Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited interwar German art. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was inspired by cultural relics from Germany’s short-lived colonial times in Africa and the Pacific, which ended after World War I.
Curators criticized Kirchner’s “colonial” concerns, mirroring critical race theory. The exhibit catalog claimed that he “encountered plundered art at ethnic institutions.” Berlin’s Brucke Museum exhibited paintings by Kirchner and other artists who “appropriated” colonial images this year. One curator criticized the artists for creating an “idealized colonial realm, packed with sexuality and sensuality.”
As it turns out, the Nazis accused Kirchner and others of inappropriate cultural mingling and moral depravity, too. 1937’s “Degenerate Art” show featured 25 of his paintings. Following that, Kirchner committed suicide. Like critical race theorists today, the Nazis hated a liberal society that dismissed racial and cultural classifications and mixes freely.
Today’s modern race-based Left borrows from dictatorial Right and the Left. Hitler branded Germany’s colonial past “criminally stupid” for its free-trading cosmopolitanism. He hated the role German Jews played in overseas colonialism, which perpetuated its filth.
What does the left’s CRT and the Nazi’s racism have in common? Everything. Dividing by race is racism and the left is addicted to it.
— Low Rider (@low_riding) August 3, 2022
Hitler and Stalin campaigned for the support of colonial nationalists after Germany lost territories at Versailles in 1919 and the Weimar Republic collapsed in 1933. Hitler preached racial chauvinism and a race struggle against imagined oppressors, unlike Stalin. He believed a leader who could persuade individuals that their problems were caused by other races would win.
Hitler hosted Third World nationalists who traveled to Berlin during World War II for suggestions on driving away oppressors, mainly British and French white rulers. Gandhi dispatched Congress Party representatives to Germany to cooperate with the Nazis on racial appeals to remove British rule. Much as Palestinian priests, Egyptian military leaders, and Indonesian anarchist communists all sought insights from the Führer on how to abolish colonialism and supplant it with national dictatorship, Hitler professed to have liberated Germany from Versailles’ “colonialism.”
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Japanese fascists in Burma embraced the Nazi-Esque motto “One Blood, One Voice, One Leader.” The Nazis encouraged nationalists to demand “national homelands” to preserve each race from competition and mingling—forerunners of today’s racial “safe zones” and affinity clubs.
Critical race theory’s foundational movements and books continued Nazi appropriation after the war. Johann von Leers, a former Nazi Arab organizer, became Gamal Nasser’s consultant in 1955. Von Leers was one of 2,000 former Nazis who served under Nasser in Egypt. According to academic Joel Fishman, Von Leers “saw an opening in the ‘wars of liberation’ and placed his anti-Semitism inside Third-Worldism.”
“The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon, a black doctor from French Martinique, echoes Nazism. Fanon supported Nasser and his Nazi allies in 1954 Algerian uprising against French control. 350,000 people were killed. According to German researcher Egon Flaig, The Wretched of the Earth is a “counter-enlightenment manifesto” founded on “fascist anti-colonialism.” Fanon praises the Nazis for forcibly settling Germany’s border difficulties and wants a similar uprising in Algeria. As transpired in Germany, he wrote, “The colonized peoples, these slaves of modern times, have run out of patience.”
Piggybacking on an inaccurate saying likened to Nazi leader Hermann Goring—“When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I unholster my Browning” — Fanon wrote, “When the colonized hear a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his machete.”
Fanon’s celebration of violence as “curative” or “therapeutic” for racial emancipation was Nazi philosophy. “Why, one might ask, do Fanon’s sentences read like Nazi ideology?” Asks Flaig. It’s easy to see why: Critical racial theory’s cultural critique of Western culture and liberal principles emerged from Nazi filth. Taking Fanon’s example, Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin exiled all Israelis and Asians in 1972, thinking that eliminating successful economic groups would solve “institutional racism.”
Today, woke museum curators in Los Angeles and Berlin march under the flag of racial purity and illiberal state direction of society, which all have the same unpleasant background.