Trump Campaign Adopts Nazi Iconography
Ali Breland, reporting for Mother Jones:
The fact that the upside red triangle has been an explicit piece of deadly Nazi iconography for seven decades hasn’t deterred Trump’s 2020 campaign from using them in Facebook ads. This week, the campaign started running a series of ads, disparaging Antifa demonstrators and featuring a large, bright red, upside-down triangle. Antifa, is of course, short for anti-fascist. The red triangle was sewn on uniforms of people interned in concentration camps, including anti-fascist political prisoners. Millions of Soviet and Western anti-fascist soldiers died defeating Nazism, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting—it’s absolute madness,” reads one 2020 Trump ad featuring the symbol.
In case you don’t understand the parallels, refer to this chart used by the Third Reich. It specifies which badges should be afixed to the uniforms of concentration camp prisoners to denote the nature of their crimes against the reich. For those of you who haven’t recently brushed up on your German history and German language skills, the word “politisch” in the first column of the chart above the red symbols refers to political prisoners. Political prisoners included a variety of people, including anti-fascists, socialists, communists, and others who were critical of Hitler’s regime.
Image from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, available at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/classification-system-in-nazi-concentration-camps
The similarities are not subtle. The Trump campaign is growing more brazen in their fascism by the day.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company “removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
In the name of giving credit where it’s due, this is one rare example of Facebook doing the right thing by removing the ads. (You should still #deletefacebook, though.) It’s worth pointing out that Facebook’s decision to remove these ads highlights just how egregious they were, given Facebook’s tendency to let Trump get away with things.