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edenfenixblogs · 1 year ago

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I don’t think most non-Jews understand how disappointed we are in the left right now. How completely abandoned we’ve become. How our contributions to progress for other groups have been erased or disavowed or hidden. How the actual tangible things that Jews have contributed to black rights and civil rights are being ignored. How we’re being told we contribute and have contributed nothing.

How we are being told that the world has been kind to us when it never has. As if my mom didn’t grow up getting called a Kike and getting beat up for being Jewish. How I thought I had friends until I caught them saying “xyz was beautiful until Jews showed up.” How people told me I was pretty “for a Jew.” How I grew up hearing stories about bombs being set off in Israel in buses and markets. How I couldn’t even go two weeks without hearing that and how nobody cared and somehow, every time that happened, the whole world became more hostile to me for some reason.

I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what leftists are doing. Or why. I hate that I have to say—of course, I support a free and self determined Palestine (which I truly do)—in order for you to decide I’m worthy of care and support.

We showed up for you. All of you. And the entire movement is abandoning us at best or targeting us at worst. Celebrating our deaths. Saying we deserved it. How are we supposed to trust you ever again? How are we supposed to feel safe ever again?

A very few select people who are in my life have taken the chance to actually learn about and dismantle their own unconscious antisemitism during this time. And I’m eternally grateful for them. But most people haven’t reached out at all. Most people are still sharing hateful things that could get me hurt and they don’t care. Most people Reblogging my posts are still Jews. Because we are alone. And it sucks. You need to be as loud about antisemitism as you are about Palestine or you’re an antisemite (unless you’re Arab/Muslim/Palestinian—I totally get that these groups are also doing damage control in their own communities just like Jews are).

But we are all in tremendous pain right now.

This moment will pass. And when it does, I will remember how many people let me down. I will remember that when I needed support more than I’ve ever needed it in my life, people fucking vanished. They pretended violence against my people wasn’t happening. They ignored and rewrote the history of Israel to suit their own narratives.

You don’t know what it feels like to be hated this much for opposite things. PoC hate us for being too white. White supremacists hate us for not being white enough. Europeans hate us for being middle eastern. Middle easterners hate us for being western/European. Everyone hates us for being settlers but continually kicks us out of their countries so that we have to settle somewhere else.

I saw a post going around from a Black person who said that the reason he and his fellow black activists go protest for Palestinians instead of fighting antisemitism (as if it’s a binary, which it’s not) is that Jews don’t show up. Muslims and Palestinians do. And honestly? Fuck that guy. Heather Heyer died standing shoulder to shoulder against racism in 2017. [CORRECTION: When I first wrote this post I was under the impression that Heather Heyer was Jewish. I want to correct to avoid spreading misinfo. She was just the first (and incorrect) Jewish civil rights activist I thought of. However there are plenty of other actual Jewish civil rights activists to choose from. If you have reblogged this post from me, please feel free to add a link to the permalink version of this post with my correction to your reblog.]I have devoted substantial time and effort and money that I don’t even get paid a lot of because I don’t get paid a living wage. I have continually reached out to PoC people in my life of all religions to ask how they are doing and what I could be doing to help more—both for them personally and how they would best like me to help their community. I have elevated their voices at every opportunity. And not one person I checked in with has done the same for me or for my community.

And it’s bone chilling. It’s awful. And it’s even worse knowing that when it’s over, people will want to go back to normal. They won’t apologize. They won’t self reflect. They’ll just live their lives, maybe a little more aware of how much they hate us and completely indifferent to the harm they’ve caused us. How disposable they made us feel. And the thing is…it’s not hard for you to know. You just have to ask.

Too many people are cowards. Too many people care about looking good than actually learning something or making the world better. And to those people: you should be ashamed of yourself.

I don’t have any hate in my heart. Truly. Not a drop for any group of people. But I have a tremendous lack of trust that anyone would actually lift a finger to keep me safe.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #anti zionisim #I dare a goy to republic this challenge #goyim ID yourself in the tags if you reblog this #cuz i straight up don’t believe goyisch activists give a shit unless they straight up say they do #i’m not okay #honestly #this is the Nazi stuff I am most scared of #sure the Nazis rounded us up #but you fuckers were the ones who watched and did nothing #you’re the ones who voted the Nazis in #you’re the ones who didn’t stop them #fuck all y’all for real #i/p #israel #palestine #correction issued

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crimethinc · 1 year ago

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Last Saturday, Charlottesville’s Black history museum melted down the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The statue had been a rallying point for fascists, including the "Unite the Right" rally in 2017 during which one of them murdered Heather Heyer and grievously injured many others.

For years, anti-racists had fruitlessly requested the removal of Confederate statues around the country. Far-right politicians responded with laws making it illegal to remove them. Only after anarchists and other abolitionists used illegal direct action to pull down statues—starting in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina and spreading all around the United States—were liberal politicians forced to remove some of the statues that remained.

https://crimethinc.com/StatuesDown

The struggle against white supremacy continues. Direct action plays an essential role.

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deadpresidents · 2 months ago

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Thanks for being real today.

I get people wanting to be hopeful.

But I can't with "it will be okay" and "we will survive this."

It was not okay for Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil & David Rosenthal, Bernice & Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger, Andre Anchondo, Jordan Anchondo, Arturo Benavides, Leonardo Campos, Angie Englisbee, Maria Flores, Raul Flores, Guillermo "Memo" Garcia, Jorge Calvillo García, Adolfo Cerros Hernández, Alexander Gerhard Hoffman, David Johnson, Luis Alfonzo Juarez, Maria Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, Maribel (Campos) Loya, Ivan Filiberto Manzano, Elsa Mendoza Marquez, Gloria Irma Márquez, Margie Reckard, Sara Esther Regalado Moriel, Javier Rodriguez, Teresa Sanchez, Juan Velazquez, or any of the other people killed by white supremacists whose actions were aided and abetted by the Trump presidency. These people did not survive. Not to mention all the people who haven't survived COVID, but might have if the Trump administration had taken timely action. Or the women who have died after being refused appropriate medical care because of the rapist and his buddies that Trump appointed decided with some weird pastor in the 1600 said was more important than the lives of actual living, breathing, human beings. Or the school children who would not have been shot to death if we had actual gun control laws in this country, a thing that would have been possible to achieve if Trump had lost in 2016.

Yeah, sure, the majority of us in the United States will probably survive. That's how statistics work. And if that's what somebody needs to hear in order to move forward, then I guess saying such things has a purpose. But it's looking pretty shitty for anybody living in Ukraine and to me, it comes across as disrespectful to the people whose lives have been lost in no small part thanks to what goes down in US elections.

I needed somebody today who would say not only that this is not okay, but this is *really* not okay.

Thanks for being that voice.

Thank you for this. I can't help but write what I feel, even if some of it hasn't been the most optimistic message to send. There is a reality that we need to come to terms with in order to find some way forward. I'm pissed off and I'm disgusted with this country, so I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing because it is therapeutic for me right now and I'm too old to go around punching and kicking people.

I do want to say that I'm also cognizant of the fact that some people just need some time to allow this reality to settle. I certainly don't want to add to the stress or darkness that some of us are feeling right now. There is no denying that this is fucking terrible, but we will regroup and find a way through it. It won't be easy and we're going to have to fight, but I don't want anybody to think that there is genuinely no hope. There's always something that we can do, even if it seems bleak.

If I'm writing something or somebody else is saying something that you're not ready to hear, it's okay to do what you need to do to remain healthy. These posts are going to be here whenever you might feel like reading them. You can and should step away from this if you just need a fucking break. It doesn't mean you're any less ready or willing to fight this battle than anybody else. Even if Trump and the rotten MAGA cult takes control of every lever of power, you can gain a personal victory by not allowing them to completely crush your faith in the future. You can be depressed and despair, but do not give up. Do not give them that power over you. We will find a way. We will get through this. We will figure out what it is that we need to do and who we need to back and how we need to attack, but taking care of your personal health and well-being is more immediately important than the bigger political battle or the next step in the resistance. Take care of yourselves first and we'll still be here and ready to eventually harness this anger and frustration and fucking disgust to defeat the MAGA movement and Trump's Christian nationalist personality cult.

The main thing, though, is that if you're really having a tough time in the immediate future, step away, take some time, go for a walk, read something that has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump or American politics (if you need suggestions, I always have book recommendations!), and regroup. Again, we'll get through this, and as goofy and weird and ridiculous as Tumblr can be at times, there's always a community of people on this site willing to listen and help each other when we're struggling. So, if you are having trouble getting to tomorrow, reach out because there are scores of people here who will help get there with you.

#Mental health #Politics #2024 Election #Health

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unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240 · 1 year ago

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There are two related things I've noticed coming from the left that I really want people to examine deeply in themselves, because it's a major problem that I see happening over and over again. The whole I/P issue is the most currently salient example, but it is one of many.

1. There's this tendency towards retributive justice, wherein the solutions proposed fail to take into account whether the proposed punishment is at all proportional to the alleged crime, but rather is just treated as the natural consequence of that action.

2. This same principle is also extended backwards in time and used to excuse violence post hoc that they might not have chosen as an ideal punishment but have nevertheless decided was deserved because that person [allegedly] did something bad.

Both betray an underlying punitive or retributive justice mentality, where the goal is not restoration or reconciliation + accountability, but rather punishment. (There are some interesting religious and cultural aspects to this I could get into but don't want to derail this post.)

This untethering of crime to punishment in terms of (a) due process, (b) proportionality of punishment to the crime, and (c) a failure to consider restorative justice, reconciliation, and teshuva processes instead of retribution leads to monstrous and morally bankrupt results.

Put another (blunter, crasser) way: the left's longstanding hard-on for vigilante violence is a critical failure that undermines the entire movement.

You cannot base your politics on humanism, compassion, and due process out one side of your mouth and then cheer on vigilante violence, cruel and unusual punishment, and mob mentality out the other. It doesn't work like that.

Now I understand that sometimes armed resistance is necessary. People living under authoritarian and inhumane conditions may, out of necessity, turn to guerrilla warfare and unofficial armed resistance in self-defense. But even that has limits. When leftists fantasize about death by curb stomping or slitting someone's throat as a good thing, they are imagining this happening to armed fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, or possibly other categories of irredeemable people such as domestic abusers who maim or kill their partner &/or children, pedophiles, human traffickers, etc.

What they aren't imagining is the other side of that coin, which is the alt-righter who murdered Heather Heyer with his car, abortion clinic bombers, violent Q-anoners or terrorists. Each of those people also believe in the justice of their actions and their entitlement to act as arresting officer, judge, jury, and executioner.

"But those people are wrong!"

So? Why do you get to decide that for everyone? What about the people who think YOU are wrong?

There's a reason courts and due process exist. It's the same reason why "free speech" protects the speech you hate, why freedom of the press protects that rag whose opinions you hate, and why free exercise of religion protects shitty religious groups you wish to see gone. It's because we live in a society and you aren't the arbiter of justice for everyone. If you give in to that mentality, you will inevitably end up in a "might makes right" society, which never ends well, particularly for marginalized people.

If you wouldn't accept l'chatchila a certain punishment being administrated by a court of law without outcry and protest for human rights abuses, then don't cheer it on b'dievad. Either rape is unacceptable or it's not. Either torture is unjustifiable or it isn't. Either maiming is an acceptable punishment for certain crimes or it isn't. You either support the death penalty by certain methods (beheading, burned alive, strangled, hacked apart, stoning, hanging, etc.) or you don't. Collective punishment is either acceptable or it isn't. Vicarious punishment is either acceptable or it isn't.

All of those things are either human rights abuses, or they aren't. All of them fall outside even the rules that might permit self-defense or guerrilla warfare or other uprisings of the oppressed.

Due process is the same - either you believe in due process and the right to a fair and timely trial, or you don't. The moment you support one extrajudicial punitive killing, you have opened the door to the justification of murder, provided the killer has sufficient justification.

It's true that the rules of armed conflict and war are different, but that they exist at all is relevant here too. The reason they exist is to minimize suffering during an event that is guaranteed to cause great suffering. It's the same reason why the laws of self-defense are different than the laws of intentional murder.

The truth is that in order to live in a just and civilized society, there must be specific rules that govern the administration of conflict resolution and harm. These rules must be enforced consistently and equally, and the decider of fact must have reasonable access to the evidence that exists. The state or any court of law or other tribunal must render its decision in the most impartial way possible, even for the worst, most obviously guilty people. Even those that commit heinous crimes must be given those same rights. Without those safeguards, you create the opportunity for bad faith actors to label their undesirable groups or individuals as whatever category people find so despicable that they fall out of being considered human and lose their claim to human rights protections. It must therefore be impossible to forfeit your right to due process and freedom from vigilantes and mobs.

#this is long but it's been driving me insane

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charmwasjess · 2 months ago

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My tiny mountain town is a blue dot swallowed up in a sea of red. Our statistically-irrelevant town went for Harris. The larger counties around us all went for Trump. Here’s what this election looked like in the southeastern Appalachian on the front lines of that cultural divide:

Outright unprosecuted voter intimidation: in the few blocks walk from my house to downtown, I can see a prop skeleton dressed as a Harris supporter hanging from a noose, and Harris yard signs slashed with a knife, others just ripped down to the cardboard.

Gerrymandering - years ago, these little-known poorer districts were redrawn around population centers in ways that give likely Republican strongholds more weight, particularly in rural areas like mine. Republican lawmakers literally have opened prisons in rural counties in my state to artificially inflate population numbers with people who can’t vote due to their felon status to tip the scales.

Of course, the Electoral college, where US votes are decided by weight of a state’s respective collective population and importance rather than just the counted individuals votes

I’m not making excuses. I echo the rest of the world’s collective disgust and horror about the outcome. I am literally sick with my country. People will die because of this. People who don’t live here, people who didn’t get a choice or stake in the US elections, and who probably wish they’d never heard of the place. And people in my own community.

Yet it is so easy to picture this election as the ultimate triumph of laziness and inattention, particularly in “ignorant hillbilly” places like where I live, which generally go for Trump without any fight - at least not one that shows up on an election night map. But the Republican right has been working for decades to put the legal, economic, and societal pressures that lead to this in place here.

We fought hard. Grassroots campaigners, our organizers of LGBTQIA+ groups, leaders in our communities who showed up despite the fact that it put a target on their backs if shit went bad. Teachers fighting Republican-led mandates of ignorance and racism to choke out any thinking that might interfere with their political goals for their ideal voter base. Librarians who get death threats for having kid’s books dealing with gender or queerness in the public libraries.

These are not imagined examples, these are things that happen to real people I know in my tiny blue community. And the violent, right-wing party, the party that promised to make this second Trump term one of revenge and retribution, knows who those people are too.

The Charlottesville “Ignite the Right” attack happened in my backyard. I had friends on that street when a self-described neo nazi drove into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. Trump was president when it happened; he called the alt-right who invaded Charlottesville with guns and armor and torches that day “good people.”

I have no faith in my party now. It feels like we’re still trying to play a game we lost years ago, while the other side is busy winning a new game, one where they get to make up all the rules.

I realize that there are greater global trends at play - incumbents being ousted, a swing to the right, post-pandemic economic scrambles - larger issues than the difficulties of voter suppression in my rural American communities. I'm not in a great mindset to consider them this week. I've been politically active since I was old enough to vote, and it feels like we always build so much momentum and then slam facefirst into this fucking invisible wall.

Honestly? I’m so tired and depressed and anxious, I feel like I can barely function right now. At the same time, I’m disgusted by my own despair and whining. What gives me the right to stop trying now, when so many people across the globe are facing the same anger and exhaustion? When so many people are in more active danger, with less options than I have?

Anyway, I wanted to write something out about the election, maybe just to let go of the words and get them out of me. I'm a queer politically active liberal in a Republican-dominated rural space. Next week, I'll read all the posts about hard work and hope and building support networks. This week, I just need a fucking minute on the floor.

#to be deleted #cw for depression and US election stuff I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about

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sunfortune · 5 days ago

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hi sunny!!! hope all is well <3 i was just wondering if you have any book recs from the romance & historical fiction genre without like.. heaping amounts of sex scenes lmao like i'd love to read the bridgerton series but i read reviews that said they have a lot of spicy scenes and i cba with that 🥲

bridgerton actually is pretty chaste compared to a lot of the rest of the historical romance genre funnily enough. like “the viscount who loved me” only has 1 actual sex scene in it at the end. which is not the case for a lot of those books lol

but of historicals with none or nothing really explicit

friends and foes by sarah m eden

sylvester or the wicked uncle by georgette heyer

silent in the grave by deanna raybourn

a lady’s guide to fortune hunting by sophie irwin

plus honorable mention of historical fantasies i loved

troubled waters by sharon shinn

emily wildes encyclopedia of faeries by heather fawcett

#ask #books

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of theGerman-American Bundrally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis.

That rally, the largest such conclave in U.S. history, shocked Americans at the time. They had seen the press accounts and newsreel footage of the Nazis’ massive Nuremburg rallies; they had read about Kristallnacht, the murderous, two-day anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938, which the Bund — the fast-growing, American version of the German Nazi party, which trumpeted the Nazi philosophy, but with a stars-and-stripes twist — had unabashedly endorsed.

But that was in Europe. This was America. New York City. For Americans wondering whether it could happen here, the Bund rally provided the awful answer.

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally In Garden,” blared a front-page headline in theNew York Times. Inside, photos captured the restless throng of counterprotesters outside the arena and the Bund’s smiling uniformed leaders.“We need be in no doubt as to what the Bund would do to and in this country if it had the opportunity,” the Times opined in an editorial later that week. “It would set up an American Hitler.”

Some 78 years after the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, a new generation of hectoring troglodytes descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1939, Brown Shirts at Madison Square Garden felt emboldened to seize a Jewish protester who had rushed the podium where the Bund’s German-born leader, Fritz Kuhn, was speaking, and beat him near-senseless.In 2017, members of the so-called alt-right held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, and the next day, one of those white nationalists went even further and allegedly used his car to mow down anti-Nazi protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.

Those who have studied the Bund’s rise and fall are alarmed at the historical parallels. “When a large group of young men march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ it’s only steps removed from chanting ‘death to the Jews’ in New York or anywhere else in the 1930s,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “When those young men chant ‘blood and soil,’ it conveys the same meaning as those decades before who chanted ‘blut and boden,’ referring to the Nazi glorification of and link between race and land.”

“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of “Swastika Nation,” a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”

For the Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939 demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it.Will Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago — and how this time is different.

The rise and fall of the German-American Bund in the late 1930s is essentially the story of the man behind it: Fritz Julius Kuhn.

A German-born veteran of the Bavarian infantry during World War I, Kuhn was an early devotee of Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the United States for economic reasons in 1928 and got a job as a factory worker for Ford. After a few years in the U.S., Kuhn began his political career by becoming an officer with the Friends of New Germany, a Chicago-based, nationwide pro-Nazi group founded in 1933 with the explicitblessing of German deputy führer Rudolf Hess.

At the time, imitation Nazi parties were sprouting up throughout the world, and, at least initially, Hess and Hitler hoped to use them to incorporate new areas, particularly in Europe, into the Greater Reich. But soon, FONG’s low-grade thuggery—coercing American German-language newspapers into running Nazi-sympathetic articles, infiltrating patriotic German-American organizations, and the like—became a nuisance to Berlin, which was still trying to maintain good relations with Washington. In 1935, Hess ordered all German citizens to resign from FONG, and he recalled its leaders to Germany, effectively putting the kibosh to it.

Kuhn, who had just become a U.S. citizen, saw this as his chance to create a more Americanized version of FONG, and he seized it. With his new German-American Bund, Kuhn had a vision of a homegrown Nazi Party that was more than simply a political group, it was a way of life — a “Swastika Nation,” as Bernstein calls it.

Although Kuhn dressed his vision in American phraseology and icons — he approvingly called George Washington “the first American fascist” — the Bund was, in fact, a clone of its Teutonic forebear, transposed to U.S. soil. In deference to his Berlin Kamerad, Kuhn gave himself the title of Bundesführer, the national leader. Just as Hitler had his own elite guard, the SS, Kuhn had his,the Ordnungsdienst or OD, who were charged with both protecting him and keeping order at Bund events. Although the ODwere forbidden to carry firearms, they did carry blackjacks and truncheons, which they had no compunctions about using on non-fascist heads, as they did at an April 1938 Bund meeting in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, when seven protesters were injured by members of the OD.

Like the German Nazi Party, the Bund was divided into different districts for the eastern, western and midwestern sections of the country. The Bund also had its own propaganda branch, which published a newspaper as well as the copies of “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s testament, which all Bund members were required to buy. Kuhn also oversaw the establishment of a score of gated training and summer camps with Teutonic-sounding names like Camp Siegfried and Camp Nordland in rural areas around the northeast, where his card-carrying volk could be indoctrinated in the American Nazi way, while their dutiful fraulein polished their Germancooking skills and their brassard-wearing kinder could engage in singalongs while practicing their fraternal Seig Heils. Every so often, Kuhn would pull up in his motorcade, bless the proceedings and deliver himself of a sulfurous Hitler-style harangue — in English.

In effect, the Bund was its own ethnostate, as today’s neo-Nazis would call it. And it worked: By 1938, two years after its “rebirth,” the group had become a political force to be reckoned with. Its meetings each drew up to several thousand visitors, and its activities were closely followed by the FBI. With the anti-Semitic radio broadcaster the Rev. Charles Coughlin having faded from the national scene following FDR’s landslide second-term win, Kuhn was now the country’s most vocal and best-known ultra-right leader and anti-Semite.

It was just as the Führer would have wished. Except that the Führer didn’t wish.

One year ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the German American Bund.

The Führer’s brush-off didn’t deter Kuhn and his volk, who continued to sing the Reich’s praises.

Nor did they mind the Kristallnacht of November 1938, the nationwide German pogrom set off by the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris, which led to nearly 100 deaths, scores more injuries and the decimation of what remained of German-Jewish life. Comparing the assassination to the attacks on Bund meetings by anti-Nazis—the spiritual predecessors of today’s so-called antifa — its propagandists claimed the Kristallnacht massacre was a justifiable act of retribution. The Bund’s endorsement of the horrific event increased the American public’s hostility toward it, while causing the most prestigious German-American organization, the Steuben Society, to repudiate it.

That didn’t discourage Kuhn either. Now, he decided, as the sea of opprobrium rose around him, was the moment to step into the spotlight and show just how strong the Bund was.

That’s what the Madison Square Garden rally was about. On the surface, the conclave, billed as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” was supposed to honor George Washington on the occasion of his 207th birthday. But the unprecedented event was really intended to be the German-American Bund’s apotheosis, proof positive to America and the world — as well as Berlin — that the American Nazis were here to stay. “The rally was to be Kuhn’s shining moment, an elaborate pageant and vivid showcase of all he had built in three years,” Bernstein wrote in his 2013 book. “Kuhn’s dream of a Swastika Nation would be on display for the whole world, right in the heart of what the Berlin press called the ‘Semitized metropolis of New York.’”

Although the mass demonstration was intended for Bund members, walk-ins from sympathetic Nazi-minded American citizens were also welcome. Kuhn had big dreams: One of the posters that adorned the hall optimistically declared, “ONE MILLION BUND MEMBERS BY 1940.”

Skeptics wondered whether the Bundesführer would be able to fill the massive arena. Any doubts on that score were quickly allayed, as the 20,000 Nazi faithful who had driven or flown in from every corner of Swastika Nation filed into the great hall. Meanwhile, an even larger crowd of counterdemonstrators, eventually estimated at close to 100,000, filled the surrounding midtown Manhattan streets.

New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine were prepared for both the Nazis and their adversaries, wrapping the Garden with a security cordon of 1,700 policemen — the largest police presence in the city’s history — including a large contingent of mounted officers to keep the two sides apart. LaGuardia, an Episcopalian whose mother was a Jew, loathed the Bund, but he was determined to see to it that the Bundists’ right to freedom of speech would be respected. Americans could judge the poisonous result for themselves.

Inside the Garden, things went pretty much according to Kuhn’s faux-Nuremberg script. As drums rolled, an honor guard of young American Nazis marched in bearing the flags of the U.S. and the Bund, as well as the two fascist powers, Nazi Germany and Italy. One by one, the various officers of the Bund stepped forth to extol America (or their version of it) and condemn the “racial amalgamation” that had putatively taken place since the good old unmongrelized days of George Washington. Anti-Semitism, naturally, was a major theme of the venomous rhetoric that issued forth as the newsreel cameras rolled.

Finally, after being introduced as “the man we love for the enemies he has made,” the jackbooted Bundesführer himself stepped up to the microphone to deliver one of his trademark jeremiads, scoring the “slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik Paradise” and “the grip of the palsied hand of communism in our schools, our universities, our very homes.” When he paused, he would be greeted with shouts of “Free America!��—the new Bund greeting that had replaced “Seig Heil!”but with the same intonation and raised arm salute.

According to Kuhn, both the federal government and New York City government were Jewish agents. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose antipathy for Nazism was a matter of record — “Nazism is a cancer,” he said — was actually“Frank D. Rosenfeld.” “Free America!”District Attorney Thomas Dewey was “Thomas Jewey.” “Free America!”Mayor LaGuardia was “Fiorello Lumpen LaGuardia.” “Free America!” And so on.

Of course, Kuhn’s followers had heard it all before. Now it was time for the world to listen. The people would rise up, and as Kuhn’s role model, Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s minister of propagandaput it, the storm would break loose.

The storm was certainly rising, both inside and outside the Garden.

The only alteration to the script took place when, halfway through Kuhn’s speech, a young Jewish counterprotester by the name of Isadore Greenbaum decided that he couldn’t bear Kuhn’s diatribe anymore and spontaneously rushed the podium and attempted to tackle him.

He almost made it. On the newsreel footage of the rally shown in movie theaters throughout the country the following weekend, viewers could see Kuhn’s shocked visage as the Jewish kamikazeshakes the podium. Next, they saw the hapless Greenbaum set upon by a gaggle of furious OD men, who covered him with blowsbefore he was finally rescued by a squadron of New York policemen. It was all over in a moment—but it was a moment that horrified America: A bunch of Nazis beating up a Jew in the middle of Madison Square Garden.

The Bundesführer took the interruption in stride. Kuhn proceeded with his speech.

And then it was over, and the thousands of Nazi faithful dutifully exited the arena. As far as the Bund was concerned, the rally was a success — a shining moment for America’s most prominent fascist. But the rally further angered Berlin, which was then preparing to go to war with the Allies — a war Germany still desperately hoped the U.S. would steer clear of.

LaGuardia was proud of the way his city and his police force had handled the Bund’s rally. At the same time, the orgy of hatred at the Garden sealed his determination, along with that of Thomas Dewey, to take down Kuhn, and the Bund along with him, by investigating his suspicious finances (the married Kuhn liked to party and kept a number of mistresses, evidently, at the Bund’s expense).

A subsequent inquiry determined that the free-spending Kuhn had embezzled $14,000 from the organization. The Bund did not wish to have Kuhn prosecuted, because ofFührerprinzip, the principle that the leader had absolute power. Nevertheless, with the implicit blessing of the White House, Dewey decided to go ahead and prosecute.

On December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in jail for tax evasion. On December 11, 1941, while he was locked away in Sing Sing prison, Germany declared war on the U.S. Kuhn’s support for a government now actively hostile to America gave the federal government the pretext to revoke his citizenship, which it did on June 1, 1943. Upon Kuhn’s release from prison three weeks later, he was immediately re-arrested as a dangerous enemy agent. While Kuhn was in U.S. custody in Texas, Nazi Germany was destroyed, its quest for global domination permanently halted, and Hitler was dead. Four months after V-E Day, the U.S. deported Kuhn to war-ravaged West Germany. His dreams of a Swastika Nation had been smashed to pieces. He died in Munich in 1951, a broken man, in exile from the country he had sought to “liberate.”

To be sure, historical comparisons are, to an extent, folly. For all the similarities between the Bund’s 1939 rally and the white nationalists’ Charlottesville demonstration, there are substantial differences.

Fortunately, no one with Fritz Kuhn’s particular demagogic skill set has emerged to lead his neo-Nazi descendants, though there are those attempting to play the part. “I am worried that a Kuhn figure could marshal the disparate alt-right groups,” said Arnie Bernstein, “be it a Richard Spencer, David Duke or someone of that ilk.”

Another difference is while the Bund’s rally and the violence that spilled from it was denounced forcefully by America’s top political leaders, President Donald Trump’s half-hearted condemnation and shocking defense of the Charlottesville mob as including “very fine people” has no antecedent, at least in modern American history. “We have a president blowing dog whistles loud and clear,” said Bernstein. “You never saw that with FDR.”

The Bund’s rally was at once the group’s apex and its death rattle. But it’s only in retrospect that one can make such pronouncements; nobody yet knows exactly what Charlottesville — and Trump’s response to it — will mean for the alt-right. “The striking ambivalence coming out of the White House” could help to galvanize Nazi sympathizers, said David Harris of the American Jewish Committee.

But much as the Bund–generated images of Nazi barbarism and violence drove everyday Americans from apathy 78 years ago, “Charlottesville will also mobilize anti-Nazis to stand up and be counted,” Harris said. Much as the Madison Square Garden rally did on the eve of World War II, said Harris, “I choose to believe the net effect will be to marginalize the ‘blut and boden’ fan base.”

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