Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  I agree, and I am not making such a comparison. The perception that I am rests on a failure to distinguish between Nazi concentration camps and Nazi death camps. From Dachau to Mauthausen to Ravensbruck, there were hundreds of concentration camps throughout Germany and in German-occupied territories. By contrast, there were just a few death camps—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor—and none of them were located in Germany.

  The typical concentration camp was not a death camp. It had no gas chambers. “The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust,” Timothy Snyder writes, “never saw a concentration camp.” Nazi concentration camps included Jews, but the majority of the captives were Russians and eastern Europeans. These were labor camps, just like the Democratic slave camps. They put between eight and twelve million people to work to serve the Nazi state, especially the Nazi armaments industry. Studies by German scholars of this topic bear titles like Hitler’s Slaves and Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps.3

  In his study of concentration camps, Wolfgang Sofsky notes that slave camps and Nazi concentration camps were both forced-labor systems in which the captives received no compensation for their labor and masters had virtually unlimited power over them, not merely their work conditions but their lives. The prisoners, in both cases, were reduced to complete and vulnerable dependency. Masters in both cases could compel their captives to “work without a break, beat them, torment them, or hound them to death.”

  Remarkably, the captives in forced-labor systems all display similar characteristics. Sofsky describes the work routine for Nazi captives: “For the prisoner, putting on the brakes was the supreme dictate. Work tempo was reduced to a minimum as soon as the guards or Kapo were out of sight. When the superior returned, prisoners did their utmost to appear as if they were working at a brisk pace.” Replace the term “kapo” with “planter” or “overseer” and Sofsky could be describing a Democratic slave plantation in Virginia or South Carolina.

  What protected the slave, to a certain degree, Sofsky argues, was his or her status as property. “The slave has a value and a going market price. The master does not acquire slaves in order to kill them but to put them to work for the master’s benefit . . . As barbaric as the owners often were in dealing with their slaves, the death of a slave was a loss.” By contrast, the Nazi prisoners “were not the personal property of masters but the inmates of an institution. They belonged to no one.” Thus if they were killed, no one cared.

  Sofsky also notes that both the slave camps and the Nazi camps were systems based on racial classification. Slavery of course drew a sharp racial line between the typically white slave-owner and the black slave. In the Nazi camps, there was a variety of inferior groups, each of which wore a distinguishing badge. Criminals wore a green badge, nonconformists or “asocials” a black badge, political dissidents a red triangle, foreigners a red triangle with their nationality marked on it, gypsies brown triangles, and Jews the Star of David.4

  The close connection between Democratic plantations and Nazi labor camps was noted in the early 1970s by progressive historian Stanley Elkins, who pointed out that both the slave plantation and the concentration camp were closed systems, cut off from the larger society. Consequently, he argued, they generated similar types of dysfunctional personalities.

  Essentially Elkins argues that the captives internalized their systems of oppression. Jewish kapos served the Nazi machine just as black overseers served the Democratic planters. Even those who did not become part of the regime of oppression found their moral personality disfigured. As a survival mechanism, concentration camp victims developed submissive stereotypical patterns of behavior that were also regularly observed on the slave plantation—the so-called Sambo syndrome.5

  Moreover, where did Hitler get his idea for reducing Russians, Poles and eastern Europeans to slavery? According to progressive historian Timothy Snyder, he got it from the Jacksonian Democrats of the nineteenth century. Hitler’s initial plan had been for Germany to undertake colonial expeditions similar to those of the French and the British. Hitler realized, however, that most of the valuable real estate in Asia, Africa and South America had already been taken. German colonial opportunities in the early twentieth century were very limited.

  Then Hitler remembered what Andrew Jackson and his successors did to the American Indians. Jackson’s Indian Removal Act had driven tens of thousands of Indians—the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek and the Seminole—out of their ancestral homes, forcing them to relocate farther west. When the Cherokee resisted, they were forcibly removed, leading to the infamous Trail of Tears. In Hitler’s own summary, Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”6

  This gave Hitler a new idea. Why bother to conquer in Asia and Africa when he could conquer the natives in Europe itself? Hitler’s plan was to emulate the Jacksonian Democrats in driving the Russians, the Poles and the eastern Europeans from their homes. They would be forced to relocate elsewhere. The ones who resisted would be killed. The ones who stayed would be enslaved and sent to German labor camps.

  Hitler’s scheme was called Generalplan Ost. Snyder reports that the Nazis sought to “deport, kill, assimilate, or enslave” some thirty to forty-five million people. They planned to create, on their land, small German farming communities. Snyder writes, “Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based on exterminatory colonialism and slave labor . . . As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.”7

  Hitler, interestingly enough, was also a fan of the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” reports Ernst Hanfstaengl, a friend of Hitler’s who also served as his head of the Foreign Press Bureau.8 Hitler appears to have recognized, as Woodrow Wilson did before him, that if the centralized state were to serve as a new type of Big House, administering a new type of state-run plantation, then it too would require an organization to serve as a kind of whip, to keep the subjugated people in line.

  Hitler was undoubtedly aware of the close parallels between the Klan and the Nazi Brownshirts, because many Germans and American observers noted them at the time. At their peak, both groups had three to four million members. Both were paramilitary organizations that practiced racial terrorism. Both targeted racial minorities, in one case blacks, in the other, Jews. And both were extensions of a political party, the Klan of the Democratic Party, the Brownshirts of the Nazi Party.

  Thus the concept of a fascist plantation is hardly far-fetched.

  FDR AND THE KKK

  FDR’s relationship to fascism, however, requires a little introduction. FDR was obviously not a racial nationalist like Hitler, but he did maintain a fairly close relationship with racially nationalist groups in America. Since we are discussing the Klan, it may be useful to begin with FDR’s close connection with Woodrow Wilson, the progressive Democrat largely responsible for the nationwide revival of the Klan. FDR, of course, served as navy secretary in the Wilson administration. Not once during his tenure did he criticize Wilson’s KKK affinities and racist policies or indicate the slightest discomfort with them.

  Yet progressives who distance themselves from Wilson—or at least from the racist side of Wilson—never distance themselves from FDR. FDR remains the great progressive hero, routinely invoked by Democrats today as their inspiration and ideal. FDR’s progressive biographers such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Leuchtenburg and Robert Dallek speak of him in hagiographical terms, leaving little doubt they consider him one of America’s greatest—if not the greatest—president. Except for a brief, throat-clearing reference to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, seemingly explained by the exigencies
of war, little or nothing is said about FDR’s racist ties or the racist policies of the FDR administration.

  Yet although his ties were obviously less direct than Wilson’s, FDR had a much closer association with the Ku Klux Klan than any of his biographers are willing to admit. His successor, Harry Truman, was briefly a member of the Klan. Progressives who credit Truman with desegregating the armed forces rarely mention this. If they do, they insist that Truman wasn’t a racist; he was merely anti-Catholic. This is the same Truman who wrote his future wife Bess, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.”

  Truman added, “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I . . . I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.” As late as 1963, Truman in a newspaper interview asked a reporter, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?”9

  One of FDR’s closest political allies and most enthusiastic supporters in the Senate was Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo, the state’s leading progressive. Bilbo campaigned for FDR in 1932, and FDR returned the favor, helping Bilbo to win a Senate seat in 1934. In 1940, when Bilbo won reelection, FDR proclaimed him “a real friend of liberal government,” and Bilbo routinely characterized himself as “100 percent for Roosevelt and the New Deal.”

  A longtime member of the Ku Klux Klan, Bilbo championed its agenda of segregation and resistance to racial intermarriage, which he termed “mongrelization.” He tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to segregate the national parks and publicly defended lynching as a necessary punishment for “Negro rapists.” Bilbo served twelve years in the Senate, from 1935 to 1947. During that time, FDR worked closely with him, not merely on New Deal initiatives but also to resist racial integration in the armed forces and to suppress antilynching legislation.10

  In the House of Representatives, FDR relied on a whole constellation of racist Democrats to push through his agenda, notably Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn, who would become Speaker of the House. Rayburn campaigned for FDR and against Hoover on the grounds that Hoover sought “to abolish segregation and promote a deal with Negroes.” What he liked about FDR presumably was that he was for segregation and against finding common ground with blacks.

  Rayburn was an avid segregationist who explained to an audience at First Baptist Church in Bonham, Texas, in 1928 why he could never be a Republican. “I will never vote for the electors of a Party which sent the carpetbagger and the scalawag to the prostrate South with saber and sword to crush the white civilization to the earth.”11 This same Rayburn was a critical progressive ally not only of FDR but also his Democratic successors Truman and later Lyndon Johnson.

  FDR also nominated longtime Klan member Hugo Black, an Alabama Democrat, to the Supreme Court. Black had altered his resume to camouflage his Klan association. Yet Black’s Klan ties were well known. His law partner Crampton Harris, the cyclops of the Birmingham Klan, had initiated Black into the organization. Black became an active member, marching in parades and addressing Klan rallies throughout Alabama.

  When Black ran for Senate as a Democrat in 1926, he had the Klan’s endorsement, and his election was celebrated by the Klan in a ceremony attended by Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, who presented Black with a gold-engraved lifetime passport to the Invisible Empire of the Klan. When all of this was exposed in the Pittsburgh Post following Black’s confirmation to the Court, Black protested that he had merely joined the Klan to advance his career. “The Klan,” he said, “was in effect the underground Democratic Party in Alabama.”12

  This statement is both true and telling. Many years later, Bill Clinton would say something very similar about another Democratic Klansman, Robert Byrd, who went on to become Senate majority leader and mentor to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton undertook to explain why Americans should not be too hard on Byrd for his “fleeting association” with the Klan. Byrd’s association was hardly fleeting, but we’ll let that pass. “What does that mean?” Clinton thundered. “I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected.”13 In other words, you simply had to be in the Klan in those days to advance in the Democratic Party.

  Ever the consummate political dissembler, FDR pretended he had no idea that Black had been in the Klan. But even FDR’s progressive biographer Robert Dallek, a sycophantic admirer if there ever was one, admits that “in choosing Black, there seems little question that Roosevelt was aware of his Klan membership and that his election to the Senate had partly required Klan support.”14

  Many years later, Black himself put the matter to rest in a 1968 memo. “President Roosevelt told me,” he said, “there was no reason for my worrying about having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said that some of his best friends and supporters were strong members of that organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.”15

  A FASCIST SUPERHERO

  Notice that the Klan connections of these leading progressive Democrats are much more recent than those of, say, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the nineteenth-century Klan. Yet Forrest’s statues are torn down by progressives while FDR’s are left standing. In fact, there is no indication on the part of left-wing monument destroyers that they are even ambivalent about FDR’s racist legacy.

  The same applies to Harry Truman, Hugo Black, Sam Rayburn and Robert Byrd. No one to date has called for the renaming of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. A good deal of West Virginia is named after Robert Byrd: highways, schools, medical centers and so on. They are all given a pass by progressive activists. Apparently it’s just fine to have served or worked with the Ku Klux Klan as long as you are a progressive Democrat.

  In fairness, many of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs who pull down monuments probably have no idea about FDR’s connection to Black, or Black’s deep ties to the Klan. Here we are back to the big lies of omission, the systematic progressive erasure of important events and associations to hide the complicity of big-name progressives in the worst crimes of American history. As we will see in this chapter, few people have benefited more from this left-wing cover-up than FDR.

  FDR’s reputation remains that of the indefatigable hero of the Depression and World War II, famously associated with the phrase “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I have never understood the appeal of this idiotic phrase. Imagine going to a hospital to be treated for a serious, life-threatening illness and being informed by the person in charge that “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.”

  Au contraire, dummy. The only thing I have to fear is the sickness that’s killing me. The fear is a natural, reasonable response to that. Fear during the Depression was fear of bankruptcy, of joblessness and starvation and total ruin. It was rational fear. The only way to remove the fear was to remove the underlying cause of the fear.

  This FDR did not do; the Depression continued through all his four terms in office. In the decade of the 1930s, industrial production and national income fell by almost one-third. Historians now agree that it only ended with World War II and the manufacturing boom of the late 1940s and 1950s. Even so, just four years after he first used the phrase, FDR in his 1936 renomination speech recalled, “In those days, we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have conquered fear.”16

  This is capital stuff, reminiscent of Peter Sellers in the movie Being There. Sellers plays Chance, a gardener who utters pedestrian banalities and absurdities, mostly drawing on an analogy to gardening. Yet these enigmatic pronouncements are hailed by the elite as profundities. So too with FDR,
who is routinely celebrated by progressives for profundities that are not profound and for doing things that he manifestly did not do.

  As I mentioned earlier, FDR deserves no credit for ending the Great Depression. I will acknowledge his role in leading the American fight against the fascists and Nazis during World War II. The soldiers and those aiding the war effort turned the tide against the enemy. The Red Army too played a critical role in defeating the Axis powers. Even so, FDR’s wartime leadership undoubtedly accelerated Germany’s final defeat.

  Yet it must also be admitted that these later developments of the 1940s have helped progressives to conceal FDR’s much friendlier and indeed more intimate relationship to fascism and Nazism in the previous decade. In truth, FDR admired Mussolini and embraced fascist principles that had been implemented both in Italy by Mussolini and in Germany by Hitler. For their part, in the early 1930s, the Italian and German fascists praised Mussolini and the New Deal. FDR and the fascists were part of a mutual admiration society.

  Showing these connections is telling enough. But in order to go further, we need to make a searching examination of the true meaning of fascism. We need to understand how FDR’s New Deal drew on the formulas of Italian fascism, how FDR like Hitler appealed to envy and hatred of successful entrepreneurs in order to mobilize political action against them, how fascist concepts like Gleichschaltung—which basically means political correctness—were embraced by progressives and how fascist economic policy is at the core of the progressive Democratic plantation even today.

  True, Wilson envisioned the progressive plantation long before FDR. But FDR deserves credit—or, more precisely, blame—for the fascist plantation. Wilson cannot be held responsible for it because he preceded Mussolini and Hitler; consequently, there is no way he could have had these fascist dictators as models. FDR did learn from both of them, and moreover, like Mussolini and Hitler, he had the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to justify moving his country in a direction that the people would never ordinarily want to go.