1/Reconstruction vs. De-Nazification: Another US/Germany comparison.

Following up on the discussion of what the US might learn from Germany's efforts to confront its Nazi past.

2/ Would Germany's "reckoning with the past" have succeeded to the degree that it did had it not been divided and occupied for two decades, and many Nazi leaders and collaborators tried and imprisoned? It's an open question, but I am not sure.

3/ Imagine that the occupation had only lasted five years? That many Nazi leaders had been swiftly rehabilitated and then restored to honor and power? That a sanitized version of the Nazi race laws had been put back in place? That it retained its control over Baltics and Poland?

4/ IOW: Imagine that the history of post-Nazi Germany looked like the history of the post-Reconstruction United States? Where the Freedman's Bureau was followed by Jim Crow and Confederate leaders were quickly reintegrated.

5/I sometimes wonder whether America's penchant for historical amnesia and moral whitewashing -- its impulse to always "turn the page" -- did not take root during this era.

6/ That impulse MUST be forcefully resisted now. This time MUST be different. It's time the country confronts its past. Because it's still not past, as evidenced on 1/6.

7/ Right now, that means rejecting calls for a false unity. When the Trumpist right calls for "unity", they mean unity on their terms, a unity premised on whiteness.

8/ As @Davidblight3 shows in his masterful book, "Race and Reunion", we've been down that road before. It does not end in multiracial democracy, but in Herrenvolk "democracy."

9/ To his credit, I think Joe Biden actually understand this. In his Inaugural Address, he did NOT preach unity as unanimity. He said "if ENOUGH of us" unite...That enough could and should include many white, conservative or Americans. But NOT White #ChristianNationalism.