A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators”. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.
Resurgence? it never went away.
Yeah my favorite is people who say things like “I’m the 1940s USA/Canada/aus/etc fought fascism, what happened”?
No, they fought GERMANY. tons of those soldiers came back home and became John Birchers or klansmen or Christofascist evangelicals any other kind of fascist.
Shooting nazis does not an anti fascist make, perplexingly.
Also, the US was VERY hesitant to enter the European war. There was a lot of support for the Nazis in the US. From some high ranking people. Like the first director of the OSS and the Dulles brothers (instrumental in forming the CIA and NATO). They wanted a separate peace with Germany, and to enter the European war against the Soviets. But luckily FDR was unmovable in his support of the Soviets against the Nazis.
The latter point is not particularly surprising. Many people fight in wars because they have no choice or out of patriotism, or a combination of those plus other factors.
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism. Some people might have the badly mistaken view that a certain skin color is better or worse at certain jobs, for example, but that doesn’t mean that they would endorse genocide.
Some skin colors ARE worse at certain jobs
Like, I’m white, I could never play Mike Tyson in a movie
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism.
No, not really. You could, if you really wanted to, distinguish between two different “wings” or “traditions” of white supremacist ideology (which, of course, is the only “racism” there actually is) - the eliminationist and the exploitative.
They are not mutually exclusive - the Nazis, for instance, followed both policies when they exploited Slavic people for labor with the full understanding that all Slavic people would be eliminated as soon as their labor was no longer needed by the (so-called) “master race”.
What an astonishingly reductive and inaccurate statement.
Here’s but a small token of FDR’s statements on the matter.
https://youtu.be/qrNDwyj4u1w?si=c-ZuF7_UOWJQH0wz
Anti-fascist rhetoric was clear and popular, even in nations that would be arguably considered fascist themselves today, like Segregation Era America and the British Empire.
Tons of those soldiers might have continued being a racist after being drafted to fight Nazis, but just as many learned exactly what path they were following and changed course.
FDR’s political coalition even pretty much directly evolved into the Civil Rights Movement.
The simple reality is that 20th century politics was never simple but progressive thought thoroughly won out over ideologies of hate and actively worked to undo the centuries of damage done by colonial era white supremacist thought.
It was hardly a perfect process, and it’s one that continues to this day, but to pretend it was simply just nations butting heads to the common man is dangerously revisionist.
The allied nations fought fascism. They knew what it was, could describe it better than many do today, and the leadership was clear in their opposition, even if often confusingly hypocritical, and often beset by internal opposition. That not every person in 1940 was completely on board with it is simply the human condition.
Mostly agree but in my own experience it’s not WW2 vets that went Birch/KKK etc., but their kids.
Your experience is wrong. KKK and others existed just fine before and during WWII.
It’s been smoldering and festering in the background for so long the internet just gave us a clear view into it. If they really think there’s a resurgence they’ve never been anywhere rural for the past 40 years as a minority.
Or anywhere near the punk subculture I guess. I feel like it’s something that I’ve been hyper aware of my entire life.
You need to point out you mean the skin head punks from American History X.
As there is a vast variety of sub cultures of punk, most of which despise the Neo Nazi Skins.
Most skin head punks have nothing to do with being a Nazi.
I remember watching it and it being a comment on racism at the time, no foreshadowing of the future involved.
Same with Romper Stomper for Aus which was released 6 years before American History X.
Yeah, I’m from an area of the country where the events of the movie aren’t far fetched. It wasn’t predicting anything, it was just showing you what was going on in the places where people don’t like to look.
Same. I saw it all around me. Like I knew openly neo-Nazi folks. I could have 100% seen it happening.
Growing up in the So-Cal punk scene I saw these people every time I went to a show. Dudes with boots and “wife beater” tank tops holding a confederate flag at a Voodoo Glowskulls show come to mind especially.
When it came out tho I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation … yet here we are with that exact thing almost worldwide now.
I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation.
I have to ask, how old were you when you thought that?
Those already existed in the UK and other western nations for decades.
This is England is a movie about the skinhead/nationalist groups in the Uk in 1983.
Hell, The Blue Brothers had a joke about Illinois Nazis in 1980.
Groups like this have existed for decades.
My version of this is seeing losers on 4chan trying to be edgy, didn’t know it would be a fucking breeding ground years later that would lead to the storming of the US Capitol and multiple militia groups forming.
When it came out I was dealing with National Alliance, Baltimore Hammerskins, and to a lesser extent the Pagans motorcycle gang in my area of Northern Maryland. It was far from historical if you were actively around white supremacist areas, particularly the rust belt or around orange county California. I remember visiting OC in the aughts and everyone confused me for a nazi, some waitress chick showed me her Himmler tattoo.
Why would you think that a nationalist or fascist movement could never happen in the Western world given what had already happened during the twentieth century? I’m not trying to be a piece of shit, I’m honestly curious.
Exactly. I knew kids from middle school who ended up getting really radicalized and became white supremacists. Moved away but at least one of them became a murderer so… yeah.
It reminds me of how everyone was amazed by Gamergate in the 2010s and then the rise of trump around the alt-right. Or the current “angry males” bullshit with tate and the wannabes.
Mostly it just made me think of being a gamer in the late 90s/early 2000s. Plenty of message boards were full of “weird comments” and some folk even pointed out how blatantly a few neonazi handbooks were being followed in terms of recruitment. Like, I distinctly remember feeling really uncomfortable in my Unreal Tournament clan because one of the guys “was an asshole” but nobody else thought it. I didn’t want to deal with him but I also couldn’t play UT unless I did. Fortunately I ended up breaking ties because nobody else wanted to play OFP/ArmA after UT2k4 was “fun but not the same”.
Its been the same shit for decades. And even today, if you care about something as simple as “maybe don’t call people ‘gay’ as an insult” or “that comment is insensitive”, people lose their shit and call you the modern day equivalent of an SJW. And, in the interim, neonazis are following those same publicly available recruitment handbooks and are doing a great job of making people comfortable with spewing bigotry because “it is just a joke”. Until it isn’t.
And we also see the same “oh, they are just misguided” kid gloves. It makes me IMMENSELY angry when influencers like Disguised Toast or Ludwig or Charlie/Moistcritical (although, he has let his chud flag openly fly a few times) will try to position themselves as “a left leaning centrist” but will openly praise and defend people like ishowspeed or sneako who threaten women with rape and scream misogyny but “are really talented and great at building their brand” or “just have a difference of opinion”. Rather than call them deranged right-wing lunatics. Its the same as Jimmy Fallon rubbing trump’s head to show he was just a loveable goofball.
No. American History X was pretty on the mark for the state of the US in 1999.
Trump ‘telling it like it is’ and how he was going to make Mexico pay for the border wall were what brought all the racist scum out of the woodwork.
Political correctness gets a lot of flak, but what it did was raise the bar. If you have to be careful to call one group of students ‘first years’ and not ‘freshmen’, then you know damn well calling different ethnic groups slurs is not acceptable. The PC movement drove the racists further into the closet, and then Trump was a big dinner bell to bring that shit back out again.
This ^ Neo Nazis and Militia Groups were both very real threats in the 90s and American History X is very much a reflection of that.
The fact that things have gotten WORSE and the idea that a history program like “American History X” would be outright banned from being taught in certain states, is a failure of imagination.
I’m a 90s kid, and I haven’t watched American History X partially because of how uncomfortable I think it’ll make me feel. Seems like a culturally significant film, but not one people watch more than once.
I mean he definitely didn’t make it better, but I tend to associate the “racists coming out of the woodwork” moment with Obama getting elected. Which also corresponded with the increase in Internet usage. The racists suddenly weren’t confined to their small groups of like minded people wherever they lived, but connected to all the other dip shits who believe the same disgusting shit internationally.
Great film, but I’d argue what was ahead of its time was the criticism of toxic masculinity. And it avoided the Fight Club trap of people misunderstanding that it was a critique of that mindset and glorifying the dark side of the protagonist/antagonist.
Wrt Fight Club, I took it as that’s a mental health break from a reality of desperation. Can that happen going to a soul-sucking day job? Then how much more incidences of those who lose jobs, homes, cars, SOs and kids? Then we criminalized desperation and symptoms thereof.
Oops we accidentally put Nazis in charge of our intelligence agencies.
