> An objective look at Germany begins with that it was capitalist. Then
> state-monopoly capitalist. Similarly the U.S. Then there's the
> militarism
> and warmaking. Then there's marked racism. Then there's
> anti-communism. Then
> there is the passive population in the face of rightwing shift. These
> are
> objective. To say there is _no_ resemblance is winking at things.
You can list these resemblances, but if you really look hard at what Nazi Germany was like and what 2003 U.S. is like, they are only superficial, I think.
I'm not enough of an economist to explain the differences between the types of capitalism in the two cases, but I think they are very significant. Militarism? Every country with a military is "militaristic" in a sense -- which is just about every country but Costa Rica, I guess. But I don't think the Wehrmacht and its related bodies, the SS and the Waffen-SS, have any parallel today in the U.S. The characteristic of the U.S. military today is that it is so technologically efficient that it can support the global reach of U.S. imperialism with a comparatively small personnel size and budget (or at least it could against Iraq, which was not a strong enemy).
"Marked racism?" The Nazis' attack on the Jews was much more than "marked racism" -- it was a deviously designed and relentless extermination campaign, far more intense than even the impact of the Jim Crow South on blacks. And even though we have a long way to go before racism is completely eliminated in our society, Jim Crow is long behind us.
>CB: The U.S. prison-industrial complex is disproportionately populated
by
> Black people. We have Native Americans living on reservations. Those are
> proto- and post-Auschwitz-like racism.
I don't think you are really keeping in mind what Auschwitz was -- what it was intended to do, and what it actually did. And besides it, there was Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Sobibor, Theresienstadt -- and on and on. To compare them with the U.S. prison system and Native American reservations is almost obscene. If white Americans today wanted to exterminate blacks and Native Americans, our prisons and reservations are a piss-poor way of going about it.
> We have racist police , death squads
> that shoot people according to race. We still have the Ku Klux Klan
> ( which
> predated the Nazis) , that does a Kristallnacht like thing now and
> again.
Again, do you really know what Kristallnacht was? It was a hugh, concentrated, nationwide pogrom -- not just a few broken windows, or a few crosses burned on a few people's lawns. Go find a standard history of Nazism and read up on it.
> We
> have cops rounding up "middle easterners".
I don't want to white-wash the unconstitutional activities of the FBI and some local police departments against those Arab-Americans and resident aliens who have been jailed. But fortunately, most of the "middle easterners" in the U.S. have not been harmed, either by the police or by the general population. By contrast (I don't think I have to remind you), by the time the Nazi regime was defeated, there were essentially no Jews left in Germany, Austria, Poland, and a number of other European countries. This is a quantitative difference that seems to me very significantly qualitative.
> And we just had a big bangbang ,
> the culmination of 12 years of genocidal war and blockade against the
> Iraqi
> people. Maybe you are not that familiar with what is actually going on
> in
> terms of U.S. racism
I think I'm pretty familiar with U.S. racism. What I wonder is how familiar you are with what the Nazis really believed and did.
> CB: Do you think there are any generalizations in history ? Or is it
> all
> specifics and nothing general ?
I think it is very tricky and problematic to generalize about history. Before you can do that validly, you have to get below the surface similarities and try to understand what was really happening in the various historical periods you want to generalize over -- what factors and trends were really operating, and what concepts like "capitalism," "militarism," and "racism" really meant in each of those periods -- before you jump to the conclusion that period X is "the same as" period Y or period Z.
I certainly don't mean to say that everything is hunky-dory today -- there are lots of things wrong with our society, and plenty of work to do setting those things right. But to do that, we need to understand what is really going on that is causing these wrongs, and what will counteract those causes. My view (and if I'm wrong, I'd be glad to be corrected) is that Nazi Germany just doesn't give us a very informative model to understand the situation we are in.
What the "Bush=Hitler" and "Republicans & neocons=Nazis" comparisons do do is to give some leftists a handy propaganda tool, a way of simplifying reality to a cartoon image in broad brush strokes which (they think) is an effective rhetorical weapon to bash the right with. It also gives them a way to vent their fury at the injustices that they see around them, a vivid expression of their towering rage. But I don't think that these comparisons are even very effective propaganda, because when the average American sees a "Bush=Hitler" sign in the hands of a demonstrator, she or he just thinks that that's a ridiculous idea. And (much as I oppose everything Bush stands for) I think they're right.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche