Discussion NewerThanTheyThink / Terms

And why do we associate the Fifth Column with an enemy inside the gates, rather than a friend across enemy lines? Occam would presumably say that Americans would prefer you remember us as enthusiastic Lincoln Brigade joiners and not fascist-sympathizers (most famously in the case of Ford Motor Company leadership, but pointed out as a troubling phenomenon across the class by Vonnegut and others). For the most part, though, we would have reacted in a more complex way: some passionate young people joining the LB, others (like Frank Capa) making propaganda about their heroic struggle, many people just horrified by learning of the destruction in newsreels accurately portraying it as part of the larger context of a world in conflict.

Other than the actual joiners and their fellow travelers, though, this did not extend to a thoroughgoing antifascism in either the political sense, for which you could still end up in jail or a jail-like hospital (ETA: the late German-American refugee Dr. Bronner's fate, he of the soap fame, until a belief in world peace was legalized late in his lifetime), nor the military sense. We were shamefully neutral on the war itself until that neutrality was codified into law, at which point it was mostly used as an excuse to persecute domestic leftists except where it functioned as tacit permission for Ford to donate vehicles and armor straight to Hitler which would end up in the same place. More notoriously, the US electorate was pretty hostile to the idea of intervening in what was seen as Europe's problem for a shamefully long time. Of course, the electorate was explicitly raced and classed in those times.

Our big sin in Europe was actually an Older Than They Think: Nazi race policies and concentration and/or death camps owed as much or more to dubious American achievements as to dubious British ones. Technically the British invented the concentration camp in the Boer Wars IIRC, but the German system was more influenced by the US reservation system, which has since been abolished in a (VERY) slow process of decolonization. The US Military never got a clue about this connection and they continue to throw around "off the reservation" as a casual reference to previous military enforcement actions that are rightly considered acts of genocide today.