Trump is a neighborhood bully who has claimed the United States (and the world, in his fevered imagination) as his neighborhood. He enjoys hurting people, and he's the perfect fascist.
I want to recommend a few books about what it's like living under fascism.
First is cartoonist Art Spiegelman's two-part account (Maus I and MausII) of his parents' lives in the Third Reich and after their survival. These are graphic histories (as in drawings with dialogue), and Spiegelman's parents' stories are wrenching and moving, as Holocaust stories are. This is one family's story, and there are millions more like it, most of them never told.
Bertolt Brecht's Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (aka The Private Life of the Master Race) contains eighteen short scenes of daily life in a country where you have to be careful what you say. Recent events in the USA involving Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert show us that we are getting closer to the day when more and more people will be afraid to speak out against the Trump regime.
Anton Gill's The Journey Back from Hell tells the stories of individual Holocaust survivors over time. They all feel isolated from anyone who did not share their experience, and many had mental breakdowns in the 1960s and 1970s, after they had rebuilt their lives and had some time to think. The memories came flooding back.
The Lost Childhood: The Complete Memoir, by Yehuda Nir, is different from most Holocaust memoirs I've read. Having received false papers, Nir's family spent the war in Poland pretending to be Catholics. Plenty of adventure in this one.
Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Everybody knows about this book, and it's probably the most read of the books I've listed. Anne Frank's family went into hiding in a very clever way, but somebody ratted them out.
How to Spot a Fascist, by Umberto Eco. This is a short one, with three short essays, the first of which lists his fourteen essential components of fascism: Traditionalism; rejection of modernism; irrationalism; refusal to accept criticism; exploitation of the fear of difference; appeals to a frustrated middle class; obsession with conspiracies; a feeling of humiliation by some enemy's wealth and power; the sense of life as a permanent war; the exploitation of people's need for someone to look down on; a cult of heroism/death; a contempt for women and for nonconformist sexual habits; the leader's definition of the "common will"; the use of "Newspeak."
At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Jean Amery spent time in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, and was not sure it could never happen again, correctly noting that antisemitism didn't go away after the war.
Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi. Levi was an Italian Jew who wrote several books and they are all great. How did one survive in Auschwitz? Read his story.
Gitta Sereny wrote on two broad subjects: the Holocaust and children who committed murder. Her three big books on the Nazi era are Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth; Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience; The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001. In the first book, Sereny tries to get Albert Speer to admit his part in the Holocaust, but he was unable to own up to sharing guilt for crimes against humanity. The second book is about the commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, whom she also interviewed. Sereny did a lot of work after the war to help survivors and refugees, and the third book is her summation of her experiences.
All of these books are very readable, some masterpieces of literature. In our current atmosphere, I don't think the availability of these and other books is guaranteed. If you're of a mind to read any of these, get 'em while you can.
