“The SA men are the first men in the party,” Aldof Hitler told his opponent, the private prosecutor Hans Litten in 1931. Then, in answer to Kurt Ohnesorge, the judge who moderated the hearing, Hitler said that the “red murderers” of the left were the real problem: “If an SA man really oversteps the boundary of self-defence, you can’t hold a man responsible for that.”
Compare this to Donald Trump signalling to his base. During Tuesday’s presidential debate, he was asked: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacist and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence?”
He answered, “I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” He continued: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Then came the justification: “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left. Because this is not a rightwing problem, this is a leftwing problem.”
Trump is wrong to pretend that the left is responsible for the violence on America’s streets. Between 1 January 1994 and 8 May 2020, white supremacists and other rightwing extremists in the US carried out attacks that left 329 people dead. In the same period, a single attack staged by an anti-fascist resulted in a killing.
