"Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!" interrupts 'Fiddler on the Roof' Performance

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fountainhall

"Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!" interrupts 'Fiddler on the Roof' Performance

Post by fountainhall »

At a performance of 'Fiddler on the Roof' last night in Baltimore, the classic musical that celebrates Jewish life despite persecution in Tsarist Russia, a man in the balcony stood up and shouted several Trump slogans followed by “Heil Hitler!”
Samit Verma, a journalist at Voice of America, was seated in the balcony on the right side of the theater with his wife when he heard the man shouting.

"I initially could not make out what the man was saying, but as more people exited the main theater I could clearly see him making a Hitler salute and yelling 'Heil Hitler!' " Verma told CNN. "Everyone around me appeared quite shaken by the experience, and some people were in tears."
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/15/us/m ... index.html

A Baltimore Sun contributor, Roy Scherr, wrote
the outburst, which happened during intermission, sparked fears of a shooting like the one in a Pittsburgh synagogue last month that killed 11 people.

The man, later identified as Derlunas, had been seated in the balcony and began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”

“People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’”
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryl ... story.html

However, the same newspaper states that the culprit who was drunk later told the police that he was “motivated by his hatred of President Donald Trump.” Huh?

It does seem that this episode is just one in a succession of results of the spreading of fake news. Fake news has been one of Trump’s most used expressions ever since he announced his candidacy.

In this regard, commentators have for more than two years been making parallels between Trump and the Nazi regime. Hitler and Goebbels constantly referred to the lügenpresse - fake news - to justify their increasingly megalomaniacal, tyrannical actions.
"Lügenpresse" means lying press in German. It was a major component of Joseph Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine. The term was used earlier by Catholics during Germany's revolution in 1848 to attack the rising liberal press. With the Nazis, the Lügenpresse became one of the enemies of the people. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they controlled less than 3 percent of Germany's 4,700 papers. With the elimination of Germany's multi-party system, the Nazis closed down hundreds of papers due to their connection to "outlawed political parties." The Nazis immediately seized the printing plants, headquarters, and equipment of Jews, liberals, Social Democrats, Communists, feminists, homosexuals, unions, family planning groups and many more . . . Knowing they faced imprisonment or execution, owners and journalists quickly fled the country en masse.
https://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion ... 1b0e5.html

All politicians use spin. It's almost part of their job. But Trump and his cohorts, not just in the White House but also in the Republican Party, have elevated spin into a totally new realm. It is surely becoming dangerously close to lügenpresse.

With all the dreadful lies increasingly spouted by Trump, it beats me how there are still Americans, other than the Far Right extremists, who simply cannot understand what Trump is doing and how the this analogy to Hitler and other dictators is increasingly something about which they should be concerned.
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