← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Okiereddust
Thread ID: 17693 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-04-09
2005-04-09 18:12 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/usanazis/chapter1.html]Chapter One: The Background: The American Extreme Right 1920-1960[/URL] [SIZE=3]
[B]Section Three: Some Observations On The Pre World War Two Extreme Right (53)[/B] [/SIZE]
The American Extreme Right has never been ideologically homogeneous It embraces several broad tendencies, many of which have operated from the 1930ââ¬â¢s until the present.(54) However lines of descent were broken by organisational fragmentation. The Extreme Right embraced movements as diverse as Pelleyââ¬â¢s Silver Shirts, Coughlinââ¬â¢s national socialist National Union for Social Justice, and General Moseleyââ¬â¢s Constitutionalist Movement. Its fascist wing produced Lawrence Dennis and Ezra Pound; its Christian wing spawned Leslie Fry and Elizabeth Dilling, writers whose conspiratorial theories of history bordered on the paranoid. Serious movements which could have developed along the fascist path, and actual fascist movements, were often overshadowed by the Shirt Movements or foreign-inspired ethnic groups like the Fascist League of North America or the German-American Bund. Media sensationalising followed by a dearth of historical enquiry into American fascism has left the student with a vague picture of Bundist rallies and Christian-fundamentalist agitation as his understanding of the 1930ââ¬â¢s Extreme Right. These activities discredited the native right in the 1930ââ¬â¢s and have distorted the issues.It is not altogether surprising then that Leland Bell sought to find the roots of Rockwellââ¬â¢s Nazi movement in the German-American Bund. (55) Despite it contacts with native American groups, the Bund, through its desire to further German foreign policy, isolated itself from American politics. Fritz Kuhn, Bund fuhrer, explained the essence of Bundism in these terms:
If we prefer the term American German to the term German-American we do so, for the same reason for which former German Russians called themselves Russian Germans... namely for the reason that we are first of all Germans by race, in blood, in language. We belong to the great Commonwealth of German peoples on this earth. By obtaining other citizenship we have not lost our German character. We are what we are: Germans in America, American Germans [size=4]**because we did not become Americans.[/SIZE] (56)[/B]
The mere existence of the Bund may have prompted George Seldes to write after the war, [B]that the American Right was simply an alien development and was obviously foreign inspired.[/B] (57) The great Sedition Trial (1942-4), which saw U.S. Extreme Right figures charged with being Nazi agents, probably reinforced the view. On these bases, the roots of an American fascism could only become obscured and the continuity of the movement broken. [B]For example, with the exception of Francis Parker Yockey, no post-war fascist grasped the significance of the synthesis of ideas achieved behind the slogan ââ¬ÅAmerica Firstââ¬Â[/B] (58) The Extreme Right and its critics alike failed to perceive the nature of native American fascism.
52 I have excluded from the category ââ¬ÅExtreme Rightââ¬Â groups which are purely reactionary. It is a prejudice of U.S. liberals to lump reactionaries and radicals in the same category. Such strands include fundamental-nationalists, the Klans, fascists, extreme anti-semites.
55 Leyland Bell, In Hitlerââ¬â¢s Shadow: The Anatomy Of American Nazism, New York, 1976, passim.
56 Sander Diamond, op. cit., p. 218.
57 George Seldes, One Thousand Americans, New York, 1947, passim.
[I]This analysis is interesting. What is especially interesting is the categories this writer has set up, like the difference between "reactionary" and "radical right". "Reactionaries" beside being stupid, fundamentally as he points out are alien to America, and completely lack not only sympathy or empathy, but basic comprehension of its history, culture and people. To most people they are not just as alien to America as a bunch of Russian Bolshevics, but more so, since the russian bolshevics now have a great deal of experience in "Americanizing" their ideology and terminology.
Quite obviously of is this association of radical right with the reactionaries that has always held it back, indeed has been the tool of the government to restrain it, and reactionaries of today continue to serve the government in this manner. [/I]
2005-04-09 21:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Okiereddust][URL=http://www.. [/I][/QUOTE] Thanks for this okie. helps understand. studying.
2005-04-09 21:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=TexasAnarch]Thanks for this okie. helps understand. studying.[/QUOTE]Thanks. The whole thing is interesting particularly some of thelatest chapters, where the names we know now - Pierce, Black et. al. mix with some of the earlier people - Rockwell, Wallace .et.al.
2005-04-09 22:32 | User Profile
Like I keep saying " I am a Cuban" or American Cuban if you will but because my mother was an American I guess that I can also say "Cuban American but I think first as a Cuban so American Cuban sounds better.