Re: ...the basic nature of the two situations is also different. They are similar in that there was widespread bigotry in both situations, but bigotry has historically not been rare. The existence of such bigotry isn't enough to consider the situations essentially similar. Adolph Hitler wanted to and did create a program of genocide against Jews and a few other categories of people that he considered undesirable. There was at no point in its history a program of genocide in the Bible Belt.
I completely disagree... Of course, there was no "genocide" in the US slavocracy because US slavers needed blacks just like cattle breeders needed cows... So, according to your viewpoint, Hitler's policy towards Jews and other lesser breeds would have been acceptable if it had merely consisted of turning them all into... the Reich's slaves??
All in all, what basically happened in 1930s Europe was the culmination, the climax of a 400-year continuum of racism, racial hatred and eugenic fanaticism by Europeans... The plight of Europe's white minorities (Jews, Gypsies, Communists,...) was already portended by the cruelties and atrocities perpetrated first against pre-Colombian natives in South America, next against African slaves shipped to the Americas and other indigenous people in Europe's colonies (Algeria, Belgian Congo,...)
However, what European bourgeois/ruling classes never expected was that their racism, prejudices and segregation enforced OVERSEAS would, one day, backfire right into the heart of Europe... Genocides and racist atrocities are always first committed against faraway "savages" --in Central Africa, in the Algerian bled, in American prairies, in the Amazon jungle,... And Europeans thought that the line of their genocidal urges would always be drawn at white Europe --and they were dead wrong! All the atrocities committed against colored, non-white peoples under the colonial regime eventually crept back into Europe in the 1930s... They came back to roost.
(Cont'd on next post) |
