IN Germany a man became the leader of the National Socialist Party (the Nazi party) and preached a programme to rescue capitalism in Germany from the ravages of the Great Depression and to make Germany great again and establish the ‘golden age’ of the Third Reich that was to last 1,000 years.

He and his party were elected overwhelmingly to the parliament and unleashed the Night of the Long Knives, Night of the Broken Glass and other episodes of violent criminality against the population and particular ethnic and social groups.

He built the German military as a powerful military and eventually launched his annexationist war to expand the German empire across Europe and Africa.

That man was Adolph Hitler, whose achievements included perfecting the technique of the Big Lie with his master of populist propaganda, Goebbels, in charge. His aim was also to destroy the Communist (radical left) Soviet Union.

In his rise to power he was promoted by the powerful media in Germany, as well as by the Western networks of Europe and the US.

Within Germany, the biggest monopolies and billionaires backed him.

The local officials, big intellectuals and professionals, and even business people and trade union leaders supported him, hoping to gain for themselves from his resurgent great German economy.

They later confessed at the Nuremberg Trials that they supported the Nazis out of pure self-serving hopes of economic enrichment and political office, et cetera.

So, the support for Trump’s ‘greatest political comeback’ by oppressed minority elements and the majority of the popular vote is not new; nor should it be surprising when we are told that many supported his return to the White House because they wanted more crumbs from the economic table at which billionaires like Elon Musk and the big pharma and militaryindustrial complex monopolies are engorging themselves on super-profits.

After inciting the storming of the Congress, Trump wins a big election victoryshades of the Nazis burning of the German Reichstag (parliament), blaming it on the radical left, and then winning big in elections.

The parallels between the rise of Hitler and the Nazi fascism in Germany and the rise of Trump and his MAGA white supremacist fascism in the US is neither mysterious nor accidental. Any student of history will know of all these parallels.

Clyde Weatherhead