Sorry, Washington Post: Whitewashing a Nazi sympathizer isn't "debate"

[marmar]

Sorry, Washington Post: Whitewashing a Nazi sympathizer isn't "debate"
Legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh was America's leading pro-Nazi voice — a fact that can't be laundered

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published September 21, 2024 5:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Readers of my previous articles here will have noticed a heavy focus on history: historical periods as intriguing analogies to current events; distorted history as propaganda; history as warning; perhaps above all, the question of who gets to control our history.

....(snip)....

JD Vance, the Republican aspirant to the second-highest office in the land, has even invoked the Civil War as a morality play in which Southern slaveholders were the good guys and the North consisted of woke socialists. Using the supposed lessons of history to prove some inane or horrifying right-wing talking point is also performed with other defining events: the founding of the country and the framing of the Constitution, the Great Depression and World War II, Vietnam and Watergate.

....(snip)....

That presents an unfortunate contrast to the present, when the Washington Post, the daily diary of the Beltway illuminati, has now published an opinion piece by a seemingly reputable historian vindicating by implication the America First argument with a lot of hypothetical what-ifs, and whitewashing the movement’s most prominent advocate, Charles Lindbergh.

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Anyone who was remotely aware of Donald Trump’s threats when president to withdraw from NATO, or the Vladimir Putin-friendly statements of key Republicans (including Trump and Vance), would have to be willfully blind not to comprehend the obvious ideological connection between the current GOP and the America First movement of the opening stages of World War II. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/21/sorry-washington-post-whitewashing-a-nazi-sympathizer-isnt-debate/

[lees1975]

1. Ten years ago I would have been shocked to see something like that in the Washington Post.

Their editorial board would have known better. But, I wonder how many Americans have any idea at all about how many Nazi sympathizers there were in the United States prior to World War 2, who they were and how much influence they had. The world would be a much, much different, place if Hitler had won that war, it is conceivable that the Jewish population of the world would have been completely wiped out, along with a lot of others. There were a lot of Americans who sympathized with him, and who helped all through the war and Lindbergh was one of them.

The ignorance of history is one of the reasons we are now seeing yet another movement of hatred sweep across this country. There are a lot of Americans who despise Western Europeans because they are "liberal and woke," but they fail to realize what it has taken to break down those barriers of racism, bigotry and hatred and achieve a level of recognition of human dignity and equality. It took literally bombing and burning Germany to the ground, the literal destruction of an entire country, on a massive, incomprehensible scale, something about which most Americans have no idea at all, to burn the inhumane evil of Nazism out of the country. It still rears its ugly head there from time to time.

But I'm afraid that we are heading to the destruction of this country by our lack of understanding of history, and things like this, along with what appears to be a mirror image of the same kind of prejudice, bigotry and hatred pushing itself into our politics, are moving us down that road.