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anderjak · 7 years

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“#ThisIsNotUs” Is A Lie.

The hashtag "#ThisIsNotUs" was trending yesterday on Twitter, and... We need to have a history lesson.

Prior to World War II, a commonly overlooked fact is that many corporations founded in America assisted Nazi Germany leading up to WWII. Companies like Coca-Cola and IBM (the latter of which will be important in this essay) would work to great ends to help the Nazi regime function.

Just before WWII, around 1936, the German-American Bund (formerly Friends of New Germany), a Nazi-endorsed American coalition of German-born American immigrants and Americans of German descent to push German ideology (which, at the time, was Naziism) and promote German excellence, was created. They would utilize the symbology, from the swastika to uniforms, in their public appearances. The group would dissolve, capping out at around 25,000 members in the US after immigration issues, taxation fraud, and more made it impossible to keep going. We didn't really stop them, they just sort of faded out due to legal trouble and lack of leadership.

In 1960, the American Nazi Party, formerly the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, was made an official political party in the US. This was a group explicitly devoted not just to Naziism but Hitlerism -- the expression of ideals that are in line with Adolf Hitler as both an individual and the leader of the Nazi party. While their numbers never rose to incredible heights, the group still persists to this day (despite an assassination attempt by a follower on the original founder, George Lincoln Rockwell) as New Order. They also once held the name National Socialist White People's Party explicitly to mirror the NAACP in name, fun fact. While they are technically no longer "active" as there is no longer membership within New Order, they still come up time to time, including a 2008 attempt to run another candidate for President of the USA. Much of their desire to stay afloat has been due to a lack of condemnation from official public figures; any faltering in their status has been largely from within, despite a history of violence and assassination attempts within the group.

I mention this because we sort of forget that the USA did not fight the Axis Forces because we were angry about what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish people; we only got involved after attacks were launched against us. We assisted in shutting down Nazi Germany and forced their leaders to stand trial in Nuremberg. Afterwards, many Nazi leaders were executed, Germany put a hard ban on all Nazi imagery and profession of ideology, and paid reparations to many affected Jewish people and surrounding nations -- but we didn't do it because they were Nazis. -We-, as Americans, did it because they Fucked With Our Shit. At the time, we were more than happy to contain anyone of East Asian descent in internment camps, and were rapidly heading toward our own genocide of East Asian people because of how we reacted to Japanese involvement at Pearl Harbor. (And, for the record, the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were dropped a fair deal after the Japanese surrendered; it wasn't a defensive act but a lash-out because our at-the-time sitting president was virulently racist towards East Asian people.)

What's more: We're responsible for how the Holocaust was carried out. And that's thanks to IBM.

We don't mention this much, but there was a lawsuit toward IBM about documents they held about their involvement with the Nazi Party leading up to WWII. This shouldn't really be a shock; Henry Ford, of Ford Motors, was granted the Grand Cross of the Golden Eagle, a high honor in the Nazi regime, for his assistance in manufacturing for war (it helped that he was publicly incredibly anti-semitic). Coca-Cola created a wholly unique ad campaign in Nazi Germany supporting the Third Reich and its ideals in an effort to gain a foothold within the region to push more beverages. American companies being involved with Nazis was pretty damn common since, before WWII, we had a solid relationship with Hitler.

But here's the kicker: The Holocaust, the Final Solution, would not have been possible without IBM, an American tech company. (Technically it was founded in Germany, licensed over to the US, and, as CTO of the company, Thomas J. Watson changed the name and established themselves as a unique brand within the US.) IBM acted as the means for gathering census data in Germany as early as 1933, to help identify and target political adversaries of the rising Nazi party and non-Aryan folk, specifically the Jewish people. The tattoos on interned Jewish people were a code developed by IBM. IBM would invest around $1 million to establish a new factory in Berlin, which helped Germany essentially throw out old census data of up to 600,000 Jewish folk eventually interned, as the new census data targeted 2 million people. Without IBM, Nazi Germany would likely never have been able to reach the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

I say all this because the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs is a lie; it is us. It has BEEN us. We continue to shy away from our responsibilities as a people to shut down intolerance, to be intolerant toward intolerance. We hold up Confederate statues, display Confederate flags, and try to downplay slavery's role in the Civil War. Unlike Germany, we never paid reparations, banned slave era imagery or Confederate imagery. Some Confederate leaders would go on to hold political office and even become Senators. When WWII was fought and won, we still had people coming back to segregated schools, where interracial marriage was still illegal in most of the country, where the Civil Rights movement had yet to begin, where we still treated a significant portion of our population as "lesser," as "inferior" to White People -- and we still do, with being complicit in bigotry of the highest order, of police violence toward black people, of giving extreme racism nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

I've contended with people who argue that the White Supremacist movement is directly caused by Black Lives Matter because they sincerely believe any collection of Black people for a purpose is inherently violent and toxic, despite claims that they are "absolutely not racist" and tell me about the black friend they have who's totally cool with it. I've contended with people who argue the Anti-Fascism protests are somehow causing White Supremacists to elevate to full-blown Nazi status in Charlottesville (including, but not limited to, throwing up the Nazi salute, wearing Nazi armbands, shouting "Blood and Soil," protecting Confederate monuments, et cetera). We continually contend with politicians who refuse to acknowledge the violent racist contingent of folks in this country, including our own President, who all say "violence from all sides" is somehow responsible -- despite three being dead solely because of Nazi protestors wanting to shut an Antifa counter-protest down. (An act that has been repeated in BLM protests, NADPL protests, anti-Trump protests, and more.) Our own President even refuses to answer questions about the Actual For Real Nazis in Charlottesville, taking the stance of "all sides" -- because he knows he relies on the votes of bigots who look to Trump as validation for their fears and actions. It's no wonder these people wearing Nazi armbands are also bearing MAGA hats -- they legitimately feel emboldened by our current President.

I mention all this not to make us feel worse about what's going on. I mention this because a lot of White People don't know about this, because a lot of this isn't taught in our schools. Even as a kid, I was witnessing slavery's role in the Civil War being downplayed as a small tenant of around fourteen philosophical disputes of the Confederacy (all of which, ironically, relate to the right to own slaves and the benefits it gave land owners). I had to look a lot of this stuff up myself, and take extra-curricular history courses to understand how these things connect and weave into the fabric of our country's very being. Because I don't personally experience this level of racism on a remotely regular basis; it's all second-hand. It's all witnessing it happening to others. Seeing the scars, the wounds, the obituaries of people who resisted, or people who were simply trying to get to work or go home or just perform their inalienable right to protest peacefully against injustice.

I mention all this so we all understand This Is Us. And it doesn't have to be. But we have to first acknowledge that it is. And we have to be loud about not wanting this. White Supremacy, White Nationalism, Naziism, are intolerant viewpoints. They are viewpoints whose ultimate goal is the destruction of non-Whites by any means necessary; to try and paint the entire country White as an ideologically "pure" nation. With history and with active resistance, it is on us to be loud, to shout these people down, to act in defense of the people we believe belong in this country.

We're a nation of many, and the only way we can truly be a tolerant nation is by shutting down intolerance where it stands. Make racists ashamed to voice their ideas. Make them scared. Make them suffer consequences for preaching violence toward a people on the basis of their skin color or religious identity. Naziism and White Supremacy absolutely must not be given a platform under any circumstance.

#bloggerjak

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