MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, February 2026 - History does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme — and when it does, those who fail to recognize the meter pay with their freedom, and sometimes their lives.

Consider the following facts: In 1904, in what is now Namibia, a German general named Lothar von Trotha issued a document called the Vernichtungsbefehl — the Extermination Order.

He drove eighty thousand Herero and Nama people into the desert, poisoned their water wells, and shot those who returned.

The survivors were herded into concentration camps where they were worked to death, starved, and used for medical experiments. Their skulls were shipped to German universities.

The scientist who received those skulls, Eugen Fischer, used them to build a theory of racial hierarchy. Adolf Hitler read Fischer's work in prison and incorporated it into Mein Kampf.

Fischer later mentored Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz. The race laws first enacted in colonial Namibia in 1905 became the direct template for Germany's Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935.

This is not a metaphor. This is not hyperbole. This is a documented, scholarly-verified, legally significant chain of causation. And it matters today — because the methods, the language, and the ideology are visible once again in the most powerful office on earth.

Before they build the camps, they build the language. Before they issue the orders, they test the silence.

I. The German Heritage and the Ideology That Traveled With It

Donald Trump's grandfather Freidrich Trump.
Donald Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Trump, emigrated from Kallstadt, Bavaria, Germany to the United States in 1902 — the very year that Kaiser Wilhelm II dispatched General von Trotha to Namibia with orders to crush the Herero rebellion by any means necessary.

Friedrich returned briefly to Germany before permanently settling his family in America.

The ideological atmosphere he left behind — and carried traces of — was one in which racial hierarchy was not fringe politics but state doctrine, imperial policy, and scientific consensus.

Trump's father, Fred Trump, carried that legacy forward. In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, New York — a documented historical fact reported by multiple news organizations and confirmed by arrest records.

The KKK of the 1920s was not merely a fringe terrorist organisation; it was a mass movement with millions of members, openly aligned with white supremacist ideology and the explicit goal of racial domination.

Donald Trump grew up in that household. He grew up in that world. And when we examine his words and actions as a political figure, we are not dealing with coincidence. We are dealing with formation.

II. The Language: Where the Evidence Is Irrefutable

Responsible journalism does not traffic in speculation. It presents evidence and allows readers to reach their own conclusions. The evidence here is damning.

Trump's first wife, Ivana Trump, stated under oath in divorce proceedings that Donald Trump kept a volume of Hitler's collected speeches beside his bed.

The book, titled My New Order, was confirmed by multiple associates, including Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen.

In December 2023, at a campaign rally, Trump described migrants as people who are "poisoning the blood of our country." This phrase — poisoning the blood — does not appear in the ordinary vocabulary of American political discourse.

It does appear, virtually verbatim, in Mein Kampf, where Hitler describes Jewish people as poisoning Aryan blood. The Trump campaign did not apologize for the phrasing. They doubled down.

Trump has referred to migrants as "animals" and "not people." He has described immigration as an "invasion."

He has called political opponents "vermin" — a word with a specific and documented history in the preparatory language of genocide.

When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum catalogues the warning signs of genocidal escalation, dehumanising language is listed as an early and critical stage. Scholars of mass atrocity have said so publicly and on record.

This is not analysis from political opponents — it is the professional assessment of those whose life's work is preventing the next Holocaust.

Dehumanisation is not the end point of genocide. It is the starting gun.

III. The Camps: Not a Metaphor, a Classification

During Trump's first administration, the United States government separated thousands of children from their parents at the southern border under a policy formally known as Zero Tolerance. Children were held in cages, in facilities without adequate food, sanitation, or medical care. Congressional representatives who visited described scenes of deliberate degradation.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term concentration camps to describe these facilities. She was widely criticised. But the historian Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps — a definitive scholarly work on the subject — confirmed that the classification was historically accurate. The United Nations human rights apparatus raised formal concerns.

Shark Island, off the coast of Lüderitz, was arguably the world's first death camp in the modern sense. Prisoners were worked to death, starved systematically, subjected to medical experiments, and executed. The death rate exceeded 75% in some camps.
Shark Island, off the coast of Lüderitz, was arguably the world's first death camp in the modern sense. Prisoners were worked to death, starved systematically, subjected to medical experiments, and executed. The death rate exceeded 75% in some camps.
The anatomy of a concentration camp is not defined by gas chambers — that is the end stage, not the definition. A concentration camp is defined by the mass detention of a civilian population, stripped of legal rights, held in degrading conditions, for reasons of ethnicity, nationality, or perceived group membership.

By that scholarly and historical definition, what was built on the southern border of the United States qualifies.

Under Trump's second administration, proposals for mass detention facilities holding hundreds of thousands of people — to be administered by the military — are being actively developed. The infrastructure is being built. The legal frameworks are being constructed. The language has already been deployed.

Von Trotha did not wake up one morning and issue the Vernichtungsbefehl. He built toward it. He dehumanised first. He isolated the population. He stripped them of legal protection. He constructed the administrative machinery. And then he signed the order. We are watching that process in real time.

IV. The Method: Bureaucratic Evil and the Illusion of Legality

One of the most important — and most misunderstood — lessons of history's great atrocities is that they were not conducted by screaming mobs alone. They were conducted by lawyers, administrators, bureaucrats, and generals operating within legal frameworks they had constructed for the purpose.

Von Trotha's extermination order was a legal military document. Hitler's persecution of Jewish people proceeded through the Nuremberg Laws — Acts of Parliament. The Holocaust was administered by the German civil service. Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil: the capacity of ordinary institutional processes to become instruments of extraordinary horror.

Trump's methodology follows this same architecture. The Muslim ban was an Executive Order. Family separation was a legal directive. The current mass deportation campaign proceeds through emergency declarations, military deployment orders, and expedited removal processes — all signed documents, all bureaucratically processed, all given the appearance of administrative normalcy.

This is precisely how tyranny advances in modern states: not with a sudden coup, but with a thousand small legalities, each seemingly defensible in isolation, all pointing in the same direction.

The distance between an Executive Order and an Extermination Order is shorter than civilisation would like to believe.

V. The Dismantling: Institutions Are Not Accidents

Kaiser Wilhelm II systematically weakened the Reichstag. Hitler dissolved it. Von Trotha bypassed civilian oversight entirely — his extermination order was issued over the explicit objections of the civilian colonial administration, and the Kaiser backed the general over the administrators.

Trump has attacked the judiciary with unprecedented ferocity, attempting to override court orders and declaring judges who ruled against him enemies of the state. He has called the free press "the enemy of the people" — a phrase with a specific and documented history in totalitarian propaganda. He has undermined the intelligence community, purged the military of independent voices, used presidential pardons to protect co-conspirators, and declared himself immune from prosecution.

He has stated openly, in public, that he considers himself above the law. He has suggested that the Constitution should be "terminated" to allow him to retake power. These are not the frustrated outbursts of a man who lost an election. They are the stated programme of a man who does not believe in the system he has been elected to lead.

The international community must reckon with what it is watching. The Caribbean must reckon with it. When the most powerful military and economic force in human history begins dismantling the institutional constraints on executive power, every small nation that relies on international law, multilateral agreements, and the rules-based order is in danger.

VI. Why This Matters for the Caribbean

The Caribbean's historical relationship with imperial power is not abstract. It is lived in our bodies, our languages, our borders, our economies, and our constitutions. We are the descendants of people who were told they did not matter — by the same ideological tradition that told the Herero and Nama they did not matter, that told Jewish people they did not matter.

When the United States moves toward authoritarian governance, Caribbean nations lose the protection of a rules-based international order. Bilateral agreements become meaningless. Regional sovereignty becomes negotiable. The diplomatic architecture that gives small nations a voice in global affairs begins to erode.

We have already seen the signals. Trump's administration has threatened Caribbean nations with sanctions, tariffs, and military pressure over matters of sovereign policy. It has treated the Caribbean as a backyard rather than a community of independent states. It has deployed the language of empire — our hemisphere, our interests — without the courtesy of consultation.

The question before Caribbean governments, Caribbean civil society, and the Caribbean people is not whether Donald Trump is precisely like Adolf Hitler. That question, framed that way, allows dismissal. The question is: do the methods match? Does the trajectory match? Does the language match? Does the historical pattern match? The answer, documented fact by documented fact, is yes.

We do not wait for the camps to be full before we name what is being built.

Conclusion: The Obligation of Those Who See Clearly

General von Trotha poisoned the wells. He did not do so because he was insane. He did so because his ideology told him the Herero were not fully human, that their land was needed for Germanic settlement, and that no institution or law would hold him accountable.

Hitler built the ovens. He did not do so in secret, or in isolation, or without a roadmap. He built them at the end of a long road that was paved with dehumanising language, legal frameworks that stripped targeted groups of rights, concentration camps, and the systematic dismantling of independent institutions.

Donald Trump has told us who he is. He has shown us what he reads. He has demonstrated what methods he is willing to use. He has recruited around him a circle of advisors whose ideological commitments are not hidden.

The leaders of small nations, the journalists of conscience, the historians of mass atrocity — all have an obligation not to be quiet when the pattern is this clear. Not to wait for certainty when the cost of being wrong is measured in human lives.

History does not offer second chances to those who saw what was coming and chose silence because the moment was not yet beyond doubt.

The moment is now. The pattern is clear. And the world is watching to see who will say so.

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