Pro-democracy Americans, who continue to represent some 70 percent of the total voting age population of the country, can no longer delude themselves that what occurred in Germany in the early 1930s cannot happen here. What has and is happening here is that a violent movement of Nazis, fascists, and racist Confederates have not only seized control of the Republican Party through their cult leader Donald Trump, but elected Republicans and candidates for office are moving to repaint American history. The intentions of these dreadful products of the Trump movement are clear. They seek to justify the Holocaust of World War II as a necessary, African slavery as necessary for the development of the American economy, and the genocide of the Native Americans as an acceptable manifestation of European colonial expansion.
What is occurring in America is not only a re-writing of history but a movement to require Christo-fascist indoctrination of students in the same manner that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis required Germany’s public schools to teach Nazi racist ideology. Just as German students were taught that Aryans were superior to other races, Trump loyalists are forcing school boards, administrators, and teachers to reject curricula that teach children the ugly truths about slavery, manifest destiny and westward expansion, and the culmination of centuries of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. The fascists call all of these educational topics “divisive concepts,” a term that could have been ripped from the pages of North Korean totalitarian precepts.
The Nazis have been crawling out from under their rocks and only a few wary political leaders and journalists have bothered to take note and sound the warning klaxons. In Ohio, Republican state Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur of Ashtabula has introduced House Bill 327, that would require teachers in the Ohio public school system to teach “both sides of the Holocaust,” as if the mass murder of six million Jews and several hundreds of thousands of Slavs, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, and handicapped had some sort of justification. Arthur wants the history of the Holocaust taught from the perspective of a German soldier at the time. Yes, those soldiers who had sworn allegiance and loyalty to their Führer, Hitler. But Arthur’s bill does not stop with Holocaust revisionism, a favorite playground for the neo-Nazis and white nationalists. It would teach students that the Nazis murdered “hundreds of thousands” of people “for having a different color of skin.” Arthur’s bill does not merely under count the victims of the Holocaust but suggests that Jews are not a religion but a non-white “race.” That is straight out of the propaganda doctrine of Joseph Goebbels.
The Republican Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Bob Cupp, responded to Arthur’s comments about HB327 by calling them “inappropriate” and “uninformed.” Bullshit! Arthur is merely expressing the new political catechism of the Republican Party under Trump. Soon, Ohio students will be taught that Hitler did great things for Germany, echoing what Trump told his chief of staff, John Kelly, on a 2018 trip to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Trump told Kelly that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” Of course, Trump would have been schooled in such rhetoric by his Nazi-loving father, Fred Trump, Sr., who banked on the wrong side winning World War II. Old man Fred, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, would have been sympatico with Hitler’s grievances about the war reparations exacted by the Allies in the Versailles Treaty. If Arthur and others in Ohio, including U.S. Senate hopeful J. D. Vance, have their way, Hitler will be viewed in school curricula as a champion of the downtrodden Germans and Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau as villains, who were eventually replaced by other villains in the persons of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
In opposing traditional school curricula about the Holocaust as one of several “divisive concepts” in Ohio schools, Arthur is just following in a long line of Ohio Republican women who have believed that the Third Reich was the cat’s meow. I distinctly remember when Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott said, “Hitler was good for Germany in the beginning” and “I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.” There was also Ohio Republican Congresswoman Jean “Mean Jean” Schmidt who called long serving Democratic Representative Jack Murtha, a 37-year combat veteran of the Marine Corps, a “coward.” Just as John Belushi said in “The Blues Brothers,” “I hate Illinois Nazis,” let me add that “I hate Ohio Nazi old bags like Arthur, Schott, and Schmidt.
One might shrug off Ohio’s HB 327 as a one-off deal. But it is not. Last year, Southlake, Texas Carroll Independent School District administrator Gina Peddy was taped during a conference call with teachers that if they used a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they must offer students a book with an “opposing” perspective. Peddy’s actual quote was, “make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” What did she mean? Fucking “Mein Kampf?”
Peddy cautioned the teachers to abide by the concepts of HB 3979, Texas legislation also codified by Texas Senate Bill 3 that requires “multiple perspectives” be taught. As part of its “multiple perspectives” claptrap, the Texas State Board of Education is now considering approving curricula that will teach kindergarteners to second graders that slavery was actually “involuntary relocation.” What, like being transferred by the Army from Fort Campbell to Fort Hood? Texas is justifying calling slavery “involuntary relocation” by claiming it is an implementation of that nasty old SB 3 that would teach that there was a good reason for the Holocaust.
In 2015, Texas school texts began referring to African slaves brought to America as “workers.” Perhaps other states should begin teaching that those Americans who died in the Alamo were vicious drunken mercenaries who wanted an independent Texas to ensure the continuation of slavery because Mexico had recently abolished the practice.
Several states have curricula that teach that the Native Americans were treated as civilly as possible. Verboten is any mention of white genocide of the tribal peoples of America. And just as slavery is now considered by Texas as “involuntary relocation,” the forced removal of Native American children from their parents to hideous boarding schools as mere “re-socialization” of Native American kids so they could be more easily integrated into white European America. So, these fascists want child kidnapping taught as a form of getting to go away to summer camp. In reality, white America was committing wholesale cultural genocide on hundreds of Indian tribes.
You see, what is occurring in Texas and Ohio is nothing more than an attempt to Nazify America’s education curricula. And what’s more appalling is that there are those who had relatives who fought and died in the war against fascism who believe in this mainstreaming of Nazi ideology in their school systems.
Make no mistake about it, HB 327, Texas HB 3979, Texas SB 3, and others like them enacted by the Ignorant States of America are also mandating book bans in public schools and libraries. Nazi-style book burnings and bans have become a force de rigueur in America. Rather than open young minds to the world of literature, history, language, cultures, science, philosophy, and other disciplines, states like Texas, Ohio, and other redneck hillbilly backwaters want to restrict knowledge and indoctrinate future fascist automatons. Some 36 states have either enacted or are proposing legislation to curtail education dealing with racism, slavery, critical thinking skills, or the contributions of certain groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and others, in the building of the United States.
n Florida, the tropical Mussolini, Governor Ron DeSantis, championed passage of the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act, which prohibits the teaching of the 1619 Project and other subjects designed to show that racism was baked into American history from colonial times.
In Alabama, which can always be relied upon to comes up with the most inane policies on any subject imaginable, has, with the State Board of Education’s “Resolution Declaring the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom And Nondiscrimination” prohibited blaming any ethnic group for slavery. Gee, those ancestors of the current crop of racist white Alabamians must have been committed to full employment for those “involuntarily relocated” to Alabama’s cotton fields from Dahomey and the Gambia in West Africa. How lucky were those farm employees from Africa! Next door in Mississippi, which can always be expected to outdo Alabama when it comes to being as screwed up as humanly possible, Bill 437 prohibits teaching the evils of racism with one major exception. The proposed law will continue to permit lessons on the Mississippi Constitution of 1890, which stipulates that “separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.” Mississippi is certainly living up to its motto: “First in racism and last in education.” Fuck Mississippi!
Essentially, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass are being told to get to the back of the bus when it comes to textbooks and teachers’ lesson plans. Cesar Chavez will remain in the lettuce fields of California. Susan B. Anthony will remain in obscurity in New York. Some 15,000 Chinese railroad workers who built the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad will join the ranks of the “involuntarily relocated” Africans in the South. You see, white people actually helped these non-whites of the world achieve nirvana in America! You say Chinese Exclusion Act; the horrible labor practices of California Governor Leland Stanford and his Central Pacific Railroad; the Dred Scott decision; the U.S. Army’s massacres of the Shoshone, Sioux, Cherokee, Wiyot, Wintu, Assiniboine, Tolowa, and Seminole; the beating and jailing of women suffragettes; and hideous labor practices against Mexican migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley? Republicans will tell you you’re too “woke” and inherently racist against whites—and never mind if you are white — who have only sought to help non-whites in America Land. America Land is a theme park for white comfort that features Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Reb, Paul Bunyan and Babe, Honest Abe, Uncle Sam, Uncle Remus, Uncle Tom, Ben Franklin and his kite, John Smith and Pocahontas, and Christopher Columbus and his Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. See how inspiring and guilt-free such Nazified history can be?
And who will be teaching a Nazi-laundered version of history in American schools? Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey just signed into law Senate Bill 1159, which states that a college degree is no longer required to teach in Arizona’s public schools. One only is required to be enrolled in college in order to teach. That means Bubba, the fat bearded and bald motorcycle gangster with swastika tattoos on his forearms, need only be signed up with some diploma mill in order to teach young children the benefits of being a Mexican- and black-hating racist. The Republican march to destroy public education in America is goosestepping its way in state legislatures across the country. Meanwhile, in order to satisfy those who would erase American history, book bans and burning are increasing in frequency across the nation. America is experiencing its 1930s in Germany moment. Will the ultimate outcome be the same?
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
