Reply To: Political Statements
Good! I’m happy to be in good company, MtG.
I think war gradually creates enmity between the civilian populations of countries, sometimes directly through propaganda, but often just through the individual experiences of soldiers in an “away” war, and people in occupied territory in a “home” war. So Americans got progressively anti-German during WWII, just as they were getting anti-Japanese and (to a lesser extent, I think) anti-Italian.
But the USA in the 1930’s was a place of widespread racism and ethnic prejudice. There were lynchings all over the south, the KKK was strong, and loads of anti-semitism. The pseudoscience just seemed to bolster feelings that were already there. To me what looks like the biggest change was just coming to associate the enemy’s hated leader with the dreadful remorseless murder of women and children and old people just based on racial hatred.
It gave America’s own racists a little echo of Hitler’s angry face.
And I also think the capitulation of so many European populations, and their cooperation in the Holocaust, stirred feelings of shame and regret in a lot of Americans who claimed ancestry in those countries. The French, the Italians, the Czechs, the Dutch — they delivered up their own Jewish populations to the Nazis to murder?
Every bit of the self-reflection stirred by the sights and stories that emerged after the war had to have played a role in shifting people’s reactions to injustice based on racism.
Mind you, I’m not saying that the spectrum of racial & ethnic intolerance doesn’t survive, in the US and everywhere else. All you have to do is watch an episode of Ali G or the Borat movie and lo and behold, it’s a-li-i-i-ive.