Communism and Nazism
Were it not for the Ku Klux Klan, here in America, there never would have been the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany. After all, the terror tactics of the Klan might indeed have caused the Robber Barons of the early 20th Century to panic, by creating The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Russia. For that matter, after the atrocities of said Bolsheviks, the Vatican, the British Crown, and certain more anti-Jewish Robber Barons, like Henry Ford decided they had enough, and wanted revenge. So, they actually invented The Third Reich, and Fascist Italy, modeling it on precisely the Soviet Regime that they most desired to destroy.
Needless to say, the Nazis carried out many, many of the very same types of military atrocities and crimes against Humanity that the earlier Bolsheviks did. The Nazis, much like the Bolsheviks before them, set up an entire system of Prison Camps, as well as their own version of the NKVD, namely the SS. In both Prison Camp systems, victims were tortured, butchered, and worked to death in the most hideous and horrendous ways one can imagine. Still, one could argue that the Nazis did the Bolsheviks one better, with their vast, homicidal gas chambers.
Ergo, it would be truly stupid of Americans to heatedly debate, among themselves, as to whether the Russians are eviler than the Germans or the other way about. For, after all, Americans should take a good look in the mirror! For, do they not see? The nasty and cruel things that they say about the Russian and German National Characters boomerangs on them. And moreover, the Nazis got their worst race policies, including Eugenics, from the Americans of all people. Realizing this, I even wonder: why the fixation on The Second World War in the US Media?
I don't think you can explain either with American ideologues, the KKK or American Antisemitism.
There's too mysny factors, like, how both Russia and Germany were lagging behind on becoming Nation-states and how they were both behind on industrialisarion and modernisation as well as colonialism.
Germany less so than Russia, of course. I think Russia eventually colonized a bit of China, which was even more behind in this race.
And from this place of being geographically in the proximity of, but not being one of the world powers themselves, and not being a colony of any empire either, arose an lot of friction.
... I mean ... The Russian Revolution is what you get when you imagine the French Revolution AFTER industrialisation, urbanisation and the birth of a working class. ...
Concentration camps were a British invention, btw.
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I can read facial expressions. I did the test.
Concentration camps were a British invention, btw.
Very good point. They were implemented in the Boer War. The first camps called Concentration Camps were those implemented to harm the Dutch South Africans, the Boer Guerillas who dared defy the might of the British Empire!
The Nazis did indeed get their notions of "eugenics" from Americans. But that's about it.
No nation in Europe needed lessons from the US about how to hate Jews. Antisemitism is centuries old in Europe. Indeed there were very few Jews living in Germany in Hitler's lifetime (less than 200 thousand).So few precisely because Jews had already been pretty much ethicially cleansed from Germany four hundred years earlier during the Renaissance and Reformation.
The KKK was arguable the first modern terrorist organization. But industrialists in the northern US, like Ford, were not "afraid" of the KKK. Henry Ford was not a poor Black sharecropper in the South. So he no reason to give the KKK a second thought.
But on the heels of the First World War, and the Russian Revolution, the powers at be in Europe (the church, industrialists, etc) were terrorified of the spread of "Bolshevism". And many were driven by that terror into the arms of rising fascists like Mussolini and Franco. Nazism is a virulent subset of fascism.
The term Eugenics was coined by Sir Francis Galton, an Englishman and cousin of Charles Darwin. Americans were heavily into it, right before the rise of The Third Reich.
techstepgenr8tion
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I think the most important thing to do in any of these communist or fascist overthrows of regimes and subsequent slaughters is to study how earlier states lead to the undesired final states and do whatever we can to come up with robust ways to prevent such things from happening in the future. Past that questions of whether double the kill-count is worse than insidiousness of ideology such as master race theories or vice verse seems like it's rather remote as a secondary concern. Stop both at their origins whenever possible.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
An interesting point. I never quite thought of it like that. I could take it into firm consideration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_antisemitism
You need to change human psychology.
I don't fancy your chances.
techstepgenr8tion
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Age: 44
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I don't fancy your chances.
Then less talk and more mass killing!
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin