What Lewis did not anticipate is that local authorities would prove indifferent to — or supportive of — the Nazis and fascists.
Within weeks of going undercover, Lewis’ network of spies discovered a plot to wrest control of armories in San Francisco, L.A. and San Diego — part of a larger plan to take over local governments and carry out a mass execution of Jews. Lewis immediately informed L.A. Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis of the Nazi scheme to seize weapons and, as Lewis warned in a memo later, to “foster a fascist form of government in the United States.”
Lewis was shocked when Davis interrupted him to defend Hitler. The police chief, he noted in the memo, told him: “Germans could not compete economically with the Jews in Germany and had been forced to take the action they did.” The greatest danger the city faced, Davis insisted, was not from Nazis but from communists living in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. As far as Davis was concerned, every communist was a Jew and every Jew a communist.
> I thought it was common knowledge that support for Nazis in America was widespread all the way leading to American involvement in WW2.
It's certainly not common knowledge, and most school history books don't include it (at least when I was in school). They do cover the Jim Crow laws and the KKK but don't make a connection between those and Nazi ideology.
Even less common is knowledge of how much the Nazis themselves were inspired by American style racist laws and organizations:
See also the industrialists who as well as aiding the Nazi's tried to overthrow the US Government in the 1930s:
>In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,
> > A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. ... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.
Not only that, but many policies we now regard as being Nazi were widespread and popular in the West in general. Eugenics, for example, was promoted by all sorts of celebrities, politicians, and everyday people and many Western countries engaged in highly unethical eugenics programs.
To think we fought Nazis because of their ideology is a mistake - the US, the UK, and many other countries weren't that different, in many respects, ideologically. In practice, the Nazis took horrific ideas and industrialized them.
In a way, we have Nazi military imperialism to thank for the fact that many horrible ideas are unacceptable today - otherwise there might never have been a backlash against them.
Not only was there widespread support of the Nazis in America, but the Nazis' views on race were inspired by the "science" of Eugenics, which was also widespread in America, and by the American KKK.
After the war, prominent Nazis were hired by the US government.
Common knowledge? No that chapter was glossed over.
One funny is story is how the US put a trade embargo on Japan (leading to them launching Pearl Harbour attack) while at the same time allowing US companies trade oil and other resources with the Reich. The Nazi blitzkrieg ran on US oil... Greatest generation indeed.
There are two sort of contradictory views of nazism that I was exposed to as a child.
The first one is the “banality of evil” view. The nazis were nothing special. One of many populist and racist parties. One of many hateful ideologies. The only thing that stands them out is the results. They actually won power through weirdness of politics in that time and place. They actually started a massive war (lucky timing). They actually went on the massive genocidal campaign implied by their rhetoric.
Normal people. Normal (if somewhat distasteful) party. Abnormal actions. It’s kind of related to the “one damn thing after another” theory of history.
The other (more intuitive, and unavoidable) view is the pure evil view. Hitler & Eichman were uniquely evil people. The SS were evil people. They had an evil doctrine, evil symbols, evil political methods. Evil resulted. Watch out for this sort of thing. Know the devil when you see her. Never Again!
Anyway, in 1939 I’m not sure nazism stood out as a unique evil different in some way from domestic far right movements like the kkk. It’s historical perspective that gives it the symbolic meaning that shocks us today.
Pure evil can in fact pass for normal, banal politics in certain times and places. That's the problem. Normal, banal people learned not to think thoughts like, "Are we the baddies? We've got skulls on!" and, "But what would I think if they were doing this to me?"
Remember, the late 1930s also had Stalinism, Japanese Imperialism, the British Empire sponsoring things like the Bengali Famine, and various American imperial/colonial efforts as well.
There was a lot of evil to go around.
The proper advice is: know the Evil Impulse when it appears in yourself, and then you can have a good idea of how to spot it in others.
The Jews fleeing the country, the ghettos, the concentration camps had all started. The night of the Long Knives had already happened.
Don't know if they were unique, or worse than the KKK (when the KKK had any power they killed a lot of people). But they were definitely, obviously, way evil.
Not only did it not stand out as especially evil before the beginning of the war, but a lot of politicians/personalities were speaking very highly of Hitler at the time.
Also, he was often seen as the real hope to defeat communism, which on the contrary was immediately called "evil".
To add to your first paragraph, I think that another thing that stands out is that it happened in what was one of the most civilized and culturally evolved countries in the world at the time.
Related is the debate of functionalism vs intentionalism:
The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centers on essentially two questions:
Was there a master plan on the part of Adolf Hitler to launch the Holocaust? Intentionalists argue there was such a plan, while functionalists argue there was not.
Did the initiative for the Holocaust come from above with orders from Adolf Hitler or from below within the ranks of the German bureaucracy? Although neither side disputes the reality of the Holocaust, nor is there serious dispute over the premise that Hitler (as Führer) was personally responsible for encouraging the anti-Semitism that allowed the Holocaust to take place, intentionalists argue the initiative came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
That's a spot-on quote that captures one of the fundamental tensions of US History. Johnson is a enigmatic figure, as he grew up experiencing this, and did great things to bring justice to people, yet had his own personal and policy failings that stand in jarring contrast.
Much of the institutional racial and policy oddities in this country stem from this form of control, which was used to make and keep slavery an institution and keep the lower classes in check. One of the rallying cries of the draft riots (that is uncomfortably close to the modern Trump-ist white nationalist rallying cry) is that slaves were valued more ($1,000 for a slave) than the Irish ($300 to avoid war service) and were on the rise, and that rise would drag down wages when freed slaves flooded New York labor markets.
The rally was organized by the "German American Bund," an organization that Nazi Germany had distanced itself from before the Madison Square Garden rally:
On March 1, 1938 the Nazi government decreed that no Reichsdeutsche [German nationals] could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. This was done both to appease the U.S. and to distance Germany from the Bund, which was increasingly a cause of embarrassment with its rhetoric and actions.
And if you heard Chomsky he describes how growing up there were beer parties in US when Paris fell to the Nazis.
Those things was quickly swept under the rug later, and not talked about much. Also the involvement of American companies in supporting the Nazi effort including Ford and IBM and probably others.
I grew up hearing about Nazis. For the Soviet Union it was _the_ big war, a war of survival basically. Both of my grandfathers fought in the war. One drove them all the way to Berlin. Got wounded by them. I also heard stories from teachers about the horrible atrocities they've experienced. One jarring one was how their Jewish childhood friend was raped, dismembered and buried in the backyard by German soldiers. They watched through the fence in the back of the garden hiding in the bushes.
That is why it is grating to hear everyone use "Nazis" like a joke. "You are such a Nazi", "Everyone who doesn't agree with my political views is a Nazi". "The store clerk is a fascist cause they made me wait too long", etc.
Not too bizarre, both groups were Nationalists, so I presume that they saw that cooperating on their common objective (total racial segregation) was more useful in the long term.
Interestingly, both George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X were assassinated by members of their own parties (a former one in Rockwell's case, though). Sadly, I don't know much else about them.
Horseshoe politics at its finest; when you’re extreme enough, the people like you are those who manage to be equally extreme. By then the underlying ideologies have converged on the same basic notions of rejecting the mainstream and revolution.
At the same time, "the government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few [11,000 out of the 1.2 Million born in Germany and 5 Million with two German parents]. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
The justification of rounding up all ethnic Japanese into camps was "we're at war, we will do anything to protect our country". But that same logic was never applied to the Germans or Italians, even though their countries were bigger threats than Japan.
A government commission found the treatment of ethnic Japanese to have been racially motivated, and actually paid reparations to those that were interned. But even so, this practice was never made illegal.
I find this especially interesting since a certain US President seems to have some strong feelings toward certain ethnicities and religions. In the event we went to war with a country with such an ethnicity, we would probably see these camps again, because no law has made it illegal, and there is legal and military precedence for it. It's also a near-certainty that no Supreme Court will go against a President during wartime.
I would like to point out that the raised hands / sig heil was normal American reverence to the flag, and had nothing exceptional to do with the event depicted.
It was an inspiration to the Nazi Germany sig heil just like a few other aspects of American culture.
The ritual around the pledge of allegiance was subsequently changed to simultaneously be distinctive from fascists and communists.
When the Pledge of Allegiance is being recited at the beginning, there is no "under God." I knew that it had been added in 1954 but it's interesting to hear it so clearly missing here given that the event occurred in 1939.
it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. This story was likely nudged out of the canon, in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.
Everyone is outraged that the 5 things they're passionate about aren't taught (enough) in school. The problem is that they're never same 5 things as the next guy.
Everything that follows the word "likely" is this guy crafting a narrative that fits his world view and appetite for rage much better than the more realistic answers: teacher's priorities pulled in a million directions at once and schools somehow have to fit as much as possible into an education program bounded by funding, timing, and classroom sizes.
That's a quite novel way of whitewashing the kind of whitewashing of official school (and even academic) history that countries usually do and has been studied and documented by historians and activists time and again.
No, topics like the Native American concentration camps or the history of the Japanese Americans in WWII, the gory details of the US racial and labour history, and other such things were not historically kept away from school books for decades on end because "too many things to teach, too little teaching time".
The same reason the Japanese don't keep their WWII doings in China out of their books because they have so much other stuff to cover.
The ugly parts of our country's history are under-taught, especially the closer you get to the present. This is an anecdote that points to a categorical problem.
There seems to be some kind of issue with the video between 2:08 and 2:10. You can see the flags going back and forth as if someone rewind the footage. Maybe it's an editing error?
I'd say this video footage easily qualifies as gratifying intellectual curiosity (it did mine, anyhow), despite the provocativeness of the material. Had the discussion gone haywire we'd have downweighted the thread, but it isn't too bad.
Actually we've downweighted it a bit, but before that we turned off an automatic software penalty that applied. Balancing act.
[+] [-] baursak|8 years ago|reply
Here's another sample: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ross-nazis-of-los...
What Lewis did not anticipate is that local authorities would prove indifferent to — or supportive of — the Nazis and fascists.
Within weeks of going undercover, Lewis’ network of spies discovered a plot to wrest control of armories in San Francisco, L.A. and San Diego — part of a larger plan to take over local governments and carry out a mass execution of Jews. Lewis immediately informed L.A. Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis of the Nazi scheme to seize weapons and, as Lewis warned in a memo later, to “foster a fascist form of government in the United States.”
Lewis was shocked when Davis interrupted him to defend Hitler. The police chief, he noted in the memo, told him: “Germans could not compete economically with the Jews in Germany and had been forced to take the action they did.” The greatest danger the city faced, Davis insisted, was not from Nazis but from communists living in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. As far as Davis was concerned, every communist was a Jew and every Jew a communist.
[+] [-] danans|8 years ago|reply
It's certainly not common knowledge, and most school history books don't include it (at least when I was in school). They do cover the Jim Crow laws and the KKK but don't make a connection between those and Nazi ideology.
Even less common is knowledge of how much the Nazis themselves were inspired by American style racist laws and organizations:
http://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-j...
EDIT: wording
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|8 years ago|reply
>In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,
> > A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. ... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[+] [-] Amezarak|8 years ago|reply
To think we fought Nazis because of their ideology is a mistake - the US, the UK, and many other countries weren't that different, in many respects, ideologically. In practice, the Nazis took horrific ideas and industrialized them.
In a way, we have Nazi military imperialism to thank for the fact that many horrible ideas are unacceptable today - otherwise there might never have been a backlash against them.
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
Were rich jews re-distributing a large portion of their wealth to other jews, too, so they are better off?
I just don't understand how he made the connection "those guys do so much better than us economically -> they must be communists!"
[+] [-] pmoriarty|8 years ago|reply
After the war, prominent Nazis were hired by the US government.
[+] [-] Feniks|8 years ago|reply
One funny is story is how the US put a trade embargo on Japan (leading to them launching Pearl Harbour attack) while at the same time allowing US companies trade oil and other resources with the Reich. The Nazi blitzkrieg ran on US oil... Greatest generation indeed.
[+] [-] flachsechs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|8 years ago|reply
The first one is the “banality of evil” view. The nazis were nothing special. One of many populist and racist parties. One of many hateful ideologies. The only thing that stands them out is the results. They actually won power through weirdness of politics in that time and place. They actually started a massive war (lucky timing). They actually went on the massive genocidal campaign implied by their rhetoric.
Normal people. Normal (if somewhat distasteful) party. Abnormal actions. It’s kind of related to the “one damn thing after another” theory of history.
The other (more intuitive, and unavoidable) view is the pure evil view. Hitler & Eichman were uniquely evil people. The SS were evil people. They had an evil doctrine, evil symbols, evil political methods. Evil resulted. Watch out for this sort of thing. Know the devil when you see her. Never Again!
Anyway, in 1939 I’m not sure nazism stood out as a unique evil different in some way from domestic far right movements like the kkk. It’s historical perspective that gives it the symbolic meaning that shocks us today.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|8 years ago|reply
Remember, the late 1930s also had Stalinism, Japanese Imperialism, the British Empire sponsoring things like the Bengali Famine, and various American imperial/colonial efforts as well.
There was a lot of evil to go around.
The proper advice is: know the Evil Impulse when it appears in yourself, and then you can have a good idea of how to spot it in others.
[+] [-] moomin|8 years ago|reply
Don't know if they were unique, or worse than the KKK (when the KKK had any power they killed a lot of people). But they were definitely, obviously, way evil.
[+] [-] dudul|8 years ago|reply
Also, he was often seen as the real hope to defeat communism, which on the contrary was immediately called "evil".
To add to your first paragraph, I think that another thing that stands out is that it happened in what was one of the most civilized and culturally evolved countries in the world at the time.
[+] [-] GuiA|8 years ago|reply
The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centers on essentially two questions:
Was there a master plan on the part of Adolf Hitler to launch the Holocaust? Intentionalists argue there was such a plan, while functionalists argue there was not.
Did the initiative for the Holocaust come from above with orders from Adolf Hitler or from below within the ranks of the German bureaucracy? Although neither side disputes the reality of the Holocaust, nor is there serious dispute over the premise that Hitler (as Führer) was personally responsible for encouraging the anti-Semitism that allowed the Holocaust to take place, intentionalists argue the initiative came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_versus_intenti...
[+] [-] kevmo|8 years ago|reply
-Lyndon Johnson.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
Much of the institutional racial and policy oddities in this country stem from this form of control, which was used to make and keep slavery an institution and keep the lower classes in check. One of the rallying cries of the draft riots (that is uncomfortably close to the modern Trump-ist white nationalist rallying cry) is that slaves were valued more ($1,000 for a slave) than the Irish ($300 to avoid war service) and were on the rise, and that rise would drag down wages when freed slaves flooded New York labor markets.
[+] [-] apo|8 years ago|reply
The rally was organized by the "German American Bund," an organization that Nazi Germany had distanced itself from before the Madison Square Garden rally:
On March 1, 1938 the Nazi government decreed that no Reichsdeutsche [German nationals] could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. This was done both to appease the U.S. and to distance Germany from the Bund, which was increasingly a cause of embarrassment with its rhetoric and actions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund
This was not a mass movement by any stretch, but seemed instead to be centered around a group of German-American immigrants.
The video depicts a Pledge of Allegiance ceremony that lacks the phrase "under God" because it was added in 1942:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance_(United_S...
[+] [-] UncleSlacky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|8 years ago|reply
Those things was quickly swept under the rug later, and not talked about much. Also the involvement of American companies in supporting the Nazi effort including Ford and IBM and probably others.
I grew up hearing about Nazis. For the Soviet Union it was _the_ big war, a war of survival basically. Both of my grandfathers fought in the war. One drove them all the way to Berlin. Got wounded by them. I also heard stories from teachers about the horrible atrocities they've experienced. One jarring one was how their Jewish childhood friend was raped, dismembered and buried in the backyard by German soldiers. They watched through the fence in the back of the garden hiding in the bushes.
That is why it is grating to hear everyone use "Nazis" like a joke. "You are such a Nazi", "Everyone who doesn't agree with my political views is a Nazi". "The store clerk is a fascist cause they made me wait too long", etc.
[+] [-] Mizza|8 years ago|reply
Nazis attend the Nation of Islam summit, 1961 - https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CbcE6rSSouc/WAL8t2PEfHI/AAAAAAAAL...
Black nationalists and white nationalists coming together. Bizarre stuff.
[+] [-] sdenton4|8 years ago|reply
Apparently the Nation of Islam was in favor of racial separation, and had a highly-placed anti-semite, which made alliance with the nazis possible.
[+] [-] arianon|8 years ago|reply
Interestingly, both George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X were assassinated by members of their own parties (a former one in Rockwell's case, though). Sadly, I don't know much else about them.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
Three years after this rally, Pearl Harbor happens, which results in the US entering into the already-running World War II.
Virtually all people of Japanese ancestry are forcibly relocated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps - around 115,000 people, 62% of which were US citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
At the same time, "the government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few [11,000 out of the 1.2 Million born in Germany and 5 Million with two German parents]. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Of the 695,000 ethnic Italians in the US at the time, only 1,881 nationals were detained. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_American...
The justification of rounding up all ethnic Japanese into camps was "we're at war, we will do anything to protect our country". But that same logic was never applied to the Germans or Italians, even though their countries were bigger threats than Japan.
A government commission found the treatment of ethnic Japanese to have been racially motivated, and actually paid reparations to those that were interned. But even so, this practice was never made illegal.
I find this especially interesting since a certain US President seems to have some strong feelings toward certain ethnicities and religions. In the event we went to war with a country with such an ethnicity, we would probably see these camps again, because no law has made it illegal, and there is legal and military precedence for it. It's also a near-certainty that no Supreme Court will go against a President during wartime.
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
It was an inspiration to the Nazi Germany sig heil just like a few other aspects of American culture.
The ritual around the pledge of allegiance was subsequently changed to simultaneously be distinctive from fascists and communists.
[+] [-] UncleSlacky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] louithethrid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neves|8 years ago|reply
Who is the guy talking in the lectern? The one who is despised as a demon by the "jewish controlled media"?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aezell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgottenpass|8 years ago|reply
Everyone is outraged that the 5 things they're passionate about aren't taught (enough) in school. The problem is that they're never same 5 things as the next guy.
Everything that follows the word "likely" is this guy crafting a narrative that fits his world view and appetite for rage much better than the more realistic answers: teacher's priorities pulled in a million directions at once and schools somehow have to fit as much as possible into an education program bounded by funding, timing, and classroom sizes.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
No, topics like the Native American concentration camps or the history of the Japanese Americans in WWII, the gory details of the US racial and labour history, and other such things were not historically kept away from school books for decades on end because "too many things to teach, too little teaching time".
The same reason the Japanese don't keep their WWII doings in China out of their books because they have so much other stuff to cover.
[+] [-] smt88|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkeat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebtoast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Shidizity|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deanCommie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
I'd say this video footage easily qualifies as gratifying intellectual curiosity (it did mine, anyhow), despite the provocativeness of the material. Had the discussion gone haywire we'd have downweighted the thread, but it isn't too bad.
Actually we've downweighted it a bit, but before that we turned off an automatic software penalty that applied. Balancing act.