Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Is America as Bad as Nazi Germany?

Quickly challenged, Hill pushed back that Nazi Germany "Learned their systems of genocide by watching America," and the Nazis "Borrowed significantly from American racial laws," which is why "Some Nazi scholars were in America studying racial terror in the South."

Consider, for example, Hans J. Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, and author of Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.

Reading became an "Indispensable survival tool" against "Constant racist attacks." Hans survived because "Unlike Jews, blacks were few in number and relegated to low-priority status." Hans recalls the Nazis' Kristallnacht of 1938, when more than 1,000 Jewish places of worship were destroyed, 91 Jews killed and some 30,000 arrested.

Government propaganda hailed Nazi virtue and denounced Communist evil, but Hans found this "a distortion of facts." The truth was, "In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies."

In Harlem, Hans recalled, "I saw neighborhoods peopled by active working-class folks not much different from those in my old Hamburg neighborhood. The only difference was that everyone - from the mailman to the barber to the police man to the garbage collector to the occasional big shot in a Cadillac convertible - was black." Hans also encounters racism, even in the north.

Hans took advantage of the GI Bill, "Which enabled me to earn the college education denied to me in Nazi Germany." The veteran gets a job with Ebony magazine and when Adlai Stevenson and Sekou Toure sit down for an interview "It seemed to me that coming to America had not been such a bad idea after all."

Hans Massaquoi remained aware of racism but never charges that the United States is as bad as Nazi Germany.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/america-bad-nazi-germany-lloyd-billingsley/ 

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