“You can do business with Hitler” was a ubiquitous phrase in the 1930s, enough that Douglas Miller, the former Commercial Attaché at the United States Embassy in Berlin, felt the need to write his book You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, arguing that “American businesses should not be involved with Nazi Germany, as several infamously were.”
The extent to which American business facilitated the Nazi rise to power hasn’t so much been lost to time as it’s been deliberately forgotten to avoid dealing honestly with uncomfortable parallels in the present – not just in behavior, but in motive on the part of said businessmen.
So what’s striking about Andreessen and Horowitz's endorsement of Donald Trump is what they’re declaring out loud, and how it’s like a long-arriving, barely-decayed message from the past:
You can do business with Trump.
Jul 26 202435 m