Rush - D'Souza Part #2
D’SOUZA: Yes, the Google incident, to me, reflects the fact that the fascism of the institutions is scarier than the fascism of the street. We have these Antifa guys at Berkeley and in Portland and elsewhere who wear masks and carry baseball bats and bike locks as weapons. They intimidate, they terrorize, they use violence. They are quite clearly the most obvious living equivalent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the 1920s, or Hitler’s Brownshirts in the 30s.
The main difference is that the old fascists at least embraced the name; the new fascists pretend to be anti-fascist. Yet the harm they do is less than the fascism that comes out of, say, the studio bosses in Hollywood. Or the deans in academia. Or the powers-that-be in powerful media companies and corporate America. Because, see, those are the guys who actually can enforce a chilling atmosphere across whole institutions. If you get out of line, they will get rid of you. They will fire you, they will drive you from public life, they will humiliate you, they will make you a pariah.
The Nazis had a term, gleichschaltung, which means “coordination.” What the Nazis meant by this is that the whole society must march in lockstep with Nazi ideology. No one is allowed to fall out of line. And it’s precisely that gleichschaltung that’s now come to America on the left; we call it political correctness. But it’s the same ruthless enforcement of a uniform ideology across whole sectors of American life.
RUSH: Dinesh, you say that your book uncovers a secret history between fascism and the Democrat Party and the left. Now, I’m aware of the not-so-secret arrangement between militant Islam and Nazism, but this is a new one to me. You say that Hitler even got three very destructive, genocidal ideas from the Democrat Party. Media Matters went off on you on that, so you must have hit the bullseye. What are these three Democrat ideas?
D’SOUZA: Yes, Media Matters quoted me as if what I was saying is manifestly preposterous, even though the facts I’m about to describe are in the historical record, they’re undisputed. This is not my point of view versus somebody else’s point of view. This is history that is there for everyone to see.
Now, the first idea. Hitler was sitting in Landsberg prison and he was very frustrated that the British and the French had colonized pretty much the entire planet. He thought, “How can Germany become a world power when the British and the French have already taken India and Asia and large parts of Africa? What’s left for Germany to take?” Then Hitler remembered that in the 19th century, the Jacksonian Democrats, despite the existence of all these treaties with the American Indians, essentially decided to violate the treaties, throw the Indians off their land, drive them further west, displace them, resettle that land, and if any of the Indians remained, either kill them or attempt to enslave them.
So Hitler goes, “This is a fantastic idea. I don’t need to go to India like the British, I’ll just conquer in Europe. I’ll throw the Poles off their land, the Slavs, the Eastern Europeans, the Russians. We’ll resettle that land with German families, and if any of the natives stay back, we’ll enslave them.” The historians call this notion lebensraum, which means “living space,” but it’s basically German expansion in Europe. Hitler got the idea from the Jacksonian Democrats of the 19th century. So, that’s idea number one.
Idea number two. The Germans, in 1935, were drafting the Nuremberg Laws, the laws that turned Jews into second-class citizens. These laws segregated Jews into ghettos, they involved discrimination and state-sponsored segregation against Jews, and later confiscation of Jewish property. They also outlawed intermarriage between Jews and other Germans.
The senior officials of the Nazi Party get together to draft these laws, and the reason we know about them is that there was a transcript made of their meeting, because they felt it was a momentous occasion. They were founding the world’s first racist state. Then one of the Nazis in the justice department, who happened to have studied in America, basically told the Nazis: “You can’t start the world’s first racist state, because the Democrats in the American South have already done it.” He says: “All the things we’re talking about; outlawing intermarriage, segregation, discrimination, they already have these laws. They exist. So all we have to do,” he said, “is take the Democratic laws, cross out the word ‘black’ and write in the word ‘Jew,’ and we’re home free.” So the Nazis then began a detailed examination of the Democratic Party laws.
I should pause to say, Rush, that every segregation law in the South, without exception, was passed by a Democratic legislature, and signed by a Democratic governor, and enforced by Democratic officials.
RUSH: Absolutely right. There’s no dispute. That’s why it’s one of the most amazing reversals of history for the Democrats to have had that record and essentially make the Republicans guilty of all that. It’s stunning that they pulled that off.
D’SOUZA: Right, that’s a big lie unto itself, but the point I’m making is just simply that the Nazis based their Nuremberg Laws on the blueprint of Democratic Party laws that had evolved essentially since the 1890s.
The third, and to me the most damning, is the way in which the Nazis in the 1930s based both their forced sterilization laws as well as their euthanasia laws on the models that had been created by Margaret Sanger and a whole bunch of American progressives. These American progressives were into eugenics. As Margaret Sanger said: “More children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” That’s how she viewed birth control. Not as a matter of giving every woman a choice, but as a matter of convincing the successful and the fit to have more kids, and essentially to prevent the unsuccessful, the sick, the so-called “imbeciles,” and what she considered to be the disposable people, from breeding altogether.
So American progressives had come up with two ideas. The one that Margaret Sanger favored was forced sterilization. But the other idea was proposed by a California eugenicist named Paul Popenoe, who said: “We have all these useless people who are already born. It’s not enough to have sterilization; we have to have euthanasia, we have to kill these people off. And since there are a lot of them, we need ‘lethal chambers’ to do it.”
Lethal chambers. The Nazis were all over that one. Then the Nazis started this business of gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas. The first people they killed were not the Jews; they were the sick, the disabled, the group that was called “imbeciles,” and then later the Nazi euthanasia program was expanded into Hitler’s Final Solution. So all of this is, as I say, right there in the historical record. And I’m bringing it out.
RUSH: Let me ask about the historical record. Are the three examples you have just cited the result of your interpretation, or is there documentation, are there quotes, are there written passages that attribute to Nazis the acknowledgement of studying policies of the American Democrat Party and their application to the Nazi ambitions in Germany? Or are they separate facts and similarities that you are assembling as evidence?
D’SOUZA: I am in some cases relying on the work of other scholars. For example, there’s a legal scholar at Yale, James Whitman, who has examined the transcripts of the Nuremberg Laws, how those wer
The main difference is that the old fascists at least embraced the name; the new fascists pretend to be anti-fascist. Yet the harm they do is less than the fascism that comes out of, say, the studio bosses in Hollywood. Or the deans in academia. Or the powers-that-be in powerful media companies and corporate America. Because, see, those are the guys who actually can enforce a chilling atmosphere across whole institutions. If you get out of line, they will get rid of you. They will fire you, they will drive you from public life, they will humiliate you, they will make you a pariah.
The Nazis had a term, gleichschaltung, which means “coordination.” What the Nazis meant by this is that the whole society must march in lockstep with Nazi ideology. No one is allowed to fall out of line. And it’s precisely that gleichschaltung that’s now come to America on the left; we call it political correctness. But it’s the same ruthless enforcement of a uniform ideology across whole sectors of American life.
RUSH: Dinesh, you say that your book uncovers a secret history between fascism and the Democrat Party and the left. Now, I’m aware of the not-so-secret arrangement between militant Islam and Nazism, but this is a new one to me. You say that Hitler even got three very destructive, genocidal ideas from the Democrat Party. Media Matters went off on you on that, so you must have hit the bullseye. What are these three Democrat ideas?
D’SOUZA: Yes, Media Matters quoted me as if what I was saying is manifestly preposterous, even though the facts I’m about to describe are in the historical record, they’re undisputed. This is not my point of view versus somebody else’s point of view. This is history that is there for everyone to see.
Now, the first idea. Hitler was sitting in Landsberg prison and he was very frustrated that the British and the French had colonized pretty much the entire planet. He thought, “How can Germany become a world power when the British and the French have already taken India and Asia and large parts of Africa? What’s left for Germany to take?” Then Hitler remembered that in the 19th century, the Jacksonian Democrats, despite the existence of all these treaties with the American Indians, essentially decided to violate the treaties, throw the Indians off their land, drive them further west, displace them, resettle that land, and if any of the Indians remained, either kill them or attempt to enslave them.
So Hitler goes, “This is a fantastic idea. I don’t need to go to India like the British, I’ll just conquer in Europe. I’ll throw the Poles off their land, the Slavs, the Eastern Europeans, the Russians. We’ll resettle that land with German families, and if any of the natives stay back, we’ll enslave them.” The historians call this notion lebensraum, which means “living space,” but it’s basically German expansion in Europe. Hitler got the idea from the Jacksonian Democrats of the 19th century. So, that’s idea number one.
Idea number two. The Germans, in 1935, were drafting the Nuremberg Laws, the laws that turned Jews into second-class citizens. These laws segregated Jews into ghettos, they involved discrimination and state-sponsored segregation against Jews, and later confiscation of Jewish property. They also outlawed intermarriage between Jews and other Germans.
The senior officials of the Nazi Party get together to draft these laws, and the reason we know about them is that there was a transcript made of their meeting, because they felt it was a momentous occasion. They were founding the world’s first racist state. Then one of the Nazis in the justice department, who happened to have studied in America, basically told the Nazis: “You can’t start the world’s first racist state, because the Democrats in the American South have already done it.” He says: “All the things we’re talking about; outlawing intermarriage, segregation, discrimination, they already have these laws. They exist. So all we have to do,” he said, “is take the Democratic laws, cross out the word ‘black’ and write in the word ‘Jew,’ and we’re home free.” So the Nazis then began a detailed examination of the Democratic Party laws.
I should pause to say, Rush, that every segregation law in the South, without exception, was passed by a Democratic legislature, and signed by a Democratic governor, and enforced by Democratic officials.
RUSH: Absolutely right. There’s no dispute. That’s why it’s one of the most amazing reversals of history for the Democrats to have had that record and essentially make the Republicans guilty of all that. It’s stunning that they pulled that off.
D’SOUZA: Right, that’s a big lie unto itself, but the point I’m making is just simply that the Nazis based their Nuremberg Laws on the blueprint of Democratic Party laws that had evolved essentially since the 1890s.
The third, and to me the most damning, is the way in which the Nazis in the 1930s based both their forced sterilization laws as well as their euthanasia laws on the models that had been created by Margaret Sanger and a whole bunch of American progressives. These American progressives were into eugenics. As Margaret Sanger said: “More children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” That’s how she viewed birth control. Not as a matter of giving every woman a choice, but as a matter of convincing the successful and the fit to have more kids, and essentially to prevent the unsuccessful, the sick, the so-called “imbeciles,” and what she considered to be the disposable people, from breeding altogether.
So American progressives had come up with two ideas. The one that Margaret Sanger favored was forced sterilization. But the other idea was proposed by a California eugenicist named Paul Popenoe, who said: “We have all these useless people who are already born. It’s not enough to have sterilization; we have to have euthanasia, we have to kill these people off. And since there are a lot of them, we need ‘lethal chambers’ to do it.”
Lethal chambers. The Nazis were all over that one. Then the Nazis started this business of gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas. The first people they killed were not the Jews; they were the sick, the disabled, the group that was called “imbeciles,” and then later the Nazi euthanasia program was expanded into Hitler’s Final Solution. So all of this is, as I say, right there in the historical record. And I’m bringing it out.
RUSH: Let me ask about the historical record. Are the three examples you have just cited the result of your interpretation, or is there documentation, are there quotes, are there written passages that attribute to Nazis the acknowledgement of studying policies of the American Democrat Party and their application to the Nazi ambitions in Germany? Or are they separate facts and similarities that you are assembling as evidence?
D’SOUZA: I am in some cases relying on the work of other scholars. For example, there’s a legal scholar at Yale, James Whitman, who has examined the transcripts of the Nuremberg Laws, how those wer
