Tracing the White Supremacist virus

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T.P. Wilkinson

W. Wilson seated at his White House desk. By nature a reactionary, he persecuted antiwar people and unleashed the infamous Palmer Raids in 1919 against suspected leftists, especially of foreign origin. The convenient excuse was provided by a rash of misguided anarchist bombings that injured mostly servants of the ruling class.

Woodrow Wilson was the first international mass media politician. A racist academic from South Carolina who was promoted from a Princeton professorship into the POTUS office (at a special showing at the White House in 1913, he endorsed DW Griffith’s KKK-exulting Birth of a Nation as memorable cinema: “It’s like writing history with lighting My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”), Wilson's entire presidency was public relations, culminating in the Creel Committee which essentially helped sell the decision by those who had founded the FED in 1913 that they needed US troops to protect Britain and France from defaulting on their war loans.

Adolf Hitler was the second great PR creation. His image was carefully cultivated by the same filmmaking talent that emigrated to the US to promote the Anglo-American Empire after Germany's defeat.

Malcolm X once made a poignant observation about the power of PR, although he did not use the term. He noted that the US regime between 1917 and 1949 changed the US public opinion toward Germany at least 4 times. Yet in all its history it has never persuaded the "white" population to accept that Blacks be treated equally with them. Instead the regime insisted that such attitudes towards Blacks were eternal, human nature as it were.

As a German citizen I cannot find any praise for the legacy of Adolf Hitler or his friends in the US. In fact, it is quite evident that even if the US did not manage to get AH to Argentina for retirement (I have read reports that the dental records of AH and the dental residue of his supposed charred remains in Berlin do not match) the bulk of the NSDAP and especially the SS legacy was transported to Britain and the US where it thrives to this day.

Adolf Hitler, like many others of his generation, was traumatised by the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the refusal of the Allies to merge "little" German-speaking Austria into Germany after the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. The so-called "Anschluss"-- annexation of Austria makes no sense to Anglo-Americans who have no historical-cultural knowledge of Continental Europe. It was a logical demand after Magyar speaking Hungary was given independence along with all the other language communities in the dissolved Habsburg empire. Not unlike the situation created when the West forced the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 (through assets Gorbachev and Yeltsin), the end of Austria-Hungary had created a German-speaking diaspora in central Europe. It was in part to this diaspora that the NSDAP appealed. The appeal of AH is often mistakenly attributed to the defeat in 1918 and a general resentment. While this resentment applies to some, e.g. the military, the legitimate source of frustration outside of Germany was the British promotion of ethnic-linguistic nationalism (with Wilson's ignorant, but opportunistic support) in all the crown dominions of Austria-Hungary where German-speakers had been equal subjects of the Habsburg crown and were to be deprived of their status in newly independent countries. Ignorance and mendacity contributed to a general misunderstanding that German demands were a reaction to British duplicity.

Whatever contradictions linguistic and ethnic nationalism may have, it is clear that the Anglo-American Empire (emergent in 1918) had then (as thereafter) used ethnic and language differences to split continental rivals (and to conquer in RoW). However when German nationalists claimed that they too had ethnic-national rights, Britain blocked them wherever possible. Britain had tried this during the French Revolution too-- giving impetus to Napoleon. (As always Albion was trying to prevent the rise of a competing continental power by any means necessary, and we know where THAT led. The US through much of its imperial life has done exactly the same.—Ed).

Britain, but ultimately the US, which later absorbed the British Empire, innovated the concept of white supremacy as an ideology for resolving functionally the contradictions and conflicts of confession, nationality, language and ethnicity. The US is not a multi-ethnic country like Austria-Hungary or Russia (Soviet Union) but a state based on white supremacy-- the dissolution of confession, national origin, language and ethnicity in a kind of aqua regis that precipitates "whiteness", disguised as patriotism toward a state that only protects "whiteness". Adolf Hitler's NSDAP tried- unsuccessfully- to imitate this program with the notion of "Aryan". Both the RNF and the NP in South Africa were really third rate in the sense that they never succeeded in performing this chemical reaction needed to create a solution of "whiteness" like in the US. Australia did not have to work too hard. That small dominion simply adopted "whiteness" from the beginning-- without the need for chemistry.

So much for the "good side" of AH.

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Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of the book Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Most of his work since 2015 has been posted at Dissident Voice where he also has contributed a poem every Sunday since then. Prior to that pieces were posted at Global Research, Black Agenda Report and while Alexander Cockburn was still alive at Counterpunch.