Sarah Nichterlein for BuzzFlash: Trump and Right-Wing Want to Turn "Patriot Prayer" Warrior Killed in Portland Into a Martyr, Just Like Goebbels Did With Hitler Stormtrooper Horst Wessel

September 8, 2020

Horst Wessel, made into a German propaganda martyr, is in this photo of a Nazi stormtrooper unit cerca 1929. (Public Domain)

By Sarah Nichterlein

One of the young men in the photo above is Horst Wessel. He was one of Hitler's stormtroopers, and in 1930 he was shot by two Communists in a dispute over unpaid rent. As he lay in hospital, Joseph Goebbels, who later became the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, was already transforming him into a martyr. A song about him became the marching cry of the Nazi paramilitaries. During the Third Reich, millions of schoolchildren sang that song in the Hitler Youth.

Horst Wessel was no martyr. He was a Nazi organizer and a petty criminal. His girlfriend, the one who hadn’t paid her rent, was a prostitute, and he may have been her pimp.

As a large pro-Trump car caravan made its way into Portland last Saturday night, I heard helicopters overhead. Primed by months of violent clashes between Black Lives Matter protestors and police, I knew something was about to happen, and I looked on local livestream media to find out what it was. The organizers claim that they had planned a parade route that would only tour the highways, but a group led by several truck cabs flying American flags broke off and headed straight downtown, where BLM protesters have congregated most nights for the past few months, largely peacefully.

Even several miles away, I could hear whooping and hollering, the blaring of car horns, and motorcycles loudly revving their engines. The atmosphere was threatening and bristling with violence. Pro-Trump protestors circled downtown Portland for several hours, assaulting BLM demonstrators with paint balls and bear pepper spray. Several times, they came close to running over those who tried to block them.

This was not a “peaceful protest.” It was a deliberate provocation that ended in the death of one of the Trump supporters.

In the days after the death, the founder of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, gave an interview on local TV. Patriot Prayer is an often armed, pro-Trump right-wing group aimed at provoking that engages in violence against protesters. Gibson is slick, handsome, and articulate, and he spoke more in sorrow than in anger about the loss of a friend who he said was “one of the nicest guys I've ever met.”

However, Danielson also held far-right views, was an active member of Patriot Prayer, and attended the caravan action in the same truck as Gibson.

Before Hitler’s seizure of power, there was frequent street fighting between right- and left-wing paramilitaries in German cities. It got worse before national elections, several of which were held a year. Police surveillance and uniform bans did little to stop the tide of violence. Just as the pro-Trump caravan did on Saturday night, the Nazis often deliberately marched into districts where they knew they would be unwelcome in order to provoke a fight that they could use to depict their opponents as unruly and criminal. Just as Joseph Goebbels did so brilliantly with Horst Wessel, Trump and the far right are now turning Danielson into a martyr.

If you know this history, it is painfully clear that the American far right, which has been play-acting from the Nazi playbook for years, is now playing for real. An incident like this helps Trump refocus the election on the issue of law and order, the corner on which he would most like to fight.

I'm sorry for Danielson’s killing, the pain this death is causing Danielson’s friends and family, whose anguish seems real. But we cannot let him be turned into a martyr. He was right by the side of one of the organizers of a provocative far-right action that succeeded in baiting BLM and Antifa into confirming many Americans' perception of them as lawless criminals and murderers. For unknown reasons, Mr. Danielson came back downtown after the caravan was over and seems to have been recognized, leading to a confrontation about which we still know very little. The man suspected of the shooting, Michael Reinoehl, was been killed by police as they attempted to apprehend him on September 3. He had claimed that he was acting in self-defense when Danielson was shot on August 29.

Danielson was not a martyr any more than Horst Wessel was. And we do not need Trump or Patriot Prayer to restore law and order when they are the very ones who have been working so hard to destroy it.