First, I wish that Somni wasn't banned, I just hate when users are banned when something can be explained in a way that could convince them otherwise. Now, I don't know Somni from adam and so maybe Somni has a track record of defending bad history in the name of nationalism (I don't know, probably not), but I think it's possible to respond to Candace Owen's comments in context and explain how they're factually incorrect from a historical standpoint, and from a contemporary standpoint, miss the point of what 'America' is.
I'm quoting Somni not to argue against Somni, but to explain why Candace Owen's comments about Hitler, Nationalism, and Globalism are incorrect, and why nobody should believe in them. I know that Somni can't reply to this post, but I'm sure there's a handful of lurkers who might agree that Candace Owen's has a point about Hitler, Nationalists, and Globalism, and so I'm replying to Somni's post as a response to anybody who might think there's value to her argument.
There isn't.
I'm paraphrasing Owens here, but she says that Hitler's problem was globalism, not nationalism, and that if he stayed focused on just nationalism -- making Germany Great -- then she wouldn't have a problem with Hitler or perhaps Hitler would be less problematic. I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that Owens would not have had a problem with Hitler up until he invaded Poland. There is such a key flaw in this argument and it's the crux of why Nationalism is despicable. Germany in the 1930s had a large Jewish population, about 500,000 people, and about 80% of Jews in Germany were German citizens, about 400,000 people. In addition to Jews, there were hundreds of thousands of people -- homosexuals, other racial groups, the mentally handicapped, phsychologically disturbed veteran of WW1, drug users -- who were also considered impediments to German Nationalism, which Hitler -- an Austrian by birth -- did not consider proper Germans. So, to establish a proper Germany for Germans, Hitler and his Nazi allies devised a campaign of stripping citizenship, expulsion, arrested, and of course eventually, slaughter, which has come to be known as the Holocaust.
This is antithetical to how a leader should be leading a nation. If a leader has to destroy 500,000+ of his country's citizens to establish an acceptable nation, that person is not a leader, they're a monster.
Owens' argument is sort of like a bastardization of a very true argument about Europe's ability to police itself in the wake of the Treaty of Versaille and World War I. European powers had given themselves the ability to keep Germany's military war making ability in check for most of the 10 years following World War I, but they had no mechanism in place to prevent any country from systematically destroying its own citizens. Despite there being evidence in the aftermath of World War I that the Ottoman Empire/Turks had systematically destroyed native Armenians living in and around present-day Turkey, Europe had not sought any sort of mechanism to prevent that from happening again... They assumed it just wouldn't happen: Why would a country try to destroy its own citizens when those citizens could be used for the war machine? Well, they didn't anticipate how Hitler and the NAzis would motivate centuries old European anti-semitism in an effort to annihilate Judaism. HAd Hitler never invaded Poland, it's entirely likely that he could have "solved" the German National "problem" (that is, the existence of Jews and undesirables within Germany and Austria) because Europe would have had no existing mechanism under the Treaty of Versaille to do anything about it.
Owens deems that Hitler's problem was that he was a globalist. Well, not really. Hitler saw Poland and Western USSR as being rightful German territory. Hitler's invasion of Poland and eventual invasion of the Soviet Union was not a
globalist vision, it wasn't to make Russia German, it was because he believed in an ancient, flawed, mythical vision of Germany as this everlasting nation that expanded well beyond the borders drawn up after Versaille. This is particularly important to me because I'm Polish: Hitler's blitz through Poland wasn't justified via globalism,
it was justified via nationalism.
Owens' retelling of history to fit a nationalist lens is not only wrong -- Hitler was not a globalist when he started the extermination of Jews or when he invaded Poland, he was a nationalist -- but it's also deeply threatening to the concept of the United States. THe United States is not a national homeland for anyone, it never was and was never intended to be. It was always and still is an experimental project around building a country not for a particular nationality, but for a particular ideology -- the ideology of constitutional democracy.
Owen's comments on Hitler wanting to 'Make Germany Great,' reminds me of a retort for people who defend or characterize Putin as being a 'strong' leader. A lot of people commonly say, "Well, Putin may be authoritarian, but you've got to credit him for being a strong leader..." usually as a contrast to Gorbachev. One of my favorite current affairs commentators (and world famous Chess Grand Champion), Garry Kasparov has a saying that '
Putin is a strong leader like how arsenic is a strong drink.' Likewise, with authoritarian dictators like Hitler, or even on the left like Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Hugo Chavez, and others, they're not strong leaders and they're not effective leaders. Hitler may have built a world-class highway, but he wouldn't have been able to justify the cost of that highway without nationalizing private industry in Germany, and he couldn't have nationalized private industry without the Nazi war machine, and the Nazi war machine is what led directly to the deaths of not just millions of innocent civilians, but millions and millions of Germans. THe cost of a highway is not worth the price of tens of millions of civilians dying. Likewise with any other authoritarian "strongman."
