Published in Mason Valley News as a column by Quest Lakes July 22, 2019. Eleven days after this column was written, on Aug. 3, 2019, an armed white supremacist entered a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas and killed 23 people and injured 23 others. He targeted Latino shoppers, and before the shooting posted an anti-immigrant screed praising President Trump's border wall plan.
White nationalism is on the rise in the U.S., and leaders within the movement purposely obfuscate what they would need to do to achieve their ultimate goal of creating a white ethnostate where white “supremacy” is codified. They usually will admit, however, that they want policies that will end all non-white immigration. They sometimes also admit that they would like to criminalize miscegenation.
Nazi history includes a blueprint for how a society might go about trying to create a white ethnostate.
Under the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Jews in Germany were forbidden from working in civil service or government-regulated professions such as medicine and education. Leaving Germany was difficult, partly because Jews were required to turn over 90% of their wealth as a tax if if they tried to emigrate to another country. Even if they were able to leave, by 1938 there were few countries that would take Jewish emigrants at all.
In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted at a special meeting convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party in Germany. The Nuremberg Laws consisted of two laws. One was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which criminalized marriage between Jews and Germans and forbade employment of German women under 45 in Jewish households. The second was the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of “German blood” could be Reich citizens. People who were Black, Romani, or Jewish were classified as state subjects without any citizenship rights.
A 1935 Gestapo report noted that the Nazi party would set in motion a solution to the "Jewish problem.” A government sponsored propaganda campaign resulted in a renewed wave of vandalism, assaults and boycotts against Jews by their Nazi neighbors.
By 1941, the Nazis started mass murders of Jews across Europe. By 1942, all Roma were ordered to be sent to concentration camps.
Today in the U.S., white nationalists aim to roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In addition to the more commonly known white nationalist groups such as the KKK and neo-Nazis, “white identitarian” groups like the American Identity Movement, Patriot Front, and American Freedom Party are recruiting followers. Their public rhetoric claims their aim is “pride" in their white European ancestry, but their internal messaging calls for an ethnic “cleansing” of non-whites from America. There’s only one way to create a white ethnostate in a pluralistic society. The Nazis knew what that goal required. Today’s white nationalists know what it requires.
Audio of "dapper" white nationalist Richard Spencer saying what he really thinks: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20947833/richard-spencer-white-nationalism-audio-milo-alt-right
Recommended reading: Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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