Our fathers and grandfathers fought these filthy b*stards on the beaches of Normandy, The Battle of Bulge and right into the Fuehrer’s Kehlsteinhaus. We liberated the camps where this vermin massacred millions of Poles, Czechs, and Jews. The Nazi even killed their own mentally and physically handicapped people.
Now we welcome the monsters into the very halls of Washington DC.
The Nazi Party is outlawed in Germany and it most certainly should be in the capital of Democracy.
One guy may not be a lot. Would you go to bed with a rattlesnake under the sheets? Hey, it’s own one little snake.
I don’t have the time to look it up. But, wasn’t the Nazi party made illegal after Pearl Harbor? How did they manage to get the law changed?
I’ll expand further: We live in a country built on laws, and those laws are built on principles. Those principles are what our ancestors fought for on Normandy and Iwo Jima, not just words and names and flags.
Those principles are what we uphold when we allow everyone, even the most odious, a chance to fight fairly in the political arena without fear or favoritism.
Those principles are more important than any Nazi could ever be, then, now, or at any point in the future.
I’m not afraid of them at all. I have read extensively on the rise of the Nazi’s in Germany. They were a fringe party at first. Nothing to worry about. Their rise to power took everyone by surprise.
The German’s learned their lesson. Any Nazi symbols or organizations are illegal in Germany. Never the less they have seen a dramatic rise in extremists ever since merging with East Germany. They’re trying hard to at least control their growth. Having a sister party in America that can send money and support doesn’t help what the German government is trying to fight.
I know we’ve had Nazi’s in the U.S. since the 1930’s. They largely disappeared during WWII. I was under the impression it was still a banned party here. Apparently it’s not any more.
I know there’s a bunch of different extremist groups in the U.S. We had a big one in Arkansas in the 90’s that finally got closed down. Thank goodness there doesn’t seem to be any unity amongst these various groups. Each one seems to be lead by one guy or group that builds a compound for his followers.
The references to Illinois Nazis in the movie “The Blues Brothers” weren’t just weird jokes. They threatened to march in Skokie, Illinois in the late '70s. We allow Communist and Socialist political parties, we allow the Ku Klux Klan, and as long as they follow the laws of this country, we should - distasteful as they are - allow a Nazi party to exist.
Their rise to power was predicated on street gangs and the implicit support of a military and business class terrified of the prospect of a large-scale Communist takeover, as had happened on smaller scales in specific cities in Germany already. Weimar Germany was fundamentally different from, and less stable than, how America is now.
So they taught their extremists to use different symbols. And they have. And they are doing so now. Not the lesson you had in mind.
If they’re supporting criminal organizations that makes them a criminal organization, which is something entirely different from a political party. If they are doing so.
It was only banned during the war to the extent the government may have considered it treasonous to openly support the enemy. That’s all.
There’s a reason for that: They can’t convince their followers that the established government is a big enough threat. Why? Because the established government isn’t going after them in a big way, like, say, by banning their political party.
The First Amendment says otherwise. Essentially, it means people have a constitutional right to be assholes. The guy registered as a lobbyist. Fine. It’s not like anyone that matters is going to actually listen to him.
Were they ever banned in the US? I don’t think anyone’s answered that question directly. My cursory research says no, they weren’t, although they’ve had periods where they were very, very quiet.
OP, I’ve got to ask: what do you think would change for this gentleman if we did ban the Nazi party (or the Neo-Nazi party, or whatever)? Do you think he’d suddenly like brown people? Do you think he couldn’t lobby for whatever he’s lobbying for if he wasn’t a member of the Nazi party? Do you think he couldn’t recruit other hateful idiots to work with him if he couldn’t use the word “Nazi” in his brochures? In other words, what’s the point of banning the party? What would it actually change?
(I have the same questions for Germany, where it actually has been banned. What’s the difference? Banning a party doesn’t suddenly make assholes into nice people, does it?)
As tempting as it is to say “make it illegal” I don’t want to shut down opposing viewpoints, no matter how vile. That makes it ever so much easier for a (hypothetical) particularly vile Congress to opt to shut down MY viewpoints.
It’s the Nazi party, by name. Nazis are cartoon villains by now, anybody who listens to him (in a political sense, he may be a really good botanist or something so I won’t say listens to him at all) is pretty much insane.
It’s better to keep them out in the open. Otherwise they can rebrand themselves. Again, the Nazis are cartoon villains, they’ll never get traction – I can’t say the same about some unheard of party that just so happens to be spouting similar rhetoric to the Nazis. Even better, it keeps them in the spotlight which in turn keeps them from acting without scruples from the shadows. Having them lobbying Washington is much better than having them burning synagogues to make a point.
In Germany, we actually have several parties that don’t call themselves Nazi parties outright (since the actual NSDAP is indeed banned), but are nevertheless very sympathetic to their ideas and are very careful about wording their hateful ideology to avoid crossing the line into breaking the laws.
There have been several attempts to outlaw the most radical and outspoken party among them, and you are right, if banned their members would not suddenly become nice people. However, it is very painful to watch these dickheads get elected into local and regional governments (even if they then go on to make fools of themselves), and I’m not opposed to disbanding the structures in which they work.
The American Nazi Party was founded in 1959, so apparently it wasn’t an issue (as a practical matter, I imagine being an open supporter of the Nazi’s in or immedietly after WWII would be a pretty good way to get lynched, so the fact that it didn’t exist then isn’t really surprising).
Given that we locked up people in WWII purely for being Japanese, I imagine being a member of a hypothetical Nazi party would’ve landed you in prison. But I don’t think any such “ban” would survive a court challenge after the war.
I think the ‘adhering to their Enemies’ might be broad enough to stick.
However, we have a confounding factor: The organization called the American Nazi Party was founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell. The closest we had to an explicit Nazi party on our shores before WWII was the German-American Bund, which was directly linked to the Nazi regime in Germany and was, in fact, knocked out by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) beginning in 1938; by the beginning of our involvement in the war, its leader was in an internment camp in Texas and, after the war, he was deported to West Germany, who imprisoned him until 1951.