When the Nazis wrote the Nuremberg laws, they looked to racist American statutes

When the Nazis wrote the Nuremberg laws, they looked to racist American statutes

A police officer places a sign in front of the Illinois Central Railroad in Jackson, Mississippi during its era of segregation. (Associated Press)

by James Q. Whitman

The European far right sees much to admire in the United States, with political leaders such as Marine le Pen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands celebrating events — such as the recent presidential election — that seem to bode well for their brand of ethno-nationalism. Is this cross-Atlantic bond unprecedented? A sharp break with the past? If it seems so, that’s only because we rarely acknowledge America’s place in the extremist vanguard — its history as a model, even, for the very worst European excesses.

In the late 1920s, Adolf Hitler declared in “Mein Kampf” that America was the “one state” making progress toward the creation of a healthy race-based order. He had in mind U.S. immigration law, which featured a quota system designed, as Nazi lawyers observed, to preserve the dominance of “Nordic” blood in the United States.

The American commitment to putting race at the center of immigration policy reached back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which opened citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.”  But immigration was only part of what made the U.S. a world leader in racist law in the age of Hitler.

Then as now, the U.S. was the home of a uniquely bold and creative legal culture, and it was harnessed in the service of white supremacy. Legislators crafted anti-miscegenation statutes in 30 states, some of which threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriage.  And they developed American racial classifications, some of which deemed any person with even “one drop” of black blood to belong to the disfavored race. Widely denied the right to vote through clever devices like literacy tests, blacks were de facto second-class citizens. American lawyers also invented new forms of de jure second-class citizenship for Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and more.

The ugly irony is that when the Nazis rejected American law, it was often because they found it too harsh.

European racists followed these toxic innovations with keen interest. Of course they were well aware that America had strong egalitarian traditions, and many of them predicted that American race law would prove inadequate to stem the rising tide of race-mixing. Hitler, however, was cautiously hopeful about America’s future as a white supremacist state, and after he took power in 1933 his Nazi Party displayed the same attitude.

This is the background to a disturbing story: the story of the American influence on the Nuremberg Laws, the notorious anti-Jewish legislation proclaimed amid the pageantry of the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg in September of 1935.

At a crucial 1934 planning meeting for the Nuremberg system, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on American law.  According to a transcript, he led a detailed discussion of miscegenation statutes from all over the United States. Moreover it is clear that the most radical Nazis were the most eager advocates of American practices. Roland Freisler, who would become president of the Nazi People’s Court, declared that American jurisprudence “would suit us perfectly.”

And the ugly irony is that when the Nazis rejected American law, it was often because they found it too harsh.  For example, Nazi observers shuddered at the “human hardness” of the “one drop” rule, which classified people “of predominantly white appearance” as blacks.  To them, American racism was sometimes simply too inhumane.

That may sound implausible — too awful to believe — but in their early years in power, the Nazis were not yet contemplating the “final solution.” At first, they had a different fate in mind for the German Jewry:  Jews were to be reduced to second-class citizenship and punished criminally if they sought to marry or engage in sexual contact with “Aryans.”  The ultimate goal  was to terrify Germany’s Jews into emigrating.

And for that program, America offered the obvious model — even if, as one Nazi lawyer put it in 1936, the Americans had “so far” not persecuted their Jews.  Of course the Nazis did not simply do a cut-and-paste job, in part because much of American law avoided open racism. (Laws intended to keep blacks from the polls did not explicitly name their target.) But American antimiscegenation law was frankly racist, and the Nazi criminalization of intermarriage followed the American lead.

In a sense, this ugly tale about the history of American racism is also about American innovation gone awry. Today, we’re leaders in the creation of corporate law; back then, it was race law. Other countries, such as Australia, put legislative obstacles in the way of mixed marriages, but the United States went so far as to threaten long prison terms.

And we must not forget how tenaciously the racist rulebook that the Nazis admired held on in the United States. Antimiscegenation laws were only struck down at the tail end of the civil rights era, in 1967. Race-based immigration policies did not fully end until 1968 — long after the Greatest Generation stormed the beaches of Normandy and liberated Nazi death camps.

James Q. Whitman is a professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School. He is the author of “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.”  

 

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Report: Pope Francis Refuses To Punish Pedophile Priests

Report: Pope Francis Refuses To Punish Pedophile Priests

A new report reveals Pope Francis is quietly making the Catholic church a safe space for pedophile priests.

The Associated Press reports that Pope Francis is reducing sanctions against pedophile priests, and even refusing to defrock priests found guilty of sexually abusing children, all in the name of mercy.

In one particularly egregious case, Francis let off one notorious pedophile priest, Rev. Mauro Inzoli, with just a lifetime of prayer for abusing five young boys.

The Associated Press reports about the Pope’s leniency towards pedophile priests:

One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. The Rev. Mauro Inzoli is now facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The Associated Press has learned.

The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.

The report notes that by refusing to punish pedophile priests Francis is going against the recommendations of his advisers in an attempt to show “mercy.”

In an attempt to justify the Pope’s refusal to fully punish pedophile priests in the name of “mercy,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said:

The Holy Father understands that many victims and survivors can find any sign of mercy in this area difficult. But he knows that the Gospel message of mercy is ultimately a source of powerful healing and of grace.

In other words, no justice for victims, no justice for the children raped and abused by Catholic priests, but mercy for the pedophile priests who rape children.

Bottom line: Pope Francis, like the Catholic church he leads, is morally bankrupt.

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Neo-Nazis blame “the Jews” for Michael Flynn’s resignation

Neo-Nazis blame “the Jews” for Michael Flynn’s resignation

Pro-Trump Anti-Semites Call Flynn “One Of Our Best Guys” Who Has Been “Quite Critical Of The Jews”

Via Eric Hananoki

(

Credit: AP/Mel Evans)

This article originally appeared on Media Matters.

Neo-Nazi writers are upset that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has resigned from his position as national security adviser. The anti-Semites are lionizing Flynn as “one of our best guys” and a “true patriot” who has “been quite critical of the Jews in the past.” They are also lamenting that his resignation is “definitely a loss … to the Jews” and are speculating that he was pushed out by “more subversive elements in the White House.”

As CNN noted, Flynn resigned on the night of Feb. 13 “after reports surfaced that the Justice Department warned the Trump administration last month that Flynn misled administration officials regarding his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States and was potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians.”

The disgraced former national security adviser has repeatedly pushed toxic views. Last July, Flynn shared a tweet that read in part, “Not anymore, Jews. Not Anymore.” (He later apologized.) He claimed on Twitter that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” Flynn also endorsed the work of racist author Mike Cernovich, who has frequently pushed white nationalist themes on his Twitter account (many of which he later deleted). Cernovich has claimed that “diversity is code for white genocide,” “Blacks use guns for murder. Whites use guns to kill themselves,” and “Diversity is bad for national security.”

Members of the white nationalist movement unsurprisingly applauded Flynn’s appointment to national security adviser. They are now mourning the loss of “one of our best guys.”

Daily Stormer: Flynn “Is One Of Our Best Guys. …  This Is Definitely A Loss.”

The Daily Stormer is a neo-Nazi website that worships Adolf Hitler, posts defenses of the Holocaust, and attacks Jewish people as “kikes.” Editor Andrew Anglin wrote that Flynn’s resignation “is dumb. Team Trump shouldn’t give these people an inch. Flynn is one of our best guys. And he did nothing wrong.” He added:

This is giving a victory to the kike media.

I actually didn’t think the block on the travel ban was a loss. I think that was all part of the plan to get the public stirred up against activist judges, to get ready for the Supreme Court to rule on an even more hardcore version of the Moslem ban.

But this.

This is definitely a loss.

To the Jews.

He posted another piece stating that Flynn was under “vile Jew attacks” and commenting that accepting Flynn’s resignation “sends the wrong message to Russia, and more importantly, it sends the wrong message to the people — that we are going to respond to bullying. I trust Trump, however, and I do have faith that there must have been very good reason for this decision.”

Infostormer: Flynn Is “A True Patriot” Who Has “Been Quite Critical Of The Jews In The Past.”

Infostormer is a neo-Nazi website that praises Hitler and states that it is “destroying Jewish tyranny.” Writer “Marcus Cicero” responded to Flynn’s resignation by calling him “a true patriot who loves his country, has over thirty years of service to back the first point up, and has offered nothing but loyalty to Trump since day one. He has also been quite critical of the Jews in the past.” The writer concluded:

My personal guess is that this attack on Flynn was pushed internally by more subversive elements in the White House that may or may not include Jared Kushner and Rence (sic) Priebus, who have seemingly attempted to railroad President Trump at times on his more hardcore measures.

But this is just total speculation at the moment, and I don’t want to get too hasty in making assumptions.

All I know is that the Jews are loving this whole spectacle, and are acting like sharks in blood-tinged water.

Be careful, Mr. President.

Be very careful.

Cicero posted another piece headlined “Russia Rises To General Flynn’s Defense, Brush Off Sneaky Jewish Attacks.” It concluded:

We’re going to be keeping a much closer eye on the White House factional struggles in the coming days and weeks, because if my senses are correct, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will likely be the next man attacked for his ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin.

The lead-up to the demise of General Flynn was somewhat ignored by us due to the sheer level of nonsense that has been pushed forth by the Lugenpresse lately, but we won’t make that mistake again.

The Jews are not going to get away with another bullying attack on our regime – they will be called out, and they will be defeated if and when they try again.

Richard Spencer: Flynn “Did Nothing Wrong” And Is A Victim Of “The Deep State.”

Richard Spencer is a neo-Nazi who, as the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, “advocates for an Aryan homeland for the supposedly dispossessed white race and calls for ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ to halt the ‘deconstruction’ of European culture.” He wrote on his AltRight.com website that Flynn “did nothing illegal; in my estimation, he did nothing wrong.” He concluded that “this scandal reveals that Trump lacks the allegiance, not just of the mass media, but of the Deep State, that is, the unelected bureaucratic and legal apparatus of the government. People within the Deep State leaked the information on Flynn’s phone call, and they will attempt to undermine Trump at every turn.”

UPDATE: White supremacist radio host and former KKK head David Duke is also blaming Jewish people for Flynn’s downfall. He tweeted: “Trump can’t let these Jews lynch General Flynn,” which linked to an unbylined piece on his website claiming that a Jewish conspiracy brought down Trump’s former national security adviser. He also tweeted: “(((They))) weren’t going to stop – Jewish Supremacy is out in the open like never before…”

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The Twisted Ideology That Appeals to Jihadists and Neo-Nazis Alike

The Twisted Ideology That Appeals to Jihadists and Neo-Nazis Alike

A loose network of Third Position adherents extends across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

Via Chip Berlet / Political Research Associates

Photo Credit: Everett Historical / Shutterstock

In the last few years of the 20th Century a new form of fascism emerged in a period of resurgent neofascism. Called the Third Position, it seeks to overthrow existing governments and replace them with monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racial nationalism and/or supremacist religious nationalism. Third Position neofascists have organized in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and they maintain some kind of loose network, at least for the purposes of discussing their shared ideas and agenda, but in some cases involving meetings and even funding.

For instance, Libyan president of Mu’ammar Qadhafi sponsored several international conferences in Libya promoting his special variation of racial nationalism and cultivating ideas congruent with Third Position ideology. Qadhafi also offered funds to racial nationalist groups active in the U.S. and Canada.1) During the Gulf War, according to the Searchlight magazine, “Neo-nazis is several European countries have been queuing up to shoulder arms for Saddam Hussein’s murderous Iraqi Regime.”2) One organizer for this attempted neonazi brigade, claimed he had over 500 volunteers from “several countries, including Germany, the USA, the Netherlands, Austria and France.”3) Revealing the Third Position motif, a racial nationalist journal, Nation und Europa, promoted the slogans “Arabia for the Arabs,” and “the whole of Germany for the Germans.”4) In Britain, some neofascists praised the regimes in Libya and Iran as allies in the fight against communism, capitalism, and Israel.5)

The Third Position has a more intellectual aristocratic ally called the European New Right (Nouvelle Droit ) which is different from the U.S. New Right.6) Intellectual leaders of the European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, are hailed as profound thinkers in U.S. reactionary publications such as the Rockford Institute’s Chronicles. The more overtly neo-Nazi segment of the Third Position has intellectual links to the Strasserite wing of German national socialism, and is critical of Hitler’s brand of Nazism for having betrayed the working class. See magazines such as Scorpion or Third Way published in England. Third Position groups believe in a racially-homogeneous decentralized tribal form of nationalism, and claim to have evolved an ideology “beyond communism and capitalism.”

White supremacist leader Tom Metzger promotes Third Position politics in his newspaper WAR which stands for White Aryan Resistance. In Europe, the Third Position defines its racial-nationalist theories in publications such as Third Way and The Scorpion. Third Position adherents actively seek to recruit from the left. One such group is the American Front in Portland, Oregon, which ran a phone hotline that in late November, 1991 featured an attack on critics of left/right coalitions. Some Third Position themes have surfaced in the ecology movement and other movements championed by progressives.7)

The convergence among racial nationalists in North America and Western and Eastern Europe is discussed at length in Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo, eds., Nation and Race, and Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right.8)  There is a theoretical discussion of the European Third Position and racially separate nation-states by Robert Antonio in “After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.9) The anti-U.S. aspect of the Third Position is examined in “´Neither Left Nor Right´” in the Southern Poverty Law Center magazine, Intelligence Report.10)

I argue elsewhere that a good case can be made that the religious ideology of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban is a form of clerical fascism or some close hybrid. It certainly is a form of religious nationalism. This could help explain the potential for links between Islamic religious supremacists and U.S. White racial supremacists. The White racial supremacists we are discussing are part of the U.S. Extreme Right, not the Patriot or armed militia movements or the Christian Right. This is purely a speculative exercise, however, based on ideological affinities. A similar argument that places the Islamic supremacists in the context of apocalyptic revolutionary millenarianism makes the same point, since most U.S. neofascists can be placed in the same category. See: The ‘Religion’ of Usamah bin Ladin: Terror As the Hand of God, by Jean E. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., UCLA Center for the Study of Religion.

In Right-Wing Populism in America, Matthew N. Lyons and I discussed the Third Position:

To varying degrees, some neofascists also shifted away from traditional fascism’s highly centralized approach to political power and toward plans to fragment and subdivide political authority. Many neonazis called for creation of an independent White homeland in the Pacific Northwest, based on the ethnic partitioning of the United States. Posse Comitatus, mostly active in rural areas, repudiated all government authority above the county level. And in the 1990s neonazi leader Louis Beam promoted the influential doctrine of “leaderless resistance.” While such decentralist policies may seem incompatible with full-blown fascism, we see them partly as defensive adaptations and partly as expressions of a new social totalitarianism. Industrial-era totalitarianism relied on the nation-state; in the era of out­sourcing, deregulation, and global mobility, social totalitarianism looked to local authorities, private bodies (such as churches), and direct mass activism to enforce repressive control.

In the 1970s and 1980s these efforts to reinterpret fascism were not confined to the United States, but took place among neofascists in many industrialized capitalist countries. European, Canadian, and South African neofascists, too, at times advanced the doctrine known as the Third Position, strengthened internationalist ties, used coded racial appeals, advocated ethnic separatism and the breakup of nation-states, and practiced solidarity with right-wing nationalists of color.11)

The Third Position—which rejects both capitalism and communism—traces its roots to the most “radical” anticapitalist wing of Hitler’s Nazi Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, neonazis in several European countries advocated the Third Position.12) Its leading proponent in the United States was White Aryan Resistance, headed by former California Klan leader Tom Metzger. Metzger, who was a Democratic candidate for Congress in 1980, expounded his philosophy at the 1987 Aryan Nations Congress:

WAR is dedicated to the White working people, the farmers, the White poor. . . . This is a working class movement. . . . Our problem is with monopoly capitalism. The Jews first went with Capitalism and then created their Marxist game. You go for the throat of the Capitalist. You must go for the throat of the corporates. You take the game away from the left. It’s our game! We’re not going to fight your whore wars no more! We’ve got one war, that is right here, the same war the SA fought in Germany, right here; in the streets of America.13)

Tom Metzger’s organization vividly illustrates fascism’s tendency to appropriate elements of leftist politics in some sort of distorted form. Again, from Right-Wing Populism in America:

WAR supported “white working-class” militancy such as the lengthy “P-9” labor union strike against Hormel in Minnesota, stressed environmentalism, and opposed U.S. military intervention in Central America and the Persian Gulf. The Aryan Women’s League, affiliated with WAR, claimed that Jews invented male supremacy and called for “Women’s Power as well as White Power.”14) Metzger’s television program, “Race and Reason,” was broadcast on cable TV in dozens of cities and aided cooperation among White supremacist groups. Through its Aryan Youth Movement wing, WAR was particularly successful in the 1980s in recruiting racist skinheads, who include thousands of young people clustered in scores of violent pro-Nazi formations. (Not all skinheads are racist and there are antiracist and antifascist skinhead groups.) Metzger and WAR’s position in the neonazi movement was weakened in October 1990 when they were fined $12.5 million in a civil suit for inciting three Portland skinheads who murdered Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw.15)

Out of the stew of the Third Position, and the European New Right theories of intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist, came a new version of White Nationalism that championed racially separate nation-states.16) In the United States this filtered down to White supremacists, who began to call themselves White Separatists.17) Dobratz and Shanks-Meile believe that “most, if not all, whites in this movement feel they are superior to blacks.”18) Instead of segregation, however, White Separatism called for “geographic separation of the world’s races” and in the United States this prompted calls for an Aryan Homeland in the Pacific Northwest.19)

[Excerpts are from: Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, Chapter 13, pp. 265-286.]

Connections between Canadian Extreme Right racial nationalists and Libya have been reported by author Warren Kinsella.

“The Libyan government of Mu’ammar Qadhafi had been funding [Canadian nationalist Party Leader Don] Andrew’s group since at least April 1987, when a number of his members traveled to Tripoli for a “peace conference” to commemorate a U.S. bombing raid. Qadhafi liked the white supremacists because, like him, they believed in separate racial states and they despised Jews.”20)

“Andrews worked closely with Wolfgang Droege, a leader of the Canadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who visited the U.S. to meet with members of the extreme right including David Duke.21)  Droege was arrested in Louisiana in 1981 with nine other extreme right activists in a plot to overthrow the government of the island of Dominica and establish a White homeland.22)

“In September 1989, at Andrew’s suggestion, Droege traveled to Libya with a group of 17 [Canadian] Nationalist Party members.”23)

Many U.S. White supremacists also practice a racial nationalist religion called Christian Identity. There is clearly a fluidity between political and religious ideologies based on ethnonationalist desires. Since the idea is to smash all current nations and redivide the world into separate nation states based on race or religion, there is a shared goal.

Chip Berlet is an investigative journalist and independent scholar with over 40 years’ experience in study right-wing ideologies and strategic frames. His website is http://www.researchforprogress.org.

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