Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra, is about Nazism in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. She based her podcast on the scholarly work of a Jesuit historian Professor Charles R. Gallagher, and his award-winning book. I was fascinated to learn more and discovered that he teaches at nearby Boston College. So we met for lunch, and he kindly consented to this fascinating interview. I learned that the Nazis sent agents such as Charles Scholtz to Boston to recruit and radicalize Americans. These agents wanted to prevent the United States from coming to the defense of the United Kingdom and other European countries. The Nazis did not want America to help Jews who were persecuted and exterminated. Father Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest and radio personality with a listenership of 30 million people.
@SrRochardBunson
My hometown hosted the Jewish refugees the US allowed in during the war. Thanks to homegrown Nazis and Fascists, there were only a few over 1000.
My town was mixed Haudenosaunee and white, and was famously on the Underground Railroad to such a degree that the officials were in on it. Almost all old houses in the town still have secret rooms.
None of these conditions should have been necessary, but the truth is that nowhere else wanted to take them.
@echanda@SrRochardBunson It's called Oswego, which means "The Running Out Place". It was a Haudenosaunee gathering place before the fort, (still there), was built in the 1600s. A deep river runs through the middle of town, and it runs up to a large harbor in Lake Ontario in NY.
I remember visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC with a school trip. Someone there recognized the name on our reservation and caught us before we left, brought us to a room and gave us a special presentation on our town!
@echanda@SrRochardBunson For anyone wondering how I, someone who has not lived in Oswego since High School, is sure of all of this: I joined the Historical Society at age 11 as The Littlest Volunteer Docent. By 14, I was an employee.
@SrRochardBunson Yeah, I was "that kid". I had four jobs pre-hs grad. In addition to the Historical Society, I taught BioSciences and Basic Field Studies at a Wetlands Station outside town, I sang at a small Italian bistro as a singing waiter, and I worked the counter at a fitness center. LOL
@VaylLarkinPoet@echanda@SrRochardBunson I've been there and visited SUNY Oswego. It is a nice town with a lot of history. I listen to two dopes on the radio every morning who graduated there. They talk about it a lot.
@honyell@echanda@SrRochardBunson Wonder how old they are? If they're not too young, they may remember Rosemary Nesbitt, town historian, storyteller extraordinaire, and holiday decorator of note. Imagine a tiny. elderly woman with loooong, steel-gray hair she normally wore in strict braids around her head, but which was set loose for Halloween storytelling on the river. She would sit on a barge, while everyone in town gathered on shore to listen to her. Halloween was a favorite of those events!
@VaylLarkinPoet@echanda@SrRochardBunson Josh is 41 and Cody is 38. Josh lives in Oswego County and Cody lives in Syracuse. I'm sure they have talked about Rosemary at some point.
@honyell@echanda@SrRochardBunson I believe she died in the mid-2010s, and I know that she's buried in Riverside Cemetery there, which I believe may be one of the oldest integrated cemeteries around.
Gorgeous place, like walking into a magic place where Giullermo del Toro might set something. The graves of white, Jewish, Native and Black residents are all in the same place. It's stunning to visit.
@honyell@echanda@SrRochardBunson Wow. Ok, growing up, I had a bad family life. I spent as much time as humanly possible outdoors.
From 7th grade on, my "hiding place" was a flat rock beach in a tiny cove unreachable except by water, or by going through that cemetery, through the treeline, down the embankment, across the railroad tracks, and down a smallish escarpment.
I'm now in a wheelchair and unable to visit again, but that tiny, quiet graveyard and the cove beyond were home.
Meanwhile, long before World War II, our very own home-grown eugenics "philosophers" were advancing theories and advocating polices that were formative to the Nazi doctrine. In California in the 1920s, patients in mental institutions - NOT sex offenders - were being forcibly sterilized to prevent them from procreating and harming the gene pool.
We had home-grown Nazis who never spoke a word of German.
@SrRochardBunson
Because the history that’s taught is only about how glorious we are. Rachel’s new podcast is Deja News. She and her producer share history that is repeating on this podcast too.
I think she has no equal - she and her producers. I think there will be 6 all told. A new one comes out on Mondays. In the last one she updated Bagman, by talking to the prosecutors who investigated Agnew, given the similarity to our current situation. If you haven’t discovered Bagman, her first podcast, I recommend it.
@SrRochardBunson I used to train Airmen when I was in the USAF. For a while we had access to this big training hall and one of the first things I saw when I walked in was a motivational poster on the wall quoting Werner von Braun.
That we were stationed in Germany made it even worse.
I used to bitch to my Airmen about it so much they took it down for our last night in the classroom. Which was nice but I hate that we only got away with that because it was a night shift.
@SrRochardBunson Hitler didn't expect the U.S. to go to war, and if they did he expected the U.S. to join Germany. After all, he got his ideas on racial-cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, from the U.S. These things were a big deal in the U.S. from the late 1800s into the 1930s.
@shuttersparks@SrRochardBunson
One day, in the early mid-1990s, I rode a train from Innsbruck to Vienna via Salzburg. I was seated with an old man with a wooden leg - he'd lost that leg as a Nazi soldier during the seige of Stalingrad.
I pride myself on the fact that it takes native Germans HOURS of conversation to realize that I'm not one of them. 🤣🇩🇪
When he realized I wasn't German, he launched into I tirade about how the US should have sided with the Nazis instead of fighting them.
🤣
@shuttersparks@SrRochardBunson The second part of that statement is mostly true, but not the first part.
The U.S. was neutral for longer than would seem comfortable, but it was a de jure neutrality only, they had been helping Britain for awhile and the cash-and-carry policy before that.
Also, Hitler couldn’t have expected American sympathy since he was aware from the beginning he’d come into conflict with it (Zweites Buch), never mind his European ambitions .
Actual footage of me drawing direct lines from the #Christian Front and America First crowd to today's #Fascist#GOP and #MAGA while listening to #Ultra
@casjo2022@SrRochardBunson "The paradox of tolerance:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
@casjo2022@SrRochardBunson There's a fine line between tolerance and enabling. If you "tolerate" something very destructive, like a person's drug addiction, then you really are enabling them to continue this behavior that harms them and those around them, of which is very difficult for them to get out of alone. When we as a society stand up against something, make it illegal, enforce laws, create rehab centers, that is a form of tolerance that does not enable. It protects.
@casjo2022@SrRochardBunson So I agree, we should not tolerate discrimination against people because of race, religion, orientation, gender identity, differently-abled-- they are not harming others, they are not harming themselves, they have rights to exist. People who say they don't are not be tolerated, it is not their right to openly discriminate and we should not enable them, we should shut them down as a society.
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