Mein Kampf
applauded the American South’s Jim Crow laws. Today's Nazi's applaud white nationalism, alt-right and the Confederate flag.
The recent
alliances among neo-Nazis, alt-right, KKK, and white Supremacist groups, is not
surprising. Confederate flags and the trappings of Nazism, (torch light parades, Heil salutes) are not surprising. The alt-right leader Richard Spences organized the Charlottesville demonstration that erupted in violence today (Sat.) They share the same
supremacist approach. Mixing of Confederate flags and Nazism is becoming SOP for the alt-right. However, there is
an even earlier historical connection long hidden.
[I] “Mein
Kampf. . . . He describes the United
States as “the one state” that had made headway toward what he regarded as a
healthy and utterly necessary racist regime. Historians have long sought to
minimize the importance of that passage. But in recent years, archival research
in Germany has shown that the Nazis were keenly focused on Jim Crow segregation
laws, on statutes that criminalized interracial marriage and on other policies
that created second-class citizenship in the United States.
The Yale legal scholar James Q. Whitman
fleshes this out to eerie effect in his new book “Hitler’s American Model:
The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.” He illustrates how
German propagandists sought to normalize the Nazi agenda domestically by
putting forth the United States as a model. They assured the German people that Americans had “racist politics and
policies,” just as Germany did, including “special laws directed against the
Negroes, which limit their voting rights, freedom of movement, and career
possibilities.” Embracing the necessity of lynching, one propagandist wrote:
“What is lynch justice, if not the natural resistance of the Volk to
an alien race that is attempting to gain the upper hand?”
“Hitler’s American Model” shows that
homegrown American racism played a role in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of
1935, which deprived “non-Aryans” of citizenship and the right to marry “true”
Germans. As Mr. Whitman writes, Nuremberg “signaled the full-scale creation of
a racist state in a Germany on the road to the Holocaust.”
,
archival research in Germany has shown that the Nazis were keenly focused on Jim Crow segregation laws, on statutes
that criminalized interracial marriage and on other policies that created
second-class citizenship in the United States.
The Yale legal scholar James Q. Whitman
fleshes this out to eerie effect in his new book “Hitler’s American Model:
The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.” He illustrates how
German propagandists sought to normalize the Nazi agenda domestically by
putting forth the United States as a model. They assured the German people that
Americans had “racist politics and policies,” just as Germany did, including
“special laws directed against the Negroes, which limit their voting rights,
freedom of movement, and career possibilities.” Embracing the necessity of
lynching, one propagandist wrote: “What is lynch justice, if not the natural
resistance of the Volk to an alien race that is attempting to gain the
upper hand?”
“Hitler’s American Model” shows that
homegrown American racism played a role in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of
1935, which deprived “non-Aryans” of citizenship and the right to marry “true”
Germans. As Mr. Whitman writes, Nuremberg “signaled the full-scale creation of
a racist state in a Germany on the road to the Holocaust.”
The mutual admiration lives on today.
No comments:
Post a Comment