Part 1-- How The Nazis "Reformed" German Education: The Precedent For The Florida "Anti-Woke" Model Is The Hitler Youth
How The Nazis "Reformed" German Education-- The Precedent For The Florida "Anti-Woke" Model Is The Hitler Youth
Introduction--
In 1933, Adolf Hitler was "appointed" German Chancellor by President Von Hindenberg in the aftermath of the July 1932 German election, in which the Nazi Party received a plurality vote of 37.3%, considered by Hitler himself to be such a disaster that he contemplated suicide, even though his party received the most votes. It meant Germany would be governed by a Nazi-led coalition government, which for Hitler was no victory at all, and which he had no interest in accomodating.
Within two months he had consolidated a dictatorship in the aftermath of the infamous Reichstag fire in March of 1933, which became the pretext for a state of emergency under which the Constitution was suspended, and the new Chancellor could "rule by decree." Political parties were banned, opposition press shut down, Parliament suspended, and law enforcement militarized.
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One of the first items on the agenda for Hitler to consolidate his "New Order" was a top down transformation of the German education system along the lines laid out in the racial vision presented in his book, "Mein Kampf."
Of course, most people know that Hitler's plan was to wipeout European Jewry, to conquer Russia, and create a fascist dictatorship rooted in German nationalism, based on the assertion that Germans, specifically that the Aryan race be elevated to status of a master race which would rule over the entire Eurasian land mass. Eugenics was at the core of Nazi ideology and their politics, centered around the imperative to physically acquire more "Lebensraum" or living space for the Germans through wars of conquest against other nations of "untermenschen," the intention to annihilate, re-populate then incorporate them into a Pan-Germanic empire.
(photo caption translation-- "here is what you carry with")
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To insure compliance and enthusiasm from the population, Hitler had to undertake a massive overhaul in every area of public policy, whether in the sphere of economics, culture, the legal system, political system, religious doctrine, and in the areas of the military, healthcare, labor, and not least education.
Destroying traditional education, combined with propaganda and "nazification" of the Christian churches were the top priorities, because mass indoctrination was required in order to make possible the sweeping changes which were intended. Hitler's twisted dream was to construct a "Thousand Year Reich" because he and his Nazis were self-admitted fanatics who created their own synthetic religion. Conversely, his social democratic opposition was mostly oriented toward pragmatic politics and election cycles, unfortunately not unlike our Democratic Party in the US today. So, in line with the Nazis "long game," they moved quickly to destroy the German classically based educational system to replace it with something consistent with Hitler's aims.
What Has This Got To Do With Florida?
Before proceeding with this background it is important to acknowledge what some might be thinking in response to the provocative title, ie; that a comparison of Florida's education policies under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to the Nazis is a false equivalence, and that liberals in general are too quick to attack their opponents as "fascists" in making their political arguments. The obvious form of skepticism that gets thrown about is that there is no overt anti-semitism involved in the Florida case, and that the Nazi's racism was directed primarily against Jews. In fact, most right wing Christian fundamentalists claim to love the Jews and Israel, therefore would argue they could not possibly be channeling Hitler in any way.
In response, it would be appropriate to remind our readers that the majority of this strata of "Christian Zionists" are closet anti-semites, who want to use the Jews, ie; Israel, to start World War III in the Middle East in order to fulfill the Bible prophecy of "Jesus' Second Coming" and therefore become candidates for "The Rapture." Their actual belief is that unconverted Jews will be cast into the eternal flames of Hell when "End Times" rolls around, no matter how virtuous and just a life they've led. And not coincidentally many of these Christian fundamentalists are the same as those who accused the Jews of being behind the 9-11 attacks in furthering their apocolyptic narratives. One example of Christian fundamentalist anti-semitism is the extremist mentor of Presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Rev John Hagee, who was famously quoted saying "God brought us Adolf Hitler in order to create the nation of Israel."
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https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-conspiracies-about-911-endure-20-years-later
There is also a right-wing trope that Jewish intellectuals launched liberalism, socialism and communism in the 19th and 20th centuries, took Christian prayer out of the US public schools through groups like the ACLU, and brought in secular humanism and the counterculture. Rich Jews like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg are dumped into a historical basket with the Rothschilds as arch-conspirators in supporting the drug culture, gay rights, gun control, and running "orange revolutions" to try to topple governments. These supposed Soros targeted governments are run by fascist dictators who are white and identify as Christians that are frequently held up as models for the US. (Such as Russia under Putin, Orbán of Hungary, Putin's former puppet in Ukraine Yanukovych, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and so forth)
However, given US and world history in the 20th Century and the need to cloak their racism, they've come up with a new label for those they characterize as the "evil ones," the enemy within who are the scapegoats for their grievances, real or imagined. The new name for Jews is "woke." And "woke" is the all encompassing word which defines any group of people (by ethnicity, gender or political identity) branded as threats to their mission to restore white supremacy. Christian nationalism and its cultish "Dominionist" acolytes, along with the defenders of systemic patriarchy and unfettered corporate financial greed in the marketplace, demonize those who stand in their way as the leading threat to Christian civilization.
"Wokism" is the term now used to degrade an entire section of the American population by those who are committed to a violent overthrow of the US Constitution's protections of fundamental rights, equality for all, and the General Welfare principle. Those accused of being "woke" are branded as the "real racists" on the grounds that they are anti-white, and that liberals policies are unfair retribution for the exaggerated centuries of wrongs committed by white people. They justify their efforts to impose theocratic dictatorship by claiming to be the actual victims of religious, economic and racial persecution.
Try an experiment which will be instructive. Take the recent collection of speeches by DeSantis and some of the speakers at the recent CPAC conference regarding the laws they've rammed through, the unilateral actions he has taken against those citizens he has labeled "woke," and substitute the word "Jew" for woke. Then, dig out a section of Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" and do the opposite, insert the word "woke" where it says Jew. Then, when you've read all you can handle, ask yourselves if the comparison between the two is a "false equivalence."
The proof, as if any were needed, is that the demonization of LGBTQ persons and their "enablers" as rapists, groomers, and pedophiles is right out of the original Nazis playbook, a fact which is obvious to anyone who knows some history. They even deflect from their own embrace of Nazi political tactics by attacking the "woke" as advocates of "Nazi medicine" and involuntary genital mutilation of children in regards to medical treatment of Trans youth.
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The overwhelming majority of Nazi propaganda throughout all phases was based on the use of anti-semitic articles, cartoons and radio broadcasts in which Jews were depicted as pedophiles and rapists who were stalking beautiful Aryan girls and children. This was the leading edge of Hitler's brainwashing of Germans to identify Jews as their enemy within, and to either incite or accept the violence against them. Also Jews were blamed for Germany's economic crisis, because Jewish bankers and pawnbrokers were said to be stealing the wealth and livelihood of the "Deutsche Volk."
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The purpose of the campaign against "wokism" coming from today's Trump-led MAGA/DeSantis GOP is to incite violence, in order to deploy it as a political weapon. This is an intentional frontline strategy for unleashing chaos and consolidating dictatorship, just as Hitler's Brownshirts stoked left vs right street violence to undermine the stability of the Weimar Republic. That is why they picked Gay and Trans persons along with immigrants as their scapegoats, because they are using a contrived threat to their children to make them primary targets for violence, to be followed by groups of many more. Also they are seen as "weak" and easy prey for a movement of cowardly but heavily armed domestic terrorists and incel militias. In that sense, the GOP's political war against multi-cultural liberal democracy is now almost indistinguishable from the "Save The Children" campaign of the anti-semitic terrorist cult "QAnon."
This is why the street level thugs targeting Gay Clubs and Pride events are being recruited out of the anti-semitic Proud Boys, Three Percenters and QAnon cult, with its modern day version of "The Blood Libel" about liberal (ie: Jewish) pedophiles cannibalizing Christian babies. (Or in the case of the so-called "Pro-Life" extremists who believe their babies are being aborted to harvest stem cells for "science.")
It should be understood that the mass deployment of Christian nationalist cults in the guise of anti-abortion and pro-family values organizations is based on a eugenics centered world view, driven by their obsession with the collapsing white birth rate, just like Hitler and Mussolini before them, and Russia's Putin today. Hence, DeSantis ally and white nationalist Texas Governor Greg Abbott's GOP takes a page from these dictators to push for pro-rated financial rewards for women who give birth to ten children.
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/putin-mother-heroine-medal-russian-women-who-have-10-children
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-gop-bill-reward-married-couples-more-children-1785041
And not inconsequential is the scapegoating of the "woke" on economic grounds, because their spending on "socialist" programs to promote gay lifestyles, sex re-assignment surgery and affirmative action for those people of color who they argue are undeserving, defines them as parasites who are bankrupting the government and sucking up their hard earned tax money. Of course, lumped into the general category of socialist woke programs are entitlements, which they claim are subsidizing too much "dead wood."
Likewise the the efforts of the "woke" to defend the human rights of immigrants and refugees has been turned into a monstrous campaign claiming that it is a conspiracy to "replace" white Christian America with a sea of "human refuse" flooding over our borders. Wokeism, says today's GOP, intends to take our jobs, kill our kids with Chinese Fentanyl coming in over "Biden's open border," to steal elections for Democrats with illegal voters, rape our daughters and sons, steal government money through welfare, demolish their churches to replace them with Mosques, and of course to eliminate the white race through inter-racial marriages which give birth to bi-racial children. This Nazi wet dream is brought to you courtesy of the DeSantis supporting Fox News host and leading Nazi propagandist in the US today, Tucker Carlson.
Last but not least is the contrived campaign of book banning and propaganda about "Critical Race Theory," which has been both misrepresented and used to inflame white Christians with the belief that their whole identity is being cancelled. The subsequent policy of banning curriculum which teaches the history of slavery, the progress of civil rights for African Americans, women and LGBTQ persons, the murder or oppression of indigenous persons, Asian immigrants, or other religious and ethnic minorities, is nothing other than a mass brainwashing campaign to legitimize the history and culture of white supremacy, by literally whitewashing the actual history of racism and discrimination which we have been trying to overcome. So, in addition to the targeted constituencies of ethnic and gender minorities, the GOP's extreme fascist wing has now targeted teachers as the instruments of "wokism's" war against children. And from a US historical and political standpoint, it is a program to undo the final result of the US Civil War and bring back the twisted bloody legacy of the Condederacy.
(photo collage: Library in Nazi Germany 90 years ago, Library in Florida school today)
(It is worth mentioning in this context, that when leading Nazis were tried at Nuremburg after the War, many of them claimed that their ideals were informed and found precedent in the continuing legacy of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, discrimination, and even forced sterilizations which continued into the 20th Century as the surviving artifacts of that Confederate system they had admired. *"The Nazi Doctors," author Robert Jay Lifton)
So, the leading edge of the GOP campaign to loot, lobotomize and destroy public education in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere, and to make that the model for the US, is the so-called "wokism" campaign, and the full package of culture war issues which they have brought out in this context. This is analogous to how Hitler used his antisemitic scapegoating campaign to harness the anger, rage, violence, and victimization of the Weimar era Germans. This scapegoating is the method by which fascists distort the concept of patriotism into a hostile war fever directed against nations and peoples deemed as immediate threats to their way of life. The so-called holy war to protect America's children today (demonstrated as fake by their continuing refusal to take actions against guns used in mass school shootings, or to fund healthcare for kids) is the club they are wielding in what will become an increasingly violent drive to seize power and impose dictatorship.
The GOP of today is run almost entirely by its racial vision. That has been increasingly the case since the "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon which brought into the GOP a national bloc of "Democratic" Jim Crow Dixiecrats and George Wallace segregationists to deploy against the 20th Century's progress on Civil Rights and economic equality. Everything they do is rooted in defending white supremacy and Social Darwinism. There is your "equivalence."
Part 1-- It Began With The Nazis Nuremberg Laws On Race And The Aryan Breeding Imperative
According to a classroom series anthology assembled on the history website "Spartacus Educational:"
["Hitler immediately made changes to the school curriculum. Education in "racial awareness" began at school and children were constantly reminded of their racial duties to the "national community". Biology, along with political education, became compulsory. Children learnt about "worthy" and "unworthy" races, about breeding and hereditary disease. "They measured their heads with tape measures, checked the colour of their eyes and texture of their hair against charts of Aryan or Nordic types, and constructed their own family trees to establish their biological, not historical, ancestry.... They also expanded on the racial inferiority of the Jews". (Cate Haste: "Nazi Women)
["As Louis Snyder has pointed out: "There were to be two basic educational ideas in his ideal state. First, there must be burnt into the heart and brains of youth the sense of race. Second, German youth must be made ready for war, educated for victory or death. The ultimate purpose of education was to fashion citizens conscious of the glory of country and filled with fanatical devotion to the national cause."] ("Encyclopedia Of The Third Reich," L. Snyder)
["The Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick claimed that the idea that history teaching should be objective was a fallacy of liberalism. "The purpose of history was to teach people that life was always dominated by struggle, that race and blood were central to everything that happened in the past, present and future, and that leadership determined the fate of peoples. Central themes in the new teaching including courage in battle, sacrifice for a greater cause, boundless admiration for the Leader and hatred of Germany's enemies, the Jews."] (Richard Evans, "The Third Reich In Power)
Bernhard Rust was named Hitler's Minister of Science, Education and National Culture immediately after Hitler gained power. (Reichserziehungsminister) He was a fanatical Nazi, with Hitler since the Munich Putsch and had joined the party in 1921. Prior to his political career, he was a former teacher of German Philology. It is also unsurprising that he was known to be mentally unstable and a pedophile who lost his teaching job after "grooming" an underage student for sex. He was not charged because he was considered mentally unfit for trial. (It is an interesting pattern in history and politics that fascist demagogues who build their careers as "pedophile hunters" are more than occasionally pedophiles themselves)
It was Rust's job to reshape the German educational system to conform to Hitler's "Gleichanschaung," the Nazi world view. It was he who instituted the "Heil Hitler" salute and loyalty oath for all students, every day in class and as the only acceptable greeting as the symbol of the "New Germany." He was in charge of leading the purges of Universities of Jewish teachers, administrators, or any other "undesirables." He implemented curriculum, and ran the schools as an adjunct of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, and was backed by the Gestapo.
["In 1933 all Jewish teachers were dismissed from German schools and universities. Rust explained the reasons for this decision: " As a consequence of the demand thus clearly formulated by the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish teachers and Jewish pupils have had to quit German schools, and schools of their own have been provided by and for them as far as possible. In this way, the natural race instincts of German boys and girls are preserved; and the young people are made aware of their duty to maintain their racial purity and to bequeath it to succeeding generations."] * ibid Snyder
Also fired en masse were teachers identified as anti-Nazi or simply not party members whose loyalties were suspect. Students were given rewards for informing on their fellow students or teachers if they had said anything in class or outside of it which was remotely critical of Hitler, the party, its leaders, its programs or educational curriculum. Likewise, students were either conscripted or coereced to becoming informants against immediate family and friends, who would be reported to the Gestapo and punished according to the degree of threat they were considered to be. (This should immediately bring to mind the DeSantis system in Florida which is enforcing the various book bans, and the attempt ongoing to force surveillance and reporting on the menstrual cycles of young female students and athletes, as well as the tracking and attempts at travel restriction of women who are pregnant in other Red States)
Rust established camps for training new teachers, most of whom were loyal Nazis but unqualified to teach. (Also a pattern and problem in Florida today in light of mass resignations and purges of faculty)
Teachers were forced to attend these camps where their primary purpose was to eliminiate traditional subject matter and establish race science, genetics and "Aryan mythologies." Part of the purpose of these camps for Nazi teachers was to give them administrative training for when the time came that they would need new leaders to establish occupations of conquered territories in the future. "Non-Aryan" sciences like physics (Einstein's "Jewish science") psychiatry (the Freudian school) and the modern art of the surrealists and cubists were banned. (Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann wrote an expose of the Rust system in 1938, titled "School For Barbarians")
(photocollage from German school book. Surrealist artist portraits were equated with the pctures of mentally and physically handicapped people, which the Nazis termed "useless eaters" who should be euthanized)
