Mastodawn

Laurie Voss Jan 10, 2023

An interesting thing I learned from Eleanor Roosevelt's biography is that Hitler used the USA's treatment of black people as justification for his treatment of Jews, and this was widely regarded *in the USA* as a reasonable point and a reason to stay out of the war: "we would have to stop mistreatment of black people".

This part.

Many folk in the USA know about the Nuremberg trials after World War 2, for crimes against humanity. But most US folk don't know about the German Nuremberg laws passed before the war, that were disgustingly racist, anti-Semitic laws. And almost no Americans know that the Nazi authors of those laws, based them on US Jim Crow laws. 🙂🙃

We literally made it a "crime against humanity" to treat white people like the USA treats its Black people. 🤡

The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg's definition of "Crimes against humanity:
"murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, *racial*, or religious grounds."

Some of the folks on the tribunal finished trying the Germans, then unironically came back home to Louisiana, where Jim Crow was still active, and the Angola slave farm was still functioning. The Angola slave farm is still in business today!

Amelia Jan 10, 2023

@mekkaokereke @seldo It gets worse than just the racial oppression and colonialist expansionism.

The Nazi eugenics programs, and their genocide of disabled, trans, and queer people, were also inspired directly by active sentiments and projects from the US and Canada.

Clinical Rawlsian Jan 10, 2023

@mordremoth @mekkaokereke @seldo IIRC from college, the Third Reich was particularly impressed by the eugenics laws of Virginia and Indiana and modeled their own eugenics laws after these statutes.

Clinical Rawlsian Jan 10, 2023

@mordremoth @mekkaokereke @seldo I believe we read excerpts from The Lynchburg Story: Eugenic Sterilization in America by Bruce Eadie https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/549299

Lynchburg Story: Eugenic Sterilization in America (1994)

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 10, 2023

@mekkaokereke @seldo Unlike Germany or South Africa, after the Civil War, the USA didn’t have closure or accountability or emotional processing for human rights violations. Instead, they were codified into law and culture. Our “new problems” are unresolved “old problems”.

Jeremy Kahn Jan 10, 2023

@paninid @mekkaokereke @seldo

of course, we _did_ have a closure/accountability process -- it was called "Reconstruction", but revanchists across the South undermined it from before the Civil War even ended, and it ultimately collapsed and was replaced by Jim Crow and the prison-industrial complex.

Even today schoolbooks across the South talk about Reconstruction as a time of "corrupt carpetbaggers"; but the real story is "the Union won the war but lost the Occupation".

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 10, 2023

@trochee @mekkaokereke @seldo Reconstruction ended thanks to the coup of 1876, disputed election results, and concessions to insurrectionists. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/disputed-election-1876

Disputed Election of 1876 | Miller Center

In 1876, no clear winner emerged in the presidential election because the outcomes in three states were unclear

Miller Center

Patrick Gillam Jan 10, 2023

@paninid @trochee @mekkaokereke @seldo
I keep this meme in my “Conservatives” folder for discussions such as this.

Jeremy Kahn Jan 10, 2023

@patrickgillam @paninid @mekkaokereke @seldo

I might label the kneeling dude in khakis as "legacy of white supremacist chattel slavery"

there's a few of america's problems that go back _before_ reconstruction -- like "why is the capital in a swamp" -- but even those can point to "legacy of slavery".

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 10, 2023

@trochee @patrickgillam @mekkaokereke @seldo sounds a little too close to Critical Race Theory, y’all are now banned from public schools!

Alex Jan 11, 2023

@trochee @paninid @mekkaokereke @seldo Grew up in the South and if I hadn’t further educated myself and/or listened to other people, I’d still think Reconstruction just had something to do with carpetbaggers. I’m still finding things to learn and unlearn.

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 11, 2023

@pianoblack @trochee @mekkaokereke @seldo I went to high school and college in East Tennessee (home of the Loyal Mountaineers, a term popularized in the region post-Reconstruction to highlight Union sentiment). Most people learn their state history in the 5th grade, and so I was oblivious to a lot of dynamics until well into adulthood, and it required natural curiosity to answer a lot of “why are things like this?”

Jeremy Kahn Jan 11, 2023

@paninid @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo

Likewise, i grew up in Atlanta; statewide history curricula largely ignored Reconstruction (and a major street was literally renamed from Forrest (KKK founder) to MLK _in the late 1980s_)

if my high school teachers hadn't been hippie weirdo radicals I'd have learned that the Stone Mountain generals were just "famous Georgians"

Jeremy Kahn Jan 11, 2023

@paninid @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo i should add that (1) my parents and their friends were themselves early 1970s hippie activist "carpet-baggers" and
(2) those generals weren't even all Georgian (many Virginians)

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 11, 2023

@trochee @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo speaking of Virginians, insurrectionists, and concessions:

Amy Jan 11, 2023

@trochee (not relevant to the original convo, feel free to ignore if you don't want tangents) any chance those hippie weirdo radicals were Paideia teachers?

Jeremy Kahn Jan 11, 2023

@ahailes hahaha yes that's where I went to school

Amy Jan 11, 2023

@trochee me too!

Luke Kanies Jan 11, 2023

@trochee @paninid @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo I failed the AP American history exam in Nashville my senior year (1992) because our AP history teacher just… didn’t talk about the civil war, or reconstruction, or Jim Crow. I vaguely knew Lincoln was president during it?

AP teacher. At a magnet school. Whose principal was a black woman.

Coach Pāṇini ®Jan 11, 2023

@lkanies @trochee @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo In my humble amateur historian opinion, the Civil War was just an era when American violence over immorality and human rights was heightened / formalized. However, it began in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise, escalated with Bleeding Kansas, and then remained a psychological conflict ever since. It’s omnipresent nature is an unprocessed trauma on the psyche of America.

Aviva Gary Jan 10, 2023

@mekkaokereke @seldo Well... the solution to this is to try the treatment of black people in the US (past and present) as the crime against humanity it is...

And then do what Germany and South Africa did (in their situations) to make it not happen again.

once was Jan 11, 2023

@mekkaokereke @seldo US also inspired apartheid in South Africa.