The Independent View

Sena­tor Barack Obama com­pared post-​World War II Amer­ica with Hitler’s Nazi Ger­many in a 2001 dis­cus­sion of the lead-​up to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion (1954). While Jim Crow and all that went with seg­re­ga­tion of African-​Americans is a bloody stain on our national his­tory, com­par­ing those acts to the geno­cide of the Holo­caust is an insult to the peo­ple of the United States and reflects, at best, a seri­ously flawed under­stand­ing of history.

In the Jan­u­ary 18, 2001, Chicago Pub­lic Radio con­ver­sa­tion hosted by Gretchen Hel­frich enti­tled The Court and Civil Rights, Obama was joined by Den­nis Hutchin­son and Susan Ban­des. The appar­ent focus of the dis­cus­sion was the bal­ance between the how far the Supreme Court would inter­vene and the con­tent of the court’s decisions.

The con­ver­sa­tion started out with The Court before the 14th Amend­ment and worked for­ward. Pick­ing up with World War II…

Obama:

One of the things that should be pointed out is that first the NAACP mounts sys­tem­atic thought­ful strat­egy to lay bare the con­tra­dic­tions that are embod­ied in the doc­trines and ide­o­log­i­cal struc­tures that the court is work­ing with.

The sec­ond thing is that just to take a real­is­tic per­spec­tive is that there is a lot of change going on out­side of the court that you know the judges, you know have to take judi­cial notice of.

I mean you have got WWII you have got the doc­trines of Nazism that we are fight­ing against that start to look uncom­fort­ably sim­i­lar to what is going on back here at home. You have got African-​Americans that are return­ing home from the war with cer­tain expec­ta­tions — why is it that I am not in uni­form and yet am denied more free­dom here that I was in France or Italy?

And so you have a whole host of social con­di­tions that are, you know, the court inevitably is influ­enced by and I think it is impor­tant for us to real­ize that although Brown may be one of those rare cir­cum­stances where the court is will­ing to get slightly beyond con­ven­tional opin­ion and sort of stake a place beyond the sort of polit­i­cal mainstream.

Hel­frich asked about con­ven­tional social opinion.

Obama:

Social opin­ion. But that’s very rare and even in the case of Brown I think that there were a lot of social changes atti­tu­di­nal changes of the sort that Den­nis [Hutchin­son] was talk­ing about in terms of the dif­fer­ence between social equal­ity and polit­i­cal equal­ity. A lot of that bag­gage has to be elim­i­nated before you see the Supreme Court, before you see the Supreme Court ven­ture out the way it did.

The con­text doesn’t mit­i­gate the offen­sive com­par­i­son that Obama made. It is even more dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile as Obama has made such a deal dur­ing the cam­paign of con­ver­sa­tions he had with his grand­fa­ther who served in World War II and was among the con­cen­tra­tion camp lib­er­a­tors. Again, to con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously com­pare the his­tory of African-​Americans in the U.S. to the Nazi Ger­many is so out­ra­geous as to be offensive.

But, con­sider that Jan­u­ary 2001 was just five years after Min­is­ter Louis Farrakhan’s Mil­lion Man March that Barack Obama and Rev­erend Wright helped orga­nize (See Biog­ra­phy Chan­nel, Gate­way Pun­dit, Dig­gers Realm). Just the pre­vi­ous year, Nation of Islam leader Min­is­ter Far­rakhan was reported in the New York Times say­ing “that although the Holo­caust was wrong, blacks had suf­fered “100 times worse” than the Jews.” For Min­is­ter Far­rakhan, this was the Amer­i­can Holo­caust of African Enslave­ment. In this con­text, it is not sur­pris­ing that Barack Obama who worked with Min­is­ter Far­rakhan and shared mutual friends, him­self chose to make the com­par­i­son of Nazi Ger­many to the United States.

My point here is not to debate whether Jim Crow and seg­re­ga­tion is com­pa­ra­ble with the Nazi’s and the Holo­caust. Both were evil and should be remem­bered as such. But slav­ery was not about exter­mi­nat­ing the tribes of Africa. It was a sys­tem of eco­nomic exploita­tion. The Holo­caust, by con­trast, involved ele­ments of slav­ery (e.g., forced labor) but included the sys­tem­atic exter­mi­na­tion of Jews. More than 6,000,000 Jews were mur­dered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. It didn’t stop with the Jews, by the time it was over more than 11,000,000 fell vic­tim to the Nazis.

Spe­cial thanks to reader Geoff who pro­vided the tip to the audio clip.

Cross-​posted at NoQuar­terUSA.

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