Juan Cole: Carlson’s ‘white replacement’ theory comes from an anti-American Nazi

The New England Holocaust Memorial, in Carmen Park between Congress, Hanover, Union, and North Streets in Boston, was founded by Stephan Ross, a Holocaust survivor, and designed by Stanley Saitowitz. It was erected in 1995. Each tower symbolizes a different major Nazi extermination camp.

— Photo by Beyond My Ken

Via OtherWords.org

Before a hate-filled 18-year-old murdered 10 and wounded 3 African Americans in Buffalo on May 14, he penned a rambling screed about replacement theory.

The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French far right, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers.

Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted “Jews will not replace us.” The shooter who killed 11 Jewish Americans at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 also espoused the idea of the “great replacement.”

This hateful ideology is shamelessly promoted by Fox News. The worst offender is the Lord Haw-Haw of the 21st Century, Tucker Carlson, who exposed his audience to great replacement excrement 400 times in the past year.

Republican legislators across the United States have been passing laws against teaching critical race theory, which hasn’t killed anyone — and which helps us understand the effect of ideas like the great replacement. But they don’t seem to be as eager to legislate against Nazi ideas.

And make no mistake: The great replacement is an explicitly Nazi idea.

The theory originated in Europe and had many exponents of various stripes. But the phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957), who served during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French Nazi collaborators.

You don’t get more Fascist than that. The Charlemagne Brigade included the last troops to defend Hitler’s bunker before his suicide.

Binet fulminated after the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,” by which he meant the Americans and Soviets who fought the Nazis. A biological racist, he saw all Americans as an impure mestizo “race.”

So this now far-right American nationalist idea actually originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed “whiteness” by the European right, which did not see Russians as “white” either.

Unlike cowardly boot-lickers like Binet, the true patriots of the period were the multicultural French. The French Army and then Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Army included thousands of riflemen (or Tirailleurs) from Senegal. 

History.net explains: “During World War II the French recruited 179,000 Tirailleurs; some 40,000 were deployed to Western Europe. Many were sent to bolster the French Maginot Line along its border with Germany and Belgium during the German invasion in 1940 — where many were killed or taken prisoner.”

Even after the fall of France, these Senegalese fighters “served in the Free French army in Tunisia, Corsica and Italy, and in the south of France during the liberation.”

I had two uncles who served in World War II, one at the Battle of the Bulge. In my family, we’re not in any doubt that it was the multi-racial Allies who were the good guys. With famous units like the Tuskegee Airmen, who bombed Nazi targets, the Allies drew srength from their diversity — and that gave them the strength to prevail.

People like Tucker Carlson are pitifully ignorant of history and so are wielding an anti-American, highly unpatriotic notion for the sake of their television ratings. Ironically, Tucker’s intellectual forebear, Binet, would have considered him a mongrel.

As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching AlliesJuan Cole

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the founder and editor of Informed Comment (JuanCole.com). This op-ed was adapted from Informed Comment and distributed by OtherWords.org. 

Mitchell Zimmerman: Of the Nazis and Trump's Fascist mob

Nazis during the Beer Hall Putsch

Trump’s fascist mobs, inspired by nonstop lies, invade the Capitol

From OtherWords.org

In 1923, Hitler and the Nazis stormed a beer hall in Munich, Germany, whence they planned to overthrow German democracy. The putsch failed ignominiously, and Hitler was briefly jailed.

That, of course, was not the end of Adolf Hitler. America needs to remember that history if we want to preserve our democracy from the right-wing forces rallied by Donald Trump today.

As Congress gathered to formalize Trump’s election defeat, he and his extremist followers launched their own beer hall putsch. “We will not take it anymore,” Trump told them. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength.”

With these words, Trump unleashed the frenzied horde.

They breached the barriers around the Capitol and fought their way in, brutally killing a police officer and assaulting many others. They broke into offices, smashed windows, looted, and forced Congress to cease its operations. Outside, they built a gallows.

Many rioters carried weapons and some had plastic handcuffs. Their obvious goal: to take hostages and force Congress to award Trump a second term. A total (so far) of five deaths.

Trump is responsible, but not him alone. The mob he sent had accomplices: a second mob of Republican officials who laid the groundwork by enabling Trump’s lies.

The second mob includes the eight Republican senators and 139 House Republicans who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election, as well as the 17 Republican attorneys general who supported a bogus lawsuit to throw out the election.

Finally, it includes the Republican office holders who refused to tell their voters the truth: Trump lost. There was no “steal,” as 60 court rulings — including many by Trump-appointed judges — unanimously concluded.

These Republican politicians knew this, but they still insisted that Trump be installed as president, confirming their opposition to elections and hostility to constitutional democracy.

The second mob misled Republican voters so well that 45 percent of them actually support the criminal attack on the Capitol. Those tens of millions of people represent a potential mass base for fascism.

So, what should we do?

First, Trump should be impeached, removed, and charged with inciting a riot and other crimes. And criminal charges are obviously in order for the terrorist violence committed by the first mob. Experts also suggest expelling members of the second mob from Congress or boycotting them from public life.

Accountability is vital. But the Democrats who will now control Congress and the White House must also double down on efforts to restore and strengthen American democracy.

They should act swiftly to limit the power of money in politics, restore the Voting Rights Act, and eliminate needless obstacles to voting. And Washington, D.C., should be admitted as a state, so its citizens have full voting rights and powers.

Finally, the Democratic Party must fight to enact bold programs to deal with the massive problems Americans face — from climate change to the pandemic to the declining living standards of working Americans.

Half-hearted steps will only leave ordinary Americans feeling that that government does not work, priming the pump for more right-wing radicalization. But a full-throated campaign for real, understandable change — even against Republican obstruction —  can help voters understand that democracy can work for them when it isn’t hijacked by the super-rich and their servants.

The assault on the Capitol has uncovered the true nature of right-wing Republican politics in America: a thinly veiled war on constitutional democracy and majority rule. The way to prevent the next authoritarian coup attempt is to build a robust democracy that demonstrates it is responsive to the needs and interests of real people.

A slap on the wrist for the coup plotters and a swift return to the status quo isn’t enough, as the beer hall putsch should have taught us. We need a real commitment to reverse the erosion of our democracy.

Mitchell Zimmerman is a lawyer, social activism and author of the thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Don Pesci: Connecticut's confused moralists

Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’

During his political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.

Blumenthal’s reaction to American Nazis in Charlottesville was commendable and necessary; in any denunciation of Nazism, there must be no ambiguity – no moral confusion. There are indeed degrees of evil in the world. The bank robber who murders a teller commits a greater evil than the bank robber who simply robs a bank.

However, using the greater evil to excuse the lesser cannot be defended on moral grounds. The Antifa movement, like the American Nazi movement and the KKK, uses violence as a means of moral suasion. The Nazis and the members of the KKK who hijacked a protest over an attempt to remove a statute of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville should have been unreservedly condemned for who they are by all people whose moral sense is not impaired by political considerations.

These two groups have been with us a long time; we know them, and we should not pretend to forget or forgive the unrepented sins of their dark past. Both groups have bathed in blood up to their knees. The anti-black, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic KKK used to hang or terrorize its victims; these days, they are content to defame and rouse public opinion against them. German Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews; these days, American Nazis accuse Jews, who they falsely believe are animated by anti-patriotic globalist pretensions, of capitalist greed.  The shadow of Buchenwald falls over all of this, and although David Duke is not Himmler – because there are differences in moral degrees of evil -- the seeds of the greater evil are sown in the ground of the lesser evil.

The Antifa movement – so called anti-fascists who have adopted the Stormtrooper tactics of Fascists -- should be roundly denounced for who they are by those who regularly storm moral mounts and shake their fists at the gods whenever television cameras are rolling. The Antifa movement has long been infiltrated by anarchists; in the anarchist dystopia, such senators as Blumenthal would be unnecessary excrescences.

Even for those who agree there is a moral order of greater and lesser evils, Blumenthal’s too ardent support of the more indefensible practices of Planned Parenthood is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Blumenthal's position on late term abortions, Orthodox Jews would say, is morally indefensible. Even a Reform Jew like Blumenthal may be uncomfortable with the killing of nearly born babies and the selling of their body parts to doctors, a process, some may think, that comes uncomfortably close to morally noxious Nazi practices?

The moral position on abortion – most especially partial birth abortion -- of 3rd District Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro also is confusing, which is why, she laments in her recent book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,”  her bishop removed her as a trustee of her Catholic High School.  Scandal in the Catholic Church is synonymous with sowing moral discord in the minds of Catholics. And Catholics who are public figures, so long as they remain in the faith, have a moral duty to maintain Catholic religious convictions in a morally confused universe. If they break with their Church on important matters of doctrine, a devil word in the modern period, they cannot maintain communion with the believing church, lay or clerical.

Of course, DeLauro has little use for bishops and little understanding of the historic opposition of her Church to the grave sin of abortion. She believes as a professing Catholic -- “My faith has always been important to me…” – that abortion has, within her Church, completely taken over “the conversation on faith in politics.” And she is inching toward a wholly indefensible moral position that important moral issues should be decided by the state, not bishops or rabbis.

DeLauro seems unaware that Catholic opposition to abortion and infanticide during Imperial Rome was the lever that freed women from a crushing paternalism in which the paterfamilias of a Roman family exercised complete dominion over the life and death of his unborn and born children. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, not uncommon in the Roman Empire, are becoming more common in the Western world as Christian perceptions are replaced by a morally neutral secularism, both in Europe and America.

The modern notion of human equality, unknown in the Roman Republic, descends from Biblical doctrine: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” And the highly romantic notion of the love of children also has its roots in Christian faith, “But Jesus said, suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:14).”

In Heaven, one hopes, abortion is frowned upon, as it is among bishops in DeLauro’s church. There, one hopes, Nazism, Klu-Kluxery, Antifa fascism and anarchism will not gain a foothold. Here below, the usual strife continues. Flawed moralists continue to belch fire from their secular pulpits. Medical practitioners, unbound by the Hippocratic oath – noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: “I will utterly reject harm and mischief”— perform partial birth abortions, after which dismembered baby parts are auctioned off, while politicians, wrapping themselves in moral mantels, wink behind the curtain.

Not a church going man, Abraham Lincoln, quoted from Thomas Jefferson, not a church going man, in his Columbus, Ohio, debate with Steven Douglas: “… there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat -- a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats today, it is true; but that man did not take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' …  He supposed there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah -- that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us.”

Lincoln’s audience applauded this sentiment of a frail man leaning for support upon the crutch of an eternal truth. How often, we should ask, do the political heirs of Lincoln and Jefferson tremble when they consider that God is just?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.