The Reichstag Fire Next Time
The coming crackdown

http://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/the-reichstag-fire-next-time/
Publisher:  Harper's Magazine
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article

The article draws comparisons between the current climate in the Trump era with that of pre-Nazi Germany, in particular the Reichstag Fire of 1933, an event which Adolph Hitler exploited and launched a militant stance that eventually lead to a facist state.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt: A key characteristic of the most frightening regimes of the past hundred years is mobilization. This is what distinguishes the merely authoritarian regimes from the totalitarian ones. Authoritarians prefer their subjects passive, tending to their private lives while the authoritarian and his cronies amass wealth and power. The totalitarian wants people out in the square; he craves their adulation and devotion, their willingness to fight and die for him. Mobilization was just as important an element of Hitler's 1933 consolidation of power as his crackdown. Victory rallies, national holidays, and parades demonstrated, even forced, the unity of a nation. In Germans into Nazis, historian Peter Fritzsche makes no mention of the Reichstag fire but devotes a chapter to the May Day parade of 1933, a daylong, citywide spectacle "carefully choreographed to .?.?. demonstrate the national sense of purpose that was now said to animate the German people."

To totalitarianism watchers, Trump's campaign rallies, which segued into his victory rallies, including his "America First" inauguration, have looked familiar and perhaps more worrisome than an imaginary future fire. To historians of the twenty-first century, however, they will likely look like logical steps from the years of war rhetoric that preceded them, not quantum leaps. A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.