‘Nazi Town, USA’ Review: Fertile Ground for Fascism

[Tennesseer]

On PBS Tuesday, January 23rd. Something to think about as to what is going on in the USA today.

‘Nazi Town, USA’ Review: Fertile Ground for Fascism

‘In the 1930s, there were people in the United States who were ready to try something different,” we hear during “Nazi Town, USA.” The “something different” was fascism.

The attraction of and drift toward an American strain of Nazism in particular, and Mussolini-style, trains-on-time dictatorship in general, had its reasons—more reasons than there would be today, to go by writer-director Peter Yost’s “American Experience” installment. Coming out of a world war and heading into an international economic depression, the U.S. was as polarized as it had been since the Civil War, with racist, antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-immigration and anti-democratic points of view not being whispered but rather bellowed across the landscape. America’s greatest threat, many feared, were Bolsheviks. Millions, including members of Congress, had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Father Coughlin was on the radio. Henry Ford had financed the publication of “The International Jew,” an antisemitic tract. And in New York—the “Nazi Town” of the title—the German American Bund was fomenting a coup, and filling Madison Square Garden with followers. In Yaphank, on Long Island, tract homes built as an offshoot of the pro-Nazi Camp Siegfried were going up on Adolf Hitler Street.

Rest of article here: ‘Nazi Town, USA’ Review: Fertile Ground for Fascism

[djAdvocate]

Tenn- please remind us all what the name of the place was that was created as a Nazi Summer Camp and then turned into a Whites Only community. it was somewhere in New England.

[happyhoix]

For an excellent book about how easy it would be for the US to become fascist read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, where Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election.

Scary how easy that could have happened.

[Tennesseer]

Jan 19, 2024 14:38:47 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

Tenn- please remind us all what the name of the place was that was created as a Nazi Summer Camp and then turned into a Whites Only community. it was somewhere in New England.

DJ-from Wiki:

Yaphank (/ˈjæpæŋk/) is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in Suffolk County, New York, United States. The population was 5,945 at the time of the 2010 census.[4]

Yaphank is located in the south part of the Town of Brookhaven. It is served by the Longwood Central School District, except for extreme southwestern Yaphank, which is served by the South Country Central School District.

In the 1930s, Yaphank was a center of American Nazism where Camp Siegfried drew up to a thousand weekly visitors from New York City for pro-Nazi rallies and vacationing

Camp Siegfried and Nazism
Main article: Camp Siegfried
In the 1930s, Yaphank was home to Camp Siegfried, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology.[10][11][12] It was owned by the German American Bund, an American Nazi organization devoted to promoting a favorable view of Nazi Germany, and operated by the German American Settlement League (GASL).

Camp Siegfried was one of many such camps in the US in the 1930s, including Camp Hindenburg in Grafton, Wisconsin,[13] Camp Nordland in Andover, New Jersey,[14][15] and Deutschhorst Country Club in Sellersville, Pennsylvania.[16]

Until 2017, homes in the former Camp Siegfried area, on land that was owned by the German-American Settlement League, were under covenants restricting residents to those of German extraction only.[17]

[djAdvocate]

i don't think people realize how well received Nazi's were by a certain segment of the US. the same certain segment that is now worshiping Orange Jesus.

[dondubble]

[Tennesseer]

Jan 21, 2024 20:21:35 GMT -5 dondubble said:

I wonder what all the young people in the above video clip thought of the world's events at the end of WW2 and beyond.

[djAdvocate]

every single board member should watch that 9 minute excerpt.
very educational.

especially the crowd sizes.
for those that think crowd size is important.

one last thing. we won the Civil War. the South Lost.
they don't get to pretend like that loss never happened.
sorry. they just don't.
to the victor goes the spoils.
slavery and White Christian Nationalism lost.

same with WW2. Nazi's lost. they don't get to just pretend that
never happened and run things, now. sit down. accountability and
democratic institutions and the countries that believe in them won.

same with Trump in 2020. he lost. he needs to get used to that.
and so do his supporters. was i happy when the SCOTUS settled the
debate in 2000? no, i was not. i hated Bush. i was a McCain supporter.
and indeed, he was a terrible president. the worst since Harding.
but i accepted the loss. so did Gore. he presided over the Senate
for his own loss. it was more statesmanlike than anything we have
seen SINCE THAT ELECTION. a good example of what things SHOULD look
like in a nation that respects institutions.

so, what we have here is a 150 year old insurrection that is still alive.
i would evoke the language of Trump and Hitler here, if i felt it served
my interests and beliefs, but i won't. nevertheless, the loss must be
convincing and at every level of government. our nation is at stake.
and when i say OUR NATION, i mean the pluralistic, multicultural, pro-
public nation whose arc hit the upper bound in approximately 1973.
THAT America. the America of my Childhood. not the fascist crap
that has poked it's ugly head up a few times since then, including now.

[dondubble]

Jan 22, 2024 0:06:20 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

every single board member should watch that 9 minute excerpt.
very educational.

especially the crowd sizes.
for those that think crowd size is important.

one last thing. we won the Civil War. the South Lost.
they don't get to pretend like that loss never happened.
sorry. they just don't.
to the victor goes the spoils.
slavery and White Christian Nationalism lost.

same with WW2. Nazi's lost. they don't get to just pretend that
never happened and run things, now. sit down. accountability and
democratic institutions and the countries that believe in them won.

same with Trump in 2020. he lost. he needs to get used to that.
and so do his supporters. was i happy when the SCOTUS settled the
debate in 2000? no, i was not. i hated Bush. i was a McCain supporter.
and indeed, he was a terrible president. the worst since Harding.
but i accepted the loss. so did Gore. he presided over the Senate
for his own loss. it was more statesmanlike than anything we have
seen SINCE THAT ELECTION. a good example of what things SHOULD look
like in a nation that respects institutions.

so, what we have here is a 150 year old insurrection that is still alive.
i would evoke the language of Trump and Hitler here, if i felt it served
my interests and beliefs, but i won't. nevertheless, the loss must be
convincing and at every level of government. our nation is at stake.
and when i say OUR NATION, i mean the pluralistic, multicultural, pro-
public nation whose arc hit the upper bound in approximately 1973.
THAT America. the America of my Childhood. not the fascist crap
that has poked it's ugly head up a few times since then, including now.

You mean the country that brought Reinhard Gehlen and Otto Skorzeny and other Nazis to our shores?

[djAdvocate]

Jan 22, 2024 0:32:38 GMT -5 dondubble said:

Jan 22, 2024 0:06:20 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

every single board member should watch that 9 minute excerpt.
very educational.

especially the crowd sizes.
for those that think crowd size is important.

one last thing. we won the Civil War. the South Lost.
they don't get to pretend like that loss never happened.
sorry. they just don't.
to the victor goes the spoils.
slavery and White Christian Nationalism lost.

same with WW2. Nazi's lost. they don't get to just pretend that
never happened and run things, now. sit down. accountability and
democratic institutions and the countries that believe in them won.

same with Trump in 2020. he lost. he needs to get used to that.
and so do his supporters. was i happy when the SCOTUS settled the
debate in 2000? no, i was not. i hated Bush. i was a McCain supporter.
and indeed, he was a terrible president. the worst since Harding.
but i accepted the loss. so did Gore. he presided over the Senate
for his own loss. it was more statesmanlike than anything we have
seen SINCE THAT ELECTION. a good example of what things SHOULD look
like in a nation that respects institutions.

so, what we have here is a 150 year old insurrection that is still alive.
i would evoke the language of Trump and Hitler here, if i felt it served
my interests and beliefs, but i won't. nevertheless, the loss must be
convincing and at every level of government. our nation is at stake.
and when i say OUR NATION, i mean the pluralistic, multicultural, pro-
public nation whose arc hit the upper bound in approximately 1973.
THAT America. the America of my Childhood. not the fascist crap
that has poked it's ugly head up a few times since then, including now.

You mean the country that brought Reinhard Gehlen and Otto Skorzeny and other Nazis to our shores?

was that before or after we used them in 1952 to engineer a coup in Egypt?

all of this chest puffing about how great we are and how we defeated the Nazi's is absolute cal.  if it was ever about defeating fascism, we lost.

[dondubble]

Jan 22, 2024 0:46:47 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

Jan 22, 2024 0:32:38 GMT -5 dondubble said:

You mean the country that brought Reinhard Gehlen and Otto Skorzeny and other Nazis to our shores?

was that before or after we used them in 1952 to engineer a coup in Egypt?

all of this chest puffing about how great we are and how we defeated the Nazi's is absolute cal.  if it was ever about defeating fascism, we lost.

I’ll message you tomorrow. Watching Bill Maher now.

[djAdvocate]

for those of you who think this is a weird turn in the discussion, i would suggest you read THIS piece of fine reporting from the NYT (from a FOIA request):

www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.

The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist “sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

[djAdvocate]

just keeping it in mind- 1994 was under Clinton.
never really cared for Bubba.

[happyhoix]

Sitting here watching a PBS special about the Nazi camps in America. They had five big kid’s camps, and the one in NY also had a Germany town settlement with vacation houses for families. All white, of course.

Scary.

[jerseygirl]

There was a Bund camp in our town in north jersey. When we moved here it was a big German restaurant with a big pool .
The ‘vacation’ houses weren’t used but still there.
Now it’s been sold to an Asian church. Church uses the main former meeting/restaurant and pool and vacation houses .
At this time, there are no remnants of the Bund history.

[tractor]

I watched the show and was fascinated by it. I never knew they existed, and I quickly drew parallels to what's happening in our country now. The only saving grace is that we apparently forgot all about it through successive generations, so there's hope my grandchildren will have no idea what a MAGA is.

[Tennesseer]

Jan 26, 2024 8:35:26 GMT -5 tractor said:

I watched the show and was fascinated by it. I never knew they existed, and I quickly drew parallels to what's happening in our country now. The only saving grace is that we apparently forgot all about it through successive generations, so there's hope my grandchildren will have no idea what a MAGA is.

I am thinking that is the reason why this series is airing today.

[djAdvocate]

the problem with history older than one generation is that it NEEDS TO BE REFRESHED in the minds of the younger generation, lest they repeat it.