In February 1945, Winston Churchill, FDR, and Stalin made a decision. They would wipe out the Nazi party. And wipe it out they did. They tackled the Nazi ideology and tore it out, root and branch. They insisted on reconstructing German society without inviting the people who infected it it with Nazism to partake.
This was an imperfect endeavor, carried out by people whose hearts were not always in the right place. After all, the United States made use of Wehrner Von Braun, who was both pivotal to the U.S. space program as well as a user of Nazi slave laborers. Not for nothing did Tom Lehrer sang one of the most delightfully offensive songs of his career, Wernher Von Braun, where he cheerily reminds us of Von Braun's amoral nature as the latter learns Chinese for the sake of a better opportunity.
Seven thousand miles away, also in 1945, U.S. armed forces forced Emperor Hirohito to declare that he was not a god and that the population should not bow to him or to any other royal, a radical act that paved the way to democracy.
Seventy years later, we have yet to de-Nazify the American South. When I worked in the Tennessee Government, each day I had to enter the War memorial building and legislative plaza- which was supposedly named after World War One veterans- and gaze upon a statue of that famous WWI vet, Nathan Bedford Forest, otherwise known as the founder of the KKK. And though Tennessee was a border state, parts of it were still steeped in Forest-mania, such as the charming state park named after him , and thegiant gold and silver statue visible to commuters on I-65.
South Carolina is even worse. Along with such luminaries as Alabama and Mississippi, it too celebratesConfederate memorial day. Of course, South Carolina has a long history of using slaves, having first experimented with Native Americans before switching to Africans.
Centuries later, there is no sign that the Confederate states are made to feel one iota of shame for their past. Say what you will about Germany, they have atoned. And the American South and society as a whole? It elected- twice- a man who saw fit to start his presidential campaign near a KKK killing ground, two thousand miles from his California home, singing the sweet song of states rights.
Sarah Palin, from the famous Confederate stronghold of Alaska, parades around with a crowd waving the confederate flag.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Twentysomethings now parade around the flag in front of the White House. A senior leader in the U.S. government yearns for segregation. Political rallies feature people with shirts urging that the Republicans "put the white back in the white house."
This is not about being partisan. I don't believe that Mitt Romney- a man who seemed to divide the world into useful and useless without regard for identity- is a racist. This is about the fact that when a racist email is sent out by a government employee from the office of a Tennessee State Senator, it is considered acceptable to respond by noting that the big problem was that it was sent to the wrong list of people. Imagine Germany for a moment: Imagine an aide to a German Parliment leader sending out an email of a big nosed Jew with a dollar sign tattooed on his arm. Can you imagine it? I can't.
I realize that voters are considered an unpleasant but minor irritant in modern American politics but this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. By refusing to make confederate nostalgia unacceptable, by refusing to stand against bigotry in politics and symbolism, we aren't merely asking for a massacre in a Black church, or shooting a man in the back and planting a gun on him- to name two incidents from Charleston this year alone- we're begging for it. Nobody taught us not to.