The Nazification of the Republican Party [View all]

[Kid Berwyn]

By Loretta J. Ross
Counterpunch, Jan. 20, 2021

After World War II, the Nazis who helped Hitler rise to power and murder millions of people, including at least 6 million Jews, were put on trial to send a warning to the world. Not all of them faced a judicial process, but enough were not protected by their high status, official offices, or claims of “innocence” and “patriotism.” Power through violence was the only language they spoke—not justice, not freedom—and they were held accountable. These criminals faced a tribunal at Nürnberg (Nuremberg) so momentous that the disgraced word “Nazi” is forever attached to those who participated in and enabled their horrific crimes.

After the war, Germany banned Nazi flags and neo-Nazis. In fact, the only way that Nazi paraphernalia got into Germany was through smuggling from other countries such as the United States, like from Nazi propagandist Gerhard Lauck in Nebraska, the man called the “Farm Belt Führer” who served four years in a German prison for distributing banned pro-Nazi materials throughout Europe.

I know this because I teach a course on White Supremacy at Smith College that focuses on anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, and the many intersecting components of white supremacist ideology. After more than 30 years of organizing and teaching about fascism as a Black feminist activist and academic, I know the destructive influence of these noxious ideas, and I teach young people how to interpret and resist them.

Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.

Continues...

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/the-nazification-of-the-republican-party/

PS: If the hobnailed boot fits, wear it, ‘Pukes.