Assuming, arguendo, that Dat Guy decides to follow the Fascist’s Handbook that Steve Bannon has written in his own smeared feces on the dungeon walls of Breitbart HQ, he’s going to have to not just crush his dissent, but crush other people he may not dislike but finds inconvenient.

In the rough and tumble politics of post-WWI Germany, Hitler’s rise in the German Worker’s Party (which he later renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party i.e. “Nazis”) was concurrent with several of his Munich Army buddies organizing to provide “meeting security.” Borrowing the name Storm Troops (German abbreviation SA) from shock detachments formed by the German Army during the Great War, the SA (aka Brownshirts) brawled with other parties’ thugs, cracked heads of dissenters, and beat up “undesirables.”

Sound familiar?

As the Nazi Party grew in size and organization, so too did the SA under the command of several professional officers, who imposed a military order that Hitler found pleasing. Hitlers “Praetorian Guard” – the SS – was originally a detachment under the SA. The Hilter Youth also began as an SA group. By the time Hitler had assumed power in the mid-1930s, the SA was 30 times the size of the professional German Army. Along with manpower, they also had more munitions and transport than that allowed the Army by the Treaty of Versailles. The SA leader, Ernst Rohm, was demanding that the military be turned over to him, and that the full revolution had not yet come.

Most of the SA members were from the working class and actually believed in the “Socialist” part of the party name. Members of the SS, and other influential groups, were middle or upper class. They, along with the officer class, convinced Hitler that the SA was a threat to order, to Germany and to him.

So Hitler invited Rohm and dozens of other SA leaders to a meeting at a hotel. All were arrested and/or killed at the hotel or on their way.   This night, June 30, 1934, is called “The Night of the Long Knives.”

The middle class was happy – “order” had been restored.

The SS was happy – the way had been cleared for them to be the terribly efficient enforcers throughout the Reich.

The wealthy industrialists were happy – no longer was “Socialism” anything more than a propagandist’s word.

The officer class was happy – the military remained under their control, and would eventually absorb all the SA – i.e. the working class – into the Army for WWII.

And Hitler was happy – a powerful ally who wanted more than he was willing to give, and who was in a position to take it all from him, had been utterly neutralized. Brutality had been masked and hidden in dark rooms and relocated to remote camps. With a thin veneer of diplomacy, brutality now stalked the drawing rooms of the European capitals, like the Masque of the Red Death.

Today, in America, pay attention to what happens to organizations like the militias, and the Klan, and those knuckleheads who heil their heads off for Dat Guy. If they get taken down – hard! – by Dat Guy’s Justice Department, to the approbation of all, it might not necessarily be a good thing.

It might not even be a bad thing.

It might just be the start of a much, much worse thing.