[On September
20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under
Operation Paperclip arrived at a
landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on
that fraught anniversary.]
On how to
respond to a resurgent neo-Nazi movement.
The American
neo-Nazi movement has been present for more than half a century—in the same
mid-1960s years that Tom Lehrer was releasing “Wernher von Braun,” a
dishonorably discharged Navy veteran named George
Lincoln Rockwell founded the American
Nazi Party (ANP), and the organization has been active in American politics
ever since (despite Rockwell’s August
1967 murder by disgruntled former ANP member John Patler). Over those decades
it has also spawned competing organizations such as Matthias
Koehl’s New Order, a monthly magazine (The
Stormtrooper), and a briefly active 1970s youth organization (the National
Socialist Liberation Front, or NSLF). Reading all the info in those
hyperlinked posts (none of which, to be clear, are from the organizations
themselves) makes me want to take a shower, but it’s important not to look away
from the fact that American Nazis have been a vocal political force (if of
course a minority one) for more than 50 years.
In August 2017, however,
almost exactly 50 years after Rockwell’s murder, neo-Nazis enjoyed their moment
of greatest national visibility: the August
11-12 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rallies in my hometown of
Charlottesville. The single most famous neo-Nazi participant in those hateful
rallies was James
Fields, the domestic terrorist who drove his car into a crowd of
protesters, killing Heather
Heyer. But while neo-Nazis might want to disavow Fields’ blatantly illegal
action, I’m sure they were much happier with the Friday evening march and rally
on the University of Virginia grounds, at which neo-Nazis sporting swastikas
and offering Hitler salutes chanted slogans such as “Blood and soil” and “Jews
will not replace us!” By emphasizing the presence of neo-Nazis at the
rallies, I don’t mean to downplay the many other white supremacist forces
there, nor quite frankly the centrality of these communities to mainstream 2010s
right-wing American politics (there’s a reason why President Trump argued for “very
fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville). But while white supremacist rhetoric
and violence has been a common thread in Charlottesville
and American history, the overt embrace of Nazism in this moment felt
distinctly new and even more threatening still.
So how do we
respond to that resurgent neo-Nazi movement (other than by punching Nazis, which I’m
fine with but isn’t sufficient by itself as a collective response)? It will
come as something less than a surprise to know that a main answer of mine is
that we need to better engage with our histories, including those about which I’ve
written in this week’s series. But we really do, for lots of reasons but
especially this one: despite our understandable desire to define it as
something entirely outside of and opposed to our national identity, Nazism is indeed
as American as, well, the Ford
Mustang. Or, y’know, the moon landing. But so
too is fighting Nazis, not just on the battlefields of Europe but in
communities and conversations here at home. Which is to say, the original
Antifa wasn’t just all those
WWII soldiers—it was also, and I would argue especially, someone like
Isadore Greenbaum. As always, learning the horrific histories of American
Nazism also means learning the inspiring histories of figures like Greenbaum
(and the 100K New York protesters with whom he shared that 1939 activism).
There are no more important lessons than those for our renewed fight here in
2020.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
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