Master race laws anniversary

[nondescript handle]

@Navy Vet: He probably refers to the Crimea.

[Scott Smith]

This would be the difference between "citizens of the state" and "subjects of the state," or in other words, like American citizens and resident aliens (green card carriers) in spite of probably being born in Germany, which in the USA means automatic citizenship.

Scott, why I'm not surprised on how you manage to turn Jewish status almost bearable under Nazi rule, when you make this kind of incredible and anachronistic comparison with USA?

Just trying to put things into familiar terms. A Constitution which made some three-fifths of a man and prohibited any federal law against selling slaves until 1808 must have been unbearable to the disadvantaged class. This is nothing new.

[Navy Vet]

The United States of America, slaughtered the Red Man for the land and then used the Black Man to build it.

The history of our country is not clean and I'll be the first to admit it. I am ashamed of these facts in our past. Hopefully we are doing better as a lot of things have changed since then but we were never a NAZI state.

Also, this is going way off topic so please revert back to the subject of this post.

[Scott Smith]

we were never a NAZI state.

Well, slaughtering the Red man for his land (Indians don't "own" anything) and using the Black man to build it (not many Blacks in the North or the West which had all that 19th century economic growth) is a bit of an overstatement, but what exactly does being a "NAZI state" mean? Lots of states have practiced discrimination in many forms.

[chalutzim]

Just trying to put things into familiar terms. A Constitution which made some three-fifths of a man and prohibited any federal law against selling slaves until 1808 must have been unbearable to the disadvantaged class. This is nothing new.

I don't know if I'm more sorry for your country's past or by your comparing two historical contexts so different that any attempt "to put things into familiar terms" sounds absurd.

[chalutzim]

(...) but what exactly does being a "NAZI state" mean? Lots of states have practiced discrimination in many forms.

For example:

(c) Law Against the Establishment of Parties, July 14, 1933
The German Cabinet has resolved the following law, which is herewith promulgated:

ARTICLE 1. The National Socialist German Workers Party constitutes the only political party in Germany.

ARTICLE 2. Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with imprisonment or with imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty according to other regulations

http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob60.html

Unless you think Stalin's state was a great and praiseworthy precedent, or you're a supporter of some banana republic here in South America, you have no reason to be so indulgent with the Nazi state (the land of Kant, Goethe and Marx!).

[Navy Vet]

Well, slaughtering the Red man for his land (Indians don't "own" anything) and using the Black man to build it (not many Blacks in the North or the West which had all that 19th century economic growth) is a bit of an overstatement

Scott, I am a White man that has both Indian and Black people in my family (by marriage) and have first hand knowledge of the history and of how they feel about this to this day. I find your post rude, raciest, and degrading.

Again, this post is about the anniversary of the law and the law itself. Not this off topic discussion you have posted here.

[David Thompson]

Please stay on-topic.

[David Thompson]

Chalutzim -- You're not the only one who thinks the race laws were a throw-back. Here's a David Low cartoon, published 31 Mar 1933, before the laws were enacted, on the Nazi racist outlook (it kind of reminded me of some of the posts I've read in this section of the forum):

[Scott Smith]

Well, slaughtering the Red man for his land (Indians don't "own" anything) and using the Black man to build it (not many Blacks in the North or the West which had all that 19th century economic growth) is a bit of an overstatement

Scott, I am a White man that has both Indian and Black people in my family (by marriage) and have first hand knowledge of the history and of how they feel about this to this day. I find your post rude, raciest, and degrading.

Again, this post is about the anniversary of the law and the law itself. Not this off topic discussion you have posted here.

I don't see what is "rude, racist or degrading" about it. But I encourage you to start a new thread in the Lounge and we can discuss it.

[Scott Smith]

(...) but what exactly does being a "NAZI state" mean? Lots of states have practiced discrimination in many forms.

For example:

(c) Law Against the Establishment of Parties, July 14, 1933
The German Cabinet has resolved the following law, which is herewith promulgated:

ARTICLE 1. The National Socialist German Workers Party constitutes the only political party in Germany.

ARTICLE 2. Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with imprisonment or with imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty according to other regulations

http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob60.html

Unless you think Stalin's state was a great and praiseworthy precedent, or you're a supporter of some banana republic here in South America, you have no reason to be so indulgent with the Nazi state (the land of Kant, Goethe and Marx!).

As you probably know, I am not in favor of single-party states, but there are many of them even today, or pluralistic in name only and in fact ruled by a single party or faith. The American system is a two-party State. No third party is illegal but it has no chance of ever getting any power. Even a governor who might get elected on a third-party ticket would find himself unable to accomplish anything. The major parties effectively cooperate to freeze-out any competing party from the practical levers of power. Each party says that they are inclusive and diverse. What this really means is that each of the two parties has a "big tent" to allow you in, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will share power proportionately. The nature of interest-group politics places Ideas almost dead last. Interests are king.

A better criterion is whether the government "works" or not, not what kind of forms they adhere to. The de facto government of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai "worked" because it was able to provide protection and security for the Chinese peasants from the looting hordes of the Japanese and the ravaging fiefdoms of reactionary warlords. Chiang Kai-shek's government couldn't do this. He could not even provide famine relief because his minions were afraid of bearing bad news and he didn't want to brook disagreement among his subjects. Chiang was waiting for the American gravy-train to come rolling into Chungking, while the Americans were waiting for the Chinese Nationalists to fight America's war against Japan. But do I favor Communism? Hell no. I think Marxism is an unworkable system. But it worked for the Chinese, or at least Maoism did under the circumstances. And Hitler's Germany worked for the Germans (not counting Jews and other minorities, of course, who, in my opinion at the very least should have been protected as a national resource the way we do the American Indians today).

You're not the only one who thinks the race laws were a throw-back.

If one thinks of progress as linear--onward and upward--then there are a lot of things that will be seen as atavistic in retrospect. We cannot decide whether we should have Equal Opportunity or Affirmative Action in our country today, for example. Instead of a unified society we will do well not to create a racial spoils-system where the goodies are divided according to ascriptive quotas, and even the definitions will be subject to interpretations. Personally, I can accept that culture and race are connected somehow, but I do not like the idea of arbitrary ascriptive criteria of any kind (race or whatever) used to classify people unfairly. I don't care if it is Jim Crow or discriminating against working class White males because of what people who look like him might have done to the ancestors of people who look like the slaves. Such complex social problems are not going to be solved with pat solutions and gushy rhetoric.

The Nuremberg Laws classified German citizenship on account of German nationality and excluded Jews.

In the United States today we don't believe in racism. However, Native Americans, Hawaiians, etc. are allowed to have land because of their blood. In Hawaii the locals do their genealogy to prove that they have just enough non-Howlie blood in them to get Hawaiian land. It is a major disappointment if they don't or can't prove it. Similar arrangements are true of other Indian tribes. By keeping the White man from buying native lands it keeps the land off the auction block and all plutocrats and corporations out (except for the tribal corporation). Bingo anyone?

[michael mills]

A comment on the racial types illustrated in previous threads.

These were based on the theories of the German anthropologist, Hans Günther, who postulated that the population of Europe consisted of a number of genetic units, or physical races, including the Nordic, Eastern, Western etc. Günther's theories were nothing new; they went back to the 19th century book "The Races of Europe" by Ripley, who was the first to identify three physical racial types into which the European population was divided, and which he called "Teutonic", "Dissentis" or "Alpine", and "Mediterranean", after their areas of distribution.

Like other anthropologists, Günther, whose theories were given official endorsement by the national Socialist government of Germany, did not identify any race with a single nation. Rather, he postulated that each nation was comprised of individuals from each of the European races, but that nations differed as to their racial composition, ie the proportions of the different racial types. Thus, the German nation had far more individuals of Nordic racial type, and far fewer of Western (or Mediterranean), than did the Italian nation for example.

However, Günther's theories bore no relationship to the concept of "German and related blood". All members of the German nation (Volk) were considered to be of German blood, regardless of their racial type. Certain other nations such as the English and Dutch were considered to be of related blood. Other nations were considered to be of alien blood.

Thus, by an ironic twist, a member of the German nation who according to Günther's system would be classified as "Nordic" was under German law "of German blood", whereas a member of the Polish nation also classified as "Nordic" would under German law be of alien blood, despite the fact that according to Günther's theory the two individuals must spring from the same genetic root.

That seeming paradox was later resolved by Himmler, who claimed that many European nations contained German blood, thus accounting for the large number of individuals in them of "nordic" or similar type.

[michael mills]

Navy vet wrote:

Quote:
1) Jews are forbidden to fly the Reich... ...permitted to display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is protected by the State.



This blatant double standard just shows how ignorant the NAZI laws were in the first place. Himmler aka Herr Ignoramus

In fact, there is no double standard here at all. I fear it is not Himmler but someone else who is the ignoramus in this case.

According to the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, a Jew could not be a citizen of Germany. Since the display of the German flag was a privilege reserved for German citizens, it could not be permitted to Jews resident in Germany.

However, the above law, while it denied German citizenship to a Jew, did not make him a non-person; rather, it recognised him as a member of another nation, the Jewish nation, which was alien to the German nation and hence should not be allowed to interbreed with it. It is that recognition of the Jew as a mamber of another nation that was the basis for the explicit recognition of the Jew's right to display on German territory the national flag of the Jews.

The "Jewish colours" referred to were the flag adopted by the Zionist Movement as the national flag of the Jews. It consisted of a white field bearing a blue hexagram (called "Magen David" by Jews) in the centre, with two horizontal blue stripes on either side of the hexagram; in other words, the present flag of the Jewish State.

The recognition of the Zionist flag as the national Jewish flag paralleled the German Government's recognition and endorsement of Zionism. It is ironic that in 1935 the only two territories where the Zionist flag enjoyed official recognition as the national flag of the Jewish communities resident in those territories were the Mandated Territory of Palestine (where a future Jewish state was envisaged) and National Socialist Germany (where a Jewish state was most definitely not envisaged).

[Navy Vet]

Again, this post is about the anniversary of the law and the law itself. Not this off topic discussion you have posted here.

I don't see what is "rude, racist or degrading" about it. But I encourage you to start a new thread in the Lounge and we can discuss it.

No thank you. My time is too valuable to be wasted entertaining you, I'd rather spend it here learning about the history.

[Navy Vet]

This blatant double standard just shows how ignorant the NAZI laws were in the first place. Himmler aka Herr Ignoramus.

I fear it is not Himmler but someone else who is the ignoramus in this case.

Regards, and you may be correct about what you have said above but my last days on this earth will not be spent doing a dishonorable act such as putting on a fake uniform and running away until I were caught and take the chicken crap way out by committing suicide. I seriously doubt my fate will be the same as the chicken farmer.