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[Aaron]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

There's a Dollop podcast on this very subject:
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/266-eugenics-live-in-los-angeles

 

[dabig2]

I've always like this site as it shows a lot of wartime racial propaganda used at the time. Here's a taste:

Leaflet AI-128-10-44 was produced by the Sudstern section of the SS-Standare Kurt Eggers organization and aimed at American black soldiers in Italy. The all-text leaflet tells the story of colored workers in Philadelphia who were hired to work on the subways and trolley cars, but were unable to work because white workers went on strike and refused to instruct them. Some of the text is:

And of course the infamous North Korean droplet to all black people during the Korean War:

Like seriously go through that entire page.

 

[Nepenthe]

So the Nazi uprising we're seeing is just people coming home to their rightful place? I don't think in a million years I'd ever have seen it like that. Got some good reading and research to do.

 

[theignoramus]

America what the fuck?!

Oh this shit gets deep. I spent the last two summers researching the topic and its difficult to not surrender to pure hatred when reading about the issue.

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

On August 16, 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, speaking on the Senate floor, warned that the reintroduction of black servicemen to the South would ”inevitably lead to disaster." For Senator Vardaman and others like him, black soldiers' patriotism was a threat, not a virtue. ”Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air," and, the senator cautioned, ”it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected."

Countless African American veterans were assaulted and beaten in incidents of racial violence after World War I. At least 13 veterans were lynched. Indeed, during the violent racial clashes of Red Summer, it was risky for a black serviceman to wear his uniform, which many whites interpreted as an act of defiance.

But the Nazis didnt just learn from White atrocities towards Blacks, they were similarly impressed by how American Indians were dealt with.

Here's a picture from Wounded Knee, where many of the executioners were awarded Medals of Honor for their bravery in hunting down and executing women and children.

I dare anyone to say this doesnt look like an image from a Nazi extermination site in Eastern Europe.

 

[Windam]

Many black veterans were threatened just for wearing their uniforms when they came back from Europe after WWI. There was even a case where one black veteran was killed because he refused to comply.

Jesus Christ.

 

[EdibleKnife]

Jesus Christ.

Yep. name of the guy who was lynched for daring to wear his uniform after he was threatened was Wilbur Little. He goes unheard in America and then we have the gall to act as though confederate soldiers need statues and celebration or if black historical figures are worth putting on money as though these are conversations worth having in the face of our history

 

[emag]

The whole world back then was far more racist than anything in US today. I think it's important to understand that by modern standards, there were no good guys.

Factually untrue. There were large portions of Asia and Africa, at least, that were more racially harmonious not only in the 1960s but also for centuries beforehand than the US is even today.

 

[lastplayed]

American exceptionalism.

Yep, pretty exceptional.

 

[MGrant]

Yeah, looking at how Western Europe and the US behaved themselves in the late 1800s and early 1900s is pretty disgusting. Capitalism, Imperialism, and racial purity movements are natural partners in crime.

 

[CertifiedFP]

I've always like this site as it shows a lot of wartime racial propaganda used at the time. Here's a taste:

Man, the Nazi's playing the Race Card in their anti-American propaganda is probably the richest bullshit in Human history.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

There is this fantastic Radiolab episode about the many many thousands of German Nazi prisoners in the US.

But the journalists were unable to confirm if American segregation laws where a direct influence in the populism of Nazi Ideology; "CORRECTION: A previous version of this podcast stated that the Nuremberg Laws and the Mississippi Black Code could be viewed side by side at a museum in Nuremberg. We were unable to confirm the existence of such an exhibit. We were also unable to confirm that the Nuremberg Laws were literally copied from the Mississippi Black Codes. The audio has been corrected to reflect this."




What makes this episode so insane is just how many Germans where in the US as prisoners, and what also surprises me is how well they were treated meanwhile the rest of the US rationed.
The episode goes into the anger of the American people once they find out the human rights abuse and war crimes of what the Germans did to their prisoners. I'm surprised why I've never heard about this aspect of WW2.

Nazi Summer Camp

The Dollop version is betta

 

[EdibleKnife]

The Dollop version is betta

Need to go back and see if I listened to that episode. I'm sure I did.

 

[StayDead]

What the hell
This shit is mentioned nowhere in any public education history book

I never knew this kind of stuff happened. Fuck.

The Allies did some REALLY fucked up shit prior and during the war, there were clear good and evil, but even the good were evil in their own way back then. It's never mentioned, because history is written by the victors.

 

[Dingens]

The Allies did some REALLY fucked up shit prior and during the war, there were clear good and evil, but even the good were evil in their own way back then. It's never mentioned, because history is written by the victors.

Sometimes I wonder if that's actually true. The information is out there, easily accessible. Seems more like history is written by wilfully ignorant people who don't wanna burst their little "I'm part of the good guys"-bubble.

 

[StayDead]

Sometimes I wonder if that's actually true. The information is out there, easily accessible. Seems more like history is written by wilfully ignorant people who don't wanna burst their little "I'm part of the good guys"-bubble.

That's the thing, the information is out there and easily accesible, if you go looking for it.

Most people will go through school, learn whatever is thrown at you and then never look up anything else about the historical periods either due to ignorance or no willing to want to learn anything else. There's so many things I've learnt since I've left school that I never heard about or was never mentioned in school. Now that might just be because there's not enough time in the school day to teach you everything, but in the UK during my schooling at least there was certainly an emphasis when we learnt about the World Wars of the good stuff we did rather than the more deplorable and the stuff other countries did.

 

[Memory]

I've always like this site as it shows a lot of wartime racial propaganda used at the time. Here's a taste:

And of course the infamous North Korean droplet to all black people during the Korean War:

Like seriously go through that entire page.

Thanks for posting, I find stuff like this morbidly interesting and enlightening.

 

[Mumei]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

There was a book last year about the Supreme Court case (still the law of the land) that authorized the sterilization of a woman who had been declared "feebleminded." It also talks regularly about the influence of the American eugenics movement on German eugenics policies.

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
One of America's great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court's infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of ”undesirable" citizens the law of the land

In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, bestselling author Adam Cohen exposes the court's decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be ”feebleminded" and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law—including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court's famous declaration ”Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being ”swamped with incompetence." At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared ”feebleminded" and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.

Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior.

Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a ”test case" to determine whether Virginia's new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her—not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized.

In the end, Buck's case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck's sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more.

Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended some sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.

There were also interviews with the author on NPR:

GROSS: And we'll get to more about that a little bit later. I want to get to the Nazis because I was dismayed to read that the Nazis actually borrowed from the U.S. eugenics sterilization program. What did the Nazis take from us?

COHEN: Well, we really were on the cutting edge. We were doing a lot of this in the 1910s and 1920s. Indiana adopted a eugenic sterilization law - America's first - in 1907. We were writing the eugenics sterilization statutes that decided who should be sterilized. We also had people who were writing a lot of, you know, what might be thought of as pro-Arian theories. So you have people like Madison Grant who wrote a very popular book called "The Passing Of The Great Race," which really talked about the superiority of Nordics, as he called them, and how they were endangered by all the brown people and the non-Nordics who were taking over. A lot of those ideas were really precursors to Nazism. And also - people forget now - but there was - you know, there was some strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the United States before World War II. In New York there were pro-Nazi rallies. In some intellectual circles it was not uncommon to find people who actually espoused Nazism. So one of the characters in my book, Harry Laughlin, who ran the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, a guy who grew up in Missouri, a one-time agriculture professor, he was pro-Nazi. He corresponded with Nazi scientists. And he wrote with pride in his eugenic journal that the Nazis were looking to his model statute and American eugenics to plan their racial program.

 

[eizarus]

I was lucky to have a handful of teachers who discussed the portion of history that's usually swept under the rug, and the biggest thing to take from it was that the US was basically Proto-Nazi Germany. From the eugenics programs to the enforcement of racism and so on. It's a shame that so many Americans believe that the US is and always has been a bastion of freedom, hope and whatever else is the latest propoganda buzzword.

 

[EdibleKnife]

There was a book last year about the Supreme Court case (still the law of the land) that authorized the sterilization of a woman who had been declared "feebleminded." It also talks regularly about the influence of the American eugenics movement on German eugenics policies.

There were also interviews with the author on NPR:

Thanks Mumei. That's another book on my wishlist. Dark stuff but I think these are all necessary reads or at least the knowledge within is necessary for an actual solid view of the country we live in currently