To: guardian.letters@theguardian.com (From Mike Faulkner. Occasional contributor to Lenspoliticalnotes.com. Mahooten.
Subject: Trump and Ethnic Nationalism: Letter for publication
Jason Stanley is right to emphasise the close similarity between the rabidly anti-Muslim nationalism of Modi’s BJP government in India and Trump’s white supremacist ethnic nationalism. (For Trump and Modi, ethnic purity is the point of power. Journal 25th February). He is also right to draw attention to the part such nationalism played in shaping US racist immigration policy, which was much admired by Hitler, in the early part of the twentieth century.
There are indeed unmistakable similarities between the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s and the resurgence of extreme right racist nationalism today. Stanley says that the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935 “created a category of second class citizenship for the Jews” – a category into which his father, then three years old – fell. Actually, the Nuremberg laws didn’t turn Jews into second class citizens. It was much worse; as non aryans they were deprived of citizenship entirely. They became non-citizens, or “subjects of the state”, deprived of all rights. This is where fascism leads.
There are also other lessons to be learned from the history of fascism which are relevant today. Trump rails against Muslims and dark skinned people from “shit-hole countries”, not welcome in the US, while claiming that “America loves India and is “a loyal friend of the Indian people.” He embraces Wahabi Saudi Arabia as a close friend and ally. Where vital interests of foreign policy are concerned, Realpolitik trumps the most passionate racist bigotry.
Pseudo-scientific Nazi race theory established a hierarchy of subordinate races below the aryan “supermen”, according to which Asians occupied an inferior status. The Japanese however, Germany’s close allies in the World War Two Axis pact, became “Honorary Aryans”
Modi’s Hindu nationalists and the Saudi Wahabis are Trump’s “Honarary Aryans”