Two regimes, troubling parallels

Pam Bondi, the Attorney General has redefined political dissent against Trump as domestic terrorism and authorised law enforcement agencies to prosecute people for what she labelled anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christian views, and hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.

Barring Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great, autocrats who have presided over their peoples have always been men. However, none of them has ever amassed power without the support of a group of other men who served as advisers.

Only rarely did women serve in such a capacity. Hitler, for example, strongly believed that women should stay out of politics and focus on supporting the men in their lives. Nevertheless, he more than welcomed women who served as prison guards at concentration camps or propagandised his message of the superiority of Germany’s white Aryan race.

In his 2024 book, Hitler’s People – The Faces of the Third Reich, author and eminent historian Richard Evans has meticulously catalogued the extensive participation of German women in sustaining the Third Reich’s brutal regime. At the top of the list of an elite group of women are two names – Gertrud Scholtz-Klink and Leni Riefenstahl.

Scholtz-Klink’s official designation was ‘Reichsfrauenfuhrerin’ (Reich Women’s Leader). Although Scholtz-Klink was not personally responsible for any acts of violence, as the head of all the women’s organisations in Germany, she presented Nazi ideology to millions of women as a ‘benign social and political system whose negative side only affected a minority of the population’ – Jews, socialists, communists, gypsies, petty criminals, and the feeble-minded.

Riefenstahl, having achieved fame through her films – Triumph of the Will, on the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, and Olympia, on the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin – followed Hitler to chronicle on film his military triumphs of World War II. The military commander of the area in Poland where she was filming described her attire thus: “She wore a kind of tunic, breeches and high, soft boots. From the leather belt that girded her hips, there hung a pistol. The equipment for close combat was augmented by a knife sheathed in her boot.” Riefenstahl’s cinematic art was highly political, well-suited to serving the interests of the Nazi regime, much like Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ elaborate machinery to spread disinformation about European Jewry.

In Donald Trump’s current cabinet, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice, is a powerful woman. Her actions and pronouncements are patterned after Scholtz-Klink and Riefenstahl. Bondi has redefined political dissent against Trump as domestic terrorism and authorised law enforcement agencies to prosecute people for what she labelled anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christian views, and hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality. She has crusaded to persecute anyone who sought to investigate Trump for colluding with Russia and his role in attempting to decertify Joe Biden’s election as President. Bondi has been active in disenfranchising large segments of the Democrat-leaning minority populations across the country.

Earlier this month, Trump fired Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, following widespread criticism of her leadership. Last year, she posed in front of underwear-clad Venezuelan migrants whom she had ordered sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security anti-terrorism prison, while wearing a baseball cap and sporting a $50,000 watch. This particular episode earned her the nickname “ICE Barbie”, not to be confused with Klaus Barbie, the ‘butcher of Lyons’ who killed over 4,000 French partisans and deported 7,000 more when he was the Gestapo chief in Lyons during World War II. Noem has also proudly admitted that she shot her recalcitrant pets and threw their bodies into a gravel pit. She was the boss of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police, the masked thugs who have been terrorising immigrants in the US. Even the Gestapo did not wear masks.

Newly-wed women in Nazi Germany received free copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which outlined his ideology and goals for a unified, racially pure, militaristic, and hegemonic Germany – a nation far removed from the one utterly humiliated by the terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed at the end of World War I. Hitler wanted to make Germany great again.

The ideology and the goals to make America great again are clearly spelt out in the documents of Project 2025 and Agenda 47, modern variants of Mein Kampf, if you will. The vision of the authors who currently serve in the Trump administration is an America which is a male-dominated, Christian, capitalist, white society.

Make Germany great again didn’t work all that well, did it?

The writer is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.