The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.
According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.
This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.
We never actually de-Nazified after 1945. Between Operation Paperclip, Operation GLADIO, and the rat-lines to Latin America, we just shuffled the Nazi deck chairs on the Nazi Titanic.
In October 1945, in order to constitute a working legal system, and given that 90% of German lawyers had been members of the Nazi Party, the British decided that 50% of the German Legal Civil Service could be staffed by “nominal” Nazis. Similar pressures caused them to relax the restriction even further in April 1946.
This failure to de-Nazify post-war Europe, combined with the need to engage mercenaries and scientists in the ramp up to Truman’s war in Korea and the coups in Greece, Albania, and Iran, led to a kind-of global re-Nazification. Former Nazis took power in South Africa, in Brazil, in the newly reconstituted West Germany, and became influence brokers in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey.
From the Prescott Bush and Thomas J. Watson days of outright collaboration with Fascist Governments to the United Fruit Company rampaging through Latin America to Reagan’s Iran-Contra deal, we’ve been working hand-in-glove with Nazis practically since their inception.
Hey, just like we failed to de-traitor the American South after the civil war! It’s almost like you have to pull that bullshit out by the root.
Whoa.
I know the son of a paperclip. He is one of the best guys you’d know; the kind of guy who doesn’t come from asshole parents.
Maybe the scientists and many others weren’t true believers? Maybe leave the regular victims out when their only crime was being unable to leave until their science degree gave them a way to escape?
Hannah Arendt
Or maybe they weren’t shy about turning their coats when their backs were against the walls.
Or maybe the wheels of the genocide machine turn the same, whether they folks at the controls are true believers or not.
Ah, the good old Nuremberg Defense.