Next Tuesday half of America’s white males will vote for a presidential candidate who has been credibly called a fascist by military leaders who know history and the nation’s enemies. Their insights make no difference to people convinced they were living the good life when Trump muffed the covid epidemic in his panic not to lose his 2020 reelection. Trump can hardly object to the word fascist as he himself has called Kamala Harris the same. 

I listened to a Wisconsin businessman last night who was once as committed as Trump to removing the reported 11 million “illegals” said to be in America. Coincidentally, that is a number close to the 12 million victims of German death camps. The gentleman had changed mind recently about the illegals in his town. There were suddenly 1,000 mostly Nicaraguan refugees in his town of 15,000. They have revived the city’s economy. Many of them now work for the businessman, who describes them as hard workers and good neighbors. 

Hearing this a reporter asked him why, with his change of heart, he still plans to vote for Donald Trump. The answer? The businessman liked Trump’s policies. 

As for Trump’s fascist threats the businessman assured the reporter that Trump wasn’t serious about ruthlessly deporting 11 million residents. According to the businessman, Trump was only saying this to make sure he got elected. It was simply good business for Trump to lie.

I grew up hearing a lot about the liberation of German death camps by the fathers of my baby boom generation. I sat in our family living room with my Dad and watched movie footage of bodies stacked to the sky and bones in cold crematoriums. 

General Dwight David Eisenhower made sure they would be seen by the world so no one could doubt what fascists had done. I’ve visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum twice and Israel’s Yad Vashem once on a visit to Jerusalem. I wept at Nazi movie footage of two skin and bones brothers sitting on a Warsaw curb, the older holding a brother near death. They were starving doppelgangers of my two healthy grandsons. Fascists did that.

Like England with Shakespear, France with Monet, Spain with Cervantes, Russia with Tchaikovsky, Germany was a land of high culture. 

Few educated adults anywhere on Earth could fail to recognize the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. He was not the only German musical genius. Hitler’s favorite was Richard Wagner, whose opera arias charmed me the instant I first heard them. Hitler loved them too, as well as the nationalist and nativist fairy tales Wagner set to music. 

In my college years I began smoking grass while staying up all night to listen to the greatest symphonies while reading about the music on the album covers. I loved Wagner’s music too despite, his well-known antisemitism. 

I learned about the infamous misuse of his music in concentration camps. Jewish musicians were spared death, put in orchestras and forced to play Wagner in the death camps as the slaughtered billowed into the sky as smoke from overworked ovens. 

The year my daughter was born riots broke out in Israel when a conductor attempted to play Wagner’s music. A holocaust survivor rushed to the stage and stripped off his shirt to show his scars from Auschwitz. Similar protests erupted the next 20 years in Israel whenever Wagner’s glorious music was played, as it was once played to quiet prisoners being led to gas chambers. No one playing such civilized music need be feared.

Who should I believe?  The words of a candidate for president who has contempt for the laws of the nation he wishes to lead or the Wisconsin businessman who assures us that Trump will not set up secret police and the mechanics of a police state because Trump’s not a man of his word?

As I child I often heard the question: why didn’t the German people stop Adolph Hitler before he became their dictator? 

Americans were also amazed that that Jews did not race away from Hitler like jack rabbits. They had one insurmountable barrier. The nations of the world were all ruled by policies like those of Donald Trump. 

Harry Welty will be voting for the candidate most like Republican Abraham Lincoln in 2024 - Kamala Harris: Read more at lincolndemocrat.com