Germany was never denazified. That’s why it’s siding with Israel today.

 

The Allies failed to denazify Europe by failing to dismantle the political foundations their own nations shared with the Nazi regime. Europeans need not repeat that mistake.

Germany’s firm stance in support of genocide in Palestine raises the question: How come the country best known for its supposed reckoning with guilt for its past genocide is repeating such similar mistakes? Understanding what Nazism is — not the crimes it committed, but its very nature as a sociopolitical vision — helps us understand how and why the Allies deliberately failed to denazify Germany and why the specter of fascism continues to haunt Palestine, Europe, and the world today. It also helps us understand how the solution is in our hands.

Nazism is not an apolitical criminal impulse, but a criminal political project built on three foundational pillars: the politicization of identity, colonialism, and capitalism.

All states make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Nazism, however, constructed a separation between insiders and outsiders on the basis of identity, excluding German citizens from identities it considered undesirable. Interestingly, in formulating their political program, Nazi leaders referenced American segregation law. Books such as the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934-1935 and Heinrich Krieger’s Race Law in the United States of 1936 drew heavily on American precedent, finding no other nation with comparable templates for racial legislation. Krieger’s research inspired the Nuremberg Laws, which brought into force the early Nazi Party’s discrimination against Jewish, Romani, and Black Germans. 

Nazism’s politicization of identity also expressed itself in a colonialist way, drawing, again, direct inspiration from American westward expansion when strategizing its conquest of Poland and its Slavic neighbors. Hitler himself carefully studied American eugenics and adopted similar propaganda to justify his party’s genocides. Indeed, Nazi expansionism and ethnic cleansing were nothing new to European nations, the difference being that others such as Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK colonized, enslaved, and orchestrated genocides primarily outside of Europe. In European eyes, Nazi Germany’s sin seems not to have been its colonial project itself but where and on whom it was imposed.  (more...)

Germany was never denazified. That’s why it’s siding with Israel today.