Berlin 1945, the end of a racist empire
I just finished a long book about the Holocaust. The author, Timothy Snyder, begins the book showing that Hitler used the Jim Crow south as a model for the racist state he dreamed of. Hitler also admired America’s long history of betraying and murdering native Americans. He saw the Volga River in Russia as his own Mississippi River and the Slavic people of eastern Europe as the native population to destroy. He would make Germany great and has rich as America by taking over all of eastern Europe and Russia as far as the Volga and getting rid of all the Jews in the process.
Hitler believed that conquest of these lands was necessary because the German land could not support the population of Germany. It is one of the terrible ironies of his anti-intellectualism that he held back the green revolution that would feed all of Europe and much of the world after he was dead, and the fascists were out of power in defeat. By the 1960s every free democratic country could not only feed itself but had surplus food to export. Part of that food surplus went to the Soviet Union because the green revolution there was stopped by the perverse biological beliefs of Joseph Stalin.
In 2016 Trump took control of the Republican Party by being openly racist instead of pretending not to be racist as the party had done since Nixon. Trump has spent three years destroying the environment and laws protecting the environment. He attacks the green new deal and all environmental initiatives as socialism. Like Hitler a century ago Trump is an idiot who could make America better, but his prejudices and hatred of science rule his third-rate mind. Stupid people are always the most stubborn.
Hitler took control of Germany with the votes and the backing of Evangelical and Catholic Christians by making them so afraid of socialism they embraced Hitler’s racism. The southern churches that backed slavery then Jim Crow laws are now the state church of Trump. They are anti-science, anti-intellectual and they want an apocalypse not a living planet. If the resistance to environmental progress seems crazy in America it’s because people with vile beliefs and vile goals really are looking forward to Armageddon.
Snyder’s book: “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” traces the history of the Holocaust in every country that the Nazis controlled. Throughout the book the terrible suffering that racism brings to the world is clear. Also clear is the terrible irony that some of that suffering is because racists are anti-science and anti-intellectual and their a thorough stupidity ruins even their own world.
