Circle of Evil
By Akhilleus
As President Brownshirt continues his very public kissyfacing with Nazis, and more white supremacy marches of hate and violence are planned across the country, it might be instructive to see where the Nazis got some of their most heinous ideas about race in the first place.
Surprise! They got them from America. I guess this is another example of American Exceptionalism. Nazis thought we were exceptionally good at fucking over non-Aryan races. After all, we had our own ethnic cleansing period (Indian Wars) that lasted over 200 years, and had enslaved a completely different race, all at the same time. Whew. That is some serious white supremacy going on there. Where else on earth were there better examples of how to use laws and public policy to screw other human beings of different races?
According to history.com, "'America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,' says [James Q.]Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. 'Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.'
In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany."
The Jim Crow era, you may recall, was a time when most of the now revered monuments to white people stepping black people were erected. Those monuments for which Trump demonstrates such sentiment.
But there was a problem. American laws didn't go far enough. Here's why. Blacks were already poor and oppressed. Jews in Weimar Germany were in much better shape, socially and economically. So, what to do? Who had the answer to this thorny problem?
Again...We did.
"Nazis were more interested in how the U.S. had designated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as 'nationals.'"
And another big plus for Hitler were American miscegenation laws.
"'America had, by a wide margin, the harshest law of this kind,' Whitman says. 'In particular, some of the state laws threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriage. That was something radical Nazis were very eager to do in Germany as well.'"
This was that state's rights thing that Confederates are still up in arms about. The right to screw others (and to put the kibosh on other kinds of screwing). And we're still seeing it in the way wingers have set about destroying voting rights for Americans who might not vote for their approved candidates.
Ohhhh....Nazis loved them some American ideas about race. And we have returned the favor by loving the updating of those ideas as they've been filtered back to the US and which now find approval from the American President.
Everything old (and evil) is new again. And the ideas and concepts about racism that influenced one of the most deadly regimes in world history are being revived and held up the president as models of social engagement.
That's how we roll in Trump's Amerika.
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Reader Comments (2)
Und ... zey alzo like U.S. eugenics laws und praktizes. Forced institutionalization und sterilization vas verry pobular back zen, ja.
Before the Jewish onslaught and after Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference in Geneva, the government established a new code: Twas a crime for a gentile man or woman to marry a Jew (see Akhilleus' reference to our past miscegenation law). Paramount in the code was the stress on protection of the family and this outlawed abortion except if it was a fetus of a mixed race. The plan to establish a pure German race had begun.
And "fake news? Germany took over most of the country's newspapers which was then almost wholly under the control of Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment.
Ring any bells?