Nazis? Not Hardly
Debunking South-Haters

by Michael C. Tuggle

You've seen the accusations. Every time there's a debate on the Confederate Battleflag, someone compares it to the Nazi flag. Typical of such comments is this one from a letter to the Charlotte Observer:

‘The Stars and Bars [sic] represents the same thing to African-Americans as the Nazi swastika represents to Jews. Why should a people be subjected to a painful reminder of a time when they were systematically victimized, to be sold like cattle, starved, beaten, and murdered just because of their race?’

And so on.

Another round of Confederate flag bashing was unleashed after the election in Austria of a candidate said to have neo-Nazi ties. Editorial cartoonists around the US showed the Confederate flag flying over Vienna, while others penned the Nazi flag over Columbia.

The truth is, when you compare the underlying ideas of the Confederate and the Nazi governments, it's clear that such comparisons have no basis in fact. Further, if you take the next step and compare the Union and Nazi causes, some troubling (or amusing, depending on your point of view) parallels emerge.

First, what was Nazism? The Nazis created a centralised, authoritarian government based on nationalist and socialist principles that reject traditionalism and celebrate man’s sovereignty. Nazis, like Communists, believed in the centralised power of the state as an instrument for creating a better world. The state was supreme, an expression of the ‘people’s will.’ Hitler perverted the normal affection for one’s own countrymen into a materialistic creed of racial superiority. An alliance of state power and big business kept the masses busy with rallies that transformed men into machines. When Hitler promised that he would ‘teach Germans how to think,’ he meant that they would learn to act logically rather than being constrained by traditional morality or compassion. The old order, according to the Nazis, was based on a ‘slave morality’ that encouraged compassion and forgiveness, obvious signs of weakness to the Nazi mind. Nazi racial theories were based on ‘survival of the fittest’ ideas of progress, with superior races eventually coming to dominate inferior races. Thus, in the Nazi view, the all-powerful state should promote the growth of the superior race, and discourage the growth of inferiors.

Compare Nazism to the Southern Cause. Our Confederate forefathers were secessionists who wanted only to be left alone to preserve the traditional order, an order based on Christian principles and limited government. What use would Hitler have had for a Confederate constitution that limited the president to a single six-year term? States Rights, which seeks to disperse political power as a counterweight to the central government is based on the idea that fallen man simply cannot be trusted to wield concentrated power.

The status of Jews in the South would also displease Herr Hitler. Judah P. Benjamin served in the Confederate cabinet. David Yulee of Florida was the first Jew to be elected to the US Senate. After the war, former North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance toured the US making a speech entitled ‘The Scattered Nation,’ which argued for tolerance of Jews.

On the other hand, more parallels quickly come to mind when comparing the North to the Nazis. Like the Nazis, the Radical Republicans represented an alliance of Big Business and Big Government. Hitler’s first political speech was a blistering attack on a professor who'd advocated that the state of Bavaria secede from Germany. Like Lincoln, Hitler believed national glory justified mass slaughter, as well as the illegal imprisonment of dissenters. When the South peacefully seceded, Lincoln, leader of the party of nationalist expansion through Federal subsidies of Big Business, instead embarked on an unconstitutional campaign to hold and subjugate the agrarian South by any means.

Many Native Americans, aware they stood in the way of North’s dreams of nationalistic glory, allied with the Confederacy. Cherokee General Stand Watie was the last Confederate commander to surrender. The Union’s subsequent genocide against Native Americans included the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets on reservations. General Phil Sheridan, who declared the only good Indians he’d ever seen were dead, used the same techniques of warfare against Indian women and children he had perfected against civilian Southerners. But despite Sheridan’s and Sherman’s war crimes, Robert E. Lee refused to retaliate against Northern civilians. The North, like the Nazis, pursued a brutal policy of military aggression to pursue its ends.

And what of Grant’s Gen. Order number 11, which expelled all Jews from his theatre of operations? This order, issued in late 1862, was backed up by Assistant Secretary of War Wolcott, who approved such action against ‘Jews and other unprincipled traders.’

Such actions cannot be easily dismissed as accidents of war. When two parties undertake similar actions, it's critical whether they base those actions on shared underlying ideas. After the North brought its version of progress and enlightenment to the South, it then eradicated the Indians in the name of progress as well. Subsequent US campaigns against the Philippinos took nearly a quarter million lives.

The legacy of Northern ‘progress’ continued to manifest itself in subsequent social policy in Northern states. On 13 August, 1999, National Public Radio reviewed Nancy Gallagher's book Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State. Gallagher has documented the eugenics programs of the 20's and 30's, which she clearly identifies as being based on ‘the legacy of progressive era reforms.’ While Southerners rejected notions of the perfectibility of man, many Northern states implemented social policy based on just such notions. One of the groups targeted by the Vermont Eugenics program were the Abenaki Indians, who were deemed undesirable because of their traditional lifestyle of hunting and living off the land. Sterilization and reeducation were used to limit the numbers of the Abenaki and other so-called ‘undesirables.’ It's interesting to note that California conducted a similar eugenics program.

So, which side, North or South, has the most ‘links’ to the Nazi movement? Some of those links are fairly direct. The Reich Youth Leader in the Nazi administration was Baldur von Schirach, whose great-grandfather was a Union officer who fought at Manassas. Baldur told his captors at Nuremburg that he began to despise Jews at the age of 17 after reading Henry Ford’s Eternal Jew.


Mr Mike Tuggle is the chairman of the NC League of the South