As Florida county bans Holocaust book, actual neo-Nazis grow bold in U.S. - Rachel Maddow - MSNBC

[Rhiannon12866]

Rachel Maddow notes that among books banned from some schools in Florida is a Jodi Picoult book about the Holocaust and the rise of Nazi Germany, while at the same time, incidents of antisemitism and neo-Nazi activity are growing in frequency and openness across the United States. - Aired on 03/13/2023.

[tornado34jh]

1. The people who fought against Nazism must be rolling in their graves

If they saw what the United States has become, I don't think they would recognize it.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. Not to mention those of us who learned history in school, where were these traitors educated??

[tornado34jh]

7. Who knows?

But then again, many of the worst people were actually pretty well educated. For example, Osama bin Laden actually had degrees in business administration, and civil engineering, so while he was one of the worst terrorist on the planet, he actually had a pretty good education. In fact, many evil dictators (Pol Pot, Putin, and others) studied in some of the best schools, whether in their country or abroad.

[Rhiannon12866]

8. Well, somewhere along the line they learned the completely wrong views

And though I was born well after WWII, I grew up knowing that nazis were the enemy long before studying World History in school.

[tornado34jh]

10. It's not always during school

Sometimes it occurs well after they get educated, often due to the surrounding environment. It often takes years before it becomes known.

[Rhiannon12866]

11. Well, that's the way it was with me. I heard of Hitler when I was a kid and that he'd been our enemy

[tornado34jh]

13. True

But again, no one can tell if an educated person will become a dictator. It may lie dormant for years. Also, many dictators started off with things that people thought would lead to better things.

[jaxexpat]

16. My best childhood friend was Jewish.

I learned more about the holocaust from his family than from any classroom. His father's family was totally wiped out.

[Lonestarblue]

15. DeSantis graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School.

I’m sure he knows history quite well, especially the history of how fascists manipulate information and play on fear and resentment to take and keep power.

[Warpy]

9. There were just as many, if not more, people in total sympathy with the Nazis

and with Mussolini pretty much up until Germany declared war on us after we'd declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor.

They just got shamed into silence for a few decades when the appalling scale of the Holocaust became known.

Now they're all crawling out from under their rocks and praising Putin openly on right wing TV while fighting against civil rights, free speech, freedom of the press, and democracy, itself, in the name of a cult of personality. They were always out there, they were just keeping it quiet until everybody forgot about why we fought in the last big war.

And no, it wasn't for corporate convenience.

[tornado34jh]

12. Indeed

It never left, and keep in mind that many Nazis ended up in South America. In fact, most of the people in what is known as the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile), particularly Argentina and Uruguay, have a lot of European descent, and many of their governments let them in. But Putin is only a symptom of a much larger problem.

[keithbvadu2]

3. Trump "emboldened" the Nazis

Trump "emboldened" the Nazis

America fought a war against the Nazis and supposedly won.

Yet here they are marching to "take back America".

When did the Nazis have America?

" Michael Von Kotch, a Pennsylvania resident who called himself a Nazi, said the rally made him "proud to be white."

He said that he's long held white supremacist views and that Trump's election has "emboldened" him and the members of his own Nazi group. "

https://starherald.com/alleged-driver-of-car-that-plowed-into-charlottesville-crowd-was-a-nazi-sympathizer-former-teacher/article_23a7866c-6dfe-583c-abfa-290190baec47.html

[Rhiannon12866]

4. Thanks! Horrific agenda! And we remember Charlottesville - "Fine people on both sides..."

[tornado34jh]

6. Well, the truth is Nazism/white supremacy was never really "gone"

It was just underground. But now it is wide open, and it's not just in the United States, many far-right groups with ties to white nationalism are occurring in other countries as well. We saw what happened in Christchurch, New Zealand a few years ago.

[MagaSmash]

5. If they want to come for our books; can we at least "come for their guns"?

[SheltieLover]

14. Kicking for Visibility

[appalachiablue]

17. Sieg Heil! Not funny. K/R

[orthoclad]

18. US race laws inspired Hitler

It's not that the Nazis contaminated the US: the US contaminated Germany.

Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model
How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany

"As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh."

And many other sources.

It's tempting to be shocked that USians admire Nazis, but remember: the Nazis admired US race practices, with an even further inspiration to genocide in the form of the US extermination of the indigenous. An ugly truth we have to grapple with.

We have Nazism baked into our culture.

[Rhiannon12866]

19. Yikes! Great find, but scary as hell

And not surprising...

[orthoclad]

20. That's just the first hit from a quick search

There is a lot of documentation that Hitler was inspired by our dark side.

We think these modern US thugs came out of the 30s and 40s, but that dark side has been with us all along, and it's a deep part of our culture. We need to recognize this in order to deal with it, or it will keep coming back in different guises.

And remember: miscegenation was only finally outlawed in living memory. Long after WWII.

[Rhiannon12866]

21. I remember my 9th grade Social Studies teacher covering the Civil Rights movement of the '60s

Yet events these days appear that we're going backwards. Also, Mary Trump's second book covered these abuses extensively. And it sure appears that these abuses are still with us now as much as ever before.

[orthoclad]

22. I grew up in a heavily German neighborhood

Now, my own heritage is Teutonic (some of my best friends are German, heh), but a local restaurant hosted meetings of the German-American Bund, and the little old lady down the street saved a box of Nazi propaganda. Balance this against the heavily anti-slavery German immigrants who fled the crackdown on the Euro socialist revolutions of 1848. Nothing is black and white. But the 13 colonies had some terrible practices. One of the driving forces for the US Revolution was GIII's 1763 order to stay east of the mountains and leave the Indians alone. Couldn't have that tyrannical imposition on our Freedoms, now, could we? We needed Lebensraum. Hitler thought of the Slavs kinda how the US thought of Indians, and practiced a campaign of Slav extermination across Eastern Europe. Something worth remembering.

Are we going backwards or finding our roots?
We can't change history but we can change the future.

[Rhiannon12866]

23. My maternal grandparents both emigrated from Poland

And my mother and her sister grew up in a town largely populated by fellow immigrants. My grandmother was 15, the eldest in her family and traveled with only a friend. She never went back, but spent the rest of her life sending what she could back to family in Poland.

My grandfather, who coincidentally emigrated in the same year, was 18 - and they made him a citizen and sent him to France to fight for his new country in WWI.

I never met my grandfather, he died well before I was born, but my grandmother had emigrated from a part of Poland occupied by Russia at the time. I've seen the ship's manifest and it says she came from "Russia." She was a very kind person, would do anything for anyone, but she retained a hate for Russia for the rest of her long life.

[orthoclad]

24. The American Nazi Party opened an office in a Polish neighborhood

ca 1972. Bad move. Under siege, windows broken, fistfights.

[Rhiannon12866]

25. Oh, Good Grief! No one wanted to get my Polish grandmother started on the nazis!

Members of her family suffered during WWII - and she had a younger brother who fought. I remember that she had that classic portrait of JFK framed and hanging in her living room.

[orthoclad]

26. One of our problems

is that we're rapidly running out of people who actually fought fascists and remember what it was like.
I wonder how a Nazi office would go over in that neighborhood now? Freedom of speech, maybe?