leftist-daily-reminders:

Can we please stop treating resistance to fascism and Nazis as this emphatically American thing? I’m seeing people reblog Captain America and Indiana Jones punching Nazis with the emphasis “as American as apple pie”; then there’s the one where DC’s Joker refuses to work with Marvel’s Red Skull (a Nazi) because the Joker is “an American criminal lunatic, goddammit!”; “I even saw a Richard Spencer punch video with Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” edited into the background.

Like, what the hell? Y’all do realize that the Nazis got their inspiration for the concentration camps from the American Indian reservation system, right? This nation was built on active ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population and colonialist domination, for god’s sake; and that’s not even going into the centuries of mass enslavement on the basis of race. America as a nation-state does not have some glorious patriotic tradition of eschewing fascist racial hierarchies. 

It opposed the Nazis in WWII because it was strategically necessary for it to do so; Germany would have represented a rival power in Europe that would in turn cut down the material interests of American capitalists (i.e. economic/state competition). Though there are plenty of American individuals who fiercely oppose fascism on moral grounds, the American ruling class actively supports fascism abroad when it does align with their material interests. In another important example, “American as apple pie” Henry Ford was deeply antisemitic and supported Hitler during his rise to power. Moneyed interests were supporting the Nazis up until a certain point, because they were subduing militant labor and “the reds”. Those in power (especially in America) have historically uplifted fascism around the world at the expense of socialist and labor causes, for obvious reasons: it aligns with their material interests to block movements in favor of economic democracy. 

TLDR: You have not argument to stand on when you base your anti-fascism around “cuz America!”