It is common to say that Hitler was “inspired by American policies”. However, the specific part of American History he was inspired by, through the philosopher Carl Schmitt, was Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency, as Schmitt analyzed the method by which a crisis can be used to justify any policy, with the American Civil War as one possible example.
The State Of Exception, or The Schmittian “Emergency”
Now if it was only the notion “crisis” that was taken from the American Civil War, that wouldn’t be enough to justify a connection, but the particular policies taken during that crisis can also be used as examples of the particular policies Germany would pursue during their deliberately induced crisis intended to take advantage of the concept of crises allowing otherwise impermissible actions. Schmitt basically thought that the way leaders like Lincoln governed in a crisis is the way leaders should always govern.
Thus if one can get oneself into one of these States of Exception then one can pursue all the exact same policies that were an outflow of that State of Exception, whether this be caused by an attempt to seize federal property by a State Government or somebody burning down the Reichstag parliament building, you just need something to get yourself into a State of Exception and then you can do whatever you want. Given that the system that is in an “exceptional” state is based on property rights, the purpose of the State of Exception is to have the ability to ignore property rights while being able to pretend like you are upholding them, as obviously this is the thing exceptions are going to be made about. This is because the system does not need to make exceptions to violate anything other than property rights since it does that during normal states of affairs.
I’m not the only person who says something similar, so I didn’t just conjure this up due to burning to many hemp rope bridges. For instance, Zohran Mamdani’s Father saying that Hitler was inspired, not by Jefferson Davis, but rather by Abraham Lincoln.
So why do people constantly say this? Is everyone just hating for no reason and somehow came to the same incorrect conclusion? Or do people of vastly different beliefs come to the same conclusions because this disparate view points
People will say the extermination of the buffalo was genocidal intended to kill the natives. Maybe that is true, but it was Union General Tecumseh Sherman who created the buffalo extermination strategy. He is also credited with burning down Atlanta, which was part of the same general strategy of economic warfare to make it impossible for the South to continue the war. He applied that same strategy to make it impossible for the Natives to pursue an independent existence by destroying their economy rather than fight them directly.
If one wants to say “Atlanta deserved it” then maybe one also ought to say “Buffalo deserved it” too. (Explaining the joke: there is a city in New York State called Buffalo as an analogue with Atlanta, but buffalo is also something American Bison are called, so the joke is implying that Sherman burned down the city of Buffalo instead of the city of Atlanta as an allusion to him also being responsible for the extermination of the plains buffalo. So the joke is that if Atlanta deserved it, the buffalo also deserved it, since the same guy is responsible for both)
Others might mention that Lebensraum was inspired by American History, but the specific period of time where that Lebensraum was occurring in American History was the US Civil War when Lincoln used the emergency situation to pass the Homestead Acts. The purpose being that they strategically wanted to surround the Southern States in the Anaconda Strategy and the Settlers would fight the slavers from taking large areas of land to work with slaves as the settlers would want that land for themselves.
Note that the year of the Homestead Act was 1862, which was in the middle of the civil war. This was possible because of what Carl Schmitt called emergency governance in the State of Exception. Normally you couldn’t just give property away for free, but Lincoln could actually do that during the Civil War because everyone was playing fast and loose with things. Anything which could be justified as necessary to win the war could be justified to be done, even if it violated private property, as the entire war in the first place was being waged to defend federal property from seizure by the Southern States.
Manifest Destiny Was Something People Literally Believed
The war of extermination by the Union against the Confederacy is often justified on the basis of “they owned slaves”. All well and good, but the Natives also owned slaves, so was a war of extermination justified against them? Rarely do you find a person in our current era who supports both the war of extermination against the South AND a war of extermination against the Natives, but at the time supporting both was the common position. The same person who thought “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” also thought “traitors should be fed to alligators”. Largely because neither of those positions was based on anti-slavery sentiment but rather it was based on Manifest Destiny sentiment that the Union should just control the whole continent and both the South and the Natives stood in the way of that.
Indeed if you can just take over a country because it has slaves then Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was totally justified as the declaration of war literally mentioned slavery, but most people are smart enough to realize that Italy just wanted to expand and slavery was an excuse. Similarly the Union just wanted to expand and needed an excuse. The carpet bagging economy that emerged afterwards was a crucial component of the Northern bourgeoisie’s quest for world dominance, and thus the first act of US financial imperialism the world now deals with got its jump start in the post-Civil War. Mussolini justified imperialism on this basis that smaller countries like Italy needed empires to avoid getting taken over by the larger ones, as he was predicting the current state of the world where the USA dominates Italy financially and didn’t want that. Japan also more or less used this as their justification.
World War 2 was largely a coalition of middle powers against the super powers of the USA, Soviet Union, and British Empire which dominated the whole globe except for the scraps the middle powers fought over. Indeed, the WW2 Axis was fighting each other in the Interwar Period. Nazi Germany provided support to Ethiopia against Italy, and to China against Japan. The middle powers all felt thy needed to replicate some kind of Manifest Destiny in order to compete. “But they fought America!!!” yeah they did, because at this time the USA was ALREADY an established power and so needed to fight those seeking to revise the world order. World War 2 happened because the middle powers all temporarily aligned against the super powers, and in the absence of the middle powers keeping each other in check the superpowers had to engage in an expensive war against the middle powers.
There is an interesting case where the British Empire could have prevented the rise of America as a superpower if they supported the Confederacy, but the foreign policy of the Confederacy failed to achieve this kind of support the same way the Continentals in the American Revolution got France to support them against the British. British strategy could have been getting middle powers of the Union and Confederacy to fight each other, but thy failed to stop manifest destiny, though they did try on numerous occasions, with Canada being the product of one attempt to create a pro-British middle power to challenge the USA, but the USA eventually just scooped it off them.
Preventing A Slave Rebellion Against the Union Army
The Emancipation Proclamation is actually similar to the Homestead Acts if you remember that slavery was based in the concept of property and the reason it was so difficult to abolish was because abolishing it was kind of like abolishing property, which is usually difficult to do in a system based on private property. If you recall the Fort Sumter incident which prompted the Civil War was over the States thinking they had the right to try to seize Federal Property, so the Civil War was technically being fought by the North FOR property retention, and it was the South that was against property and therefore the “bad guys”. The Emancipation Proclamation was essentially declaring that the property in the form of slave in the rebelling territories was no longer property on account of their rebellion, which was only possible with the same emergency situation as the Homestead Act where governance was ignoring the concept of the unviability of property to just give it away as they saw fit in order to win the war. One must recall the Emancipation Proclamation only impacted slaves in territories considered to be in active rebellion. Slaves in New Orleans occupied by the Union remained enslaved, while slaves in the still rebelling parts of the South were liberated.
Much of the reason for this was that slaves that crossed over to Union lines were technically still slaves as the Union had not abolished it yet, so the Union advancing to occupy the plantations they fled technically meant the Union was fighting to send them back to those plantations as they would be required to restore all property after the war. To avoid a slave rebellion, against the Union Army advancing, by all those slaves that had fled the plantations which were to be occupied, the Union Army needed to ensure that them advancing further did not technically mean they were advancing to the point that they would have to start giving the slaves back. This threat of the slave rebelling against the Union was a sufficient enough “State of Exception” that it could be justified to forsake the principle of property in this one particular instance if it meant preserving it in all other instances, as a slave rebellion would be deleterious to property rights, so if the choices are “slave rebellion against the union” or “confiscating the confederacy’s slaves” the choice was always going to be to confiscate the slaves of the Rebels. Note that the slaves of non-Rebels were not confiscated until the passing of the 14th amendment which was considered more “legal” because it passed through the convoluted process of making a Constitutional Amendment, and even then it retained the exception that involuntary servitude could be maintained as punishment for a crime to make it even more legalistic than it already was.
You can sort of imagine that they transferred the ownership of slaves from slaveowners to the slaves themselves such that thy now owned themselves in the same way that land was just transferred from natives to Northerners (more accurately “those who have never rebelled against the Federal Government” was the criteria used for determining who was eligible) through the homestead act, which was required under technicalities as prior to this slaves were quite literally treated as property. When people hear that “slaves were property” they think about it in terms of outrages, but they were also treated as property in the most boring senses which meant that people would take out loans to buy slaves with the slaves being collateral on those loans. There was entire debt bubbles related to slavery which made it difficult to abolish without ruining large sections of the financial system. This is why it took a Schmittian Emergency where they would just ignore the financial consequences of recklessly transferring property like this and just let the chips fall where they may. It is for this reason that New York was a hotbed of Confederate support in the North, as all the bankers were freaking out that all the loans they made would be worthless is slavery got abolished.
The Loophole To Abolish Slavery By Being Even More Racist
If you consider that slaves were literally property, then the laws against the expansion of slavery were in practice laws which forbid particular kinds of property from being brought into particular areas. This is what Bleeding Kansas where the shooting of the civil war actually started was about, in fact the anti-slavery side literally declared Kansas to be a White Ethnostate to make it illegal to bring slaves into it.
Following the model of Oregon, citizens of the 2nd Territorial District petitioned the 1855 Free State convention to incorporate a “black exclusion” clause in the Topeka Constitution. This would have prevented not only the enslaved, but also free African Americans from residing in the state. It was rejected by convention president James H. Lane and others, who allowed the issue to be voted on separately in the January 1856 referendum; the results favored exclusion.
Yet the constitutional convention called by the radical free state element, meeting at Topeka in September, 1855, was in favor of excluding free Negroes from the new state. ... The free state party was anxious to clear itself of “the stale and ridiculous charge of Abolitionism.” The Negro exclusion policy of the Topeka meeting was upheld, in a large majority, by the free state voters. “Three-fourths of the Free State settlers were in favor of a free white State,” says Villard, “and the heaviest voting against the free Negro was” in Lawrence and Topeka.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topeka_Constitution
Part of the reason for this was that the Doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty” (The topic of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates for their Senatorial election in Illinois, concurrent with the Bleeding in Kansas, before eventually facing off once again for the Presidency) declared that a territory would vote on if it would be a Free or Slave State at the point of admission into the Union, but this implied that it would be a Slave Territory until it became a State, and being a Slave Territory first would allow the slavers a chance to get themselves set up. The White Ethnostate concept was essentially a loophole which circumvented this by just making it illegal for black people to be in the state, so while a slaver could move to Kansas and then vote to make slavery legal, they could NOT bring any slaves with them until that happened. In the mean time the settlers just shot at the slavers on the pretext that bringing in black people was illegal in what was called Bleeding Kansas.
John Brown, who Americans seem to worship for a reason I will never understand, moved to Kansas into this period of time because he wanted to shoot slavers, but I find it humorous that in doing so he was essentially fighting for the white ethnostate since the Territorial Government he was fighting for made it illegal to bring black people into Kansas and so Slavers would be outlaws under such a law even if Slavery itself could only be made illegal after admission as a State.
Lincoln’s Republicans also passed the Anti-Coolie Act, with Coolie being a word for imported Asian labourers often in situations that resembled indentured servitude as opponents of Slavery predicted that after slavery of black people was abolished that slave owners would just import a bunch of Asian labourers instead so they had to close that loophole. This served as the basis of future Asian Exclusion as they just banned the entry of Asians entirely to end indentured servitude the way they tried to ban the entry of Black people as a means of getting rid of slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coolie_Act
Astute readers might think that all the illegal Mexicans are just a product of the slave owners trying to loophole themselves back into having some kind of bonded labour the way the anti-slavery people tried to loophole an abolishment of slavery by banning all non-whites. Therefore the Republicans and Democrats have not actually changed their positions over the centuries and everyone is still fighting the Civil War.
“But that’s racist, and slavery was racist. Racism is bad. I’m against racism so I’m good”. Yes, but would it have accomplished the goal of eliminating slavery or indentured servitude if they just banned other races from being in the country? There are many different ways to accomplish the same material end, some racist, some not. You can’t just say “racism” to a proposed solution to a material problem, you need to propose something with the same material result. Most of the time counter-proposals don’t actually change the material situation. Marginally increasing the treatment of migrant labourers by ending immigration enforcement does not abolish the migrant labour system intended to make it so that employers are not bound by local employment market dynamics. Employers can still reach into the recesses of some random country and scoop up random people so they can avoid paying local wages. If your “anti-racist” policy doesn’t end that system then you aren’t solving the problem in a material way. Banning immigrants does actually make that system impossible even if you don’t like that solution.
During the American Civil War you had both these “racist” and “anti-racist” opponents of slavery in the same political movement, because ultimately racism was immaterial. It is important to recall that the issue of slavery had dragged on for at least over a decade since the Compromise of 1850, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned it completely in favour of the slavers occurring in 1854 (Civil War begun in 1860). Immediacy of the solution took precedence over an optimal solution and everyone was willing to support any short term solution that might immediately stop it in its tracks. So yes, just banning people who would be slaves was considered a viable solution at that point, as that does get rid of slavery.
You might interject that you, as one particular kind of Democrat, is fighting to “free” the slaves (taken up the mantle solely of whatever particular opponent of slavery who you classify as being “anti-racist”) by abolishing this illegals system entirely by just giving up on border enforcement such that the migrants no longer need to fear deportation and then somewhere down the line they might be able to bargain with their employer for marginally better conditions. That maybe so, but the standard policy for Democrats here is that whatever the outcome these jobs must still be done by the migrants, even if in theory some might insist that they get better conditions if border enforcement stopped (“Slavery would be fine if they just treated the slaves better”). There is no material difference in the desires of Democrats here as regardless of how “extreme” one goes in regards to border non-enforcement, the implied assumption is always that migrants must be doing this labour as it is impossible for citizens to do it for some inexplicable reason. Opponents of migration, for any fault you might assign this, reject this premise entirely.
The Radical Republicans and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
By contrast, while the Practical Republican is not different than the Practical Democrat and just does performative border enforcement to appease the Radical Republican while making Exceptions to justify non-enforcement of agricultural labourers (The crops will rot in the fields if w don’t import migrants! This is a crisis worthy of ignoring the law!), just as the Practical Republican once did performative abolishment to appease to the Radical Republican, but the nature of who did labour and under what conditions remained unchanged with the emergence of the sharecropping system, the Radical Republican does endorse something which has a material difference: either the labour is done by Citizens, or it will not be done at all.
That “it will not be done at all” line is operative when it comes to it defining a materially different reality. Even the most radical proposals to tax the rich implicitly endorse the notion that those rich can with whoever they choose generate the wealth that is to be taxed to pay for those programs, and in response to this implicit assumption the bourgeoisie threatens that these taxes will result in the operation of those businesses that generate that potential tax revenue not occurring at all. The proposals of the Radical Republicans turn these threats by the Practical Republicans to end production if they can’t have the conditions the bourgeoisie desires into the goal. Rather than being afraid of the cessation of production by the bourgeoisie reducing tax revenue, the Radical Republicans WANT production by the bourgeoisie to cease UNLESS it occurs under the conditions demanded by the proletarian citizens, which is possible since as Republicans they have no desire that can come from taxation of the bourgeoisie and instead simply wish to be in control of the conditions where labour will occur.
To the Radical Republican this just seems like common sense, democratic even. Of course all labour in the country should be done by its citizens, how can we even call ourselves a distinct country otherwise! They think that they are asking for less than nothing as the only thing they consider is the cost to the taxpayer, indeed they are the only people who truly take this principle of bourgeois government seriously in their thinking that they should be able to do anything that costs the government no money, but to the bourgeoisie this is a demand to place the proletariat in between them and their ability to hire who they wish to maximize their profits, which in practice is also the proletariat so it mans the proletariat would be in charge of determining the fate of the proletariat as thee proletariat would be deciding democratic when and where and by who labour is to be done.
Pumped full of propaganda from birth as to what matters when it comes to governance, and completely devoid of any real thought leaders in their language as any potential intellectual has shirked that responsibility, by hyper focusing politics on only if something costs the taxpayer money as being the only thing which is impermissible, the proletariat in seemingly the most capitalistic society ever devised or could be devised has restricted itself to one sole modest demand: the complete abolishment of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the assignment of labour.
Contained within the demand that only citizens may work in a country, and that they are free to determine who it is that is a citizen, is the core of what makes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and also what means that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the only class dictatorship that is democratic and not based on the subjugation of any other classes. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat seeks only self-regulation, and is only oppressive towards the Bourgeoisie because it denies them the right to direct labour via whatever convoluted scheme they might come up with. The Bourgeoisie of course thinks this is oppressive towards them because without the ability to direct labour the Bourgeoisie would cease to be the Bourgeoisie, so preventing the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is an existential issue for them. Thus the demands of the proletariat in establishing their dictatorship will always be denied for whatever flimsy reason the Bourgeoisie can come up with, as they know that once it is established and the proletariat themselves is in charge of determining when labour occurs, the whole Bourgeois system will unravel.
While the wages system would be maintained under this dictatorship of the proletariat, and competition would still technically exist between citizens, the first steps would be taken where the proletariat gets to determine who does labour instead of the bourgeoisie. It matters not that they do not wish to split the profits with the bourgeoisie the way Democrats do, as the proletariat is demanding no profits can be made at all unless the Proletariat consent to it in the first place by “voting with their feet” on if a job even exists based on a citizen being willing to work it. The Radical Republicans violate the bourgeois principle that profits MUST be made in ways Democratic taxation never does by asserting that if no citizen is willing to work a job that this job cannot exist regardless of if the Bourgeoisie might be able to whipped out some imported labourer out of their back-pocket. In early days this labourer would be bought and forcibly ripped away to do this labour, now it is different but the consent of a slave does not change the underlying system they uphold.
Now I say Radical Republicans in reference to the term as it was used historically, but also in reference to political modernity. I do this because contrary to widespread belief amongst Americans, the factions have not changed and American politics is the same as it ever was. There was indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat around the US Civil War, and this same faction if their demands were realized would establish another one. Objections to this statement would come from people who simply don’t know what the original Radical Republicans were like, but I assure you any objection you might have to them in the modern day existed back then.
It should be noted that you will find amongst the Radical Republicans people who might fit into your adequate definitions of an “anti-racist” but the reason they fit in so well is precisely because that faction within the party was so full of oddballs that you would have weirdo anti-masonic Thaddeus Steven who briefly joined the nativist Know Nothings being the exemplary figure of anti-racism within the Radical Republicans. If banning black people to abolish slavery strikes you as a contradictory position to hold, then being pro-black because at least they aren’t immigrants will make your binary concept of racism brain explode, but that was a faction within th Know Nothings. The Radical Republicans attracted such groups of people who ran the gamut of every conceivable position as they only needed to agree on one thing: slavery must be stopped IMMEDIATELY.
In practice Americans simply don’t know their own history so they will simply refuse to believe that slavery was abolished by the vulgar masses who held opinions the vulgar masses would hold. (Yes, slavery was abolished by the 19th century equivalent of anti-vaxxers because they were the only ones crazy enough to actually want to do something about it, go cry about it) Advocates for “the masses” or “the workers” would also be aghast to find that the masses might hold opinions held by the masses. I assure you that since that the Republican Party of our current day has never been more like the original Republican Party than they have ever been since before Reconstruction.
Inclusive vs Exclusive Language, Or In Other Words, Irrelevancy
When tasked with determining if the inclusion of people from out of the country is more important than placing the conditions of labour under democratic control some “radicals” might balk a the assertion that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat might be limited to something as arbitrary as “citizenship” in the first place. Such people have determined that “inclusion vs exclusion” is the dividing line of politics rather than class conflict. In reality whether a policy is “exclusive” or “inclusive” is what is arbitrary, and “inclusive” policies can be designed that accomplish the same things as “exclusive” ones, so one need not care if the trial run is based in exclusion as it was essentially just a flip of a coin if one ended up excluding or including when the policy was pulled out of the recesses of a class’s consciousness.
Structurally this demand to require jobs to only be done if they meet the demands of citizens to do them is identical to the Programme of the French Workers Party from 1880, which is prefaced by statements that these demands exist with the aims of the eventual expropriation of the capitalist class.
The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means of organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following immediate demands:
4) Legal prohibition of bosses employing foreign workers at a wage less than that of French workers;
One might point out that this is not demanding that no foreign workers can be employed, but rather they can only be employed at the same wage as a French Worker. Yes, that is what it says, but the implication of foreign workers only being paid the same as French workers means that if no French workers is willing to work for less than a specific amount, no foreign worker can be employed at that amount either. The employer must offer whatever it is that French workers demand instead of circumventing French workers entirely by only hiring foreigners for less.
The objection someone might have to the vulgar demand of the Radical Republicans to ban hiring all foreigners to prevent them from being paid less than the Americans who would otherwise work the same job should go away when confronted with this demand by the 19th century Programme of the French Workers if it was simply based on inclusive versus exclusive language, but the material results of policies are not based whether one talks in an inclusive or exclusive manner, but rather the material results of policies are the result of party making the demands. In both cases, inclusive or exclusive, the party of the proletariat is demanding that the citizens of the nation have the power to decide the rates at which labour is to be done, rather than the bourgeoisie. In my experience the naysayers will raise objections over it not being “inclusive enough” in both cases anyway, they just look more ridiculous in the latter case.
If one objects to “exclusion” contained within the details of the language of the demand, one cannot “counter” the exclusionary demands of the proletariat to be in control of the rates at which labour is to be done with inclusionary language if that demand to moderate the language results in a materially different outcome, such as the proletariat not being in control of the rates at which labour is to be done.
They will reject it, and will rightfully consider those demanding the language change which results in a materially different outcome to never be trusted. Any “inclusive” alternative MUST preserve the ability of the proletariat to decided on the conditions of labour with their country by refusing to work when conditions are not to their liking. If your “inclusive” counter-proposal to just banning non-citizens falls short of that, your proposal is a step backwards, not an “inclusive step forwards”.
Indeed people “counter” with an entirely different proposal that doesn’t include putting the proletariat in charge of determining the conditions labour is done because that was the point of making a big deal out of the “exclusion” in the first place.
In the American case this demand for the proletariat to decide on the conditions of labour within their country has manifested in a vulgar exclusionary language only because the educated inclusionary “thinking” (I use that term loosely) class has neglected to think up an inclusionary language for achieving the same material outcome that the proletariat demands. That burden of producing “educated” “non-fascist” language in the English speaking world once against falls upon the French (in the nineteenth century no less!) due to the complacency of the English-speaking intelligentsia in their historical refusal to ever be intelligent about anything.
The lack of a sympathetic intelligentsia to “do the thinking for them” didn’t stop the English-speaking proletariat though, it merely vulgarized them as they had to operate within anyone attempting to elucidate the purposes behind why they were making particular demands. Even without a “brain” the proletariat still came to the conclusion that they, rather than the bourgeoisie, ought to be able to decide which conditions of work are worthy of being done, and which should result in the operation closing down (something the bourgeoisie routinely threatens in regards to any taxing demand created by the “intelligent”, because taxing the rich is something dreamt up by the intelligent, but the workers deciding when the rich can hire them is something only the dumbest workers voting against their interests could ever want), the workers just made the fatal mistake of phrasing it in a way which caused the "brains” to shriek and reflexively scurry back into the arms of the employers.
Much of the reason that these demands manifest first in exclusionary terms is that it presents a quite simple solution to the issue. If the employers use imported labours to circumvent local labour conditions then you can just ban that practice. “Just ban it” is immediate. That is an immediate answer that is actionable even if not ideal. The consequences of banning “it” can be dealt with as they emerge as opposed to deliberating upon it endlessly while doing nothing. It is no surprise that in the decade long deliberation on the question of slavery those for which the issue was of immediate importance and couldn’t afford to deliberate just came up with the solution of “then ban the slaves”.
Der Fuhrer Burgermeister von Lincoln
Even the anti-semitism has precedents in the US Civil War as Union General Ulysses S Grant expelled Jews from the states under his military occupation because he accused them of smuggling cotton out of the southern states which was prolonging the war by funding the Confederate War Effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)
The advancing Confederate Army actually ended up rescuing Jews from expulsion.
The Secretary of State in charge of foreign policy of the Confederacy was also a Jewish man named Judah P. Benjamin. Now it should be noted that the Confederacy FAILED to achieve its foreign policy objectives of getting recognition from other major powers, notably the British who would have the greatest geopolitical interest in it by permanently dividing their main rival power, so not only were Jews running the Confederate foreign policy, they were also BAD at running it, which is similar to the situation where not only are Jews secretly running Israel and are also bad at secretly running it.
If one asserts there is a Jewspiracy one might think that maybe they undermined the Confederacy deliberately, but the other Jewish Senator who supported the Confederacy, David Levy Yulee, was eventually tried for treason by the Union due to him assisting the Confederate President Jefferson Davis in escaping. It should be noted that this is a completely futile act from when the war would have already been well and truly lost, so there is literally no reason to do this if Jewish involvement was just to undermine from within. They stayed loyal to the traitors until the end.
I point this out as a counter another prominent Jewspiracy claim involving the Soviet Union. Jews being involved in government is one thing, but the real question is if those Jews were loyal to the government they were involved with, or their involvement with it just amounted to undermining it. The Jews involved in the Confederate government demonstrate a profound loyalty to it despite their incompetence. By contrast the Jews involved in the Soviet Union were always disloyal to it and constantly undermined it in both a deliberate and plausibly deniable manner. Trostky is the most famous example but, there was also the likes of Genrikh Lyushkov who defected to Imperial Japan after asserting that he was “merely following orders” to explain away all his crimes while Head of the NKDV in the Far-East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Lyushkov
On top of that you also had Fanny Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin, and the two Jewish Bolshevik Triumvirs who defected over to Trotsky to form the United Opposition after having been in alliance with Stalin against Trotsky’s Left-Opposition, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, were also notable for having been opposed to the idea of the Bolsheviks attempting a unilateral takeover during the October Revolution, which Lenin remembered in his Testament.
The October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [their opposition to seizing power in October 1917] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.
None of this has to mean anything, but if you are going to assert a Jewish conspiracy, the conspiracy needs to at least conform to the actions of the Jews in involved, and all actions point to if there had been a Jewish conspiracy, it would have been against the Soviet Union rather than for it. By contrast the Jews involved in the Confederacy seemingly remained loyal to it long past the end of the cause being lost.
So Jews ARE loyal, they are just loyal to reaction.
“But what about all my favourite Social Democrat Jews!!?!” Congratulations on correctly identifying that Social Democracy is the reactionary position. Accusations of Judeo-Bolshevism fall a little flat when you start counting the number of Jews involved with the Mensheviks, and Menshevism is largely what you can describe the usual Social Democrat position to be.
The only time I can point to Jews being loyal to a revolutionary state is their support of the Williamite Wars against the British Catholic Jacobites. Anglo-Catholic books by authors like E. Michael Jones assert that there is some kind of “Jewish Revolutionary Spirit” due to their support of the Protestant English revolution against Anglo-Catholicism, but he clearly did not think through the entire rest of Jewish History where Jews acted in the most reactionary ways imaginable.
The revolution can exist with Jews or it can exist without Jews. If Jews remain with the revolution rather than undermine it, the revolution won’t have a problem with them, but if they undermine it the revolution will have to take action against them like any other enemy.
From a Schmittian perspective the expulsion of the Jews by the Union Army occurred for the exact same reason that Germany used to justify their actions. The opinion of “the revolution” on these actions does not measure based on “anti-semitism” or “fighting anti-semitism” but rather the revolution generally thinks that defeating the Confederacy was a good thing so whatever actions taken to do that were either necessary, or if they weren’t necessary and were an “excess” the actions would be regrettable but the revolution will not stop itself just to obsessively contemplate if it is in the “morally correct” position simply because an excess occurred.
In regards to the terror in the French Revolution, it might have been necessary, or it might not have been. Marx’s daughter suggested that in the French Revolution the Terror was an act of the terrified bourgeoisie, with this passage coming from a discussion Marx and Engels had over it by highlighting it.
The defence of Paris, if nothing extraordinary happens in the course of it, will be an entertaining episode. These perpetual little panics of the French – which all arise from fear of the moment when they will really have to learn the truth – give one a much better idea of the Reign of Terror. We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in 1793 lies almost exclusively with the over-nervous bourgeois, demeaning himself as a patriot, the small petty bourgeois beside themselves with fright and the mob of riff-raff who know how to profit from the terror. These are just the classes in the present minor terror too.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_09_04.htm
Given that this comes from Marx’s daughter it suggests when the French Revolution was still new (Marx and Engels were born just after the end of the Napoleonic Era and so were the first generation to be born when the French Revolution was firmly in the past) opinion among revolutionaries was that the terror was necessary even if perhaps regrettable. Marx and Engels themselves never questioned it, but as time went on it began to be questioned more, and identified as a product of the bourgeoisies precarious position. The possibility therefore exists that this was merely a characteristic of the bourgeoisie and a proletarian revolution might not need such a phase. Nevertheless the historical progressiveness of the French Revolution is never questioned even if repeating parts of it gets to be deemed unnecessary.
In this sense while we can question why something happened, if it was necessary, who was ultimately responsible, but we don’t question our stance of being on the side of revolution vs reaction simply because this stuff happens. Marx and Engels were ultimately supporters of the French Revolution and were in a sense trying to take the next steps, but at the same time acknowledge that it was a bourgeois revolution and a proletarian revolution might differ.
For the US Civil War, the actions of the smugglers were thought to be aiding the reactionary enemy, the Confederacy, and thus the population accused of engaging in these actions had to be removed in order to alleviate the “Emergency” created by the War, which was being prolonged by the actions of the party to be removed. Anything could be justified as part of the War Effort, including the expulsion of a particular population.
The same exact thing can be said about Germany’s actions in the war. They thought that the Jews were detrimental to their war effort so they got rid of them. One’s opinion on this is ultimately related to one’s opinion of the war over anything else. Nobody was going to change their mind on who they were supported just because an atrocity occurred, instead the sides and therefore opinions pre-distributed themselves already based on the side one supported before the war based on class interests.
The reason I say this is because the revolution at the moment is clearly on the side of the proletarianized Palestinians seizing back their land from the circular system of Israeli seizure and then sales to fund the war effort. While for a time the Israeli system can continue this circular process of seizure and sale, the inevitable result of it is a larger and large proletarianized population that will seize it back. Supporters of the revolution worldwide that recognize this will end up supporting this revolutionary cause. This is inevitable and is not a product of any innate bias against any group of people.
This might be falling on death ears, but revolutionary support for Palestine is not just some kind of unique bias against Israel, but instead can be logically deduced from first principles. If the revolution sides against you, it is because you have taken the side against the revolution.
With all these things together: exterminations, ethnostates, bankers freaking out, Schmittian emergencies, Jewish expulsions, the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln has Hitler written all over it. There is even a German connection where a bunch of Germans left Germany after 1848 and came to America and many of them fought for the Union in the Civil War, so it is not out of the question that the Germans in Germany would have known all about them. Thus the Nazis could have been inspired, not by the Confederacy as some might say, but instead by the side that the Germans had supported in the Civil War, the Union, but not the Union of mythology, instead the Nazis were inspired by the ACTUAL Union as it was in reality.