The Rise of the Fourth Reich

Only in America...

The Good German always seems to get a bad rap for failing to notice the odious stench of racist fanaticism, as it wafted through Bavaria during the heyday of the Weimar Republic. Many still wag a disapproving index finger in his general direction for failing to rise in confrontation, as legions of drunk veterans took to the streets during and after the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Previously, I too was one of these critics.

The lineage of the current radical fringe taking over the Republican Party extends back to German-American paramilitary organizations, which sprouted like a noxious invasive weed upon our shores after Hitler seized power in 1933. Millions of rapt Americans gaped in wide-eyed awe at mass rallies subjected to his spittle-laden rants.

As the Great Depression dragged on, angry immigrants among an increasingly unemployed working class, began to dress up in uniform for organizers clamoring to produce spectacles of hate inside the shrine of Manhattan: Madison Square Gardens.

After the unjustified invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939, world sentiment began to coalesce in opposition to Hitler. Important political figures such as Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Joe Kennedy, Sr. (father of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy), and Senator Prescott Bush (father of President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush), who were pivotal in financing the rise of the German Nazi Party during the previous decade, suddenly exhibited a quiet distancing of themselves from all things Hitler.

In their wake, the short-lived America First movement began to grow. Eventually revived by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, and ultimately resuscitated by Donald Trump, America First got its start in 1940 as the America First Committee. Founded by President Gerald Ford and other Yale Law School students, including future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and Sargent Shriver (father of Maria Shriver), the organization tried to convince average Americans that Nazis were not our problem.

As the Teutonic flavor of Friends of New Germany and the German American Bund had been far too extreme for the mainstream, America First intentionally avoided the use of Nazi symbolism, relying instead upon the popularity of Charles Lindbergh, who promoted a non-interventionist message in regards to German aggression in Europe.

Although the America First Committee disbanded and faded into obscurity just days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nationalist fervor had succeeded to a great degree in cloaking the group’s core anti-Semitic motives until September of 1941. This model of suppressing Nazi symbolism by use of American imagery, appears to have become the standard shell game used to promote fascist political ideology within the U. S. since that time. Strangely, it seems that it’s always been about the marketing.

There is no way to tell if this same isolationist message would find traction in our country today, should the endlessly hyped invasion of Ukraine by Russia ever materialize, but the same Republican players eager to milk the violence of January 6th to promote party lockstep, may tread there; anything to be the opposition party.

Without having this information in the consciousness of the people, it is hardly surprising that a third-rate con-man could build his empire of lies in less than a decade. Appropriating previously successful slogans like “America First” and “Let’s Make America Great Again,” without crediting President Ronald Reagan or others who were responsible for their value and utility, speaks volumes of his character.

The fact Ivana Trump revealed her ex-husband kept a copy of the collected speeches of Adolph Hitler in his nightstand for bedtime reading back in 1990, should have alerted us to the nature of this beast. Yet here we are, every Good American now faced with a possibility the Beer Belly Putsch on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, could eventually metastasize into the rise of a Fourth Reich, wrapped in red, white, and blue.