this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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If today, I wonder if the US would be more reluctant to get involved in that war, considering how seemingly half the country wish Hitler were their president.
More reluctant? It's arguable that if Japan did not directly attack the US they never would have joined. "America First" was a powerful political group that urged elected officials and the public to stay out of European wars even if Hitler took over all of Europe. America First disbanded after Pearl Harbor. Fun fact: Dr. Seuss got his start parodying this group in political cartoons.
surprised_pikachu.jpg
Yeah, I'm well aware, hence the word more.
Also worth noting that the two largest ethnicities in the US at the time were Irish and German Americans. With the famine still in living memory as well as Ireland's independence being relatively recent, Irish-Americans were not very keen on helping the British Empire. (Ireland itself maintained neutrality throughout the war, largely for this reason.) Similarly, German-Americans --many of whom still spoke German at home and in their day to day lives-- weren't very stoked about going to war against Germany.
Left-leaning communities like Lemmy want to have it the way that the US recalcitrance in getting involved in the war was only about good old fashioned American racism, but the real history is much more complicated. It turns out that while Nazi sympathizers did play a role, the politics were fraught in many other ways as well. The Irish and German American constituencies were too big to simply be ignored by the politicians in power, regardless of what their own sympathies may have been.
I'm not sure if they want it more now or wanted it more then. This is a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939:
Washington would be appalled by that
I don't know. A lot of ideas about eugenics came from the US to Nazi Germany. US' support of allies was more political than ideological, and that in turn changed US ideology. Also, death camps which are the automatically objectionable act weren't known (or maybe weren't happening yet, I'm hazy on this) before Pearl Harbor.
It's so fucking wild that Germany just ends up getting used as a scapegoat, so we can blame someone else in the history books, and gloss over one's own country's eugenics programs.
And we Germans embrace it fully. We build our modern nationalism on our commemorative culture and the "never again" and how not patriotic we are (paradoxically). So much so that we forget our colonial history. In 1904, we did the first genocide of the century (the Herero and Namaqua genocide) but all we talk about in history classes is Hitler.
We have that opinion now because the west took in and harboured all the smart Nazi's that did the research and developed the technology.
The problem wasnt Nazi policies, the problem was destabilized world order. Leaders easily look the other way on moral issues when power is at stake.
I always think of that line in the movie The Right Stuff where they're talking about whether the Soviets or the Americans had saved the right Nazi scientists and Von Braun says, "our Germans are better than their Germans."