It's time to call Nazis "Nazis"

Even Mike Godwin himself says we should call the Charlottesville marchers Nazis—“again and again.” Much as we prefer to fall back on our native mythology of a perennial civil war, Charlottesville seems less about Gettysburg 1863—or Birmingham 1963—than about Berlin 1932, when street skirmishes between fascists and anti-fascists were symptoms of a dying republic, not a fight to keep the union whole.

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Rather than contradicting that template, the ouster of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and avatar of the white nationalists, eerily evokes events surrounding the Third Reich’s first major crisis, when Adolf Hitler was forced to tame the obstreperous revolutionaries of his base. Night of the Long Knives, meet the no-one-was-killed-in-the-making-of-this-reality-show Trump edition, Night of the Longest Knives the World Has Ever Seen, Believe Me.

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