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VI. The Enemy is Fascism

The theory of Japan as the champion of the darker races ignores the fact that militarist-fascist Japan itself is oppressing weaker colored peoples in Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria. It tends to divert attention from the main danger threatening the Negro and colonial peoples and all humanity - the deadly menace of fascism. It is clear that support for the ally of Mussolini and Hitler means support for fascism, support for colonial oppression.

Fascism in every land, in its drive for power, as well as in its efforts to retain power, invariably fastens upon racial prejudices and animosities, fanning them into a flame to divide the people. Here in the United States, a far-flung system of racial oppression - based upon ideas rooted deep in chattel slavery and with strong survivals up to the present day - provides a fertile soil for fascism.

With the rise of fascism, we have seen a new revival on a world scale of the spurious "Science of Race," false theories of Negro inferiority, and of the "'Nordic' master race." Hitler has taken over, lock, stock and barrel, the racial theories of Gobineau, of Madison Grant, of Lothrop Stoddard, and of the Southern Bourbons, as a weapon against the Jews, and to support his demands for the right of Nazi Germany to African colonies.

To the ear of the American Negro, is there not a ring of familiarity in the following, from Hitler's Mein Kampf:

"The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours, satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl, whom he defiles with his blood and thereby robs from her own race...

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"There were and are Jews who brought Negroes to the Rhine, always with the same aim and idea in their minds of destroying, through the bastardization that must inevitably result, the white race which they hate - of bringing it own from its high cultural and political level, and themselves getting the mastery over it."

In Nazi Germany, it is the Jewish people who are the scapegoats for fascist race hatred and slander. In America, no one can doubt that the Negro will be the worst sufferer, should fascism be victorious in this country.

WHAT FASCISM WOULD MEAN TO THE NEGRO

Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, in a speech made on April 3, 1938, at a banquet commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Jewish Daily Courier in Chicago, declared that fascism, "arrogant, devoid of conscience, and knowing no mercy for man, woman, or child," is a real threat to American institutions.

"Do not forget," he warned, "that in American the Jews are not the only minority group. One has only to turn his mind from the international Ku Kluxism of fascism, to the Ku Kluxism that is natively American, in order to discover here a rich field for oppression and terrorism!
"Against this background, it is not difficult to foresee that fascism if it should ever become established in this country, would have not only its Jewish devil, it would have its Negro devil..."

Let us not be deceived, therefore, by the false contention that the condition of Negroes "could not be worse under fascism"; that we have "always known fascism."

What would fascist rule mean to the Negro? Let us imagine for a moment that the policies of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion were the official policies of the national government at Washington, as today anti-Semitism is the official policy of the Nazi murder regime in Germany. That is what the victory of fascism in our country would mean for the Negro.

Today, lynching is still considered a crime before the law.

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