this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
1816 points (88.5% liked)
Memes
45520 readers
1798 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Remember, the American Nazi party had a ridiculous amount of traction. Enough to fill Madison Square Garden for Washington's birthday. Those people didn't just vanish after WWII. They didn't denounce their beliefs. They just crawled into the cracks like cockroaches.
Also the Nazis took example with the pledge of allegiance as an effective tool for indoctrination of school children. In the US it also used to be done with the same gesture that is now the Nazi salute.
Furthermore eugenics and race theory were prominent as "sciences" in the US and the Nazis also took example there. If it wasnt for the alliance to the Japanese and Pearl Harbor, the US might well have been on the Nazis side of history, given that the social and ideological culture had many more similarities than disagreements.
While your comment about the Nazis getting a lot of their eugenics ideas from America in the 20's-30's is accurate, there's no way in hell that we'd have just accidentally ended up in the Axis powers like that.
Were there Nazis in the US? Absolutely. Was their ideology common and/or the majority? Not at all.
We were literally allied with countries that the Nazis were attacking, and assisting them with supplies long before we ever entered the war due to Pearl Harbor. That's before we even get into things like the Zimmerman note which indicated that the Germans in WW1 wanted to engage us as an enemy, which doesn't bode well for their actions against those same allies 20 years later.
You're taking the fact that eugenics existed here in the US and making up a metric fuck ton of revisionist history surrounding it.
You say all that, but remember the time Prescott Bush was part of a group of rich and powerful men that tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist government?
That last paragraph is a load of bs.
As long as FDR was in office, there was literally no way the US would have joined Germany. It wasn't a matter of if, but a matter of when the USA got involved. The us was in by proxy before 41/42, Doing the same stuff the modern US has done for Ukraine, but for the Commonwealth nations.
The raised-arm salute isn't inherently bad, it's bad now because the Nazis did it. And so, America using a similar salute before the Nazis doesn't mean America was as evil as the Nazis.
Don't forget, however, that it was not the "right" in the US that was pro eugenics. It was the left and the Fabien socialists. Also didn't forget, how those were the groups that were aligning themselves with the KKK.
Out of the shadows and into the light.