What is Reddit's opinion of Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Yes god forbid the Nazis European honor be besmirched by false comparison with the mongrelized ideals of the Americans

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

Oh whoops looks like America’s institutionalized racial oppression was a significant influence on the Nazis own racial policies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Where do you think this is illegal and please cite the law.

It is not even illegal in the US to BE a Nazi

The Nazis modeled themselves on the US

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

It is illegal in Germany

Operation Paperclip might indicate we were just better competition at being fascists. We framed the war as a good-vs-evil struggle and hanged some war criminals, but we've been telling the Hague we're exempt from the international law we used to prosecute Nazis ever since.

Also worth noting that the Nazis modeled their race laws after Jim Crow laws, but thought we were a little extreme about the "one drop of black blood means you're not white," and instead said 3/4 of you grandparents determined your race.

Nazi = member/sympathizer of the NSDAP, I don't believe any of them cared for American republicans. Furthermore, the Nazis had the American Democrats as a model when coming up with their racial laws and I don't mean simply inspiration, but a conscious attempt at copying what the democrats were "doing right".

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

there are dozens of books written on this topic, and you can find plenty of info online as well. All based on hard evidence, documents and transcripts, it's not simple speculation.

Thank you for the book recommendation.

Also, Hitler and the Nazis based many of their anti-Jewish laws (no Jews in parks, Jews not allowed in restaurants) on American Jim Crow Laws. http://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/

https://smile.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

Oh Hitler absolutely took inspiration from US racism:

> Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.”

​

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

That book is by a professor at Yale. It seems to be the primary source for most of these articles.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1842933?seq=1

The above source focuses more on Hitler's personal views on America.

Then there are some choice quotes straight from the Nazi-horse's mouth:

> Since the civil war, in which the southern states were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In this spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.

^ Hitler, talking about how great he thought the US was... until the Civil War.

> You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought...

^ Charles Goethe, writing to a colleague about American eugenics inspiring Hitler and other Nazi officials (1934), as quoted by Edwin Black, "Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection", The San Francisco Gate, Nov. 9, 2003

> At the outset of the German Government's movement against the Jews, an American visitor asked Herr Hitler why he was making it so ruthless. The Reichskanzler replied that he had got the idea from us. Americans, he said, are the great rope and lamppost artists [i.e., lynching] of the world, known of all men as such. He was using the same methods against the Jews that we used against the loyalists of ‘76, the Indians, the Chinese on the Western coast, the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Filipinos — every helpless people in fact whom we had ever chanced to find underfoot.

^ Albert Jay Nock, "The Jewish Problem in America," Atlantic Monthly, June, 1941.

The Nazis were actually huge fans of American race laws. Here’s a good book about it.

bruh

>In the Nazi state, Lebensraum became not just a romantic yearning for a return to the East but a vital strategic component of its imperial and racist visions. For the Germans, eastern Europe represented their “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler and other Nazi thinkers drew direct comparisons to American expansion in the West. During one of his famous “table talks,” Hitler decreed that “there's only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”

another

>In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Literally a whole book about it from a Princeton graduate

> a lot of it wasn't directed malice with the majority of it being done by disease and private actors, rather some sort of American Einsatzgruppen

Ok what the fuck was the US military doing then with it's dozens of wars against native tribes? Certainly wasn't respecting tribal rights. Plus I imagine that not every german citizen was on board with Lebensraum either, the difference is that Nazi Germany had a larger secret police.

>Despite our tolerance of free speech, we haven't fallen under the spell of any radical ideology yet.

the united states has been consistently under the spell of many radical ideologies at varying points in time. some of our policies were used as inspiration for the Nazi programme, my dude.

let me repeat: Adolf fucking Hitler admired the USA for our racist policies.

confused a bit: you're more concerned that someone might punch jp for being a nazi than you are concerned that he is elevating... literal nazis? that he is collaborating with people who want genocide? that he is normalizing these views to his fans?

i am far less concerned about jordan peterson getting punched at the grocery store than i am of a group of whitenats killing a black kid — which has been a regular occurrence throughout the US's history up until... nvm it never really stopped! hell, eugenics was an extremely popular concept in the US in the early 20th century. so maybe let's stop handwringing about hypothetical slippery slopes and pay attention to what history shows us.

i'm guessing you're either unfamiliar w American history or you don't fully understand the threat of fascism or how it works. which is fine! it is okay to be young and not know things. but please take the time to educate yourself on the subject. the Southern Poverty Law Center is a great place to start.

the FBI disagrees with you btw. young men are being radicalized in droves, and it's a threat to democracy everywhere. the best way to handle white supremacist and fascist ideology is to deplatform it, marginalize it, condemn it, make that ideology unacceptable to support publicly, and if that doesn't fix the problem... yeah, punch them. you don't just sit around on your hands and hope they don't become more powerful than they already are.

if JP doesn't want to get treated like a Nazi, he shouldn't be ACTIVELY COLLABORATING WITH and ELEVATING literal white supremacists. JP gets to choose what he says and who he associates with. he doesn't get to choose to be free from the consequences of his choices. he can't have it both ways — that's how children think.

JP's insistence on collaborating with white supremacists and fascists is an active threat to our democracy. he is normalizing these ideas (like eugenics! fucking EUGENICS!) to his fans and radicalizing young impressionable boys in droves, who have been slowly conditioned into thinking that these ideologies are not that big of a deal, that hypothetical censorship is a bigger problem than the people advocating literal genocide.

to be clear, i don't think the average young, disaffected kid who read 12 rules for life and found a lot of value from it to be a fascist or anything. i'm glad it helped you. really, i am. however, it's 2022. JP is actively collaborating with fascists now. you can be thankful for the help and advice he gave you in your time of need, and then move on with your life. find better, smarter, more thoughtful people to look up to. people who aren't flirting with genocidal ideologies.

i get it: it sucks when your heroes go off the deep end. but everyone has to be accountable for their actions — and that includes jordan peterson.

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Here’s a list of books written by historians breaking it down. They even have primary resources in them so you can attribute the literal words out of nazis mouths as part of my “fictional world”

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/

https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Hitler-Making-Thomas-Weber/dp/0465032680/

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Democracy-Hitlers-Downfall-Republic/dp/1250162505/

https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Connection-Eugenics-American-Socialism/dp/0195149785/

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

Hitler was most certainly influenced by ideas of Biological Evolution. He was principally influenced by the American Eugenics Movement and often cited the racial injustices in America as both an example and justification for the equally vile and atrocious actions he sanctioned or directed in the interest of "Lebenraum" — that is, living space for the natural, German race.

>"At present, there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model, German Republic, but in the U.S.A., that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State." — Mein Kampf, Volume Two - The National Socialist Movement Chapter III: Subjects and Citizens.

Hitler's adoration of American Eugenics and Race Laws, which were themselves founded on social and practical applications of the Darwinian Model of Evolution is undeniable.

I would also recommend that you read, "Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law", James Whitman.

Here's a truly interesting blog on the matter of the continued prevalence of exceptionalism in America.

It is unfortunate that the dark side of Darwin's theory, played out in history, is rarely discussed among atheists and evolutionists. Darwin's theory is praised with little thought as what it produces when applied in real life.

Unchecked, Social Darwinism has profound social implications — it results in genocides, abortion, discrimination, forced sterilizations, marriage regulation, destruction of the unfit, racism, hatred — the opposite of everything the golden rule teaches us, that is, to "love your neighbour as you love yourself" and "to be kind to strangers in need".

This is echoed in a piece produced by History Hit, "Social Darwinism in Nazi Germany", where it is cited,

>"Charles Darwin's Origin of Species revolutionized accepted thought about biology. Despite being a highly universal theory, it is widely accepted now that the Darwinian view of the world does not transfer effectively to every element of life."

...

>"The most infamous instance of Social Darwinism in action is in the genocidal policies of the Nazi German Government in the 1930-1940s.

>It was openly embraced as promoting the notion that the strongest should naturally prevail and was a key feature of Nazi propaganda films..."

Hopefully, you will consider all of the evidence available that shows that when Darwin's theory of evolution is actively applied as social policy it results in nothing short of racism. On this basis I posed my proposition that racism, in all of its forms, can never hope to be eliminated from our social constructs as long as we continue to give a voice to Darwin's racist thought.

Republicans are a cult, call them for what they are, cause cults are always gonna be culting.

Trump started the birther movement, tells you alot about how none of his base are racists, they just hated Obama's policeys.

The fascist roots run deep in America started around Andrew Jackson(Trumps fav) trail of tears.

Pre ww2 Nazi and American history is not so black and white.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-nazis-studied-american-race-laws-for-inspiration-2017-2

https://www.amazon.ca/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420

The US certainly served as a model for Nazi Germany:

>Pushing back against scholarship that downplays the impact in Nazi Germany of the U.S. model of legal racism, Whitman marshals an array of evidence to support the likelihood “that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect direct American influence.” As race law’s global leader, Whitman stresses, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.

​

Nazi legal theory was inspired by US segregation policy:

​

>Especially significant were the writings of the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” who spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Seeking to deploy historical and legal knowledge in the service of Aryan racial purity, Krieger studied a range of overseas race regimes, including contemporary South Africa, but discovered his foundation in American law. His deeply researched writings about the United States began with articles in 1934, some concerning American Indians and others pursuing an overarching assessment of U.S. race legislation—each a precursor to his landmark 1936 book, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”).

​

This work was additionally impactful:

​

>Whitman’s “smoking gun” is the transcript of a June 5, 1934, conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The record reflects how the most extreme among them, who relied on Krieger’s synoptic scholarship, were especially drawn to American legal codes based on white supremacy. The main conceptual idea was Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction. In both America and Germany, the importance and meaning of race for the most part had been determined less by scientific realities or social conventions than by political decisions enshrined in law.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/

​

Hitler cites the US directly:

> Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.”

​

> In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” W*hen he spoke of* Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

And this isn't a particularly new point of view:

>As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “<strong>The American West and the Nazi East</strong>,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “<strong>The Nazi Connection</strong>,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler