I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
All of that stuff is still happening today and burying it as “in the past” is EXACTLY what I mean when I say it’s unexamined.
Let this sink in. The US is what you’d get if Nazi Germany stood for 250 years. The corrupt fascist heart still beats at the center, and it drives every decision this country makes.
It is NOT in the past.
Hitler grew up reading Karl May’s American western novels for young people, which featured tales of taming the “Wild West” through “Indian wars.” He also regularly re-read them into adulthood, even recommending them to his generals as sources of creative ideas. Writing in “Mein Kampf” in the 1920s, Hitler praised the way the “Aryan” America conquered “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” to make room for more “racially pure” settlers and lay the foundation for its economic self-sufficiency and growing global power. Indeed, the concept of Lebensraum was coined and popularized by Friedrich Razel, who said his theory of colonization and racial replacement drew inspiration from the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” and its identification of “colonization of the Great West” as central to American history and identity.
Once the Nazis gained power in Germany, Kakel details how the American West became an “obsession” for Hitler and his closest followers, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Their goal was to remake the demographics of Europe the same way the United States remade the demographics of North America. The Nazi leadership routinely referred to Eastern Europe as “the German East” or the “Wild East,” and its inhabitants as “Indians.” Admiring how the United States had “gunned down the millions of removed to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage,” Hitler spoke of his intention to similarly “Germanize” the east “by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as removed.” Echoing American justifications for westward settlement, he stated, “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” His answer? “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America.” For Hitler, “Our Mississippi must be the Volga.”
As in the American case, Hitler used threats of war and then war itself to gain territory in the east. Then regular army troops, paramilitary units called “Einsatzgruppen,” and collaborating locals began killing, terrorizing and expelling inhabitants considered racially inferior. A “Hunger Plan” envisioned mass starvation, mainly of Slavs. Meanwhile, the SS drew up plans to expel all European Jews to a massive Judenreservat, or “Jewish reservation,” either in Madagascar (once British control of the sea lanes was defeated) or Siberia (once the Soviet Union was defeated). Most were expected to die of disease and starvation.
After the invasion of Poland, Germany quickly annexed part of the country and began the process of moving in ethnic German and other sufficiently “Aryan” settlers. Nazi propaganda showed photos of German colonists departing in covered wagons and described the lands to the east as the “California of Europe.” German newspapers featured headlines such as “Go East, Young Man!” — an imitation of Horace Greeley’s famous advice to American settlers to seek their fortune in the west. As for resistance by those being conquered, killed and cleared? Hitler compared it to “the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.” After all, he said, “who remembers the Red Indians?”
If Hitler had been successful in Eastern Europe, leaders and politicians today would be talking about them the same way we talk about American native groups. “Sure, what a tragedy it is, but that’s all in the past now! We had to ensure that civilization and order spread across the region! There were some unfortunate casualties, but the number of graves show that it was relatively minimal, and those camps were merely for labor, not extermination! Look, how about we do a minute of silence out of remembrance of the people who used to stand where we’re building this next mall? That’s good enough, right?”
America is the prototypical example of a fascist state that won. “But they aren’t doing that anymore!” No shit, most of them are dead. And, as Awoo states below, the government still is oppressing what remains of indigeneous communities.
Ever heard of colonialism and slavery? Amerikkka is founded in genocide and evil. Or was that not “blatant” enough for you?
Nazis blatantly and directly oppressed, captured , and murdered large swaths of people.
Where do you think they learned their tactics? They got the idea of their concentration camps from the US reservation system, a system that still exists and still operates much like concentration camps, in an ongoing genocide on the people who’s land you are talking about were not all “wiped out” they are still here and the genocide is still happening.
none of that is happening anymore
I think some indigenous peoples would disagree.
Forced relocation, residential schools, starvation, contaminated blankets, bounties and U.S. Cavalry troops may have been replaced by police shootings, incarceration, desecration of reserve lands, foster care, lack of infrastructure and services, and poverty as the tools of ethnic cleansing, but I argue the genocide continues today.
They’re the smallest racial group at just 8 percent of the population but are the most likely to be killed by police at 1.9 percent of all police killings. They are also incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and victims of violent crime at more than double the rate of all other citizens, with 88 percent of those crimes being committed against women by non-indigenous peoples. Young people are 30 percent more likely than whites to be referred to juvenile court than have charges dropped, and children are removed from their homes by state social service agencies at a far higher rate than other children.
Obviously you probably know all of this so I’m writing it for the benefit of others. I don’t think you gain at all by accepting the narrative that they’ve stopped. Changing methods doesn’t mean it stopped. You’re entitled to think otherwise but I really don’t think you should soften your language on it, you lose out by doing so and you absolutely deserve better.
but there is absolutely not a genocide of native Americans happening today.
congrats on shacking up with a well off native from a well off native family, but their experience is not universal to their people nor is it universal to all the nations in the US. there is no chance you are operating in good faith by extrapolating one person’s claimed experience into the reality of indigenous life in the US today.
i have worked with and developed friendships with individuals and families on the largest reservation (by size and population) in the US. young men, younger than me, were physically abused in school by their white public school teachers for speaking their native language and told it was the devil’s language. in the fucking 2000s.
none of that gets into the absolute disregard for missing and murdered native women by settler law enforcement. or the ongoing resource theft of settler governments prevent natives from their water rights.
so yes, it is happening today.
For example, many meetings where I am start with an acknowledgment that the land we’re on once belonged to a particular tribe of people who were wiped out.
A land acknowledgement isn’t shit if it isn’t backed by any action. It means jack shit to acknowledge that one is on stolen land and then do nothing to give the land back to those it was stolen from.
All it does is let white libs feel a little better about themselves for five minutes, and then wash their hands of any of the true consequences and outcomes of the genocide that gave them this land.
The thing is, none of that is happening anymore
Racial slavery continues in the US prison system. Native Americans on reservations live in abominable conditions under US occupation and have their land and territorial rights regularly violated. Their treaties remain broken. Abortion rights are rolling backwards. The government in place almost exclusively benefits property owning white men.
You’re expressing exactly the mindset we’re criticizing in this thread.
The belief that “this is all in the past” is a key part of what was the dominant propaganda strategy for a long time (as opposed to the current push towards complete denialism): instead of completely denying the horrors of the past they gloss over them and teach about how this or that event “ended” them. The end result is people come out of high school with this idea of a horrible past that’s still heavily whitewashed, believing they’ve learned the truth when they just got a watered down and sanitized version of it (which still manages to be horrific), and believing this all to be in the past.
Entire decades of cruelty and horror get turned into single sentences like “this gave way to the sharecropping system and its problems,” with no elaboration on what those problems were or that it was ongoing up into the middle of the 20th century. Things like the coup and seizure of Hawaii by American mercenaries and marines get garbled into nonsense in textbooks. The century of pogroms and systematic exclusion and terror against PoC following the end of chattel slavery is glossed over or omitted completely, as is the way the enslavement of prisoners who were then leased to private interests quickly emerged as a way to continue the systems of the antebellum south.
And when the sanitized and content light horrors of the past are taught, every step of the way they take pains to make them seem more distant: horrors that persisted up through the 20th century get pushed back into the late 19th instead, the legal end of American apartheid is some distant and historic thing instead of something that happened in living memory and that much of the ruling class were already adults for, if it’s mentioned at all forced sterilizations and mass ethnic cleansing are things that last happened in the 50s when both are alive and well with ICE and its concentration camp system.
In short, what people are taught in schools is little more than “things were bad, like definitely real bad and not good, as I’m sure you know. No I will not elaborate and besides that’s all done with anyways, now moving on…”
none of that is happening anymore
coerced sterilization still happens to ndn people (& black people) across turtle island. blood quantum is a deliberately genocidal policy that the feds and their compradors maintain to this day in many (most?) recognized indigenous groups. gtfo with this settler-apologist bullshit
yeah I had another reply to this shithead where.I felt like I should’ve mentioned Hawaii, PR, Guam, Samoa, etc. etc.
