| The USA is a Model for the World (of intolerance that is) |  |
As a Latvian who was forced out of his country by the of the Nazis I am alarmed at the recurrence of intolerance here. But intolerance is part of America’s culture but few recognize its dangers.
By John Freivalds
Minneapolis Star Tribune
As much as we like to regard our country as a shining welcoming light on the hill beaming out “love between our brothers and our sisters” as Peter, Paul and Mary sang in If I Had a Hammer, truth is that the USA always has had a dark underside from its very beginning. And every so often that dark underside appears, dredged up by the recurring demagogue of the times, and overwhelms our better angels.
The issue of slavery is raised today in teaching, but few know that the USA segregation policies served as a model for the Nazis in Germany to follow. Yep, it is true. So, the parades and violence of the Charlottesville riots and storming the US Capitol by the Proud Boys are repeats of what the Nazis did in Germany.
Today’s Neo-Nazis are not an aberration. They have always been there smoldering as former President Trump’s “base” which media pollsters deemed “less educated white males” and it took Trump’s rhetoric and misinformation to awaken them. The base has felt disenfranchised from mainstream America and fear that dark-skinned people are now a majority and will take away their guns.
All you must do is read James Q. Whitman’s 2017 well-researched book Hitler’s American Model which examines how Hitler’s Third Reich found sustenance for its race-based initiatives in American law. In fact, Nazi Germany sent 45 lawyers to the US in 1935 to study American segregation laws. They just were amazed at US legislation. Whitman notes:” this went beyond segregation governing America Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations and prohibitions against miscegenation and some 30 states. No other county, not even South Africa, possesses a comparably developed set of relevant laws. “In the 1930 Americans were more concerned about the threat of communism than fascism and all Nazis of different shapes and sizes were welcome. The Proud Boys of the time were called Silver Shirts and served as a base for a Nazi spy network that Hitler tried to set up to eventually topple the government. He chose Los Angeles as a place to begin.
Steven Ross author of the Pulitzer Prize 2017 finalist book Hitler in Los Angeles relates “For Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels no American City was more important to the cause than Los Angeles home to what he called the world’s greatest propaganda machine.
Only the Jewish population in this country was alarmed as at that time many people in the US were anti-Semitic. Many called Roosevelt’s economic programs the “Jew deal.” This was before the World War II and the Holocaust. And since we eventually went to war against the Nazis this past relationship is forgotten.
In 1935 the Nazis passed their infamous two laws (The Reich Citizenship Law and The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor) collectively known as the Nuremberg Laws which defined a person’s place in the Nazi racial superstructure. But the Nazi’s had a tough time figuring out who was what. Whitman writes: “The Nazi’s looked to America and how American jurisprudence classified race. Controversial rule stipulated that anyone with any Black ancestry was legally Black and could not marry a white person. Laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American . . . Virginia even had a Pocahontas exemption for prominent white families who claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.”
This story does not end with the Nazis, former President Trump is taking America’s expertise in intolerance overseas. He is behind Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil who is behind in the polls to win reelection and is accordingly claiming that the next election is rigged. The New Republic writes
now attempting to link events in Brazil to the broader network of fantastical delusions, resentments, and outrages that fuel the Trump base and, by extension, much of the Republican Party. Bolsonaro—with Bannon apparently on his side—wants to make Brazil the next MAGA battleground.”
The only good news in all this is that the US and the world will eventually right itself and for at least two generations we will have peace. But we, of course, won’t be around to taste all of it.