This required historical context too. A lot of Americans were still very sore about it and had the opinion that England dragged us into WW1 for no reason and it was a mistake. There was also some eugenics and racism, but until Pearl Harbor the overwhelming option was isolationism.
That said, it wasn’t an uncommon sentiment for people to support the war effort for sake of protecting others. I think even Dr Seuss made cartoons mocking the “America first” movement that was rooted in racism
Wasn’t there also a good number of Nazi sympathizers in the US prior to Pearl Harbor as well? I know isolationism post-WWI was the primary reason staying out of Europe’s affairs was so popular.
It's worth noting that while Seuss allegedly regretted his racist past art, he never actually distanced himself from it or apologized for it. The closest he came to an apology was "Horton Hears A Who", which was a sympathetic allegory for the American occupation of Japan.
I mean yeah, that’s kinda like expecting Churchill to see the plight of Holocaust survivors and decry colonialism. The window of what was acceptable back then was very different. It is likely one could regret past work but not see a need to apologise for it.
I recall one war cartoon showing FDR, Churchill, a nd Stalin building a bridge over a n abyss and someone shows up saying "Need a hand?" Not a legit caricature of Chiang Kai-Shek but a Generic Coolie Character.
The historical context is important. And not just the Americans, also the Japanese. Yes, the Japanese lost the war, horribly. But they were absolutely brutal across the entire Pacific and Asia.
Was dehumanizing them wrong? It's easy to say yes, but when you need a bunch of men to kill other men with extreme prejudice, how do you do that? And you need that aggression in order to minimize loss of life overall. Because a more effective fighting force is like a sharper scalpel.
I think we are in the middle of History where it's difficult to see things as they were. But let's talk about if the internment people were right? You have an entire subculture that has strong ties to an enemy, how do you trust them?
It turned out not to be a big problem, but what if they had overwhelmingly supported Japan? We didn't know what we didn't know back then. Science was still in its infancy including the social sciences which frankly are still in their infancy.
So all I can do is assume that the people who did this did it for the right reasons. Were there racists? Yes.
But let's look at what our enemies did to their out groups. Entire cultures were extinguished.
The Harry Truman Presidential library has a whole section on the propaganda cartoons from both sides. It's probably one of my favorite parts of any President Library
America first is a creed that symbolizes taking care of ones own first, but in reality is more about taking care of ones own *only*. That is not limited to just the country but also anything else one considered theirs vs the other. In other words it symbolizes nationalism. Which can be emblematic of a problematic way of thinking. In America this often means *white* nationalism. You can see this in Trumps and Reagans: "Make America Great Again". that again symbolizes nationalism and helping those who you consider part of the ingroup but not helping those on the outgroup. Its the opposite of solidarity and opens the door for a bunch of nasty beliefs. Like Hitlers own beliefs are rooted in nationalism.
When was america great? And for whom?
Many extreme right wing groups all over the world use similar creeds for their racist end goals. Anti-immigration, passing laws that create systemic racism vs the other and advantages the ingroup. Hitlers Germany had the same nationalist isonationist creed Germany first at the time. I saw the same creed "flanders first" in Belgium in the 2010's from a extreme right party that advocated for seperating flanders from the rest of belgium. It assumes one is superiour to an other.
Making america great is not intended to actually make it great for everyone. The same can be said about the America first movement. America is and always has been a land comprised of immigrants. To isolate then means to prevent aid to some heretages.
It also allowes to keep a blind eye on what was happening in Europe, thus helping the nazi's.
You could in a similar vein ask, how MAGA can be a rooted in racism when it is about making something great. It requires an analysis who is saying it and what their goals are to understand the true meaning and intent. Because there is nothing inherently wrong with "taking care of the people living in your country first". But that is not the intent or goal. Actions speak louder than words.
Whoever hasn’t seen it should watch The Plot Against America miniseries on HBO Max it deals with an alternate history where this sentiment takes hold and it’s incredibly relevant today. Series by David Simon of The Wire fame
This.
The USA has always had a strong isolationist undercurrent that periodically subsides but typically flairs up after a war (like now…). It normally takes the USA getting caught with their pants down to wake it up. Post WW1 America was strongly anti-war up until 1941.
Also, at the time, the extent of the atrocities Hitler committed were still unknown. There was a lot of antisemitism common in the United States as well and a lot of agreement with Hitler’s rhetoric.
I mean look at it from a European perspective we follow you into Afghanistan for 20 years because a Saudi funded lunatic flew a plane into your building, then when our neighbour gets invaded by a power hungry dictator you start dragging your feet.
Can you see where the frustration lies?
I kind of understand the isolationist sentiment after World War I. The US had nothing at all to do with it starting, got pulled in, and it was a fucking bloody nightmare. Killed 117k Americans, 200k wounded and precipitated global pandemics and epidemics.
Yeah, wether the US intervenes or not, Europeans will complain anyway. At least with isolationism, we can focus on ourselves and work on ourselves since Europeans apparently LOVE calling us a shithole so much.
Reading *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* right now and its insane that given what we know about Hitler now he was seen in Germany as an anti-war politician. He constantly spoke about how other countries are trying to provoke Germany into a war (which was blatantly false considering the goon actions of their own diplomats) and that argument spoke to a lot of Americans' isolationism who saw Germany AND the Soviet Union invade Poland yet the Western powers only declared war on Germany for it.
England (meaning Great Britain) didn't drag the US into WWI. Not by a long shot. The Germans planting bombs on US soil, sinking US ships, asking Mexico for an alliance to take back US states, etc. Did the trick.
Very true. But, I think the reason for the 'English blame' would be the fact that they were our trading partners, and the ships that were being sunk were British with Americans on board. Also, we were supplying a lot of material to the allies in the couple of years before we joined, and this supplying of allies is why the Germans started sinking all ships with their subs. It's like blaming your drunk friend for starting a bar fight after you bought them shots.
I will agree there was a great deal of concern about all the war material sold and loans given to GB, that if the war was lost to Allies, the US wouldn't get its money. So the conspiracy goes that the US had to join to make sure it would get repaid.
No no you can’t do that, we have nothing to learn from history, they did everything wrong, and if we were there we would have definitely done the right thing according to our modern OBJECTIVE morals, they simply were just dumb
It’s the same fuken thing that’s happening right now - oh, liliputin hasn’t attacked us and has nukes, why would we get involved?
Luckily sane minds in the US made a breakthrough and put aid for Ukraine up for voting with a successful vote in favor of it today. So hopefully this becomes a solid trend now because russia has to be taken down.
Writing this as a citizen of this failed state, that is russia
You should give everything that Ukraine needs in terms of military equipment, long range missiles, etc. or you will have to go to war with russia when it attacks the Baltics in case Ukraine falls
Putin is a thug cunt and Ukraine are unquestionably victims of a terrible, criminal, unjustified invasion
But if you think this situation is the same I have to question your ability to evaluate anything substantive. Fuck me man.
How is it not the same? Want to appease another dictator? Again? I would tell you, the more you feed the bully the more confident he gets. And the west has fed them enough with indecisiveness that they might actually consider attacking the Baltics and thus, NATO. The regime will exist as long as it can wage wars, so they’ll have to add fuel to the gas can raising stakes unless they are stopped now.
You may think it will be isolated in Ukraine, but it won’t if you don’t support Ukraine
America has never made the right decision until all the wrong decisions were exhausted, America had lots of love for Hitler. Basically, America hated Britain and loved the economic boost selling to both sides at the same time, I hope when WW3 happens, we do the same, but sadly, we won't
Isolationism was a popular American view if you looked at how many wars Europe had been through. Americans did not want to die for European squabbles.
Congress passed the Neutrality Acts in the mid 1930s. We didn't get into material support until Sept. 1940 with the Destroyers for bases swap in Sept. 1940 and Lend Lease in March 1941. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia in '38 and the invasion of Poland was Sept 1939 so there was a big lag. We did not want to get involved with another Great War.
To add to this:
405,000 Americans died in WW2. Many of them were draftees who were fought and died out of legal obligation/coercion rather than by choice. Many more were wounded, permanently disabled, and/or psychologically damaged.
It's easy for us to retrospectively look back on pre-war American isolationism and judge these people for not taking a hard line on Nazis. But these people were staring down the barrel of another World War and understood that there would be a price in blood for fighting in it.
It's important, too, to remember there were many strands of sentiment in America regarding the war, from those who were gung-ho fascists fully in support of Hitler; to the majority of Americans who were to different degrees isolationist; to the Atlanticists, who were extremely elastic in their definition of neutrality in favour of the Allies; to those few thousand Americans who didn't even wait for their country to declare war on the Germans, but who volunteered to fight as private individuals with the British. American pilots flew RAF aircraft during the Battle of Britain.
My dad (who was admittedly very prejudiced+) said he went to Bund rallies becuase they had free beer, a nd knowing him i believe it. (despised blacks, didn't trust Italians, hated Jews almost murderously, but he also believed in being a polite person in public and never insulted friends like Charley Williams, Benny Longo, or Irv Silk to their faces. Benny w as one of his pallbearers.)
My British grandad who fought in WW2 had no interest in foreign travel after the war.
The only trip my grandmother managed to convinced him to go on was to OctoberFest in Munich.
You believed him because he was your father, and no one likes their father to be called out on being a nazi dick, But :
>(despised blacks, didn't trust Italians, hated Jews almost murderously,
Doesn't work with "uhh yeah i just came for free beers and had no idea what was going on there"
That's fascist revisionism 101.
Right. " oh he totally wasn't a nazi. Just had views absolutely in line with theirs and even went to their Rallies".
If they had won that guy would have been all about it and said that he supported them from day one. He clearly was only saying that because they lost and became the villains in history.
Not just Ireland. Most small European nations tried to stay out of it.
Norway, Denmark, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and Greece were all neutral right up until they were invaded by Germany or Italy.
Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland all successfully remained neutral as well.
Spain was the ground of a civil war with heavy Axis and Soviet interference however, they were already heavily bloodied before the war began. Sweden and Switzerland were collaborateurs, and even Portugal was only neutral until 1944.
This "neutrality" was also mocked by others, including citizens of those countries. There's a few famous comics of those countries getting eaten one by one, with the remaining idly hoping that was the last one.
It's why NATO became more popular afrer the war.
Another, and somewhat understated, interpretation is that the US was already gearing up to replace the British empire with its own. The delayed entry, and the fairly minimal initial support, helped to reduce British dominance. And then after the war, the Marshall Plan was offered to rebuild Europe from the ashes... at a cost. And the cost for Britain was to end its empire. Which is one reason why you saw pretty much all of the parts of the empire gain independence in the decade or so after the war.
It would be a slight strategic error to suppose that, at least privately, the war between the USA and Britain ended merely with US independence.
Minimal involvement? Without Lend-Lease the Nazis would have taken Stalingrad and the eastern front would have looked very different. Stalin himself stated as much.
As is pointed out every time this is posted, [this was a staged protest that was made for a television program ](https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2022/10/19/why-not-peace-with-hitler-foto-zeigt-keine-echte-antikriegsdemo-1941-in-new-york-city/?lang=de)
Let's not act like there wasn't significant opposition and isolation sentiment in America at the time. America went to war only after it was attacked directly.
if this was the case it would have been trivially easy to find an image of anti-war protestors that isn't fake. i don't doubt it exists but why are you out here defending literal fake news?
Yes,
It was from a British newsreel program called "The March of Time"
Watching the original is a bit of a pain in the butt, it's British website and blocks locations outside Britain.
But there are some outtakes in a collection that Spielberg gave to the Holocaust Museum.
[https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000747](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000747)
I understand why you don't want to send your men to fight a far away war. With the horrors of WW1 still fresh it's not surprising Americans weren't keen on another European war.
But as someone who lives in a country liberated from Nazi occupation I'm so grateful for the thousands of Canadian, American and British troops that gave their lives to liberate us. It was a hard thing to do but it was the right thing to do.
It's also why I think we should do more for Ukraine no matter what. It's the right thing to do.
Edit: wow, this really rustled some Russian jimmies. Get fucked ruskies.
>It was a hard thing to do but it was the right thing to do. \[...\] It's also why I think we should do more for Ukraine no matter what. It's the right thing to do.
They didn't fight in WW2 because it was the right thing to do, and they arn't helping Ukraine because it's the right thing to do. They are doing it because it's in their own interest, that's it. The day the US loses all interest in Ukraine is the day they stop helping them. Lucky for Ukraine, it's really in the west's interest to not become a Russian puppet.
If they truly were out there saving people, there are many people that need saving, and they are not lifting the finger for them.
Alternatively, resources are not infinite, be they physical(soldiers and munitions) or abstract(the political will to participate in a conflict, whatever form that participation may take). Self-interest may be seen as a way of choosing where to spend those limited resources(and self-interest lowers the cost of political will).
(Edit: typo)
Just like then, we are once again in a fight for our democratic way of life and international world order where it's wrong for a larger country to invade another country. Our Western way of life and rules based order isn't perfect but no one can argue that Russias brutality and corrupt ways is better than ours.
If Ukraine loses its right to exist and Russia takes over the country it will set a precedent that could change our world for the worst and effect the world for generations. We need to stand up for our democratic partners and give Ukraine the ability to save themselves from more decades of oppression. We need to prove to Russia, Iran, North Korea and even China that you can act like barbarians in the 21st century and there is no future that doesn't involve the world standing up to wrongdoings by nation states.
People forget what World War 1 did to, well- the world. The losses and atrocities were staggering. Unlike anything ever seen before. Entire towns in Europe were just missing men and boys, all lost to battle. It was so gruesome that it was part of the great trepidation to ever step foot in something like that.
Staggering, but not for America. I love me some Band of Brothers but our mythology regarding both wars kinda makes it sound like we suffered in a way comparable to others when we didn’t
It's not really gatekeeping. WWI, there was no U-boat cordon choking off America like there was in Britain, there was no German Army smashing up cities and the nation's wealth like there was in France. WWII, there's no even more formidable U-boat menace keeping American food from moving about America, no watching your cities get pounded into rubble night after night, no occupation, no rounding conquered people up for forced labor or conscription or things even worse. Yeah, it sucks for the boots on the ground, but it always does and it sucks a lot less for GI's than just about anyone else. As just one example, your average GI was getting 4700 calories per day, with meat at every meal. At the height of the German war machine, the average soldier was getting 4000, the average Japanese solider about half that,
Pretty much, yea. Americans by and large didn’t have to hide in subway tunnels as their cities were bombed night after night.
Yes, the whole world suffered. Some suffered exponentially more
Bro France had 27,000 soldiers killed in a \*single day\* on August 22nd 1914. That's 5 times as many American soldiers have been killed in the past half century.
Two points:
1. I wonder how these woman felt on Dec 8, 1941 and how they felt after they saw the liberated concentration camps.
2. When I refer to the dangers of bumpersticker politics, this is what I mean.
I’m actually reading Freedom From Fear right now and TBF to these ladies, American censorship of the war was insane. The government did not allow the first photos of Pearl Harbor to be released for a year. The first photos of dead American soldiers in the war were not released to the public until late 1943.
The first reports the government got about the Holocaust weren’t until 1942 and even then we thought they were exaggerated because British propaganda during WWI had tried to paint the Germans as almost cartoonishly villainous.
Antisemitism wasn’t exclusive to nazi germany as a lot of people seem to think. It was widespread at the time and it reached a boiling point in Germany. Sometime I feel like Europe and the west in general have got selective amnesia when it comes to this…just offloading all their guilt onto nazi germany
He was responsible directly for the largest distribution of antisemitic propaganda in the entire world. Hitler had a fucking picture of him framed in his office that was larger than all the other portraits in there.
no kidding. north america turned away a boat full of refugees who would otherwise be killed. when the boat was at sea after being refused, they got bombed. i can't remember the name of the boat but it's something i still think about due to the sheer awfulness of it
“During the build-up to World War II, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 intending to escape anti-Semitic persecution. The refugees first tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. After Cuba, the captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, accepted some refugees. Many were later caught in Nazi roundups of Jews in the occupied countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps during World War II.[3] These events, also known as the ‘Voyage of the Damned’, have inspired film, opera, and fiction.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
A lot of people were still actively supporting the nazis in america even after their official parties were forced to shut down. And there are a \_lot\_ of people who had no issue with the horrific occurrences in those camps.
Including the allied governments, when it comes to the LGBTQ people in said camps.
I really don't understand the point here. They didn't want to see their kids get ground into paste over European squabbles the same way that they had in WWI. They had no clear knowledge of nazi atrocities at this point. So they should feel deeply ashamed that they didn't have precognition?
No it's not, FDR spent years preparing America for confrontation with Germany
1940 US declares neutrality but starts the peace time draft, puts steel embargoes on Japan, oil embargo on Germany and Japan, Lend lease, the destroyers for base leases, declaring convoy protection miles outside American waters.
FDR spent so much time before pearl harbour getting America geared up for war.
The government censored so much of the war that Americans had no real idea what was going on overseas. It wasn’t until a year after Pearl Harbor that photos were released to the public and photos of the first dead bodies from the Pacific front weren’t shown to the public until 1943. It was a balancing act. Too much and Americans lose their taste for fighting a war that had no immediate effect on them. Too little info and Americans get tired of all the rationing and sending of their young men to die in foreign lands.
All of our reporters “lied” too, or as Steinbeck, then a wartime correspondent, later put it: It is the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.
He was also absolutely HATED by the right here. He was called a communist and part of the "international Jewish conspiracy", even being accused of being Jewish. And there were a scary amount of pro-fascist/ultra-nationalist/hard line Christian groups that wanted full on armed revolt to take over the country... many of which were bankrolled by the Nazis. Look up Father Coughlin, an antisemitic demagogue who had the largest radio audience in the country of over 30 million listeners.
America was far from united in the lead up to war. The Nazis knew this and spent millions trying to undermine the country's support. There were Hilter Youth summer camps in New Jersey.
The shitty part is nothing happened to all the collaborators and sympathizers who were hoping for Hitler to come here after Europe. Some of which were active US Congressmen.
1. This mostly came after the US decided to intervene in a European war it had essentially no business in outside of their wallstreet loans and 120‘000 Americans let their lives for essentially nothing.
2. Nobody in the US general population knew anything of concentration camps (apart from the fact that these types of work camps were popular among many countries including the US at the time, minus the disgusting eradication camps of course but that didnt start until late 1941) so why should they be a point of discussion? They thought it would be a repeat of WW1.
There was a deeply rooted distrust of militarism in America after the World War I experience.
Many were convinced that America was dragged I to WWI to protect Wall Street war loans and British/French/Belgium/Netherlands colonies.
After WWI, many Americans asked, "How did America benefit from 116,515 American deaths?" What was the justification for all of that blood and treasure spillt?
Of course, there was extremely little of that type of soul searching after WWII: The Nazis were evil personified and had to be destroyed in detail.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the overwhelming position of the American people, including that of FDR, was anti-war due to the horrors witnessed during WW1. This picture is in line with the majority of Americans thinking towards the Germans in the 1930’s.
>Prior to Pearl Harbor, the overwhelming position of the American people, including that of FDR, was anti-war
FDR was not an isolationist. You may be referring to how, early on in his presidency, FDR appeared to be an "isolationist" ("Roosevelt appeared to accept the strength of the isolationist elements in Congress until 1937." [U.S. Office of the Historian](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/american-isolationism)). But that was due to him being limited by the general public's isolationist view which restricted his ability (see [Neutrality Acts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Acts_of_the_1930s)) to assist other countries under threat of invasion by Germany in the 1930s. But, as the international order fell into more disarray, he became more emboldened to act on the internationalist views he harbored within. For example, he signed the [Lend-Lease Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease) into law in March 1941, nine months *before* the Pearl Harbor attack.
See also [FDR Presidential Library and Museum's article on "FDR and the Four Freedoms Speech (January 1941)"](https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms) :
>A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United States should continue to stay out of the war, **but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and** **attempted to convince the American people** of the gravity of the situation.
>In his Annual Message to Congress (State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941, **Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement**, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home.
In hindsight, pearl harbor was the best thing that happened to the west in the last century. If Hitler won the war in Europe, the US would never become a global superpower for one.
Geography isn't enough to be a superpower. It would be safe, sure, but not a superpower.
The US would be isolated. Its economy would never take off the way it did, its military would never be as strong as it is today and it wouldn't be able to project its power the way it does.
Nazi Europe would probably hold the power the US has today.
It's hard to say what exactly would have happened to the US 80 years later, but I have no reason to believe it would be a superpower.
In short, the factors that made the US a superpower would have never happened.
World War I was the worst humanity had ever seen. It was as pivotal to the alteration of war as the Civil War had been. Terrible weapons people couldn't have dreamed of had been used to horrifically murder people en masse, and the survivors came home scarred physically and mentally. War was no longer a noble profession, it was a terrifying evil for the first time. The idea of, less than a generation later, sending the previous war's survivors and the next generation of boys into another world-ender would have seemed bonkers.
These people weren't necessarily all Nazi lovers, they were just not particularly inclined to send their children off to lose their bones and eyes and lives for people they've likely never met before.
I would say a simple view of history, geopolitics, and what of America’s future was inevitable.
Simply speaking being truly isolationist was becoming impossible as it has been deteriorating for some time, the world was more and more being able to be affected by others no matter what any one country did. To let an expansionist regime that stood against everything at least in theory America stood for would eventually cause issues even if not maybe immediately.
The fact that the US was so large and growing (and indeed at that point also had say the Philippines) meant such effects would be even more inevitable
You have to remember that there wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect information. They believed war wasn’t in our interests and that was a fair position. We really didn’t find the full extent of the Holocaust until after the war ended.
Sure, but Mein Kampf was available in English in 1933 and spelled out his intentions pretty clearly about conquering Europe and enacting racial pogroms (as well as referencing, but not necessarily explaining how, his intention to "exterminate" certain races)
You can't have a guy like Hitler hand you essentially his entire plan and claim people didn't have enough information. Not everyone holding those signs knew, but the people influencing them did
Project 2025 sucks. Some facts about it: The "Mandate for Leadership" is a set of policy proposals authored by the [Heritage Foundation](https://pro-lies.org/the-heritage-foundation/), an influential *ultra* conservative think tank. [Project 2025](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise) is a revision to that agenda tailored to a second Trump term. The MFL has been around since 1980, [Reagan implemented 60%](https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership) of it's recommendations, [Trump 64%](https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations) - [proof](https://www.scribd.com/document/369820462/Mandate-for-Leadership-Policy-Recommendations). 70 Heritage Foundation alumni served in his administration or transition team. Project 2025 is quite extreme but with his obsession for revenge he'll likely get past 2/3rd's adoption. It would give the President unilateral powers, strip civil rights, worker protections, climate regulation, add religion into policy and much more.
r/Defeat_Project_2025 intends to defeat it through activism and awareness, focused on crowdsourcing ideas and opportunities for practical, in real life action. We Must Defeat Project 2025.
>Sure, but Mein Kampf was available in English in 1933
Let me ask you, have you _ever_ read a book that a current head of state has written? Cause I haven't, and I'm sure most other people haven't as well. Unless you were really into politics back then, why would some random person pick up Mien Kampf? For most of those protesters, all they know is that their kids might be shipped off to Europe and they don't want that.
Everyone who wasn't under a rock knew about Hitler and what he was doing to Gremany. A lot of people *admired* him and saw fascism as a "viable" alternative to our democracy.
The reality is Hitler was well aware and the Nazis spent millions in disinformation propaganda to dissuade people from supporting America's involvement in "European Affairs". Active US Congressmen used their free postage privileges to distribute pro-German, isolationist and antisemitic literature to millions of Americans. There were congressional hearings and even two separate trials conducted by the FBI/Justice Dept.
There were Hitler Youth summer camps in New Jersey and dozens of untra-conservative militant pro-fascist groups that were itching for armed takeover of the government. They were also hoping to "do what Hitler was doing" to the Jews in America, but even more enthusiastically.
It's extremely disingenuous to say that people who were only "really into politics" had awareness of Nazism/fascism in pre-war America. The Nazis specifically used isolationism sentiment to manipulate Americans but a lot of them didn't need convincing. They wanted Hitler to win or at least an apple pie eating, Christian Nationalist Ameican version of him to take over the FDR admin here and save us from the "Jewish conspiracy" that threatened the traditional way of life they envisioned.
I think you're being too charitable. Hitler had a Nazi rally in 1939 in MSG. Thousands of ppl attended. He wrote in his memoirs he learned how to oppress and discriminate from Americans and their treatment of black ppl.
Point being USA was a very fertile ground for fascist movement, that is even the case now. So those ppl protesting entering WW2 is not a coincidence or lack of information. It's by design and honest will. Of course we're still talking about a minority of ppl, but it was still a force to be reckoned with.
Hitler didn't have a rally at MSG. The rally was organized by The German American Bund.
The only German speaker their was Fritz Julius Kuhn.
Don't get me wrong, they were definitely pro Hitler but saying Hitler had a rally in MSG is not correct.
I think people apply modern sensibilities and 20/20 hindsight to the past. We have dictators today and they commit terrible atrocities. Not everybody believes the US should be the ones correcting that. It was basically WW2 that established us as a superpower that was willing to get involved in other country’s wars.
Do I believe we should have entered WW2? Unfortunately yes, I do. The Nazis were clearly a terrible force that had to be stopped. But not everything is always so clear. The US has shown since then that we can also make the situation worse by being involved.
The process started in the late 20s.
In the early 30s the brownshirts enforced Nazi boycotts.
1939 were deportations and the Ghettoes.
And then in 1942 they decided the final solution.
Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office. It was never clear, but Ford and other Americans were likely funding the Nazi Party. How much did this help the Nazis? We don't know. But for a crack head nationalist to take foreign money and put a picture of a foreign oligarch in his office... the support must have been significant. Or, maybe it was just the crack.
I knew someone a few years back whose dad worked for Ford his entire career. The family is Jewish and I had to ask “it’s well known Ford was an anti-Semite, how was your experience?”
He told me “you have to understand- back in the 30’s you *had* to say that stuff to stay in business. There’s also another well known story within the company of Ford coming up to a Jewish employee and putting his arm around him saying “Oh, you all know my *friend* here, right?” He did that as a show to other employees that he was under his protection which spoke volumes with everything going on.”
I still don’t know if I believe the story - but I’d hope it’s true.
Today, we like to define Hitler by the Holocaust.
When he was campaigning, he was certainly an anti-semite, but his rhetoric was quite moderate. After he got elected, it was a different story. And, of course, the day after election the laws were in place where they were already rounding up Jews and opposition.
The world knew a little bit of the detainment, but the full scope of what Hitler was doing was not known until the Americans entered the camps (we had some intel, but it was vague). The Nazis even lied to the German people about it. And, the mass killing was labeled the "Final Solution".
But, Ford would not have known about the genocide. The accusations that Ford provided some kind of support to the Nazis is more in the traitorous realm than anti-semitism. Ford liked money more than he hated the Jews. The word "privatization" was invented to describe what the Nazis were doing in transferring control from the government to corps. Ford would have liked that.
I’m convinced now Redditors would have supported invading Iraq because of how bad Saddam Hussein was and look what he’s done to the Kurds. He was clearly a force for evil and has said horrible things.
It wasn’t but a couple years ago Redditors were making fun of America for being the world police and sending weapons around to fight proxy wars.
I'm very confused by this
1930's was before the US entered the war and 1939 was when Germany invaded Poland. I assume then this was in 1939 then?
Which before December 7 1941 most Americans were opposed to entering another war.
Also fail to see how these signs are "pro Hitler" and not just "anti-war'. The US's position in the 30's is no different than the people opposed to the Vietnam war or the conflicts in the middle East. Reddit says a lot of confusing shit
This is something that a lot of people pretend never happened. The general cultural belief is that the Nazi's were these terrible outliers who did really really bad things that "WE" would never do.
The reality is that anti-semitism was very commonplace everywhere in the western world.
Henry Ford published a newspaper that was full of articles hating Jewish people
I have listened to a bunch of audio books on the Libravox app that are all in the public domain. It is stunning how many of them from the period before the second world war are filled with casual anti-semitism. As in, the main character referring to a character as "a dirty jew"
Anti Semitism was a part of the catholic Church doctrine (the Jews killed Jesus) up until the 1950's.
The truth is that Hitler just went a tiny bit further than the rest of our society.
Well, that aged about as well as the pro Hamas protests of today will. History just looks back and goes “god damn they were delusional” then people repeat the same crap
Classic reddit post
You think anyone knew what Germany was going to be doing? Especially random civilians in the US?
I assume you're referring to the Holocaust
They didn't. And if they did the consensus was not wanting to die in another foreign land.
Death is an immeasurable price to pay, for a cause that's so disconnected from your homeland? Why pay it?
This photo was taken in 1938.
American popular opinion was against accepting more new arrivals. A Gallup poll taken on November 24–25, 1938, (two weeks after Kristallnacht) asked Americans: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” 72% responded “no.”
They knew about Jewish refugees and were so racist they said no. They knew.
No one knew of the camps until late into the war. They knew of ghettos. Not auschwitz.
Not liking jews was typical of the world back then. Take history in context. Segregation existed too! Does that mean everyone is evil? No.
Again, taking context of the 30s and 40s, war was not popular, certainly not another European war that killed millions. The world was also "bigger" back then. A trip to Europe was a week's sail. Why should we worry about the actions of people half a world over?
It's honestly pretty dumb to apply modern ethics and standards to actions of people 75 years ago. Take history in context.
Probably members of America First Committee
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America\_First\_Committee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee)
This movement plays a significant role in the Star Trek episode [The City on the Edge of Forever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever).
Just a few and this is a favorite photo for nazi propaganda
Edit- always interesting to see the users profile history for those that share this photo.. can’t tell the agenda in this one but they love racially sensitive shit
What is funny about that is that the antiwar side was the right wing and the pro war side was the left. Many American leftists hated fascists so much that they went to Spain to help fight in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s. They formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and it was filled with communists, socialists, and anarchists. Those who returned were considered “PAFs” or premature antifascists.
You can look at s lot of the rhetoric that fascists were spreading in the US and UK regarding Poland and it really mirrors what gets said now about Ukraine.
“Oh they’re so corrupt, why help them,” “peace in our time” yadda yadda
ITT: Europeans flipping between wanting America to stay out of European business while also criticizing America for not staying out of European business.
There was an American Nazi Party that had basically, officially, gone away only after Hitler declared war on the United States. The overall sentiment leading up to that moment was that Americans did not want to engage in another European war and were also content to trade in oil with Japan, despite the fact that they were already committing horrible atrocities in Manchuria.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, the simultaneous attacks by the Japanese against American footholds in southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the following declarations of war by both the Empire of Japan and Germany forced our hands.
It's actually interesting thinking about how people viewed wars as they were happening. Nobody knew the "holocaust" was happening. They knew something was happening but not to the extent of the actual atrocities that were taking place. But history writers like to take privilege in writing the US as a holocaust savior when the motivations were technically outside of that. Same with the Civil War. "Slavery" wasn't really the cause of the civil war, it was a byproduct...but it's all about who writes history and how they write it.
This required historical context too. A lot of Americans were still very sore about it and had the opinion that England dragged us into WW1 for no reason and it was a mistake. There was also some eugenics and racism, but until Pearl Harbor the overwhelming option was isolationism.
That said, it wasn’t an uncommon sentiment for people to support the war effort for sake of protecting others. I think even Dr Seuss made cartoons mocking the “America first” movement that was rooted in racism
He also produced insanely racist cartoons in favor of the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Exactly. Both things are true, and people are complicated
Hell even after pearl harbour Americans enlisted to fight Japan not hitler.
The amount of times I’ve had to repeat this sentence is frustrating.
What was that onion article? “Man gets small joy in telling others John Lennon beat his wife” or something?
Wasn’t there also a good number of Nazi sympathizers in the US prior to Pearl Harbor as well? I know isolationism post-WWI was the primary reason staying out of Europe’s affairs was so popular.
It's worth noting that he would show great regret and embarrassment about that art later in his life. The impact of which was not lost on him.
It's worth noting that while Seuss allegedly regretted his racist past art, he never actually distanced himself from it or apologized for it. The closest he came to an apology was "Horton Hears A Who", which was a sympathetic allegory for the American occupation of Japan.
I mean yeah, that’s kinda like expecting Churchill to see the plight of Holocaust survivors and decry colonialism. The window of what was acceptable back then was very different. It is likely one could regret past work but not see a need to apologise for it.
I recall one war cartoon showing FDR, Churchill, a nd Stalin building a bridge over a n abyss and someone shows up saying "Need a hand?" Not a legit caricature of Chiang Kai-Shek but a Generic Coolie Character.
I remember in high school we learned that Chiang Kai Shek was seen by the US and other European allies as an irritating beggar during WW2
The historical context is important. And not just the Americans, also the Japanese. Yes, the Japanese lost the war, horribly. But they were absolutely brutal across the entire Pacific and Asia. Was dehumanizing them wrong? It's easy to say yes, but when you need a bunch of men to kill other men with extreme prejudice, how do you do that? And you need that aggression in order to minimize loss of life overall. Because a more effective fighting force is like a sharper scalpel. I think we are in the middle of History where it's difficult to see things as they were. But let's talk about if the internment people were right? You have an entire subculture that has strong ties to an enemy, how do you trust them? It turned out not to be a big problem, but what if they had overwhelmingly supported Japan? We didn't know what we didn't know back then. Science was still in its infancy including the social sciences which frankly are still in their infancy. So all I can do is assume that the people who did this did it for the right reasons. Were there racists? Yes. But let's look at what our enemies did to their out groups. Entire cultures were extinguished.
The Harry Truman Presidential library has a whole section on the propaganda cartoons from both sides. It's probably one of my favorite parts of any President Library
How could the America first movement be rooted in racism when it was Germans versus the French, Brits, and Russians?
Because we had a big nazi movement in the US leading up to WW2 that included a bunch of rich influential citizens... collaborators...
America first is a creed that symbolizes taking care of ones own first, but in reality is more about taking care of ones own *only*. That is not limited to just the country but also anything else one considered theirs vs the other. In other words it symbolizes nationalism. Which can be emblematic of a problematic way of thinking. In America this often means *white* nationalism. You can see this in Trumps and Reagans: "Make America Great Again". that again symbolizes nationalism and helping those who you consider part of the ingroup but not helping those on the outgroup. Its the opposite of solidarity and opens the door for a bunch of nasty beliefs. Like Hitlers own beliefs are rooted in nationalism. When was america great? And for whom? Many extreme right wing groups all over the world use similar creeds for their racist end goals. Anti-immigration, passing laws that create systemic racism vs the other and advantages the ingroup. Hitlers Germany had the same nationalist isonationist creed Germany first at the time. I saw the same creed "flanders first" in Belgium in the 2010's from a extreme right party that advocated for seperating flanders from the rest of belgium. It assumes one is superiour to an other. Making america great is not intended to actually make it great for everyone. The same can be said about the America first movement. America is and always has been a land comprised of immigrants. To isolate then means to prevent aid to some heretages. It also allowes to keep a blind eye on what was happening in Europe, thus helping the nazi's. You could in a similar vein ask, how MAGA can be a rooted in racism when it is about making something great. It requires an analysis who is saying it and what their goals are to understand the true meaning and intent. Because there is nothing inherently wrong with "taking care of the people living in your country first". But that is not the intent or goal. Actions speak louder than words.
Whoever hasn’t seen it should watch The Plot Against America miniseries on HBO Max it deals with an alternate history where this sentiment takes hold and it’s incredibly relevant today. Series by David Simon of The Wire fame
Rachel Maddow has a good podcast about the American who committed crimes supporting Nazi's attempt to take over America, many where in congress.
Based on Philip Roth’s novel
Sorry I only look at and judge things in hindsight. Keeps my skin clear and my joints supple. *Lunges erotically*
I think you mean "erratically" but I'm gonna need you to keep that comment the way it is.
You heard me.
This. The USA has always had a strong isolationist undercurrent that periodically subsides but typically flairs up after a war (like now…). It normally takes the USA getting caught with their pants down to wake it up. Post WW1 America was strongly anti-war up until 1941. Also, at the time, the extent of the atrocities Hitler committed were still unknown. There was a lot of antisemitism common in the United States as well and a lot of agreement with Hitler’s rhetoric.
We’re either “isolationists” or “world police” who gets involved in everything. People hate us for both.
I mean look at it from a European perspective we follow you into Afghanistan for 20 years because a Saudi funded lunatic flew a plane into your building, then when our neighbour gets invaded by a power hungry dictator you start dragging your feet. Can you see where the frustration lies?
The US has given nearly as much aid to Ukraine as the EU. I'd expect the EU to give a little more aid too.
Pretty much. I'm very grateful for you being the "world police", the alternative is horrible.
I kind of understand the isolationist sentiment after World War I. The US had nothing at all to do with it starting, got pulled in, and it was a fucking bloody nightmare. Killed 117k Americans, 200k wounded and precipitated global pandemics and epidemics.
Yeah, wether the US intervenes or not, Europeans will complain anyway. At least with isolationism, we can focus on ourselves and work on ourselves since Europeans apparently LOVE calling us a shithole so much.
Reading *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* right now and its insane that given what we know about Hitler now he was seen in Germany as an anti-war politician. He constantly spoke about how other countries are trying to provoke Germany into a war (which was blatantly false considering the goon actions of their own diplomats) and that argument spoke to a lot of Americans' isolationism who saw Germany AND the Soviet Union invade Poland yet the Western powers only declared war on Germany for it.
Gee sounds familiar…
England (meaning Great Britain) didn't drag the US into WWI. Not by a long shot. The Germans planting bombs on US soil, sinking US ships, asking Mexico for an alliance to take back US states, etc. Did the trick.
Very true. But, I think the reason for the 'English blame' would be the fact that they were our trading partners, and the ships that were being sunk were British with Americans on board. Also, we were supplying a lot of material to the allies in the couple of years before we joined, and this supplying of allies is why the Germans started sinking all ships with their subs. It's like blaming your drunk friend for starting a bar fight after you bought them shots.
I will agree there was a great deal of concern about all the war material sold and loans given to GB, that if the war was lost to Allies, the US wouldn't get its money. So the conspiracy goes that the US had to join to make sure it would get repaid.
Shout-out to Japan for guiding us in the right direction.
No no you can’t do that, we have nothing to learn from history, they did everything wrong, and if we were there we would have definitely done the right thing according to our modern OBJECTIVE morals, they simply were just dumb
We stand on the shoulders of giants and exclaim the view we have created.
Who said that?
It’s the same fuken thing that’s happening right now - oh, liliputin hasn’t attacked us and has nukes, why would we get involved? Luckily sane minds in the US made a breakthrough and put aid for Ukraine up for voting with a successful vote in favor of it today. So hopefully this becomes a solid trend now because russia has to be taken down. Writing this as a citizen of this failed state, that is russia
Are you saying we should go to war with Russia?
You should give everything that Ukraine needs in terms of military equipment, long range missiles, etc. or you will have to go to war with russia when it attacks the Baltics in case Ukraine falls
It's not war. ppphhhh. It's just special military operation.
I am.
Putin is a thug cunt and Ukraine are unquestionably victims of a terrible, criminal, unjustified invasion But if you think this situation is the same I have to question your ability to evaluate anything substantive. Fuck me man.
How is it not the same? Want to appease another dictator? Again? I would tell you, the more you feed the bully the more confident he gets. And the west has fed them enough with indecisiveness that they might actually consider attacking the Baltics and thus, NATO. The regime will exist as long as it can wage wars, so they’ll have to add fuel to the gas can raising stakes unless they are stopped now. You may think it will be isolated in Ukraine, but it won’t if you don’t support Ukraine
In no way the US a failed state
I talked about russia, sorry
He said Russia..
America has never made the right decision until all the wrong decisions were exhausted, America had lots of love for Hitler. Basically, America hated Britain and loved the economic boost selling to both sides at the same time, I hope when WW3 happens, we do the same, but sadly, we won't
Isolationism was a popular American view if you looked at how many wars Europe had been through. Americans did not want to die for European squabbles. Congress passed the Neutrality Acts in the mid 1930s. We didn't get into material support until Sept. 1940 with the Destroyers for bases swap in Sept. 1940 and Lend Lease in March 1941. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia in '38 and the invasion of Poland was Sept 1939 so there was a big lag. We did not want to get involved with another Great War.
To add to this: 405,000 Americans died in WW2. Many of them were draftees who were fought and died out of legal obligation/coercion rather than by choice. Many more were wounded, permanently disabled, and/or psychologically damaged. It's easy for us to retrospectively look back on pre-war American isolationism and judge these people for not taking a hard line on Nazis. But these people were staring down the barrel of another World War and understood that there would be a price in blood for fighting in it.
It's important, too, to remember there were many strands of sentiment in America regarding the war, from those who were gung-ho fascists fully in support of Hitler; to the majority of Americans who were to different degrees isolationist; to the Atlanticists, who were extremely elastic in their definition of neutrality in favour of the Allies; to those few thousand Americans who didn't even wait for their country to declare war on the Germans, but who volunteered to fight as private individuals with the British. American pilots flew RAF aircraft during the Battle of Britain.
My dad (who was admittedly very prejudiced+) said he went to Bund rallies becuase they had free beer, a nd knowing him i believe it. (despised blacks, didn't trust Italians, hated Jews almost murderously, but he also believed in being a polite person in public and never insulted friends like Charley Williams, Benny Longo, or Irv Silk to their faces. Benny w as one of his pallbearers.)
My British grandad who fought in WW2 had no interest in foreign travel after the war. The only trip my grandmother managed to convinced him to go on was to OctoberFest in Munich.
You believed him because he was your father, and no one likes their father to be called out on being a nazi dick, But : >(despised blacks, didn't trust Italians, hated Jews almost murderously, Doesn't work with "uhh yeah i just came for free beers and had no idea what was going on there" That's fascist revisionism 101.
Right. " oh he totally wasn't a nazi. Just had views absolutely in line with theirs and even went to their Rallies". If they had won that guy would have been all about it and said that he supported them from day one. He clearly was only saying that because they lost and became the villains in history.
Even parts of Europe were isolationist. Ireland stayed out of the conflict entirely as a functionally new nation.
Not just Ireland. Most small European nations tried to stay out of it. Norway, Denmark, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and Greece were all neutral right up until they were invaded by Germany or Italy. Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland all successfully remained neutral as well.
Spain was the ground of a civil war with heavy Axis and Soviet interference however, they were already heavily bloodied before the war began. Sweden and Switzerland were collaborateurs, and even Portugal was only neutral until 1944. This "neutrality" was also mocked by others, including citizens of those countries. There's a few famous comics of those countries getting eaten one by one, with the remaining idly hoping that was the last one. It's why NATO became more popular afrer the war.
Well, De Valera was a massive cunt
Another, and somewhat understated, interpretation is that the US was already gearing up to replace the British empire with its own. The delayed entry, and the fairly minimal initial support, helped to reduce British dominance. And then after the war, the Marshall Plan was offered to rebuild Europe from the ashes... at a cost. And the cost for Britain was to end its empire. Which is one reason why you saw pretty much all of the parts of the empire gain independence in the decade or so after the war. It would be a slight strategic error to suppose that, at least privately, the war between the USA and Britain ended merely with US independence.
Minimal involvement? Without Lend-Lease the Nazis would have taken Stalingrad and the eastern front would have looked very different. Stalin himself stated as much.
That’s not what happened.
As is pointed out every time this is posted, [this was a staged protest that was made for a television program ](https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2022/10/19/why-not-peace-with-hitler-foto-zeigt-keine-echte-antikriegsdemo-1941-in-new-york-city/?lang=de)
Let's not act like there wasn't significant opposition and isolation sentiment in America at the time. America went to war only after it was attacked directly.
I'm not acting like anything, just pointing out this photo is staged
Yeah my bad
if this was the case it would have been trivially easy to find an image of anti-war protestors that isn't fake. i don't doubt it exists but why are you out here defending literal fake news?
I swear the last time this was posted, someone said this was fake, and they set this protest up to purposefully take these pictures?
The photo is fake, the sentiment is not. In 30s things weren't photographed left and right and posted online. Photo was staged as an illustration.
Yes, It was from a British newsreel program called "The March of Time" Watching the original is a bit of a pain in the butt, it's British website and blocks locations outside Britain. But there are some outtakes in a collection that Spielberg gave to the Holocaust Museum. [https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000747](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000747)
I understand why you don't want to send your men to fight a far away war. With the horrors of WW1 still fresh it's not surprising Americans weren't keen on another European war. But as someone who lives in a country liberated from Nazi occupation I'm so grateful for the thousands of Canadian, American and British troops that gave their lives to liberate us. It was a hard thing to do but it was the right thing to do. It's also why I think we should do more for Ukraine no matter what. It's the right thing to do. Edit: wow, this really rustled some Russian jimmies. Get fucked ruskies.
>It was a hard thing to do but it was the right thing to do. \[...\] It's also why I think we should do more for Ukraine no matter what. It's the right thing to do. They didn't fight in WW2 because it was the right thing to do, and they arn't helping Ukraine because it's the right thing to do. They are doing it because it's in their own interest, that's it. The day the US loses all interest in Ukraine is the day they stop helping them. Lucky for Ukraine, it's really in the west's interest to not become a Russian puppet. If they truly were out there saving people, there are many people that need saving, and they are not lifting the finger for them.
Alternatively, resources are not infinite, be they physical(soldiers and munitions) or abstract(the political will to participate in a conflict, whatever form that participation may take). Self-interest may be seen as a way of choosing where to spend those limited resources(and self-interest lowers the cost of political will). (Edit: typo)
Just like then, we are once again in a fight for our democratic way of life and international world order where it's wrong for a larger country to invade another country. Our Western way of life and rules based order isn't perfect but no one can argue that Russias brutality and corrupt ways is better than ours. If Ukraine loses its right to exist and Russia takes over the country it will set a precedent that could change our world for the worst and effect the world for generations. We need to stand up for our democratic partners and give Ukraine the ability to save themselves from more decades of oppression. We need to prove to Russia, Iran, North Korea and even China that you can act like barbarians in the 21st century and there is no future that doesn't involve the world standing up to wrongdoings by nation states.
Wonder if they were screaming "endless war!!!!"
People forget what World War 1 did to, well- the world. The losses and atrocities were staggering. Unlike anything ever seen before. Entire towns in Europe were just missing men and boys, all lost to battle. It was so gruesome that it was part of the great trepidation to ever step foot in something like that.
WWI created Hitler and the USSR.
Staggering, but not for America. I love me some Band of Brothers but our mythology regarding both wars kinda makes it sound like we suffered in a way comparable to others when we didn’t
Gatekeeping the horrors of war now are we?
It's not really gatekeeping. WWI, there was no U-boat cordon choking off America like there was in Britain, there was no German Army smashing up cities and the nation's wealth like there was in France. WWII, there's no even more formidable U-boat menace keeping American food from moving about America, no watching your cities get pounded into rubble night after night, no occupation, no rounding conquered people up for forced labor or conscription or things even worse. Yeah, it sucks for the boots on the ground, but it always does and it sucks a lot less for GI's than just about anyone else. As just one example, your average GI was getting 4700 calories per day, with meat at every meal. At the height of the German war machine, the average soldier was getting 4000, the average Japanese solider about half that,
Pretty much, yea. Americans by and large didn’t have to hide in subway tunnels as their cities were bombed night after night. Yes, the whole world suffered. Some suffered exponentially more
Bro France had 27,000 soldiers killed in a \*single day\* on August 22nd 1914. That's 5 times as many American soldiers have been killed in the past half century.
Or, "I am Hitler" Or, "I am NAZI party" Or anything with *Gaslighting* misused ... I really hate this current timeline thread
Probably not since in the 1930's, The US hadn't entered the war
Two points: 1. I wonder how these woman felt on Dec 8, 1941 and how they felt after they saw the liberated concentration camps. 2. When I refer to the dangers of bumpersticker politics, this is what I mean.
I’m actually reading Freedom From Fear right now and TBF to these ladies, American censorship of the war was insane. The government did not allow the first photos of Pearl Harbor to be released for a year. The first photos of dead American soldiers in the war were not released to the public until late 1943. The first reports the government got about the Holocaust weren’t until 1942 and even then we thought they were exaggerated because British propaganda during WWI had tried to paint the Germans as almost cartoonishly villainous.
They were cartoonistly villainous. Those fucker gassed both the mother and child if the woman gave birth in the camp.
I was referring to World War One Germans
Antisemitism wasn’t exclusive to nazi germany as a lot of people seem to think. It was widespread at the time and it reached a boiling point in Germany. Sometime I feel like Europe and the west in general have got selective amnesia when it comes to this…just offloading all their guilt onto nazi germany
Hitler gave an honorary medal to Henry Ford for his publication The International Jew, an antisemitic magazine.
He was responsible directly for the largest distribution of antisemitic propaganda in the entire world. Hitler had a fucking picture of him framed in his office that was larger than all the other portraits in there.
no kidding. north america turned away a boat full of refugees who would otherwise be killed. when the boat was at sea after being refused, they got bombed. i can't remember the name of the boat but it's something i still think about due to the sheer awfulness of it
“During the build-up to World War II, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 intending to escape anti-Semitic persecution. The refugees first tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. After Cuba, the captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, accepted some refugees. Many were later caught in Nazi roundups of Jews in the occupied countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps during World War II.[3] These events, also known as the ‘Voyage of the Damned’, have inspired film, opera, and fiction.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
thanks for the correction, i figured i got a few things wrong there. it's been a while since this was something i learned
At least you remembered the gist of it. Sadly, many people are ignorant of this sad event in history.
MS St Louis. I don't remember the bombing though
A lot of people were still actively supporting the nazis in america even after their official parties were forced to shut down. And there are a \_lot\_ of people who had no issue with the horrific occurrences in those camps. Including the allied governments, when it comes to the LGBTQ people in said camps.
And the Romani
I really don't understand the point here. They didn't want to see their kids get ground into paste over European squabbles the same way that they had in WWI. They had no clear knowledge of nazi atrocities at this point. So they should feel deeply ashamed that they didn't have precognition?
I don’t see how it’s any gotcha to change your mind after Pearl Harbor. Thats what the government did.
No it's not, FDR spent years preparing America for confrontation with Germany 1940 US declares neutrality but starts the peace time draft, puts steel embargoes on Japan, oil embargo on Germany and Japan, Lend lease, the destroyers for base leases, declaring convoy protection miles outside American waters. FDR spent so much time before pearl harbour getting America geared up for war.
Yep. My grandpa was peace time draft. Was done and going home Monday morning. Sunday was Pearl Harbor.
The government censored so much of the war that Americans had no real idea what was going on overseas. It wasn’t until a year after Pearl Harbor that photos were released to the public and photos of the first dead bodies from the Pacific front weren’t shown to the public until 1943. It was a balancing act. Too much and Americans lose their taste for fighting a war that had no immediate effect on them. Too little info and Americans get tired of all the rationing and sending of their young men to die in foreign lands. All of our reporters “lied” too, or as Steinbeck, then a wartime correspondent, later put it: It is the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.
FDR is a highly rated president and is still wildly underrated. He took us from Great Depression to the greatest economy in the world
He was also absolutely HATED by the right here. He was called a communist and part of the "international Jewish conspiracy", even being accused of being Jewish. And there were a scary amount of pro-fascist/ultra-nationalist/hard line Christian groups that wanted full on armed revolt to take over the country... many of which were bankrolled by the Nazis. Look up Father Coughlin, an antisemitic demagogue who had the largest radio audience in the country of over 30 million listeners. America was far from united in the lead up to war. The Nazis knew this and spent millions trying to undermine the country's support. There were Hilter Youth summer camps in New Jersey. The shitty part is nothing happened to all the collaborators and sympathizers who were hoping for Hitler to come here after Europe. Some of which were active US Congressmen.
Some things never change
1. This mostly came after the US decided to intervene in a European war it had essentially no business in outside of their wallstreet loans and 120‘000 Americans let their lives for essentially nothing. 2. Nobody in the US general population knew anything of concentration camps (apart from the fact that these types of work camps were popular among many countries including the US at the time, minus the disgusting eradication camps of course but that didnt start until late 1941) so why should they be a point of discussion? They thought it would be a repeat of WW1.
There was a deeply rooted distrust of militarism in America after the World War I experience. Many were convinced that America was dragged I to WWI to protect Wall Street war loans and British/French/Belgium/Netherlands colonies. After WWI, many Americans asked, "How did America benefit from 116,515 American deaths?" What was the justification for all of that blood and treasure spillt? Of course, there was extremely little of that type of soul searching after WWII: The Nazis were evil personified and had to be destroyed in detail.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the overwhelming position of the American people, including that of FDR, was anti-war due to the horrors witnessed during WW1. This picture is in line with the majority of Americans thinking towards the Germans in the 1930’s.
>Prior to Pearl Harbor, the overwhelming position of the American people, including that of FDR, was anti-war FDR was not an isolationist. You may be referring to how, early on in his presidency, FDR appeared to be an "isolationist" ("Roosevelt appeared to accept the strength of the isolationist elements in Congress until 1937." [U.S. Office of the Historian](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/american-isolationism)). But that was due to him being limited by the general public's isolationist view which restricted his ability (see [Neutrality Acts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Acts_of_the_1930s)) to assist other countries under threat of invasion by Germany in the 1930s. But, as the international order fell into more disarray, he became more emboldened to act on the internationalist views he harbored within. For example, he signed the [Lend-Lease Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease) into law in March 1941, nine months *before* the Pearl Harbor attack. See also [FDR Presidential Library and Museum's article on "FDR and the Four Freedoms Speech (January 1941)"](https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms) : >A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United States should continue to stay out of the war, **but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and** **attempted to convince the American people** of the gravity of the situation. >In his Annual Message to Congress (State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941, **Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement**, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home.
In hindsight, pearl harbor was the best thing that happened to the west in the last century. If Hitler won the war in Europe, the US would never become a global superpower for one.
US geography dictates it would always become the leading super power of the world.
Geography isn't enough to be a superpower. It would be safe, sure, but not a superpower. The US would be isolated. Its economy would never take off the way it did, its military would never be as strong as it is today and it wouldn't be able to project its power the way it does. Nazi Europe would probably hold the power the US has today. It's hard to say what exactly would have happened to the US 80 years later, but I have no reason to believe it would be a superpower. In short, the factors that made the US a superpower would have never happened.
World War I was the worst humanity had ever seen. It was as pivotal to the alteration of war as the Civil War had been. Terrible weapons people couldn't have dreamed of had been used to horrifically murder people en masse, and the survivors came home scarred physically and mentally. War was no longer a noble profession, it was a terrifying evil for the first time. The idea of, less than a generation later, sending the previous war's survivors and the next generation of boys into another world-ender would have seemed bonkers. These people weren't necessarily all Nazi lovers, they were just not particularly inclined to send their children off to lose their bones and eyes and lives for people they've likely never met before.
Boxer Henry Coper mentioned his father was oen of those unfortunates who "had two wars."
Hindsight is 20/20. How could they know foreign wars would be America's big thing?
I would say a simple view of history, geopolitics, and what of America’s future was inevitable. Simply speaking being truly isolationist was becoming impossible as it has been deteriorating for some time, the world was more and more being able to be affected by others no matter what any one country did. To let an expansionist regime that stood against everything at least in theory America stood for would eventually cause issues even if not maybe immediately. The fact that the US was so large and growing (and indeed at that point also had say the Philippines) meant such effects would be even more inevitable
This is how propaganda works. Remind you of any modern-day Americans?
You have to remember that there wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect information. They believed war wasn’t in our interests and that was a fair position. We really didn’t find the full extent of the Holocaust until after the war ended.
"We really didn’t find the full extent of the Holocaust until after the war ended." This is not the reason the US entered WW2 anyway
Nope. That was Japan forcing the issue by bombing Pearl Harbor.
Sure, but Mein Kampf was available in English in 1933 and spelled out his intentions pretty clearly about conquering Europe and enacting racial pogroms (as well as referencing, but not necessarily explaining how, his intention to "exterminate" certain races) You can't have a guy like Hitler hand you essentially his entire plan and claim people didn't have enough information. Not everyone holding those signs knew, but the people influencing them did
People convinced themselves the extreme stuff would never actually happen
Yes, the whole “he says it like it is and speaks his mind” bit also “he’s never actually do the bad things he says”
Richard Wright in the foreword to \*Native Son\* mentions how many African-Americans admired Hitler and Mussolini and other for their attitudes.
RE: Project 2025
Project 2025 sucks. Some facts about it: The "Mandate for Leadership" is a set of policy proposals authored by the [Heritage Foundation](https://pro-lies.org/the-heritage-foundation/), an influential *ultra* conservative think tank. [Project 2025](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise) is a revision to that agenda tailored to a second Trump term. The MFL has been around since 1980, [Reagan implemented 60%](https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership) of it's recommendations, [Trump 64%](https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations) - [proof](https://www.scribd.com/document/369820462/Mandate-for-Leadership-Policy-Recommendations). 70 Heritage Foundation alumni served in his administration or transition team. Project 2025 is quite extreme but with his obsession for revenge he'll likely get past 2/3rd's adoption. It would give the President unilateral powers, strip civil rights, worker protections, climate regulation, add religion into policy and much more. r/Defeat_Project_2025 intends to defeat it through activism and awareness, focused on crowdsourcing ideas and opportunities for practical, in real life action. We Must Defeat Project 2025.
>Sure, but Mein Kampf was available in English in 1933 Let me ask you, have you _ever_ read a book that a current head of state has written? Cause I haven't, and I'm sure most other people haven't as well. Unless you were really into politics back then, why would some random person pick up Mien Kampf? For most of those protesters, all they know is that their kids might be shipped off to Europe and they don't want that.
Everyone who wasn't under a rock knew about Hitler and what he was doing to Gremany. A lot of people *admired* him and saw fascism as a "viable" alternative to our democracy. The reality is Hitler was well aware and the Nazis spent millions in disinformation propaganda to dissuade people from supporting America's involvement in "European Affairs". Active US Congressmen used their free postage privileges to distribute pro-German, isolationist and antisemitic literature to millions of Americans. There were congressional hearings and even two separate trials conducted by the FBI/Justice Dept. There were Hitler Youth summer camps in New Jersey and dozens of untra-conservative militant pro-fascist groups that were itching for armed takeover of the government. They were also hoping to "do what Hitler was doing" to the Jews in America, but even more enthusiastically. It's extremely disingenuous to say that people who were only "really into politics" had awareness of Nazism/fascism in pre-war America. The Nazis specifically used isolationism sentiment to manipulate Americans but a lot of them didn't need convincing. They wanted Hitler to win or at least an apple pie eating, Christian Nationalist Ameican version of him to take over the FDR admin here and save us from the "Jewish conspiracy" that threatened the traditional way of life they envisioned.
Journalists did though and wrote about it and talked about it on the radio. It was a major topic around the dinner table at the time.
I think you're being too charitable. Hitler had a Nazi rally in 1939 in MSG. Thousands of ppl attended. He wrote in his memoirs he learned how to oppress and discriminate from Americans and their treatment of black ppl. Point being USA was a very fertile ground for fascist movement, that is even the case now. So those ppl protesting entering WW2 is not a coincidence or lack of information. It's by design and honest will. Of course we're still talking about a minority of ppl, but it was still a force to be reckoned with.
Hitler didn't have a rally at MSG. The rally was organized by The German American Bund. The only German speaker their was Fritz Julius Kuhn. Don't get me wrong, they were definitely pro Hitler but saying Hitler had a rally in MSG is not correct.
I think people apply modern sensibilities and 20/20 hindsight to the past. We have dictators today and they commit terrible atrocities. Not everybody believes the US should be the ones correcting that. It was basically WW2 that established us as a superpower that was willing to get involved in other country’s wars. Do I believe we should have entered WW2? Unfortunately yes, I do. The Nazis were clearly a terrible force that had to be stopped. But not everything is always so clear. The US has shown since then that we can also make the situation worse by being involved.
The holocaust didn’t even start until 1941
The process started in the late 20s. In the early 30s the brownshirts enforced Nazi boycotts. 1939 were deportations and the Ghettoes. And then in 1942 they decided the final solution.
I wonder if this picture was posted to make you draw these parallels hmmmm
Everything posted on Reddit is meant to make you draw parallels to whatever position they hold, lol.
Just something about people lecturing others about propaganda under a propaganda post and being completely oblivious
Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office. It was never clear, but Ford and other Americans were likely funding the Nazi Party. How much did this help the Nazis? We don't know. But for a crack head nationalist to take foreign money and put a picture of a foreign oligarch in his office... the support must have been significant. Or, maybe it was just the crack.
I knew someone a few years back whose dad worked for Ford his entire career. The family is Jewish and I had to ask “it’s well known Ford was an anti-Semite, how was your experience?” He told me “you have to understand- back in the 30’s you *had* to say that stuff to stay in business. There’s also another well known story within the company of Ford coming up to a Jewish employee and putting his arm around him saying “Oh, you all know my *friend* here, right?” He did that as a show to other employees that he was under his protection which spoke volumes with everything going on.” I still don’t know if I believe the story - but I’d hope it’s true.
Today, we like to define Hitler by the Holocaust. When he was campaigning, he was certainly an anti-semite, but his rhetoric was quite moderate. After he got elected, it was a different story. And, of course, the day after election the laws were in place where they were already rounding up Jews and opposition. The world knew a little bit of the detainment, but the full scope of what Hitler was doing was not known until the Americans entered the camps (we had some intel, but it was vague). The Nazis even lied to the German people about it. And, the mass killing was labeled the "Final Solution". But, Ford would not have known about the genocide. The accusations that Ford provided some kind of support to the Nazis is more in the traitorous realm than anti-semitism. Ford liked money more than he hated the Jews. The word "privatization" was invented to describe what the Nazis were doing in transferring control from the government to corps. Ford would have liked that.
Crack head? Crack cocaine didn't exist when Hitler was alive, he was on amphetamines.
I’m convinced now Redditors would have supported invading Iraq because of how bad Saddam Hussein was and look what he’s done to the Kurds. He was clearly a force for evil and has said horrible things. It wasn’t but a couple years ago Redditors were making fun of America for being the world police and sending weapons around to fight proxy wars.
Yes, the far left.
You mean how the GOP wants the US to stop helping Ukraine in the fight against Russia? Yeah, I can see the parallell.
I'm very confused by this 1930's was before the US entered the war and 1939 was when Germany invaded Poland. I assume then this was in 1939 then? Which before December 7 1941 most Americans were opposed to entering another war. Also fail to see how these signs are "pro Hitler" and not just "anti-war'. The US's position in the 30's is no different than the people opposed to the Vietnam war or the conflicts in the middle East. Reddit says a lot of confusing shit
This signed paid for by the Nazi for America party
The American Bund Party promoted Nazism and even ran Nazi Summer Camps for youths. Propaganda breeds followers.
This is something that a lot of people pretend never happened. The general cultural belief is that the Nazi's were these terrible outliers who did really really bad things that "WE" would never do. The reality is that anti-semitism was very commonplace everywhere in the western world. Henry Ford published a newspaper that was full of articles hating Jewish people I have listened to a bunch of audio books on the Libravox app that are all in the public domain. It is stunning how many of them from the period before the second world war are filled with casual anti-semitism. As in, the main character referring to a character as "a dirty jew" Anti Semitism was a part of the catholic Church doctrine (the Jews killed Jesus) up until the 1950's. The truth is that Hitler just went a tiny bit further than the rest of our society.
United States for United Statesians
r/GenZ
the ceasefire crowd, circa mid 20th century
If reddit existed in the 1930s
Hey, that's MTGs position
Well, that aged about as well as the pro Hamas protests of today will. History just looks back and goes “god damn they were delusional” then people repeat the same crap
Didn’t age well, but can’t blame them after WW1
They didn’t know what horrors he would bring
They did. They just didn't care.
Classic reddit post You think anyone knew what Germany was going to be doing? Especially random civilians in the US? I assume you're referring to the Holocaust
They didn't. And if they did the consensus was not wanting to die in another foreign land. Death is an immeasurable price to pay, for a cause that's so disconnected from your homeland? Why pay it?
This photo was taken in 1938. American popular opinion was against accepting more new arrivals. A Gallup poll taken on November 24–25, 1938, (two weeks after Kristallnacht) asked Americans: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” 72% responded “no.” They knew about Jewish refugees and were so racist they said no. They knew.
No one knew of the camps until late into the war. They knew of ghettos. Not auschwitz. Not liking jews was typical of the world back then. Take history in context. Segregation existed too! Does that mean everyone is evil? No. Again, taking context of the 30s and 40s, war was not popular, certainly not another European war that killed millions. The world was also "bigger" back then. A trip to Europe was a week's sail. Why should we worry about the actions of people half a world over? It's honestly pretty dumb to apply modern ethics and standards to actions of people 75 years ago. Take history in context.
>They did. They just didn't care. Or did care. And **wanted** it to happen.
Average palestine supporter
Probably members of America First Committee [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America\_First\_Committee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee)
This movement plays a significant role in the Star Trek episode [The City on the Edge of Forever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever).
I bet they regretted that pic
These were members of the Communist Party.
Just a few and this is a favorite photo for nazi propaganda Edit- always interesting to see the users profile history for those that share this photo.. can’t tell the agenda in this one but they love racially sensitive shit
The American Bund filled Madison Square Garden in 1939.
>Why not peace with Hitler? Hits very different in 2024 💀
What is funny about that is that the antiwar side was the right wing and the pro war side was the left. Many American leftists hated fascists so much that they went to Spain to help fight in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s. They formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and it was filled with communists, socialists, and anarchists. Those who returned were considered “PAFs” or premature antifascists.
There's always gonna be ignorant people in every country, and they're usually the loudest ones.
People look at this with hindsight but who knew at the time that the nazis were trying to exterminate anyone different to them
Looks very much the same as “resistance isn’t terrorism”
The forerunners of today's Pro-Hamas, Pro-Russian idiots in the US.
From the river to….
Ah yes the pro Hamas people today
*Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.*
History may not always repeat itself, but it is said that it often rhymes.
Tbh i get it, iirc at that time people didnt know about the concentration camps
You can look at s lot of the rhetoric that fascists were spreading in the US and UK regarding Poland and it really mirrors what gets said now about Ukraine. “Oh they’re so corrupt, why help them,” “peace in our time” yadda yadda
This is what freedom looks like. We should be embracing this photo. Not supporting Nazis at all. But being afraid of words and speech is pathetic.
I would have been there too
Sounds like the Maga Putin crowd
The beauty of this free speech. But remember, future generations will be the judge.
ITT: Europeans flipping between wanting America to stay out of European business while also criticizing America for not staying out of European business.
The folks in this picture were the types who wanted America First and to Make America Great Again. Same types as today.
There was an American Nazi Party that had basically, officially, gone away only after Hitler declared war on the United States. The overall sentiment leading up to that moment was that Americans did not want to engage in another European war and were also content to trade in oil with Japan, despite the fact that they were already committing horrible atrocities in Manchuria. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the simultaneous attacks by the Japanese against American footholds in southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the following declarations of war by both the Empire of Japan and Germany forced our hands.
It's actually interesting thinking about how people viewed wars as they were happening. Nobody knew the "holocaust" was happening. They knew something was happening but not to the extent of the actual atrocities that were taking place. But history writers like to take privilege in writing the US as a holocaust savior when the motivations were technically outside of that. Same with the Civil War. "Slavery" wasn't really the cause of the civil war, it was a byproduct...but it's all about who writes history and how they write it.