Comrade Trump

Donald Trump won the electoral college vote. You would think this would be enough for Him. Hillary Clinton got about two million more popular votes than He did. But Trump wants to rewrite history. He claims that He actually won the popular vote, because those votes for Clinton were illegal. See the USA Today article here. He wants not only the presidency but wants history to remember Him as the recipient of the huge and virtually uncontested adoration of Americans.

And He can do it.

Will Trump, by his endless repetition of his claims, alter the records of history in the United States? Will future generations of American students learn that Trump led an immense popular revolution? This sort of thing has happened before, though not in America.

Joseph Stalin was one of the Bolshevik leaders of the Russian Revolution in 1917. There were others who worked beside him and were just as important. But when Stalin grabbed power in the Soviet Union, he proceeded to literally rewrite the history of the Revolution. As one by one his former comrades-in-arms began to fall from his favor, Stalin literally had them purged out of the photographs of the period. Consider this set of four images. The original photograph shows four men—Stalin and three comrades who fought with him. One by one, the images of the others were erased until Stalin is left alone, implying that he single-handedly led the Revolution. The others were literally erased from history.

Here is another example. Nikolai Yezhov was the water commissar in Moscow. The original photo of him with Stalin appears at the top of this post (Blogger will not allow me to imbed it in this post). But Yezhov later fell from favor with Stalin, who had him erased from the photo:

Trump is arrogant enough, and has enough popular support, that He could conceivably rewrite American history to fit his views, particularly with regard to himself.

You can find more information, and the images I have used, here.

In a similar fashion, Adolf Hitler got everyone in Germany and outside Germany to think that all Germans supported, indeed worshiped, Him. This was to the advantage of Hitler, who pretended that there never had been any serious opposition to Him, and to the Allies, who wanted to maintain the fiction that all Germans were Nazis. History does not even remember that there were Gentile white Germans in 1940 who were not Nazis. There were many thousands of them, as explained here; 77,000 of them were executed by the Nazis.

One would think that only God could create truth. But Donald Trump considers Himself to be in the same league as God. As a Christian agnostic, I do not have a problem with the man Jesus, but the oppression that churches have carried out in Jesus’ name over the last two millennia. And now conservative churches urge their followers to consider Trump to be God’s choice. American Christianity is, by and large, little more than the comrades of Donald Trump who wish to rewrite the history of the world with American Republicans of 2016 as the climax of history. This is a deed worthy of Comrade Stalin, or of Adolf Hitler. Will American opponents of Donald Trump be as forgotten by history as the anti-Nazi Germans? American Christianity, by and large, appears to hope that this will happen, even though one of the most prominent German anti-Nazis was the famous Christian writer Dietrich Boenhoeffer, whose books (especially The Cost of Discipleship) are still read by thousands of Christians. Or, at least, they used to be.