sigh It's a valuable discussion to have, but as per usual there's this American mea culpa about race that's just so fucking tedious. This is due in no small part to the fact that America was an ethnically diverse environment where the prevailing tribe was being threatened by the prosperity of the aforementioned Italians, Irish, blacks and what-not. Spain had long since expelled the Moors, ejected the Jews and exterminated the Protestants. Europe had no immigration to speak of. The Russians had been practicing pogroms for a couple hundred years. Japan had sealed its borders to all foreigners for 200 years, only to be drawn forcefully out of isolation by Commodore Perry and an American armada. When Hitler took note, it wasn't because of laws keeping the Irish down or whatever as the Hapsburg Empire had forbidden Jews from owning property for fuckin' a thousand years. It was because the American empire displaced Native Americans and corralled them on reservations for easy domination and steady attrition. The Nazis didn't need to follow American law to make miscegenation illegal; such laws were based in European codes going back to before the Puritans. Where the Nazis followed the American lead was in a fascination for eugenics and a desire for racial purity through conscious breeding programs. If we're going to throw Americans under the bus for anything, eugenics is worth throwing us under the bus for.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America led the world in race-based lawmaking, as a broad political consensus favored safeguarding the historically white character of the country.
Amen. There are parallels and differences in the racial injustice of Europe and America, and the self-effacing, self-flagellating American will always over estimate our role in shaping the Nazis. Eugenics wasn't even uniquely American, even if it was formalized here. A lot of the early "scientific" studies that led to the eugenics movement were pioneered in Britain, because British people have thought of themselves as genetically superior for a really long time (and the largely British descended WASPs of America followed in that tradition). American racialism has always been about what everything in America is about: economics. The economy of the South was based completely on using humans as commodities, and we've never reckoned with that. Nazism was based on Hitler's perverse ideas about "Natural Law", which in his view was being subverted by the Jewish-Communist. Both slavery/Jim Crow (and the other racial laws passed here that affected other groups such as Jews, Chinese, etc.) and the Holocaust are are obviously abhorrent, but I think the parallels are flimsy. What was it you said last week about blaming the party planner for blocking an exit after Godzilla stomps on the party? Beautiful turn of phrase and also very apt comparison when blaming America for the rise of Nazism. Nazis caused the Holocaust and any attempt to shift blame away from that (even in the context of historic inquiry) is wrong factually and morally. Einsatzgruppen weren't studying the writings of Agassiz when machine gunning pits full of innocent citizens.