ヒトラーのモデルはアメリカだった

先ほどのアメリカが異人種間の婚姻を禁止していた話につながるのですが、ナチスとアメリカの類似性を指摘した本について取り上げたNew Yorkerの記事が4月にありました。

A Critic at Large

April 30, 2018 Issue

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

By Alex Ross

重い話になる前にその前の書き出しで出版界の格言に触れているところを。アウシュビッツ関連の小説はで続けていますし、それに『世界から猫が消えたなら』の本も猫好きが見逃せないタイトルになっていますよね。

An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats.

この記事がアメリカとの類似性を取り上げるのは後半部分なのですが、先住民のインディアンを駆逐していった西部開拓、人種差別法や1930年代の優生思想、海外植民地フィリピンやプエルトリコでの二級市民の扱いだったことがナチスの先駆となったと考えられているようです。

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

National Geographicの記事でも20世紀初頭での日本人の扱いについて触れています。露骨な人種差別があったんですが、トランプ政権になって新たな意味を帯びてきています。

SCENES FROM THE JAPANESE INTERNMENT RESONATE TODAY

When the U.S. government held more than 120,000 civilians captive during World War II, it left an enduring stain on the nation.

On May 7, 1900, San Francisco Mayor James Duval Phelan had said, “Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.”

The American Federation of Labor lobbied Congress to legally exclude all “Mongolian” labor. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle agreed: “Our first duty is to preserve America for the Americans and the white races whom we can assimilate, and whose children will have the American standard of life.”

A pattern soon emerged, constraining the freedoms of people of Japanese ancestry. First, immigration from Japan was limited by an unwritten agreement. Japanese people were not allowed to own land in California. It became illegal for anyone with Japanese ancestry to marry a Caucasian. Then, in 1924, Congress approved an immigration ban on all Asians, including Japanese people, saying that they could not become citizens, no matter how long they lived in the United States. Only their children, if born in the U.S., could be citizens, as guaranteed by the Constitution. The nation’s leaders made it clear that Japanese people were not wanted in America.

New Yorkerの記事で登場していたJames Q. Whitmanの“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”はちょうど翻訳が出たばかりでした。

ヒトラーのモデルはアメリカだった――法システムによる「純血の追求」 単行本 – 2018/9/4

ジェイムズ・Q・ウィットマン (著), 西川 美樹 (翻訳)

（アマゾンの紹介文）

合衆国の人種法と市民権法が、ニュルンベルク法を生み出した。

アメリカがヒトラーのジェノサイド政策に与えた影響を、史料から丹念に掘り起した画期的業績。

「本書の目的は、ナチスがニュルンベルク法を考案するさいに

アメリカの人種法に着想を求めたという、これまで見落とされていた歴史を

紐とくことだ。それにより、この歴史がナチス・ドイツについて、

人種主義の近代史について、そしてとりわけこのアメリカという国について

私たちに何を語るのか、それを問いかけることにある」(はじめに)

そして本書は、ナチスのニュルンベルク諸法が、市民権、および

セックスと生殖を重視していたことを指摘する。

「アメリカの人種法にはナチスから見て魅力的な面がいくつかあった。とりわけ

異人種婚に重罰を科すアメリカの稀有な慣習が「ドイツ人の血と名誉を守るための法」

の背景に見てとれる。いっぽう「血の一滴の掟」(ワンドロップルール)といった他の点は、

あまりに過酷すぎると驚かれた」(終章)のだった。

法と歴史の狭間から、豊富な史料を駆使して、

人種法における世界の「リーダー」たるアメリカ、

さらにアメリカそのものに深く根付いた人種主義をあぶりだした、初めての試み。

この本に対する書評は学術書のためかあまり多くなくAtlanticが出しているくらいでした。

What America Taught the Nazis

In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.

IRA KATZNELSON

NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE

薄い本なのでコスパが悪いのですが（汗）早く内容を知りたかったので翻訳本の方を読みました。センセーショナルに書くのではなく、できるだけ冷静にナチスへの影響を探ろうとしています。ナチスのニュルンベルク諸法成立に絞ったものなので、あらゆるナチスの蛮行がアメリカに着想を得たものではありません。記事にあった“everybody does it” justificationを持ち出しても意味がありませんし、アメリカを悪の帝国と描くのも単純かし過ぎですが、世界大戦の頃の歴史の見直しはしいつでも必要かもしれません。