 teaches us about America. And what Ken Burns film teaches us about America. It's called the US and the Holocaust and the stress is really on the US. Although the Holocaust footage is extraordinary, it's footage you have never, ever seen before. You can be watching movies about World War II and the Holocaust your whole life and you will never have seen footage as you see in this Ken Burns film. So today we're gonna study that here on Bigotry in America. The stress is bigotry in America. And Manfred Henningson, who is an emeritus retired political science professor from UH Minoa who has studied this and various other political science issues in the United States and in Europe is here to join us for this discussion. Welcome to the show Manfred, as always. Thanks a lot. So I'll tell you a vibe. There's one thing you should tell, you should mention, you know, I was born in Germany and I grew up after World War II in a country that avoided talking about the Holocaust. And, you know, that changed only 20 years. It took more than 20 years until, you know, Germany entered into the processing of its macro criminal past. It started when Billy Bond became chancellor in West Germany in 69. But it became in a way really very, very powerful in the 70s. So all of that silence, you know, that you had before was gone. And so from then on, you know, Germans confronted their past. And I think came to terms with it. And it's taught in schools and universities, you know. And that's very important. And a lot of what you see in Burns's film about American history, the parallelism is not really taught in American public schools. And I think what we are confronted with is now a political movement in the United States that wants to even further minimize, you know, the teaching, the critical teaching of history. Yeah. Well, we see that increasingly. Yes. We know where it leads when you don't teach history. Leads to a repetition of history. Santayana wasn't it, you know? If you ignore history, you are doomed to repeat it. And some people say, no, no, no, that's not true. It rhymes. It rhymes with history. But my reaction more and more, Manfred, is that it's not a rhyming. It's an actual repetition. Well, in this particular case, yes. And then, you know, when we meet the role of Charles Lindbergh, for example, I think is pretty unknown to most Americans. You know, he is a heroic figure and that he became really the first American fascist and was celebrated in Nazi Germany by Hitler and other Nazi leaders like the leader of the Luftwaffe Göring is unknown. I mean, and he's buried in Hanna, I think most people in Hawaii don't know that this super American fascist is buried in Hawaii. Now, the grave has not become a shrine. And I don't know whether it ever will be, but what is so interesting when you listen to his speeches, you know, in this documentary, there are echoes today, you know, of what he is talking about and it's sickening. Yes, but he wasn't the only one. No, no, he wasn't the only one. There were organizations, even organizations that have names that are the same as names that are of organizations that are popping up today. America First, that was a Nazi organization. And then it was something about the Christian League or something along those lines. Those organizations were pretty violent. They had guns, guns stolen from the army, ammunition stolen from the army. They had people who were in the army and their mission, their sworn mission, which they expanded to various places around the country thanks to Father Coughlin on the radio who actually reached 40 million people out of a total population of 120 or 30 million people. That's a huge percentage of people. These organizations were dedicated to blowing up the United States government to assassinating a whole bunch of federal officials, congressmen and the like, and taking over in an overt violent coup. And the public was not really opposed to that. It's really hard to understand. And the reason I'm fresh on this is because only this week, Rachel Maddow has gone into her podcast, which is called Ultra. I recommend everybody to take a look at it or listen to it because it's historic. And she describes these events in the 30s and especially 1940 in great detail and talks about these organizations with some degree of detail and accuracy. And it's well worth knowing because just as you stay, it's repeating itself. Right. Well, I mean, what is so remarkable about American ignorance, historical ignorance, is that they are not only not aware of this fascist past, but the racist past that is connected with the legacy of slavery, the anti-black racism. And when you see these parades of the KKK in New York and in other cities, in the documentary, it scares the hell out of me because you have signs of that today. Despite the fact that you could say, a lot of progress has been made in the area of civil rights. But nevertheless, there is a level of racism that goes very deep and has not been taken care of. So what you have is not only this fascist, the anti-Semitic background, but you have also the general racist background that people do not want to be taught about in schools. I mean, I mentioned the non anti-Semitic background because for Hitler, American history became a model. The genocidal removal of Indians became for him an argument when he was designing in World War II, the move into the Soviet Union in June of 1941. And trying to conquer the agricultural core of the Ukraine and Russia. So he used openly references to the way the United States is trying to conquer the agricultural core of the Ukraine references to the way the United States took care of the native people and removed them or killed them. Now, the other thing is the Jim Crow laws, the race laws were used by the Nazis as a justification for the Nuremberg laws in 1935. I mean, you have a book by James Whitman which was published in 2017, Hitler's American model, the United States and the making of Nazi race laws in which he shows the parallels. So you have there, when you talk with American students about it, even though I'm retired, I mean, I remember having these discussions, they were always shocked. When I mentioned that, you know, that America's race policies were looked upon by Hitler as a model for what he was doing, including the eugenics, the sterilization. You have it in judgment of Nuremberg, one of the great movies about World War II with Spencer Tracy, you know, playing Supreme Court judge and being at the center of some of these trials in Nuremberg, they were totally unaware of these parallels. Well, it was a race, wasn't it? I mean, in a sense that, and I'm speaking now of the Ken Burns episodes, that Hitler wanted to keep this quiet. He didn't want people to know that he was running a big death machine and he was dedicated to killing every single Jew in Europe. And in fact, his killing was way ahead of where American observers thought it was. And by the time, you know, he finished, Hitler had actually killed two thirds of the Jews in Europe. That's a lot of, that's millions and millions of people. And in the U.S., the general perception was, yeah, there was some articles in the newspaper, Harold Tribune in New York. I'm talking about maybe two million when in fact it was four or five million. And so, you know, what happened is Hitler won the propaganda game. He lied about, and he didn't tell anybody about the killing machine. And in the U.S., we were oblivious and we didn't believe it. And there was a Nazi propaganda machine in the U.S. that was telling us that no, no, no, this is only rumor. It's not real information. Run by American Nazis, yes. Yeah. So I mean, the bottom line there was like, it was a contention of the truth versus the lie. Right. And for a good part of the war, the lie won out. Right. And there were, you know, all kinds of people, you know, who did not counter this lie. You know, when you think, for example, of the story with the American State Department, with the American State Department, but the same applied to the foreign office in London, you know, to deny extra visas to German and Austrian Jews. Even though these, I mean, they could have submitted, they could have gotten visas, but the resistance within the State Department and in the foreign office to helping them was absolutely amazing. You know, now, whether that was simply a bureaucratic behavior or whether they were anti-Semitic influence as well is not completely clear, but I think there were a lot of anti-Semites working within the Foreign Service in the United States that did not want to let thousands of Jews come. I mean, the story of the St. Louis, you know, that ship that went from Cuba, you know, to Florida and then back to Europe. Now, most of them did not end in Auschwitz or any of the other death camps. Many went to Great Britain, but some went to France, but then they had to flee, you know, once Germany occupied France. So that story is a sickening story, if there is any. Well, talk about sickening, you know, you asked me before the show, what did I learn from this Ken Burns documentary that I didn't know before? And somehow I became emotionally involved, invested to a degree that I have never been involved before. And I began to see things through the eyes, not only of the survivors, but of the people who were killed. And you know, that's the lesson of history. The history is told by the survivors, not the ones who were killed. And in this particular documentary, you begin to see it through the eyes of the ones who were killed. And Frank is a good example, you know? Teenage girl and increasingly worried about, you know, and the thing like little transitions. For example, recently I saw a movie called In the Garden of the Finzi Contini, which is an Italian movie made in the early 80s. It was the second time it was made about a wealthy Jewish family in a town called Ferrara, near Rome, and it's so interesting how the walls closed in on them. First thing is they couldn't go on public transport and then they all had bicycles. Europe was so heavy on bicycles that they got around on bicycle, no big deal. And then the Nazis said, including El Duce, the Nazis said, you can't have bicycles either. You have to turn your bicycle in. And now you have to walk on the street and you have to have a Jewish star on you. And you have to have identification papers that confirm the Jewish star. And if you had no Jewish star, but you had identification papers with a J, you were in trouble. If you had the identification paper, if you had the Jewish star and the identification papers didn't say a Jewish, you were in trouble. I mean, they would fall you away. And so, you know, it's this, seeing it through the eyes of the decedents is what struck me and involved me. And I think everybody should see it that way because those people, they speak to us. They speak to us today. They speak to us through that film. No, no, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned just the J. You know, that was a demand by the Swiss and the Swedish government. They asked the German foreign service to have Jewish citizens get this J-stamp in their passports. So it was a request that was issued by the Swiss and the Swedes to identify, to help their pass control to identify people. I mean, this sickening implication of governments in the sickening bureaucratic involvement of the Swiss and the Swedish government in facilitating, you know, this has also not been known. Yeah. Well, let me ask you a question, it's slightly academic, but I've been thinking about it. You know, they say the 20th century was really rotten. We had World War I in which millions and millions of people died for no good reason. We had, you know, all this bigotry in the 30s getting worse and worse. And I don't know if you can say that FDR saved us by, you know, what he did during the war, but it was getting pretty bad. And then we had World War II in which millions of people died. And there was a lot of lying and propaganda going on and a lot of, you know, genocide going on in the cruelest, most mechanical way imaginable. And of course, this film helps us understand just exactly how cruel it was to people. So the 20th century really, you know, it doesn't end up very well as an enlightened period for the benefit of humanity. Even those moments where it seemed to be enlightened, I'm not sure you can say it was. Now, here we are in the 21st century, which is revealing itself. 2022, 2023. And we like to think that this country is enlightened and maybe for, you know, part of the time in the 70 years or so since World War II, it had been relatively speaking enlightened. But this is my question, Manfred. Is there any good reason why the 21st century can't turn into a disaster in the same way the 20th century did? Look, I had a colleague, Rudy Rommel, who published five studies on what he called democide. He didn't like the ethnic connotation for the mass killings that took place in the 20th century. And he, for that reason, used DMOS instead of SNOS. And he said in the 20th century, 160 million people were killed in non-war activities. So he did not include the war casualties. And when you're looking, when you're listening to American politicians, you know, talking about the situation today, it's as scary as it was in the 30s. I mean, the immigration issue, for example, the migration of millions of people will grow radically as a result of the ecological crisis. So what you have, you know, the Southern border in the United States, you have the borders of all developed countries in Europe as well as in Asia. So, but there is no general policy, you know, to deal with, you mainly with that. There is an avoidance of that. I mean, when you listen to the rhetoric, not only of Trump, but all of his followers, you have the same thing that you have, you know, that motivated Swedes to vote for, you know, the Sweden Democrats, which are the neo-Nazi party in Sweden. They don't want to have people come in that don't look like them. You have the same in Hungary, you know, with Orban, you had the same thing in Poland. It's a xenophobic disease, you know, that is in Western countries spreading like the plague. And so for that reason, you know, I'm not optimistic. Let's forget the plague killed a good part of Europe. That's right. Again and again. And so I put this question to you now. So we have had the constitution, the rule of law, it's been, you know, at least theoretically quite remarkable over the history of this country. And it's been a, you know, it's a city on the hill, it's a leadership point, and our political system is in many ways admirable. But we are now at a point where not everybody believes in that political system and the social compact is therefore threatened. And so we may have a situation where the people who hold the offices in Congress and the Supreme Court know that don't believe in it anymore. And if they don't, you know, that changes things. Now a lot of people feel, Manfred, I'm sure this has happened before in history, a lot of people feel so what? So my life will be the same. So what? We don't have the rule of law. So I'll still go to work every day, I'll get my paycheck, I'll be able to buy a car, I'll be okay because it doesn't really affect me. And on the other hand, I say to myself, as a lawyer, you know, an observer, I say to myself, no, that can't be true because if you undo the rule of law, you are also undoing the rights of each individual citizen. And we take those rights for granted. We have for many years. And if we lose them soon enough, like riding a bicycle down the street of Amsterdam in 1940 or 41 or 42, you know, you may have to give your bicycle back. You may have, you may lose the rights. You've been so, you- But you have to remember, you know, when you're praising the American constitution, this American constitution included the enslavement of 18% of the people living in 1789 in the U.S. It didn't include Indians, they were excluded. So what you have here is a genocidal dimension of the constitution that otherwise you could say was really an extraordinary document compared with all other societies in the world. So when talking about the United States, when praising it, when always has, you know, to remind oneself also of these deficiencies that were there. I mean, the first time slavery was mentioned in a constitution was when it was abolished in the 13th Amendment. And so, you know, for that reason, I think talking critically about the American constitution, its achievement has to include these negative dimensions that become quite obvious, you know, in Ken Burns' documentary, which I think is an extraordinary documentary. You know, I did not expect him to do something like that because normally he is in the business of celebrating America, you know? And this is not an uncritical celebration of America. This is a very, very critical portrayal of the United States. And before the background of the sickening history of Nazi Germany and all of its the victims that it has been responsible for. So when I'm listening, you know, when I'm listening to Republican politicians speaking about critical race theory and what it really means, namely being anti-whites, then I'm getting sick, you know? Because that's not what it does. Then I taught classes that had politics of race that included a critical reading of American history and making kids understand that, you know, you cannot leave out these negative dimensions. You have to include them in your discussion of American, of the greatness of the constitutional framework of this republic. If you don't do that, you know, you are simply perpetuating something that is really responsible for some of the things, you know, that have and still are occurring in the United States. I mean, when I watched Ken Burns, you know, the documentary and when I'm listening to, when I'm watching Christian Amanpour's interviews, you know, with a lot of politicians, it's absolutely unnerving, you know, to listen to some of these guys. Well, they're not only guys, they're also some crazy women, you know, some of them are worse than the men, you know, in their fascist policy statements that they are making, you know, the Congresswoman from Georgia Green and others that are running for office now. So what you have there, you know, is there are fascist tendencies that float. And I think what is so remarkable about the Ken Burns documentary is that you can make the connections between these tendencies that were afloat, you know, in earlier parts of American history and have never been critically included in the self-understanding of American history. You know, this unwillingness to look in the mirror, I think it's not hypocrisy. I mean, it may be having this impact on people looking at the United States as hypocrisy, but it's a will to be not informed. Is it related to American exceptionalism? Yes, you know, I have some problems with that notion, American exceptionalism, but this exceptionalism has justified a lot of harm that people do not want to confront. You know, they don't want to talk about it. I mean, coming back to Pearl Harbor in this book, Inclusion, I think it's a remarkable book about Hawaii being exceptional in a way it dealt with a crisis that could have torn apart, you know, the state and the refusal to put 160,000 people of Japanese background into camps was an extraordinary achievement that has to be praised. But I think Kaufman, the author of the book, is wrong when he says it had an impact on the mainland. It hasn't because mainland Americans don't know Hawaii and they don't know this dimension of Hawaii, Hawaii history and Hawaii politics. And I don't know how one can make mainland Americans understand Hawaii as being exceptional because it has all the features, you know, that could make America great. And well, you know, you suggest that there's really two Americas, one America is moral and kind and caring and the other America is hatred and bigotry and immoral or amoral and there's a tension between those two forces in our political world, let's say, that is always at play. These two vectors fighting each other to prevail. And the question I put to you is, can you remember a time in the United States, I guess we have to accept the Civil War when those two forces were so aggressively in contention and further that it appeared that those who would like to bring the country down may very well prevail, even more likely than the ones Rachel Maddow talks about in 1940 and the ones that Ken Burns talked about in 1940. Well, I am slightly optimistic about the fact that this disaster will not happen in November and in 2024. But I say only slightly because I see the possibility, you know, that American politics can go down the drain. And I'm told, you know, to leave and I must say, you know, as a people, as a person with dual citizenship, you know, German and American, it would be maybe a good solution to go to Germany. But you see the German story is interesting, not only because I'm German, but because I think they have come to terms with their, the evil of their history. And they whatever, you know, reminds them of that in actions that they get involved in becomes tempered, you know, by this knowledge. I mean, the hesitation that in now present, Chancellor Scholz, the Social Democrat has always been delivering weapons to the Ukraine is informed by this historical knowledge, you know, he is against war. He does not want to not only start a war that may, you know, end in a nuclear expansion. No, he is somehow, he is tempered, you know, by the history of German history, by the knowledge of German history to not go as easily in the direction, you know, that he is urged to go by his colleagues in the other European countries. So in that sense, the German situation, is a very good illustration of what can positively happen if a society faces the evil of the macro criminality of its past. But you cannot make that, you know, you cannot make a decree that people have to do that. Most countries do not do that. You know, they don't want to face that history. As you mentioned earlier though, Manfred, it took 20 years for Germany to actually address this. And for 20 years, as you said, they were silent. Yes, I grew up with this. That's a long time. And if you say that right now, we in this country have a pervasive level of ignorance, willful, even intentional ignorance, it would take a generation at least to correct that in the schools and among the population in terms of education. And so that's why, among other things, that's why this Ken Burns movie is so important because it talks truth to power. It talks truth to ignorance. Yes. Just as important. Remember the German story is different in one respect. Two, Germany got bombed twice in the 20th century back into sanity in World War I and in World War II. And these experiences are part of the German memory as well. You know, so in that regard, you know, and you could say the sanity that Germany, the science of the sanity, the political sanity that it shows today was that it became sane was as a result of Germany being after the war occupied by the four powers. Hundreds of thousands of troops were staying there, you know, from 1945 to 1990, when the unification took place. So Germany had the luxury to grow up and get out of that denial, the silence of denial because the forces that may have wanted to prevent this reckoning with the history to come to occur, they were contained by the occupiers, by the hundreds of thousands of American, British, French, and Russian troops. Germans could not take it out on each other. The same you could say happened in Japan, you know, but they were only the Americans. You could have gotten a civil war in Japan in after August 1945 easily, you know, there were a lot of people who were angry. So, you know, American politicians forgot this for example, when they moved into Iraq, Shiseki, you know, the local Japanese general who was asked in the Congress hearing, you know, how many troops do you think we should keep? And he said, well, 200,000 at least and he was laughed out of Congress. But that's what should have happened, you know, the Americans should have learned from the success in Germany and Japan that, you know, you cannot simply defeat the regime and then leave. If you want to be successful, well, I think the German stories and the Japanese to some extent also is the best lesson you can get, you know, don't leave. We don't have that. We don't have that. We have a disintegrating civil society, a disintegrating democracy and we don't have anybody to tell us that. And as a result, in my opinion, the accelerates the disintegration. But let me, we're almost out of time. We are out of time, Manfred. And I just want to ask you one question if you could address. And that is, so here we have this Ken Burns film and we have the Rachel Maddow podcast, both historical, both dealing with what happened in the 30s and the 40s and to some extent after that, immediately after the war in this country and so the historical study. And the funny thing is that comes now, it comes now. It comes at a time when our democracy is clearly under threat and disintegrating visibly. Is that, do you think that's a coincidence? Or is this something that was intended by both of them in order to teach us just as you say, we need to be taught? You mean both of when, what do you mean both? I mean, I don't know. Ken Burns episode and Rachel. Rachel Maddow's treatment of the history of fascism in the United States in the 30s and 40s. You know, I wondered, I mean, I did not expect Ken Burns documentary being what it really is an incredible achievement, intellectual achievement and being honest in a way that is absolutely remarkable. So one would have to ask him and I don't know whether that was intended, that was the motivation. It's possible, but you see what I find also interesting is how little has been written about the documentary. I haven't seen much. I haven't seen any editorial comments in the New York times or in other places in journals that may still come. But I have been waiting to see a public discussion about this documentary. I don't know why nobody talks about it. I mean, but you. But us, but think tech feel like we're ahead of the game on this and I agree with you. There hasn't been enough public discussion about this incredible documentary, but I'm happy that you and I can talk about it and other shows on think tech have talked about it and we're not finished with our conversation. So I hope you'll circle back with me and we'll have a further discussion about it. Manfred, it raises so many issues, so many critical issues. Yes, it is wonderful to have these conversations with you. Your openness is remarkable. Thank you, Manfred. Manfred Hennigson, a regular political science emeritus guest on think tech. We greatly appreciate your time and expertise in having these discussions. Aloha. 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