am I?


Answer: ADOLPH HITLER.

If you were thinking of SOMEONE ELSE, you should be scared ... very scared !



There may be a couple iffy statements in this, but Most of it hits the nail on the head.

You forgot one.. the above murdered millions of innocent people because of their beliefs and ethnicity. I only know of one person who ever did that. Any comparison between two people where one is Hitler fails.

Stalin.

Pol Pot, Idi Amin, a lot of them all depending on your threshold.

Some of that is accurate re Hitler's history , but some of it isn't completely the case. Not sure where they got Hitler disguising himself as someone who cared about the poor and worked among them. He was poor no doubt in his youth, but he didn't have a job working with the poor. He didn't have a job beyond selling some art and odd jobs during that period. So it was stretched in several places to "fit".

I will say there is one troubling similarity, and hardly one for which they are alone (and NOT a comparison of the two obviously ) but both practice(d) the politics of division and blame, as do all too many politicians and leaders. Hitler blamed the Jews and foreign interests for the economic struggles of the depression in Germany just as Obama blames the rich in the US for not paying their "fair share." Jobs going abroad is an inherent evil in itself without ever addressing why those decisions are being so made. It's just evil and we're supposed to blame those who make them for our suffering.

Clearly one's solution is taxes and the other's was extermination so I'm not drawing a parallel there, but I do find the politics of blame and division to be a bad thing and I do also think it leads to lots of half truths and misrepresentations. Obviously Hitlers' were 10000000000x worse but Obama tries to paint it that his taxes will only hit Donald Trump as if he's the only entrepreneur or self employed person to be hit by the adjustments he wants in self employment tax etc.

As a complete aside, it's unfortunate that whenever anyone draws comparison to Hitler or any other truly evil person they only see the broad analogy. "You're saying he's like Hitler!" No, not necessarily. The rise and fall of Hitler is very interesting and there are lessons to be learned there beyond the knee-jerk reaction of a comparison.

Hitler was in fact a nondescript person of moderate birth who had not advanced himself socially or economically in business or any real job yet came with relative speed (decades really, but still meteoric in scale) to rule a major industrial nation with complete authority. More to the point, he was able to do so despite holding beliefs that ran from extreme to criminally insane, beliefs that weren't all that hard to see.

How was it that otherwise intelligent, Western citizens in an industrialized nation would accept that Jews and Communists and foreign interests caused all the problems and if we only got rid of them (very early he argued Jews be denied citizenship) it would be OK? The power of economic despair (the middle of the Great Depression) shows just desperate that makes people to cling to something ideologically and otherwise.

Of course Hitler never said "if you vote for me I'll kill every Jew". He said "the Jews are behind this and it's not your fault you're poor and struggling and not Germany's fault for the war and here's who we need to blame." The politics of blame on the grandest of scales.

Germans like to say they didn't know what was going to happen till it was too late but I don't buy it. OK they didn't think they'd gas the Jews, but the Nazi party was promising "bread and freedom" and their fundamental principles were to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles and stop Jewish repression of the German people. It wasn't very subtle.

No Obama or any other divisive politician is very likely to be the "next Hitler" but maybe we could learn to see when a politician is selling a bill of goods by blaming "those guys over there" for "your suffering" and how that's just a ploy of politicians, and a powerful one.

FWIW that happens on both sides all the time, it's far from Obama. I will say in the US at an economic level the left does it far more than the right but that's just b/c of how the argument is structured. If it suited the GOP to do it they would in a heartbeat, and in fact do when it suits them.

It's politics 101, and we need to all reject it and call them on it.

In short, we should reject leaders who want to throw some Americans under the bus in order to get the votes of other Americans. I believe in a sense of pareto optimality. We shouldn't as a matter of course make some Americans better off by making others worse off, and that works in both economic directions. We must focus on moving us all up as a nation.

That's the one place where I think maybe we can learn a lesson from Hitler, though obviously on a scale so different that I shouldn't even have to say so.