“[They] are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy… Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
Sounds like someone knowledgeably writing about modern Trumpist Repugnicans, or maybe even any (all?) of the populist, conservative parties worldwide. It was actually written in 1944 by Henry Wallace, 33rd Vice-President of the USA. He was commenting on the American pro-Nazi fascists. Before WWII, they had millions of followers in organizations like America First, Silver League, the German-American Bund, and similar groups. Many of them continued their subversive activities even while the USA was fighting Germany.
It’s a part of American history detailed in Bradley Hart’s book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s American Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books – St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2018). It’s not the first book I’ve read on this dark chapter in American history, merely the latest, but what has always puzzled me is how the lessons learned in the 1930s and ’40s about the right and their subversive activities seem to have been forgotten: today, the pro-Nazi right is again on the rise in the USA.*
Hart draws on “recently opened archives and personal papers,” adding a new dimension to the story, documenting in eight chapters the various groups, organizations, and individuals who promoted and pursued various ideologies that, if not specifically pro-Nazi helped Germany’s aims. These include both American politicians, businessmen, university student organizations, spies, and religious leaders. The support for the Nazis in the USA was strong for many years. It still is, although today’s neo-Nazis are mostly sad, puerile imitators of that ideology, with little more than hate and a poor education to collectively sustain them.
It wasn’t just these organizations that promoted racism and fascism in the USA, but also several well-known personalities pushed it (or promoted aspects of it, like anti-Semitism): Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh are among the most notable, but there were rightwing Christian pastors and churches working for groups like the Christian Front, a pro-Nazi religious-political organization run by the deeply anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin. Other pro-Nazi advocates at the time included the Kansas minister Gerald Winrod, Louisiana’s Gerald k. Smith, and others.
Today, the American, pseudo-Christian Talibangelists and fake Evangelists promote many of the same ideologies, although they focus their bile on Muslims more than Jews (when not promoting themselves and demanding money from their gullible followers). These are deeply anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian theocracy lobbyists. They still continue to promote Trump as the winner of the election he lost, and to spread Trump’s lies about election fraud.
Trump is not generally viewed as anti-Semitic, at least in public, although like his profession to Christian faith, it’s highly suspect. He has tweeted what many consider anti-Semitic remarks such as those he made in 2019:
In August, Donald Trump tweeted that Jewish Americans who vote for a Democrat are guilty of ignorance or “great disloyalty: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” Many commentators wrote that this assertion echoed the anti-Semitic trope that Jewish Americans have “dual loyalty” to Israel.
However, his anti-Muslim bigotry is well established in the public record. In 2017, he retweeted “…a series of anti-Muslim propaganda videos shared online by a high-ranking official in the ultra-nationalist UK political group Britain First” as CNN reported. By spring 2018, barely two years into his term, media had documented “86 Times Donald Trump Displayed or Promoted Islamophobia.”
The actual Nazis in Germany encouraged their American supporters and even launched an official Nazi political organization called the Gauleitung-USA, based in New York City, in 1931. However, after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in ’33, the organization was dissolved and replaced by the German-American Bund. That group included an armed wing modelled after Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA), trained to use force. Another group, Friends of the New Germany, which had recruited around 5,000 members between 1933 and ’35, was also absorbed into the Bund.
Watching American political dramas like their presidential elections is both entertaining and frightening. Yet it is also strangely educational. it has taught me a basic tenet: Americans as a people know little to nothing about politics. Not just about international politics, 