#Lügenpresse #history #déjà_vu
"For about a dozen years, the pages of the Münchener Post newspaper were splashed with headlines warning that Adolf Hitler was an existential threat to Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, and calling on the citizenry to stand up against his ambitions for absolute power.
The Post acquired leaked documents from the Nazis’ Munich headquarters, dirt on Adolf Hitler from disgruntled followers, and whatever else they could get their hands on in their dauntless pursuit of der Führer, which lasted from the early 1920s until the Nazi leader brutally shut down the paper after he came to power in 1933.
This epic clash between a despotic madman and a feisty little newspaper run by socialists began playing itself out a century ago. But Hitler’s battles with the Münchener Post are relevant to our own perilous times. The newspaper’s fearlessness is a symbol of how a free press can challenge authoritarianism.
At rallies before his adoring followers, Donald Trump often points at non-MAGA journalists at the event and taunts them with his favorite epithet: “the fake news.”
Like Trump, Hitler had his own pet insults for journalists who exposed his lies. The “lying press” was one of them, which, incidentally, Trump has also used against journalists.
But Hitler had an especially visceral hatred for the Münchener Post, and had specially chosen names for the paper. The 'Poison Kitchen was one of them. Another was the 'Munich Pestilence.'
(. . .)
Donald Trump is using a panoply of means to try to silence his critics in the press: filing defamation lawsuits against ABC News, CBS News, and The Des Moines Register, and threatening others, seeking to cut funding for PBS and NPR, advocating the dismantling of long-standing protections for journalists from libel lawsuits, and giving preferential treatment to sycophantic outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, Breitbart News, Real America’s Voice and The Gateway Pundit, as well as MAGA podcasters strewn across the nation.
So why didn’t Germans heed the warnings of the Münchener Post?"
https://forward.com/opinion/721378/hitler-nazi-trump-journalists-targeting-munchener-post/
