AMERICA- THE TWELVE WARNINGS

 Grant Coleman

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AMERICA- THE TWELVE WARNINGS

There is a book sitting on shelves right now that most people will not read. That is how it always works. The warnings arrive. They are catalogued with precision by serious scholars who spent decades in the archives, who interviewed the survivors and the perpetrators, who built the evidentiary record brick by careful brick. And then the moment arrives when the warnings stop being history. When they become a mirror.

Laurence Rees has spent his career building that mirror. The former head of BBC TV History programmes, author of nine books on the Nazis and the Second World War, winner of the British Book Award for his work on Auschwitz, has now produced what may be his most urgent contribution. The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History is not a polemic. It is not a partisan document. Rees insists, with the discipline of a serious historian, that he offers his twelve warnings as someone who values democracy over dictatorship, in support of neither left nor right. He does not name names. He does not point fingers at specific governments.

He does not need to.

On June 2, 2026, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former White House communications director, did it for him. In a post on X that cut through the noise like a blade, Scaramucci named all twelve chapters of Rees’s book and applied them directly to the United States of America under Donald Trump. He was not being hyperbolic. He said so explicitly. He was, in his own words, grounding his use of the word “fascism” in a historical analysis of what leaders do when they want to be authoritarian. A man who served inside that machine, who watched it operate from the inside, has now told you what it is.

So let us go through the twelve.

1. Spreading Conspiracy Theories

This is where Rees begins. The Nazi project opened with the “stab in the back” mythology, the manufactured lie that Germany had not lost the Great War on the battlefield but had been betrayed from within by Jews and socialists and defeatists. General Erich Ludendorff and the military brass built this fiction deliberately, methodically, to protect themselves from accountability while the politicians were left to absorb the consequences of a defeat the generals had engineered. Hitler inherited the lie and weaponised it. Psychological research, Rees notes, confirms that apparent inconsistencies are not uncommon among committed conspiracy believers. The amygdala responds to fear and hatred before the cortex can intervene. Trump has spent a decade operating on exactly this neuroscience. The election was stolen. The deep state is real. The media is the enemy of the people. The infrastructure of manufactured grievance is identical in structure to what Rees describes. Identical.

2. Using Us Versus Them

Hitler understood, Rees writes, that one of the easiest ways to bond people is to convince them who their enemies are. He understood that the search for enemies must be never-ending, and that if you do not have enemies you need to create them. Immigrants. Trans people. Democrats. Journalists. Judges. Universities. The list refreshes constantly because the mechanism requires a permanent other. You cannot have a movement without a threat. The threat must be existential. The threat must be everywhere. This is not politics. This is a psychological technology applied to mass populations. Rees identified it in the Nazi context. It is operating in real time in the United States.

3. Leading as a Hero

Hitler worked relentlessly to construct an image of certainty and strength because the reality, that he had been a vacillating and inconsequential nobody, was far too devastating to reveal. The heroic self-image required the suppression of any evidence of failure, any admission of weakness, any acknowledgment of error. The cult of the infallible leader is not incidental to fascism. It is structural. Scaramucci noted that Trump wants his name on the US dollar, inside the passport, his face on everything the American people touch when they interact with their own government. Washington would not have done that. Eisenhower would not have done that. Reagan would not. Obama certainly did not. The compulsive need to stamp identity onto the apparatus of state is the behaviour of a man who cannot distinguish himself from the nation he governs. That is not leadership. That is something else entirely.

4. Corrupting Youth

This is one of Rees’s most important warnings. The adolescent brain is structurally vulnerable to radicalisation. The parts of the brain that process novelty and excitement are already shaped before the critical faculties reach full development. Hitler knew this instinctively and built an entire apparatus around it. MAGA has built its own. The pipeline from algorithmic radicalisation to organised youth movements is documented and understood. The pipeline from economic despair to political extremism among young men is real and growing. Scaramucci himself acknowledges the economic engine underneath all of this. In a generation, he has said, America went from aspirational working class families to desperate ones. Desperation is the substrate on which youth radicalisation grows.

5. Conniving with the Elite

The Nazi movement was not a working class uprising against capital. It was a project that secured elite cooperation by promising protection from labour, from communism, from the threat of genuine redistribution. German industrialists funded Hitler. German aristocrats gave him legitimacy. German professionals administered his institutions. The collusion of the wealthy class with authoritarian populism is not a contradiction. It is a recurring historical pattern. The tech oligarchs at the inauguration, the billionaires at Mar-a-Lago, the asset managers threading the needle between democratic norms and profitable access to power, these are not anomalies. They are the pattern.

6. Attacking Human Rights

Rees traces how the erosion of human rights under Nazism proceeded incrementally, each step normalised before the next was taken, each outrage absorbed into the new normal before the subsequent outrage arrived. The executive orders targeting immigrants, the weaponisation of deportation machinery, the legal dismantling of due process protections, the elimination of asylum pathways, these are not policy disagreements. They are the sequential removal of the protections that distinguish a rights-based state from an authoritarian one. Rees’s warning is specific: watch the sequence. Watch what gets dismantled and in what order.

7. Exploiting Faith

The Nazis did not simply tolerate Christianity. They colonised it, hollowed it out, dressed their programme in its language while subordinating its ethics to their ideology. The fusion of MAGA and evangelical Christianity has followed the same logic. God is invoked to sanctify cruelty. Scripture is cited to justify exclusion. The cross and the flag appear together in spaces where the founding documents explicitly kept them apart. This is not religious expression. This is the deployment of faith as an instrument of political authority.

8. Valuing Enemies

Hitler needed enemies because enemies justify everything. They justify surveillance. They justify detention. They justify violence. They justify the suspension of normal rules. A movement that has no enemies has no reason to demand extraordinary powers. Rees makes this explicit. The enemy must be maintained, renewed, escalated. The current American administration has needed enemies in succession: migrants, judges, universities, Europe, Canada, journalists, federal workers, political opponents. The list never shrinks. It grows.

9. Eliminating Resistance

The apparatus of the state was turned against anyone who would not comply. Prosecutors who would not pursue preferred cases were replaced. Generals who would not follow illegal orders were removed. Institutions that maintained independent authority were defunded or dissolved. Rees documents how this elimination of internal resistance was not dramatic and sudden but procedural and persistent. The gutting of the civil service, the firing of inspectors general, the installation of loyalists throughout the administrative architecture, Scaramucci names these directly. Trump’s approach to corruption, he says, is to do everything in the open, making it so ridiculous and inundating that people go numb, and then keep going.

10. Escalating Racism

Rees is precise about something that is often obscured. The racial dimension of Nazism did not begin with genocide. It began with the construction of racial hierarchy as a legitimate category of political organisation, with the codification of differential rights based on ethnic identity, with the gradual normalisation of the idea that some people belong and some people do not. The current administration’s immigration enforcement operates with explicit racial logic. The rhetoric of contamination, invasion, and demographic replacement that circulates openly in MAGA media and in government communications is not metaphor. It is the language Rees catalogues.

11. Killing at a Distance

Among Rees’s most disturbing chapters is his examination of how the Nazi system enabled ordinary people to participate in mass killing by removing them from its immediate reality. The bureaucrat who processed the deportation order did not load the train. The commandant who signed the paperwork did not operate the chamber. Distance, institutional mediation, and the diffusion of moral responsibility allowed people who considered themselves decent to be instruments of atrocity. The drone strike authorised in a bunker. The deportation to a country where the deportee will be killed. The policy that produces mass death without anyone’s hands appearing directly bloodied. Rees is talking about mechanisms, not individuals. The mechanisms are present.

12. Stoking Fear

This is the final chapter and perhaps the master key to all the others. Fear is the substance that makes every other element of the authoritarian playbook possible. Fear of the other. Fear of economic collapse. Fear of cultural displacement. Fear of loss. Fear of weakness. Hitler targeted the amygdala, the part of the brain that immediately processes anxiety, fear, and anger. The only stable emotion, he said, is hate. Fear produces hate reliably. Hate can be directed. It can be organised. It can be made to vote, to march, to look the other way. The daily production of threat narratives by American state media and government communications is not accidental. It is a programme.

Rees closes his book with a warning that should stop every reader cold. The terrible crimes he describes did not happen because the Nazis were German. They happened because the Nazis were human beings. The implication is not comfortable. The implication is that no nation is exempt from these dynamics. No democracy is structurally immune. No population is constitutionally incapable of producing or tolerating what the Nazis produced and what ordinary Germans tolerated.

Scaramucci is not a progressive. He is a Wall Street financier, a former operator of the Trump machine, a man who spent years inside the architecture of power he now describes. He is not making an ideological argument. He is making an architectural one. He is reading from Rees’s twelve chapters and pointing at the present.

The book is not a warning about Germany. It never was.

It’s a warning about America.

P.S. I read the book and highly recommend it!

Sources:

Rees, Laurence. The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. PublicAffairs, 2025.

Scaramucci, Anthony. Post on X (formerly Twitter), June 3, 2026.

Rozsa, Matthew. “President’s former aide cites 12 hallmarks of fascism to explain Trump’s actions.” Alternet, June 2, 2026.

Nagorski, Andrew. Review of The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees. The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2025.

Murphy, David. Review of The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees. Open Letters Review, May 20, 2025.