The Talismanic Nazi
It would seem that the only historical figures with which Americans are even passingly familiar are a handful of German National Socialists. Nearly every day, a public figure in the United States declares another public figure, or recent episode, to be somehow the same as the Nazis, or worse than the Nazis, or “literally Hitler.” Recently, a congresswoman named Nancy Mace grilled Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, over the latter’s use of Nazi metaphors to describe the enforcement of immigration law in America. Walz had deployed the standard “everyone is a Nazi” bombast to make his political opponents look like psychopaths. Mace, not to be outdone, simply increased the level of hyperbole and made Walz’s ahistorical ravings appear amateurish by comparison.
Examples like these could be multiplied ad infinitum. Americans know almost nothing about history. They do know, however, that everyone around them is a Nazi.
It might appear, at first blush, that Americans compare so many things in the twenty-first century to a group of Germans from more than three-quarters of a century ago because of the limits on comparison imposed by ignorance of the past. Everyone is a Nazi, in other words, because Americans lack any other means of establishing historical analogy. Given the state of American public school “education,” it is hardly surprising that when Americans reach for historical metaphors, they find very little from which to choose. Of the few scraps of history they think they know, the Nazis are the most garish, so, by default, Americans, it might seem, reach for that almost every time.
But on closer reflection it becomes clear that ignorance of history is not a cause of Americans’ obsession with the Nazis, but a symptom of it. The obsession came first. And before that, further reflection reveals, came a morbid sensitivity to any comparison with the Nazis. And before that came a nauseating realization that Americans and Nazis were not very different after all. This is the chain of causation. Americans first knew that they were like the Nazis, then were very anxious to pretend to be unlike them, then built their education system around catering to the almost fundamental psychological need to convince themselves that they were not what they accused everyone else of being. “Nazism” in America today is talismanic. Almost nobody, except for maybe some lunatic skinheads, is “literally” a Nazi. But that’s just the problem. Nazism is not antithetical to America. It is central to it. Which is why Americans must forever accuse others of being Nazis, in order to convince themselves that things are otherwise than they know them to be.
There are two threads to this story. To begin with the one proximally related to Nazism, it was not the Germans but the Americans (and, to some extent, the British) who developed the intellectual framework, namely eugenics, which the National Socialists perfected, institutionalized, and industrialized in Europe in the early 1940s. Eugenics is very much an American vintage. The systematic discrimination against those whom the Americans once blithely labeled “morons” and “idiots” and “backwards” and “savages” and “mentally feeble” was a born-on-the-Fourth-of-July phenomenon.
One would not know this today to hear the Americans tell it, of course. But this willful, and mendacious, severing of the practice of eugenics in Germany from its invention and implementation in the United States helps explain why, today, so many Americans rush to condemn nearly every adversary as a recrudescence of Nazism in their midst. Even, especially, when a disagreement has nothing whatsoever to do with Nazism, Americans insist that those with whom they disagree are “literally” Nazis, are “literally” the return of Nuremberg rallies in our time.
Donald Trump gave a speech at Madison Square Garden in the autumn of 2024. Long before that, American Nazis had gathered there. Therefore, Trump must be Hitler. This was a central argument in the presidential campaign of Trump’s opponent. That opponent made her political career by doing the will of Planned Parenthood, perhaps the biggest eugenicist organization in the United States. Trump is Hitler, says the pawn of the eugenicists. Americans are unable to come to terms with their own history. They do not want to know the wrongs they have done. And so, they fob off their sins onto others. The Germans have become Uncle Sam’s doppelganger, a Conradian or Melvillean figure who contains the projected darkness of one onto another.
Consider the shrillness with which Americans have remembered slavery since the end of the Second World War. Slavery is second only to Nazism in America as an all-purpose denunciation tool, a tactic for announcing that one’s opponent is beneath human consideration. But there is a short-circuit at the heart of this juvenile logic. To hear Americans tell it, racism is everywhere today, but slavery was the fault of some band of misfits, some cretins who crept into the American body politic and whose memory, and ancestors, must now be forever and continuously driven out of the land. Everyone is racist, but only some people were slavers. Slavery is remembered now as the work of a region, of a place preternaturally prone to racist hatred. Americans have forgotten that slavery is an all-American institution, and that those who trafficked in kidnapped Africans and their progeny are no different than those who helped themselves to a continent by killing off its inhabitants. Americans act as though slavery were a unique problem, when of course there is horror even more widespread than enslavement in North America, horror that Americans desperately wish the legend of slavery that they have invented would explain away and contain.
Jim Crow, too, fits this pattern precisely. It is always someone else who has done wrong against another. It is always some malign interloper somewhere, some bearer of a historical disease. It was the racists then, the racists there, who creep up to steal our innocence now. Some Nazi in the shadows, sending out malevolent vapors, is jeopardizing the American dream. As though that dream were not built on rapine and slaughter, murder more demonic than any slaver could ever have devised. Jim Crow, like the plantation, was a phenomenon of dehumanization, but also of contradiction. For either to work, the dehumanized had to be human beings. It makes no sense to enslave non-humans. It makes no sense to have separate movie theaters or drinking fountains for non-humans. Jim Crow and slavery were ubiquitous and stupid. Eugenics, by contrast, is an abstraction, free of any constraint by reality. Eugenicists ground their pronouncements in science, in the heights of Enlightenment philosophy. This is America. Not the plodding stupidity of Jim Crow, but the pervasive “science” of eugenics. In the mummery that is American “history,” however, Americans pretend as though slavery, something which makes no sense and which is evidently inhumane–something which comes with its own built-in refutation–is America, in order to pretend that eugenics, that is to say, Nazism, has nothing to do with the true nature of the country.
Everyone is a Nazi, everyone is a racist, everyone is secretly plotting to re-enslave and re-segregate and re-Aryanize–because, deep down, Americans know that this melodramatic silliness is not true at all. Americans know that, deep down, the Nazis are not everyone else. The Nazi is in the mirror.
The second thread is closer to Nazism, and also closer to who Americans believe themselves to be. Americans are a chosen people, they claim. Americans were not just the first full-blown eugenicists. They were also the first Zionists. Long before anyone had a concrete plan to move European Jewry to the Levant, another band of European religious zealots, the Puritans, declared themselves chosen by God and set off to found cities in His honor in another remote wilderness. American history, the history that Americans learn in textbooks, is the story of that pre-Zionist Zionism. The men in the tight breeches and tri-corner hats, the men in waistcoats and braided ponytails, who set up highflown systems of government to blanket a land which they were steadily emptying of inhabitants, are the same kinds of men who went to Palestine for shooting practice, and who dreamed sick dreams of a Europe ethnically cleansed.
Thomas Jefferson’s worst sin was not that he enslaved and raped people. That was bad, but not the worst. His worst sin was that his prowess rested on wholesale dispossession and murder. Not just in faraway Africa. Right under his feet. In “Virginia,” the name the invaders gave to a place where they did not, and still do not, belong. Virginia. As though virginity had anything to do with what Thomas Jefferson was up to there.
Even today these truths, although self-evident, are not held high.
“America is a land of immigrants,” Americans cry. “We are all immigrants here.”
No. This is not true. This leaves out a very important part of the story, the part before the proto-Zionists invaded. But to tell that part would be to provoke a moral crisis. Americans who understood how their country had been established would have to choose either to justify, openly, the genocide that preceded their crowing about independence and constitutions, or to accept the moral consequences of that act and return whence they came. I suspect it will always be the former. Consider that Americans somewhat troubled at having kidnapped and enslaved Africans did not suggest that those Africans be recompensed in North America, but that they be sent to a completely invented country, “Liberia,” on the west coast of Africa.
The 1619 Project unfolded, ironically, in the same blind spot as earlier hagiography of Thomas Jefferson and his friends. It is not a new insight that Africans were dragged away from their homes, sold, shipped, and subjected to pure horror, torture, rape, murder, and forced labor by the millions. Americans have always known that. The objection to the 1619 Project was not that it might reveal something unknown. The real fear was that it might touch something deeper. But it did not. The 1619 Project was part of an internecine skirmish, an attempt to rewrite the founding of America. But the much more terrible truth is that America was never founded. It was invaded. Because God told a few boatfuls of people to do so. Abraham wandered. Moses wandered. There is always a blank space into which the chosen people go.
And so we come full circle to the present. We come to the Holocaust of the hour, the rubbling of the Levant in the name of the prevention of another Holocaust. Zionism is always correct. Zionism means never having to say you’re sorry. Everyone who disagrees with a Zionist, or with an American, is a Nazi. The truth is the opposite, but the truth must never be swallowed down. So we all shout, “Nazi! Nazi!” This is talismanic Nazism. The name of the enemy is the name of the self, but by repeating it as the name of the enemy we keep the realization of our identity with him at bay.
American scholar of the Middle East Roy Casagranda has pointed out that the postwar Zionist project was more than the Nazis ever dreamed of doing, because not only were Ashkenazi Jews leaving Europe, they were also killing non-white people in the Levant. It was two ethnic cleansings for the price of one.
This helps explain why Americans are so touchy about the Nazis. Americans like to think that they are not Nazis. They insist on it. They will screech about it if provoked. Their ancestors, they say, defeated the Nazis. (It was the Soviets who did this, but history is not important.) Americans believe in equality, diversity, human rights. There were never any North American Holocausts.
The Navajo, the Cherokee, and many other peoples are still in camps in North America. Many other peoples have been culturally, even genetically, cleansed from the North American fabric. This is exactly why Americans will always “support” Israel. It doesn’t take crafty lobbying to convince Americans to do this (although AIPAC-funded propaganda certainly helps). Of course, there are Biblically-inspired political reasons for supporting Israel. The American ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee–this is all that needs to be said about that. But even those who scoff at the Huckabees of America are on his side.
To question Israel is to be a Nazi. To question an American is to be a Nazi. Everyone is a Nazi. Except, of course, the ritually pure one who denounces the world around as being “literally Hitler.”