Barrett Clark
Laurie VossAn 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".
Ray Ryan (he/him)@seldo They and South Africa also took a lot of inspiration from Jim Crow law.
Stefan@seldo TBH the entire republican platform still revolves around "we would have to stop mistreatment of black people"
jake lazaroff@seldo i did not know that second part holy shit
mekka okereke 
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. šš
We literally made it a "crime against humanity" to treat white people like the USA treats its Black people. š¤”
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@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@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.
@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
Coach PÄį¹ini Ā®@mekkaokereke @seldo Unlike Germany or South Africa, after the Civil War, the USA didnāt have closure or accountability or emotional processing for human rights violations. Instead, they were codified into law and culture. Our ānew problemsā are unresolved āold problemsā.
Jeremy Kahnof 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".
@trochee @mekkaokereke @seldo Reconstruction ended thanks to the coup of 1876, disputed election results, and concessions to insurrectionists. History doesnāt repeat, but it does rhyme: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/disputed-election-1876
Patrick Gillam@paninid @trochee @mekkaokereke @seldo
I keep this meme in my āConservativesā folder for discussions such as this.
I keep this meme in my āConservativesā folder for discussions such as this.
@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".
@trochee @patrickgillam @mekkaokereke @seldo sounds a little too close to Critical Race Theory, yāall are now banned from public schools!
Alex@trochee @paninid @mekkaokereke @seldo Grew up in the South and if I hadnāt further educated myself and/or listened to other people, Iād still think Reconstruction just had something to do with carpetbaggers. Iām still finding things to learn and unlearn.
@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 āwhy are things like this?ā
@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"
@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)
(2) those generals weren't even all Georgian (many Virginians)
@trochee @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo speaking of Virginians, insurrectionists, and concessions:
Amy@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?
Luke Kanies@trochee @paninid @pianoblack @mekkaokereke @seldo I failed the AP American history exam in Nashville my senior year (1992) because our AP history teacher justā¦ didnāt 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.
@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. Itās omnipresent nature is an unprocessed trauma on the psyche of America.
Aviva Gary@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@mekkaokereke @seldo US also inspired apartheid in South Africa.
Michael Sentance@seldo The Ken Burns documentary on the Holocaust explores that quite a bit.
Jon@seldo Some part of the end of Jim Crow was the propaganda value it provided to the USSR and the communist bloc.
Michael š“āā ļø Fleet@seldo
And I've heard that when Nazis captured Americans, they would make this same argument to the POWs. Basically, "why are you fighting us, we're the same".
And I've heard that when Nazis captured Americans, they would make this same argument to the POWs. Basically, "why are you fighting us, we're the same".
plague-of-grackles š·ššāā¬@seldo itās apparently written in mein kampf. The Native American reservations were also a stated inspiration in Mein Kampf.
RonG@seldo Once in the war, I understand we wanted segregated everything for our troops we sent to Britain, and the British refused.
@argee the same British who were letting several million Indians starve to death rather than divert war material so not great on any side.
@seldo Yep. Everyone's got dirty hands.
GagsYep.
Same British who held dominion over the, self governing, Union of South Africa at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_South_Africa
It was probably down to cost ā¦ !
Johnny@johnnynoodles @seldo I didn't mean to implly the British had a good record about not running around killing people. I know better.
@johnnynoodles @seldo It was more along the lines of "Even the British thought this was wrong"
HighlandLawyer
@HighlandLawyer @seldo
Oooh. Thanks for that link! I didn't know about that. Funny (not funny) how little has really changed over here in the USA, except now it's the civilian police doing the bad.
Oooh. Thanks for that link! I didn't know about that. Funny (not funny) how little has really changed over here in the USA, except now it's the civilian police doing the bad.
The Skeptic's Book of Lists@seldo I remember reading about Ohio Congressman Chilton White who wanted to keep Black Americans out of the republic's army during the Civil War. Yes, they were badly needed to fight the south but he argued think of the ramifications... once Black Americans got a taste for killing white people, there would be no way to put that genie back in the bottle. Black American soldiers would turn on white people everywhere with a kind of unquenchable blood lust.
White went on to vote no on the Thirteenth Amendment...
echodrift šš·šØš@seldo Hitler & co also looked at the "one drop rule" in the US for delineating black and white and decided that was too extreme, and went with three or four Jewish grandparents when writing their race laws.
Our race laws were too extreme for Hitler.
Nichol Brummer@seldo coming from south africa, I was surprised to see apartheid style segregation was a US thing before long it became written down in law in South Africa
Daph (she/her)@daphneyd @seldo how have the original Americans been treated, and how are their descendants treated even today, in 'America'?
Settler colonial supremism is ghastly everywhere. Independent of 'colour', which is a social construct anyway.
Treatment of Ukraine can easily be put in that class. And don't underestimate how black Africans from the conquering kind treated others. The San and Khoi were treated as subhuman by both whites and Bantu blacks.
She smashes@seldo oh!..greatā¦. This goes well with our export of insurrection to Brazil recently š
Berkubernetus@seldo South Africa's Apartheid policy was developed after their officials visited the US.
anniegt@seldo Ken Burns' latest doco on The US and the Holocaust is a must-watch! And a lot of the stuff in there is reiterated on Rachel Maddow's podcast "Ultra." US history is ugly.
Jeff MoeH* really liked the USA reservation system too...
Guillotine@jebba @seldo Before deportations began in germany, many jewish people were only allowed to live in specific districts. Two streets down from the house I grew up in is an alley still called "Judenberg" (jewish hill) to this day. The term "Ghetto" was first used by italian fascists for jewish districts in Venice.
Bert Latamore@seldo The US was not packing millions of black people off to concentration camps and killing them when they arrived. But in the South white vigilantes were lynching and beating black people to death right through the 1950s. And racism is still obviously present across the US today. Now the far right is rltryingvto revive anti-Semitism.
Will Meyerhofer@seldo The Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws were based on Southern racist Jim Crow codes. As in...literally, they were used by German legislators as the precedent for the German laws. No kidding.
hallvors@seldo Will you write a biography thread about Eleanor Roosevelt? If yes I look forward to it :)
A woman in my family attended Roosevelt's post-war international women's conference. Topic "the world we live in - the world we want". I would love to know more about it but do not have time for a three volume biography at the moment :)
A woman in my family attended Roosevelt's post-war international women's conference. Topic "the world we live in - the world we want". I would love to know more about it but do not have time for a three volume biography at the moment :)
The Polish Dispatch@seldo
This, and:
- nazi gas chambers were inspired by US hydrogen cyanide prison executions,
- nazi concentration camps were inspired by US indian reservations,
One of favorite Hitler's books was "The Passing of the Great Race":
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist
This, and:
- nazi gas chambers were inspired by US hydrogen cyanide prison executions,
- nazi concentration camps were inspired by US indian reservations,
One of favorite Hitler's books was "The Passing of the Great Race":
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist
acm@seldo Adding some hashtags that this entire conversation is sorely lacking.
Will š¹š“@seldo they taught me in school the reason the US took so long to join ww2 was just principled isolationism. Now I know it's really because it took them that long to decide with side they wanted to join
Aris Teon