How US Race Laws Inspired Nazism

As much as Americans like to think of Germany’s Nazism as a foreign evil, Adolf Hitler and his henchmen drew inspiration and guidance from U.S. race laws, as documented in a new book, reviewed by David Swanson.

By David Swanson

James Q. Whitman’s new book is called Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. It is understated and over-documented, difficult to argue with. No doubt some will try.

Post card photo of the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie in Duluth, Minnesota, June 15. 1920.

In cartoonish U.S. historical understanding, the United States is, was, and ever shall be a force for good, whereas Nazism arose in a distant, isolated land that lacked any connection to other societies. In a cartoonish reversal of that understanding, which would make a good straw man for critics of this book, U.S. policies have been identical to Nazism, which simply copied them. Obviously this is not the case.

In reality, as we have long known, the U.S. genocide of Native Americans was a source of inspiration in Nazi discussions of expanding to their east, even referring to Ukrainian Jews as “Indians.” Camps for Native Americans helped inspire camps for Jews. Anti-Semites and eugenicists and racists in the U.S. helped inspire those in Germany, and vice versa.

U.S. bankers invested in the Nazis. U.S. weapons dealers armed them. Nazis borrowed from U.S. propaganda techniques developed in World War I. Admirers in the U.S. of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy attempted at least one coup against President Franklin Roosevelt. The U.S. refused to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees or to help evacuate them from Germany. The State Department turned down Anne Frank’s visa. The coast guard chased a ship of Jews away, sending them back to their fate. Et cetera. We have known all of this.

We have known how the U.S. treated African-Americans, Japanese-Americans and others at the time of World War II, how it experimented on Guatemalans even during the trials of Nazis for human experimentation, and continued to allow human experimentation in the U.S. for many years. And so forth. The good versus evil cartoon was never real.

What Whitman’s book adds to the complex story is an understanding of U.S. influences on the drafting of Nazi race laws. No, there were no U.S. laws in the 1930s establishing mass murder by poison gas in concentration camps. But neither were the Nazis looking for such laws. Nazis lawyers were looking for models of functioning laws on race, laws that effectively defined race in some way despite the obvious scientific difficulties, laws that restricted immigration, citizenship rights, and inter-racial marriage. In the early Twentieth Century, the recognized world leader in such things was the United States.

Troubling Parallels

Whitman quotes from the transcripts of Nazi meetings, internal documents, and published articles and books. There is no doubt of the role that U.S. (state, not just federal) legal models played in the development of the Nuremberg Laws. The 1930s was a time, we should recall, when Jews in Germany and primarily African-Americans in the United States were lynched.

German dictator Adolf Hitler

It was also a time when U.S. immigration laws used national origin as a means of discrimination — something Adolf Hitler praised in Mein Kampf. It was a time of de facto second-class citizenship in the United States for blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and others. Thirty U.S. states had systems of laws banning interracial marriage of various sorts — something the Nazis could find nowhere else and studied in comprehensive detail, among other things for the examples of how the races were defined.

The U.S. had also shown how to conquer territories of undesirables, such as in the Philippines or Puerto Rico, and incorporate them into an empire but not give first-class citizenship rights to the residents. Up until 1930, a U.S. woman could lose her citizenship if she married a non-citizen Asian man.

The most radical of the Nazis, not the moderates, in their deliberations were the advocates for the U.S. models. But even they believed some of the U.S. systems simply went too far. The “one-drop” rule for defining a colored person was considered too harsh, for example, as opposed to defining a Jew as someone with three or more Jewish grandparents (how those grandparents were defined as Jewish is another matter; it was the willingness to ignore logic and science in all such laws that was most of the attraction).

The Nazis also defined as Jewish someone with only two Jewish grandparents who met other criteria. In this broadening the definition of a race to things like behavior and appearance, the U.S. laws were also a model.

One of many U.S. state laws that Nazis examined was this from Maryland: “All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and a member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race . . . [skipping over many variations] . . . are forever prohibited . . . punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months nor more than ten years.”

Jim Crow Inspiration

The Nazis, of course, examined and admired the Jim Crow laws of segregation as well but determined that such a regime would only work against an impoverished oppressed group. German Jews, they reasoned, were too rich and powerful to be segregated. Some of the Nazi lawyers in the 1930s, before Nazi policy had become mass murder, also found the extent of the U.S. segregation laws too extreme.

High-ranking Nazis on trial at Nuremberg

But Nazis admired racist statements from contemporary U.S. pundits and authorities back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Some argued that because segregation was de facto established in the U.S. South despite a Constitution mandating equality, this proved that segregation was a powerful, natural, and inevitable force. In other words, U.S. practice allowed Nazis to more easily think of their own desired practices in the early years of their madness as normal.

In 1935, a week after Hitler had proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, a group of Nazi lawyers sailed to New York to study U.S. law. There, they were protested by Jews but hosted by the New York City Bar Association.

U.S. laws on miscegenation lasted until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling. Vicious and bigoted U.S. policies on immigration and refugees are alive and well today. Whitman examines the U.S. legal tradition, noting much that is to admire in it, but pointing to its political or democratic nature as something that the Nazis found preferable to the inflexibility of an independent judiciary.

To this day, the U.S. elects prosecutors, imposes Nazi-like habitual offender (or three-strikes-you’re-out) sentences, uses the death penalty, employs jailhouse snitches’ testimony in exchange for release, locks up more people than anywhere else on earth, and does so in an extremely racist manner. To this day, racism is alive in U.S. politics. What right-wing dictators admire in Donald Trump’s nation is not all new and not all different from what fascists admired 80 or 90 years ago.

It’s worth repeating the obvious: the United States was not and is not Nazi Germany. And that is a very good thing. But what if a Wall Street coup had succeeded? What if the United States had been bombed flat and faced defeat from abroad while demonizing a domestic scapegoat? Who can really say it couldn’t have or still couldn’t happen here?

Whitman suggests that Germans do not write about foreign influence on Nazism so as not to appear to be shifting blame. For similar reasons many Germans refuse to oppose the slaughter of and mistreatment of Palestinians.

We can fault such positions as going overboard. But why is it that U.S. writers rarely write about U.S. influence on Nazism? Why, for that matter, do we not learn about U.S. crimes in the way that Germans learn about German crimes? It seems to me that it is U.S. culture that has gone the furthest overboard into a sea of denial and self-idolatry.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. [This article originally appeared at http://davidswanson.org/node/5516]

30 comments for “How US Race Laws Inspired Nazism

  1. Mike
    April 26, 2017 at 18:21

    And the Jews continue to be the problem.

  2. Tom
    April 26, 2017 at 12:02

    “The unforgivable sin of Hitler’s Germany was to develop a new economic system by which money was created by the Reichsbank by which the International Bankers were deprived of their usury profits.” Winston Churchill

    “The NSDAP waged a defensive war against Marxists intent on destroying Germany and Europe as we see today with third world weaponized refugees. Hitler’s war was on the banker”s NWO and parasites trying to destroy non white nations. His sin was resisting Judaism.” Judaism is communism, marxism…tyranny. (In America they are called liberals)

    No death gas chambers. No extermination plan. No 6 million gassed. Today, the 3 pillars of the holocaust have been proven false, in court… no official…physical, forensic evidence…only false eyewitness. Germany was fighting to stop communism, which is what we should have done. This is why Patton was murdered, because he realized we were fighting for communism.

    As a thank you to Germany for reinstating Poland as a Suvereign Kingdom in 1916 (freeing Poland which was a Russian province at the time) the Polish Judeobolsheviks answered like this. Concentration-camps in Poland. Right after the Versailles peace-treaty and the re-instatement of Poland as country (by Germany) during the war the following concentration-camps (for Germans) was erected by the new Polish Government: Szcypiorno, in the Posen area, erected 1918 Stralkowo, also in the Posen area, erected 1919

    In these camps about 16.000 Germans were imprisoned. These two camps were the First Concentration-camps in Europe.
    From 1920 to 1939 more than a million Germans were forced to leave Poland, in many cases a hasty escape from abuse.
    During the Pilsudski era further concentration-camps for Germans and Ukrainians, but also for political enemies and Polish opposition were erected in Poland :Bereza Kartuska (Galizien), erected 1926 Brest Litowsk, also erected 1926.

    In the time from March to September 1939, this being before the beginning of the second World War (1/9-1939) more than 50.000 Germans were imprisoned and subject to severe maltreatment.

    The European People saw what was being done to the Christian Ukranian/Russian People by the Jews, even though Americans never paid attention to what was going on. Do you think the actions of the Jewish Bolsheviks just might have influenced Hitler’s view of Jews? These crimes happened as Hitler was climbing the ladder and he knew what the Jews were doing to Christians, unlike America where Jewish Bolshevik actions were not reported.

    The Jews’ 1933 declaration of war on Germany was no mere bluff or empty threat. Jews were an active internal enemy. At home, alert Germans had already seen the bloody Jewish revolution of 1918-1919 that installed the secessionist Judeo-Communist Bavarian Soviet Republic. While Germany was trying to fight World War 1, subversive Jewish revolutionaries like Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, and Eugen Leviné were murdering innocent Germans at home. By the time the Jews formally declared war on Germany in 1933, Germans had already seen millions die in the Jewish-led-and-funded Communist revolutions of the early twentieth century in Russia, Hungary, Bavaria, and elsewhere in Europe. There was a holocaust of over 60 million at the hands of Judeo-Bolshevism, but there was no jewish holocaust.

    “Hitler will have no war (does not want war), but we will force it on him, not this year, but soon.” – The Jewish Emil Ludwig Cohn in Les Annales, June, 1934 (also quoted in his book “The New Holy Alliance”). “We Jews are going to bring a war on Germany.” – David A. Brown, National Chairman, United Jewish Campaign, 1934

    The Führer to the German People: 11 December 1941
    “Already in 1940 it became increasingly clear from month to month that the plans of the men in the Kremlin were aimed at the domination, and thus the destruction, of all of Europe. I have already told the nation of the build-up of Soviet military power in the East during a period when Germany had only a few divisions in the provinces bordering Soviet Russia. Only a blind person could fail to see that a military build-up of world-historical dimensions was being carried out. And this was not in order to protect something that was being threatened, but rather to attack that which seemed incapable of defense … I may say this today: If the wave of more than 20,000 tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of artillery pieces, along with more than 10,000 airplanes, had not been kept from being set into motion against the Reich, Europe would have been lost.”

    “Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a Jew or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or Hebrew.” Jew Almanac 1980.

    “The Communist soul is the soul of Judaism. Hence it follows that, just as in the Russian revolution the triumph of Communism was the triumph of Judaism, so also in the triumph of fascism will triumph Judaism.”
    ~ Rabbi Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and Humanity, p. 143-144

    Holocaust myth was used to dupe Jews to establish a “national homeland.” in Palestine. In 1897 the Rothschilds found the Zionist Congress and arranged its first meeting in Munich. This was rearranged for Basle, Switzerland and took place on 29 August. The meeting was chaired by Theodor Herzl, who latter stated in his diaries: “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews… become worse… this will assist in realization of our plans…I have an excellent idea… I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth…The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends.”

    “You have not begun to appreciate the depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the latest Great War, but of every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone.” ~ Marclis Eli Ravage, Century Magazine February, 1926.

    “Anti-Communism is Antisemitism.” ~ Jewish Voice, July ~ August 1941.

    “Some may call it Communism, but I call it what it is: Judaism.” ~ Rabbi Stephen Weiss.

    The threat to liberty is the New World Order and their plan to subjugate the entire planet into a marxist ideology,
    and this enemy is already within the gates. Our destruction will not come from some outside source…it will be from within.

    “the leader of the German people has no doubt in his mind that the Jewish problem is the center of all problems, not merely in Germany, but in the world. It is useless to dismiss this as an illusion, because if it is, it demands explanation. But it is no illusion. It is the truth. Hitler’s declaration that the Jewish consciousness is poison to the Aryan races is the deepest insight that the Western world has yet achieved in its own nature; and his capacity to realize this is the proof of his genius” (p.199) Rabbi Harry Waton “A Program for the Jews and An Answer to All Anti-Semites: A Program for Humanity” 1939

    If you don’t know who the enemy is, you won’t know which way to point the revolution.
    NWO Communism by the Backdoor by Dennis Wise…worth the watch.

    • M.E.C.A.A.
      April 26, 2017 at 20:00

      Yes, yes, Judaism is pernicious, and its people are a menace to the world. Still, this is not enough to show that the Hitlerists were innocent victims. Nor is there good reason to promote the idea that there was no mass killing of Jews by the NSDAP, i.e. no Holocaust. If there was such a mass homicide of the Jews, it should be celebrated. If not, the Hitlerists deserve a doubling of our contempt for having accomplished so little in exchange for the destruction which they brought upon Germany.

      It’s by the way that Hitler wasn’t elected chancellor of Germany, as is alleged at 4:24 in Part I of “Communism By The Backdoor”. That popular notion, spread far and wide by both laboring kooks and professional historians (e.g. Jacques Barzun) betrays a risible ignorance of German government of the 1930’s, and of ironic Jewish culpability for the rise of Hitler. In fact, Hitler was appointed chancellor by the president, Paul von Hindenburg. The reason for this method was the constitution of the Weimar republic, so called, which was foisted upon Germany in no small part because of Jewish political activism. One Jew in particular left so many fingerprints on the Weimar constitution that he has been called the father of the Weimar republic. That Jew’s name is Hugo Preuss, and it was through his gift to the German people that Hindenburg was empowered to appoint Hitler. It usually goes unnoticed that if the old system had been substantially preserved after the Great War, the central government of Germany would have remained much less powerful than it was made by the Jews under their precious republic. But the Jewish do-gooder always knows better. Thus did the new republic concentrate control over welfare statism, and with that expense comes the need for fiscal control, too. The Jew republic also led to another great irony of the dread Shoah, namely, that the Austrian rabble rouser from the lower classes was appointed as chancellor thanks to the Jews. The Kaiser would never have gotten away with that.

      Indeed, I’m saying that the Jews brought the Shoah upon theirselves, and Hugo Preuss should be celebrated as its first hero even though he died many years before the Shaoh began. We should not hesitate to celebrate these ironic facts next year when the Jew celebrates “Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah” aka “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day”.

  3. Darrin Rychlak
    April 25, 2017 at 07:30

    US investors, like the Bush family, coupled with British investors (the Windsors) financed the German economic miracle after WWI. Beyond the riches garnered from slave labor and a desperate German workforce, the moneyed elites, Monetary Fascists, created a bulwark against Communism…against sharing the wealth. That is enough American influence for my taste.

  4. Evangelista
    April 24, 2017 at 21:22

    “In cartoonish U.S. historical understanding”…”Nazis admired racist statements from contemporary U.S. pundits and authorities back at least to Thomas Jefferson”…”the U.S. genocide of Native Americans was a source of inspiration in Nazi discussions”…and…”…a group of Nazi lawyers sailed to New York to study U.S. law”…

    As you can see, it is not difficult to write garbage that is…” understated and over-documented [and] difficult to argue with”.

    The garbage is propaganda.

    What defines the propaganda Swanson touts propaganda?

    Most readily and immediately obviously, words like “inspired” and “admired”, perspectival confinement to single focus, with a single ‘devil’ representing the assigned ‘evil’ and being provided as sole example.

    ‘Racism’ never existed before the United States bloomed into existence blossoming racism colored (no pun intended) laws? Laws for succeeding governments yearning to bloom racism to ‘buy’, root, stem and branch and plant in their own gardens-at-law?

    And to justify imposing racist differentiations on Jews?

    Jesus Christ in Samaria! Doesn’t anybody read Judeo-Christian Scriptures anymore?

    Have the Jewish invader genocides of people after people in their clearing of Canaan for their own occupation, ordered by their God, who punished insufficient aggression and incompleteness, disobedient sparing of even dumb animals God-Ordered slaughtered, been forgotten? Been written out of records?

    Does no one read even United States history anymore?

    Is it believed, today, that United States racism sprang full-grown from the thigh of Zeus, like Athene is assigned to have in some mythologies?

    Has some kind of blank-wall-of-stupidity curtain been drawn across, with prohibition to look behind, to make-disappear the Biblical-Example justification for Euros’ genocides of the ‘New-Canaanites of America’ damned to extinction by ‘Will of God’?

    And how did the British, French and Belgian (to say nothing of Spanish) examples of racism, racial division, laws against mixture and justification of genocides, applied and carried out from Albi to Africa and across India, Oceania, Australia and China get disappeared?

    If someone wants to read German Nazi-era history, they need to read it for what it says, not for what they want to say and make extractions from Nazi-era writings justify.

    They need to kick words like “inspired” and “admired” out of their vocabularies for a start, right at the bebinning: They next deed to learn to confine “Nazi” to Nazis, and recognize that not all in any geographic or political division of real estate are of the political party that may, at a given time in a nation’s history, control the nation.

    They need to develop sufficient objectivity to recognize the difference between inspiration and justification, between admiration for and adoption of. The Nazi-era legal theoreticians were not seeking inspirations or looking for admirable examples when they were combing traditions outside German traditions; they were looking for justifications. They were looking for others’ examples so they could say, “We did invent this; this is not something only we do, or did: We are only following your, and others’ examples.”

    That is what happened in twentieth century history. What happens in Whitman’s and Swanson’s propaganda is their own purpose-colored bullshit.

  5. Oz
    April 24, 2017 at 10:27

    The LaRouche movement documented all of this very thoroughly back in the 1980s.

  6. Brad Owen
    April 23, 2017 at 09:41

    Hitler was inspired by the Confederacy (CSA). Bismarck was inspired by Lincoln and his economists Henry Carey and Friedrich List. Edward VII worked very hard to get him removed from office, so that WWI could proceed, and end Bismark’s successful demonstration of American System of Political Economy. The effort led into WWII. Such was Lincoln’s American influence upon the World (also influenced Dr. Sun Yat Sen of China, now manifesting as Xi’s New Silk Road).

  7. April 23, 2017 at 03:00

    Just one correction. The US did not refuse Jewish refugees from Europe. In fact, both Roosevelt and Truman proposed such plans (e.g., the Stratton Bill), but these were blocked by the the Zionist movement which wanted all Jewish refugees diverted to Palestine. (see http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=11016.0;wap2)

    • April 23, 2017 at 09:13

      FDR was president, not Truman. FDR blocked legislation in committee.

      • April 24, 2017 at 01:04

        Hey, Dresser, where do you get your Historical “Facts” from?
        The American “Sea Of Denial” ????

  8. pete22
    April 23, 2017 at 00:50

    Many of those Nazi eugenic scientists came to the US under Operation Paperclip or reentered German scientific mainstream. Forced sterilizations or targeted voluntary sterilization (eg non profits offering money to poor, minorities or drug users in return for sterilization) into the 1970’s.

    Eugenics just renamed themselves . . For example, the Human Betterment League of North Carolina changed its name to the Human Genetics League of North Carolina in 1984.

    The Annals of Eugenics became the Annals of Human Genetics and is now a distinguished and purely scientific publication. The University College of London’s Galton Chair of Eugenics became the Chair of Genetics. The university’s Galton Eugenics Laboratory became the Galton Laboratory of the Department of Genetics. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Galton Institute.

    Diseases that target genetically susceptible, vaccines that reduce fertility rates in 3rd world countries and increased economic costs of having children in developed countries to do the same, unsafe /untested medications and GMO foods, proliferation of illegal drugs to spread disease, war on drugs to incarcerate young men, poverty and costly health care to slow increases in life expectancy , economic and military wars, immigration policies, etc are all tools of the new eugenics.

    Its working. Global population growth is expected to decline to 1 percent in 2020 the lowest rate since the 1950s. By 2050, the global population growth rate will be below 0.5 percent , bringing us back to 17th and 18th century figures. US and European native population growth in recent years is negative (excluding immigration) and life expectancy in US is declining.

  9. April 22, 2017 at 21:35

    The 13th amendment had a BIG loophole:

    Text:

    Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, ***except as a punishment for crime*** whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

    Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text

    So the South legislated all sorts of nit-picky laws — never enforced against whites — to convict blacks in large numbers (“vagrancy” being one) to keep blacks enslaved until ca. 1945.

    These neo-slaves lived and worked (such as in coal mines) in utterly appalling and dangerous conditions and the “slavemasters” did not much care if they died because these neo-slaves were so easily replaced (whereas antebellum slavemasters, while poorly treating their “property,” did not want their “property” to die (a slave cost on the order of $30 000 in today’s dollars)).

    This all-but-forgotten US history is extensively documented in the book (and documentary):

    Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_by_Another_Name

    So all that Civil War carnage accomplished next to nothing.

    It wasn’t until WW II that the federal government could be bothered to take this seriously. The concern then was that Japan and Germany would “tell the world” about it.

    So, quite inadvertently, the Nazis and Imperial Japan freed the slaves.

  10. Irene
    April 22, 2017 at 19:44

    As Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”

  11. Adrian Engler
    April 22, 2017 at 18:24

    There are certainly some parallels, and in the first half of the 20st century, ideas of racism and eugenics were generally more widespread, both in the United States and in imperialist European colonial powers. The Nazis could build their more extreme ideology on elements that had significant support in other countries, as well.

    However, slavery and Jim Crow have many distinctively American characteristics, and while antisemitism was widespread in many countries, the systematic attempt by Nazi to exterminate Jews went far beyond racist and discriminatory policies in other countries.

    There is another parallelism that could be more significant – the genocide of Native Americans and the Nazi idea of Lebensraum for the German people in the East, which would have involved planned mass starvings of the Eastern European population in order to create space for Germans after a German victory. The historian Timothy Snyder shows that the Nazi’s interpretation of the success of White people in North America against the indigenous peoples was one of the sources of the ideology about German Lebensraum in the East.

    America’s Manifest Destiny was a model for the eastward expansion in Hitler’s ideology: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/03/nazi_germany_s_american_dream_hitler_modeled_his_concept_of_racial_struggle.html

    • April 24, 2017 at 00:54

      THANK YOU, Adrian Engler, For your Important Comment about Manifest Destiny
      and the Nazis !!!!!!!

  12. Bill Bodden
    April 22, 2017 at 17:51

    We can fault such positions as going overboard. But why is it that U.S. writers rarely write about U.S. influence on Nazism? Why, for that matter, do we not learn about U.S. crimes in the way that Germans learn about German crimes? It seems to me that it is U.S. culture that has gone the furthest overboard into a sea of denial and self-idolatry.

    It is part of an American tradition of hypocrisy established by the slave owners who wrote into the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    • April 24, 2017 at 00:49

      Right You Are, Bill Bodden !!!!!!!

    • deang
      April 24, 2017 at 04:05

      Also, one suspects that the Germans would not be learning about their German crimes had they not lost that war. The US has yet to really lose a war, to lose in a way that devastates their own land; to wit: the US ostensibly lost to Vietnam in the 1970s, but it was the Vietnamese (and Laotians, and Cambodians) who had their land destroyed in the process, not the supposed loser, the US. US carcinogens and bomblets are still killing Vietnamese in their own country to this day, in fact, with no remorse from the US. If the US does ever both lose a war and have its land destroyed – and that doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon – Americans may finally have the humility to examine their own behavior, but I see no signs of that in the American character at present.

      • Fernando
        April 24, 2017 at 12:25

        That rethoric about Vietnam is always laughable and mostly in 2017. Every time i read this kind of thought one have to ask if the Americans fought alone against the jungle or ghosts? Reading your words people might get the impression that communist north Vietnam were and still is made of nothing but kindness. No one would’ve died from the communist regime if they were to be left alone and simply impose their ideology (like in the end happened). As absurd it might sound must i remind you that not every Vietnam person was communist and they fought for their right not to be. You might consider that the USA shouldn’t have intervened in Vietnam but far to many people would be dead by a totalitarian regime that surely provoques poverty and death even today. It’s not only the carcinogens and bomblets!

  13. April 22, 2017 at 17:31

    “It’s worth repeating the obvious: the United States was not and is not Nazi Germany. And that is a very good thing.”

    If the US was more like Nazi Germany there would be universal health care, and Thomas L. Friedman would not be publishing his usual rubbish.

    • April 23, 2017 at 09:12

      What’s your definition of universal. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

      • April 24, 2017 at 04:17

        “Universal Healthcare”, as in every eligible citizen is entitled to see a doctor, and be treated, and the state pays the doctor’s salary, or commission for services. In countries who choose to take advantage of the idea, the state sets the prices too.
        I understand how this is difficult for US’ans to grasp, but if you keep at it, in a few generations you might start to see it. That is of course if you people do not burn the planet first.

        • M.E.C.A.A.
          April 26, 2017 at 18:08

          Thank you for the reminder that the NSDAP was basically a communist party for nationalistic German anticapitalists.

  14. D5-5
    April 22, 2017 at 16:38

    “It seems to me that it is US culture that has gone the furthest overboard into a sea of denial and self-idolatry.”

    Of course the significance in this article points directly to today’s manifestations of the same phenomenon of racist supremacism in our foreign policy.

    We all knew of the influence of America on Nazism, so that the point of this piece is to question what is the connection to today. This “sea of denial and self-idolatry” is inherently racist and supremacist.

    We could find many examples, from Albright’s comment on how “worth it” it was to sacrifice half a million children in Iraq, to Mr. Obama’s misguided commentary on this country as “the one indispensable nation.”

    It is strangely ironical and ludicrous that a man of such heritage could make such a statement, with no indication of irony or intent to suggest a nation whose mistakes ought to be studied and verified in educational institutions.

    Instead, we have legislators suggesting Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States should be banned from schools.

    We saw it yesterday in the forum on Israel-gate with the trolls coming in to announce the unblemished righteousness of the US with any critics “depraved” etc. etc.

    Sessions is currently trying to whip up resentment and action to take out Assange, and spread toxic intolerance, from the same essential fount of supremacism and denial that the US could possibly be criticized for ANYTHING that it does.

    What significantly applies and feeds “the sea of self-denial and self-idolatry” (which is another way of saying malignant narcissism) is the continuation of US racism and supremacism, hideously mirrored in the first photo of the article, from the continuing governing structure.

    Dropping the MOAB (I have read the approval rate is 70% of the American Public) is another example, immediately sold off and accepted as destroying “rats” in tunnels. The MOAB has a blast radius of one mile. I have also read 160,000 lived in the area of the blast.

    I hope somebody will set me straight with reliable intelligence on just what the damage was from this MOAB on a foreign country that is not threatening the US, except by the US’s own paranoid actions in encouraging blowback.

    • Guest
      April 25, 2017 at 17:55

      D5-5..This from then vice-president George H.W. bush in Aug. ’88 in response to the USS Vincennes’ shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner in a commercial air corridor, killing 290 civilians; “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are”.

  15. historicus
    April 22, 2017 at 16:06

    With all the endless chatter about Nazis these days it behooves us to remember that the Germany government’s policy was the removal of Jews from Germany, not their massacre, and in this project it had the active cooperation of the Zionist movement. Six months after Hitler came to power, the Zionist Federation of Germany, the largest Zionist group in the country, submitted a detailed memorandum to the new government that formally offered Zionist support in “solving” the vexing “Jewish question”, stating, “Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about in the Jewish national group. For the Jewish people, too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance in the shaping of its existence. This means that the egotistical individualism of the liberal era must be overcome and replaced with a sense of community and collective responsibility … We believe it is precisely the new [National Socialist] Germany that can, through bold resoluteness in the handling of the Jewish question, take a decisive step toward overcoming a problem which, in truth, will have to be dealt with by most European peoples …
    It is quite forgotten that the Zionist Federation of Germany applauded the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws forbidding intermarriage of Jews and Gentiles on the same grounds as the nazis, that of preserving the purity of their superior race, and actively worked to accomplish the German government’s resettlement scheme.

    Both Nazism and Zionism arose in tandem from small insignificant social movements, arguing, with equal force, that Jews were an alien and indigestible mass living in the midst of an otherwise pure Aryan population. Both movements contributed to the widespread acceptance of this argument as mid-century approached, and both have to be held responsible for its outcomes. Jewish historian Lenny Brenner has written three excellent books on the Zionist-Nazi collaboration, which culminated in the Haavara Agreement, by which the SS relocated 60,000 German Jews, with all their property, to Palestine. The British government stepped in to sabotage the project by banning further German Jewish emigration to the Palestine Mandate. During the war the British in fact did everything in their power to prevent Jews from leaving German-controlled territory. And it has been completely forgotten that some 200,000 German Jewish refugees were forced into internment camps in Britain for the duration, allegedly because they might be Nazi spies in disguise.

    • Curious
      April 22, 2017 at 22:25

      A good reminder of the past Historicus. Thank you. You could also add the US knew about the trains and the camps as well as the pope in the Catholic Church. People don’t want to believe what actually went on. One can’t hide the deportation of so many people, and I’m including gypsies and the poor and infirm. The US can’t pretend they have the dumbest spies in the world, especially in the 30s.

      As far as the purity of the race, the Zionists fit right in with ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people. Now forgotten, Zionists are often confused with historical Judaism, and they are more of a sect than the Jews of the Old Testament. Another observation in the ethnic cleansing is still prominent in Israel. On TV when a Jewish lady kissed an Arab man it was banned and taken off the air, as an unbelievable sin. I believe this was a simple commercial.

      To listen to the Zionist rabbis they absolutely believe in the ‘purity of the race’ and go to extremes to make that happen. How Arian of them. They learned all the wrong lessons. But they won’t stop.

  16. Ld Elon
    April 22, 2017 at 15:59

    Walking dead is someone you’re murdering ‘coming back to life’.

  17. Ld Elon
    April 22, 2017 at 15:57

    A zombie is a mans description of a victim not dying like they thought the victim would die when being murdered.
    Its a psychological stain of culpable murder intentions.

  18. Ld Elon
    April 22, 2017 at 15:45

    Looks like a fema camp is a racial division camp…
    People would choose to enter if they know they’d be safe.

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