Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018.
These are notes for a review I never finished and don't want to spend the time to write.
- The Nazis regarded the racism of the USA as, rather than something reprehensible, something encouraging and they hoped for its triumph. They modeled the infamous Nurmeberg Laws on US race law.
- Nazi antisemitic policy was at first aimed at immigration, getting Jews to what we would now call “self deport.”
- Whitman was interviewed over at Truthout; you can get a sense of his thesis reading the article, “Racist US Laws Provided Inspiration to the Nazis: An Interview With James Q. Whitman.”
“...to have a common law system like that of America is to have a system in which the traditions of the law do indeed have little power to ride herd on the demands of the politicians, and when the politics is bad, the law can be very bad indeed.” – James Q. Whitman
1 comment:
Tney certainly were. 'Mein Kampf' said so explicitly, and I've wondered occasionally whether that was a reason for its banning here (in the UK). I read a chunk of it many years ago, when I was a teenager (someone my Dad knew had found a pre-war partwork set when cleaning out her uncle's attic, I think).
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