Depressing to see you shilling for the Darryl Cooper of his day.
"It was Britain whose capitulation to U.S. pressure and dissolution of her twenty-year pact with Japan in 1922 insulted, isolated, and enraged that faithful ally, leading directly to Japanese militarism, aggression, and World War II in the Pacific."
I can't remember who pointed this out: if you want to blame a country for something, you give it agency, and deny all other countries agency. It's one of those things that, once you've been warned about it, you see it everywhere. Here Buchanan is doing it to a ludicrous extent. In 1922 the United States wants something, and Britain acquiesces, and this alienates Japan. And this leads somehow "directly" to decades of Japanese militarist frenzy, American embargoes, Pearl Harbor, and eventually Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is to blame? Britain, of course. Because it has agency, and Japan and even the United States don't.
In reality, of course, Japan was not obligated to embark on a path of confrontation that led it into a hopeless war against a much stronger power for which it was utterly dependent for critical raw materials, notably oil. Japan had agency. It chose to use that agency badly, and the result was the annihilation of the Japanese empire and the occupation of Japan. Blame for that outcome rests on Japan, not Britain.
But of course giving and denying agency is Buchanan's whole book. Another example of making Britain out to be the villain when it was no more than a bystander is Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1935. France wanted to oppose this militarily, sought Britain's support, didn't get it, and acquiesced in the reoccupation. As a consequence, the Little Entente -- France's alliance with Germany's eastern neighbors -- was gravely weakened. Belgium declared absolute neutrality, which was to make joint planning with France near-impossible once war began. All this, Buchanan says, is Britain's fault for not supporting the French.
Except it's not. France, too, had agency. It could have gone ahead without British support. The Germans did not plan to resist -- the rifles the German troops sent into the Rhineland carried were not even loaded. A single battalion could have chased the Germans out of the Rhineland. But France chose to do nothing.
Also, note in passing Buchanan's hypocrisy. What Hitler was doing in 1935 was sending German troops onto German soil. You know that if Buchanan had been around then he would have been screaming at the top of his lungs that Hitler should be allowed to do what he wanted.
Sudentenland and Poland. Yes, if you know you're going to go to war, 1938/Czechoslovakia was a much better time and place than 1939/Poland. Czechoslovakia had a more modern army (the Germans used hundreds of Czech tanks when they invaded France in 1940) and much more defensible frontiers than Poland did. But at that time, the leaders of France and Britain did not yet believe that war was inevitable. Nor did their people. Chamberlain and Daladier were greeted with delirious joy on their return from the Munich conference. Yes, C&D should have known better. But have a little sympathy for fallible men trying to avoid a devastating war.
What happened after that: in March 1939, Hitler reneged on his assurances at Munich and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was that bit of treachery that induced Britain and France to give the guarantee to Poland. Of course they understood that they couldn't defend Poland directly; they hoped that the guarantee would dissuade Hitler from invading. Public opinion in Britain and France turned violently against Hitler between the Munich conference and March 1939. This was caused not just by Hitler's perfidy against Czechoslovakia but the further ramping up of Nazi aggression against the Jews -- Kristallnacht was in November 1938. That change in British and French public opinion helped cause a change in British and French policy, too.
Incidentally, although the British and French could not aid Poland directly, they were very much in a position to make Hitler repent his rashness when he did invade.
Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, in the event of war, the French armed forces would:
(1) initiate air operations immediately
(2) initiate "offensive operations with limited objectives" on the third day of mobilization
(3) if Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, "France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have! Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, Daladier would have been opposed if anyone had asked him, the British were opposed.
But the fact remains that the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and that such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory.
"A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." _Hitler's Strategy_, Andreas Hillgruber (1965).
No offensive occurred, of course. The Germans moved their army back West and embarked on a crash training and armaments program, and in 1940 they conquered France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler was given a free hand for Barbarossa and, in the fullness of time, the Holocaust. If you want to blame Britain (and France) -- don't! The blame lies with the aggressors, not the people who had to deal with their aggression. But if you insist on blaming Britain (and France), the place to look is not the Rhineland or the Polish guarantee. It's the failure to invade Germany at the beginning of the war.
Incidentally, a very good book on the whole period from the occupation of the Rhineland to Hitler's invasion of France is _Strange Victory_ by Ernest May. Its particular excellence is not judging everything by hindsight but fairly portraying everything that people were experiencing, feeling, and saying at the relevant times.
Buchanan blames Churchill for not making a compromise peace in 1940, suggesting that war in the East could have been averted. We can't rerun history and check, but I think that war in the East would have come anyway, and Hitler would have been much more likely to win it. Based on his "Second Book," his table talk, and his conversations with the military, we pretty much know that genocidal expansion in the East, making the Volga "Germany's Mississippi" was always the long-term plan. And if the Germans had conquered the USSR...
1. He planned to starve the cities of Western Russia in order to seize the Soviet grain surplus. Thirty million people would starved or fled (or likely fled, then starved) if he had succeeded.
2. The next thing that would have happened would have been German resettlement of the East, i.e. Poland and the western USSR. There was a plan for this, Generalplan Ost. About ten million Germans would have been resettled in the conquered territories. In the short term, the Slavs would be reduced to the status of slaves or near-slaves. But a permanent, large Slav population was inconsistent with longer-term German plans, pursuant to which there would be a further massive depopulation in the former USSR and Poland. 80-85% of the population of Poland, 75% of White Russia, 62% of people in the Ukraine. The area around Leningrad would have been completely emptied.
3. The Holocaust would have been much more total than it was.
However you calculate it, a massive share of the people in Poland and the USSR, perhaps 100 million people or more (the prewar population of just the USSR was 170 million, most of them in the western part of the country) would have been wiped out.
One of your arguments is that nothing could have been worse than what actually happened. I don't think that is true.
Besides, apart from a brief panic immediately after the fall of France, British public and elite opinion was solidly in favor of continuing the war. If Churchill had tried to make peace he would have been thrown out of office.
"Would not leaving Germany to squabble with the Soviets to her east and France and her allies to the west been better, in line with Britain’s role in centuries past?"
This is disingenuous to the point of outright lying. It had been British policy since the days of Louis XIV not to permit the European continent to be dominated by any single power. It's why Britain was at war with Napoleon for a dozen years, and repeatedly financed coalitions against him. Britain's actions in 1939 may or may not have been wise, but they were completely in keeping with British policy over centuries.
I'm not going to address World War I, because this comment is far too long already, but another good book is _The Sleepwalkers_, by Christopher Clark. One moral is that a whole lot of people, in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Serbia, and Russia, as well as Britain, all had agency, and they all used it in very unfortunate ways.
TLDR: addressing an era that featured Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, and Mussolini, Buchanan wrote a silly dishonest book arguing that the real villains were Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Buchanan did this, as far as I know, because he hated Brits and Jews. What's your excuse?
Obviously no one, not even the Soviets or the Americans, was looking out at the world in 1945 and saying, "wow, great. This is just what we wanted." That Britain's prewar foreign policy failed is known to all, and it was acknowledged in Britain quite early (see _Guilty Men_ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.5205). Many popular history books make that argument. If Buchanan's thesis had really been just "British prewar foreign policy was a failure on its own terms" no one would have read it -- hell, he wouldn't have bothered to write it. What is noteworthy in Buchanan is that, in a world with Hitler, Stalin, Tojo etc. he tries to paint the British as the real heavies. And that is stupid evil nonsense.
That aside, Buchanan's critique is wildly overstated, e.g. when he argues that prewar policy cost Britain its empire. The empire was going anyway. Even before World War I the British were realizing that the empire was unsustainable given the rapid development of the United States, Russia, Germany, and Japan. Look at a map from the early 20th century -- 25% of the globe was not going to continue to be ruled from an island off the coast of Europe. By the 1930s millions of British people considered British rule over India to be a moral abomination. Misha Saul can say better than I can how independent the white Dominions were by then, but they certainly seemed to have a lot of autonomy.
Incidentally, once the war came the British did well. They were on the winning side, and their casualties were a fraction of those suffered in the first war. The Soviets did the bulk of the dying on the Allied side.
There's a reason Churchill died considering himself a failure. His goal was not "be on the winning side and keep our casualties low." He wanted to save the British Empire; he was extremely clear about this. He did not want the UK to be an American satellite state, and yet every one of his policy decisions made that outcome inevitable.
I understand being annoyed at downplaying other powers agency but its clearly a history of British decision making of course it concerns itself primarily with British decisions.
Churchill was wrong. About being a failure and about the British empire, which was going to disappear if Winston Churchill had never been born. And Britain was under no obligation to become an American satellite based on anything Churchill did or didn’t do during WWII.
What was inevitable was that Britain was going to fall back to the rank of second-tier powers. This sort of thing happens, eg to the Netherlands and Portugal. But the Portuguese and Dutch Empires don’t seem to attract legions of neurotics.
"I’d love to read a book detailing the history of the American black movement for sovereignty vs the one for integration. There used to be loud voices calling for black self-determination in America or abroad. But at some point that movement seems to have died, and the one for integration / desegregation won total victory."
In the 1830s when the various factions of Northern Abolitionists were debating the American Colonization Society seems to be favored by the Northeastern Puritans, but this idea really lost out outside of Puritan circles. After the debates it was seen for the minority position that it was even if it continued to have loud and prominent proponents. I am not sure very many Black people in even in the Puritans areas were on board for such a thing making it always just a contingent of just loud voices. "African Americans viewed colonization as a means of defrauding them of the rights of citizenship and a way of tightening the grip of slavery. ...The tragedy was that African Americans began to view their ancestral home with disdain. They dropped the use of "African" in names of their organizations...and used instead [of African American] "The Colored American.""
People seem to have some misunderstandings with regard to the Cultural Nations of North America. Even though there is this vast swath of the North that gets called Yankeedom and then is posited to have Puritan roots and folkways this is not entirely true. During the 1830s and all the way up into the 1980s and 1990s the voices on the "right side" of history were for extreme equality and were significantly more Quakerish in outlook, belief, and temperament in many ways. Even in the 1990s dignity culture was very explicit in the public educational program in many places, even if you can see the roots of victimhood culture taking hold in places as early as the 70s in higher education and coastal areas. To a certain extent one could view the civil rights movement as a triumph of dignity culture over honor culture of the South and it is kind of odd that the Northeastern upper class has continued to view the lower half of America as extremely prejudiced, bigoted, and backward on matters of race and sex. Not being an upper-class person, I can't really say whether the upper-class culture is now one of victimhood. If it is fully a culture of victimhood this is quite interesting because they have had a cultural change while maintaining belief continuity.
It always seems to come from these elite positions that seem like something from an Anywhere. And most people aren't Anywheres they are Somewheres, and even more so in the South.
Yeah I get that it was an idea that keeps popping up for various people during slavery and after slavery ended during Jim Crow, even all the way up until the civil rights movement ended, it just always seems like this minority position sort of untenable with the reality of normal people.
There is a tension between the presumed identitarianism of anything based on birth and the American project. Because there has always been tensions in different areas with possible divided loyalties, presumed or real. I can't really speak to this because I am an American by birth and upbringing. At some level the question could be posed hypothetically are you an American or a black American, same for Jewish American. Catholics were subject to this too on some level once upon a time. Could the egalitarian symbolic reassurances of the founding documents of America continue to be believed in if you had a complete separation of the subgroups of humans based on phenotype in America?
I don't necessarily view it as a far fetched idea and maybe it would have had more purchase in the civil rights period without the great migration preceding it. Some of the Black migration westward after civil war to Kansas actually fits this narrative, at least as it was presented by people like Ken Burns.
"...that agency leads to grim ends for the Twymon family."
But, Why were they like that?
Also, my theory is that, when "there goes the neighborhood" and ethnic tensions rise along side crime, its preceded by some sort of financial disaster.
If that were not the case, the minority ethnic groups that might've arrived would've been of a better quality culture.
I of II
Depressing to see you shilling for the Darryl Cooper of his day.
"It was Britain whose capitulation to U.S. pressure and dissolution of her twenty-year pact with Japan in 1922 insulted, isolated, and enraged that faithful ally, leading directly to Japanese militarism, aggression, and World War II in the Pacific."
I can't remember who pointed this out: if you want to blame a country for something, you give it agency, and deny all other countries agency. It's one of those things that, once you've been warned about it, you see it everywhere. Here Buchanan is doing it to a ludicrous extent. In 1922 the United States wants something, and Britain acquiesces, and this alienates Japan. And this leads somehow "directly" to decades of Japanese militarist frenzy, American embargoes, Pearl Harbor, and eventually Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is to blame? Britain, of course. Because it has agency, and Japan and even the United States don't.
In reality, of course, Japan was not obligated to embark on a path of confrontation that led it into a hopeless war against a much stronger power for which it was utterly dependent for critical raw materials, notably oil. Japan had agency. It chose to use that agency badly, and the result was the annihilation of the Japanese empire and the occupation of Japan. Blame for that outcome rests on Japan, not Britain.
But of course giving and denying agency is Buchanan's whole book. Another example of making Britain out to be the villain when it was no more than a bystander is Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1935. France wanted to oppose this militarily, sought Britain's support, didn't get it, and acquiesced in the reoccupation. As a consequence, the Little Entente -- France's alliance with Germany's eastern neighbors -- was gravely weakened. Belgium declared absolute neutrality, which was to make joint planning with France near-impossible once war began. All this, Buchanan says, is Britain's fault for not supporting the French.
Except it's not. France, too, had agency. It could have gone ahead without British support. The Germans did not plan to resist -- the rifles the German troops sent into the Rhineland carried were not even loaded. A single battalion could have chased the Germans out of the Rhineland. But France chose to do nothing.
Also, note in passing Buchanan's hypocrisy. What Hitler was doing in 1935 was sending German troops onto German soil. You know that if Buchanan had been around then he would have been screaming at the top of his lungs that Hitler should be allowed to do what he wanted.
Sudentenland and Poland. Yes, if you know you're going to go to war, 1938/Czechoslovakia was a much better time and place than 1939/Poland. Czechoslovakia had a more modern army (the Germans used hundreds of Czech tanks when they invaded France in 1940) and much more defensible frontiers than Poland did. But at that time, the leaders of France and Britain did not yet believe that war was inevitable. Nor did their people. Chamberlain and Daladier were greeted with delirious joy on their return from the Munich conference. Yes, C&D should have known better. But have a little sympathy for fallible men trying to avoid a devastating war.
What happened after that: in March 1939, Hitler reneged on his assurances at Munich and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was that bit of treachery that induced Britain and France to give the guarantee to Poland. Of course they understood that they couldn't defend Poland directly; they hoped that the guarantee would dissuade Hitler from invading. Public opinion in Britain and France turned violently against Hitler between the Munich conference and March 1939. This was caused not just by Hitler's perfidy against Czechoslovakia but the further ramping up of Nazi aggression against the Jews -- Kristallnacht was in November 1938. That change in British and French public opinion helped cause a change in British and French policy, too.
II of II
Incidentally, although the British and French could not aid Poland directly, they were very much in a position to make Hitler repent his rashness when he did invade.
Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, in the event of war, the French armed forces would:
(1) initiate air operations immediately
(2) initiate "offensive operations with limited objectives" on the third day of mobilization
(3) if Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, "France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have! Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, Daladier would have been opposed if anyone had asked him, the British were opposed.
But the fact remains that the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and that such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory.
"A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." _Hitler's Strategy_, Andreas Hillgruber (1965).
No offensive occurred, of course. The Germans moved their army back West and embarked on a crash training and armaments program, and in 1940 they conquered France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler was given a free hand for Barbarossa and, in the fullness of time, the Holocaust. If you want to blame Britain (and France) -- don't! The blame lies with the aggressors, not the people who had to deal with their aggression. But if you insist on blaming Britain (and France), the place to look is not the Rhineland or the Polish guarantee. It's the failure to invade Germany at the beginning of the war.
Incidentally, a very good book on the whole period from the occupation of the Rhineland to Hitler's invasion of France is _Strange Victory_ by Ernest May. Its particular excellence is not judging everything by hindsight but fairly portraying everything that people were experiencing, feeling, and saying at the relevant times.
Buchanan blames Churchill for not making a compromise peace in 1940, suggesting that war in the East could have been averted. We can't rerun history and check, but I think that war in the East would have come anyway, and Hitler would have been much more likely to win it. Based on his "Second Book," his table talk, and his conversations with the military, we pretty much know that genocidal expansion in the East, making the Volga "Germany's Mississippi" was always the long-term plan. And if the Germans had conquered the USSR...
1. He planned to starve the cities of Western Russia in order to seize the Soviet grain surplus. Thirty million people would starved or fled (or likely fled, then starved) if he had succeeded.
2. The next thing that would have happened would have been German resettlement of the East, i.e. Poland and the western USSR. There was a plan for this, Generalplan Ost. About ten million Germans would have been resettled in the conquered territories. In the short term, the Slavs would be reduced to the status of slaves or near-slaves. But a permanent, large Slav population was inconsistent with longer-term German plans, pursuant to which there would be a further massive depopulation in the former USSR and Poland. 80-85% of the population of Poland, 75% of White Russia, 62% of people in the Ukraine. The area around Leningrad would have been completely emptied.
3. The Holocaust would have been much more total than it was.
However you calculate it, a massive share of the people in Poland and the USSR, perhaps 100 million people or more (the prewar population of just the USSR was 170 million, most of them in the western part of the country) would have been wiped out.
One of your arguments is that nothing could have been worse than what actually happened. I don't think that is true.
Besides, apart from a brief panic immediately after the fall of France, British public and elite opinion was solidly in favor of continuing the war. If Churchill had tried to make peace he would have been thrown out of office.
"Would not leaving Germany to squabble with the Soviets to her east and France and her allies to the west been better, in line with Britain’s role in centuries past?"
This is disingenuous to the point of outright lying. It had been British policy since the days of Louis XIV not to permit the European continent to be dominated by any single power. It's why Britain was at war with Napoleon for a dozen years, and repeatedly financed coalitions against him. Britain's actions in 1939 may or may not have been wise, but they were completely in keeping with British policy over centuries.
I'm not going to address World War I, because this comment is far too long already, but another good book is _The Sleepwalkers_, by Christopher Clark. One moral is that a whole lot of people, in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Serbia, and Russia, as well as Britain, all had agency, and they all used it in very unfortunate ways.
TLDR: addressing an era that featured Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, and Mussolini, Buchanan wrote a silly dishonest book arguing that the real villains were Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Buchanan did this, as far as I know, because he hated Brits and Jews. What's your excuse?
Good detail! Thanks
You dont exactly challenge Buchanan's thesis that British foreign policy failed at all levels on its own terms.
I find him pretty compelling
Obviously no one, not even the Soviets or the Americans, was looking out at the world in 1945 and saying, "wow, great. This is just what we wanted." That Britain's prewar foreign policy failed is known to all, and it was acknowledged in Britain quite early (see _Guilty Men_ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.5205). Many popular history books make that argument. If Buchanan's thesis had really been just "British prewar foreign policy was a failure on its own terms" no one would have read it -- hell, he wouldn't have bothered to write it. What is noteworthy in Buchanan is that, in a world with Hitler, Stalin, Tojo etc. he tries to paint the British as the real heavies. And that is stupid evil nonsense.
That aside, Buchanan's critique is wildly overstated, e.g. when he argues that prewar policy cost Britain its empire. The empire was going anyway. Even before World War I the British were realizing that the empire was unsustainable given the rapid development of the United States, Russia, Germany, and Japan. Look at a map from the early 20th century -- 25% of the globe was not going to continue to be ruled from an island off the coast of Europe. By the 1930s millions of British people considered British rule over India to be a moral abomination. Misha Saul can say better than I can how independent the white Dominions were by then, but they certainly seemed to have a lot of autonomy.
Incidentally, once the war came the British did well. They were on the winning side, and their casualties were a fraction of those suffered in the first war. The Soviets did the bulk of the dying on the Allied side.
There's a reason Churchill died considering himself a failure. His goal was not "be on the winning side and keep our casualties low." He wanted to save the British Empire; he was extremely clear about this. He did not want the UK to be an American satellite state, and yet every one of his policy decisions made that outcome inevitable.
I understand being annoyed at downplaying other powers agency but its clearly a history of British decision making of course it concerns itself primarily with British decisions.
Churchill was wrong. About being a failure and about the British empire, which was going to disappear if Winston Churchill had never been born. And Britain was under no obligation to become an American satellite based on anything Churchill did or didn’t do during WWII.
What was inevitable was that Britain was going to fall back to the rank of second-tier powers. This sort of thing happens, eg to the Netherlands and Portugal. But the Portuguese and Dutch Empires don’t seem to attract legions of neurotics.
"I’d love to read a book detailing the history of the American black movement for sovereignty vs the one for integration. There used to be loud voices calling for black self-determination in America or abroad. But at some point that movement seems to have died, and the one for integration / desegregation won total victory."
In the 1830s when the various factions of Northern Abolitionists were debating the American Colonization Society seems to be favored by the Northeastern Puritans, but this idea really lost out outside of Puritan circles. After the debates it was seen for the minority position that it was even if it continued to have loud and prominent proponents. I am not sure very many Black people in even in the Puritans areas were on board for such a thing making it always just a contingent of just loud voices. "African Americans viewed colonization as a means of defrauding them of the rights of citizenship and a way of tightening the grip of slavery. ...The tragedy was that African Americans began to view their ancestral home with disdain. They dropped the use of "African" in names of their organizations...and used instead [of African American] "The Colored American.""
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
People seem to have some misunderstandings with regard to the Cultural Nations of North America. Even though there is this vast swath of the North that gets called Yankeedom and then is posited to have Puritan roots and folkways this is not entirely true. During the 1830s and all the way up into the 1980s and 1990s the voices on the "right side" of history were for extreme equality and were significantly more Quakerish in outlook, belief, and temperament in many ways. Even in the 1990s dignity culture was very explicit in the public educational program in many places, even if you can see the roots of victimhood culture taking hold in places as early as the 70s in higher education and coastal areas. To a certain extent one could view the civil rights movement as a triumph of dignity culture over honor culture of the South and it is kind of odd that the Northeastern upper class has continued to view the lower half of America as extremely prejudiced, bigoted, and backward on matters of race and sex. Not being an upper-class person, I can't really say whether the upper-class culture is now one of victimhood. If it is fully a culture of victimhood this is quite interesting because they have had a cultural change while maintaining belief continuity.
I referred to later projects and thinkers. Frederick Douglass toyed with it. Malcolm X. Liberian project. Etc
It always seems to come from these elite positions that seem like something from an Anywhere. And most people aren't Anywheres they are Somewheres, and even more so in the South.
Yeah I get that it was an idea that keeps popping up for various people during slavery and after slavery ended during Jim Crow, even all the way up until the civil rights movement ended, it just always seems like this minority position sort of untenable with the reality of normal people.
Zionism for African Americans doesn't seem that far fetched
There is a tension between the presumed identitarianism of anything based on birth and the American project. Because there has always been tensions in different areas with possible divided loyalties, presumed or real. I can't really speak to this because I am an American by birth and upbringing. At some level the question could be posed hypothetically are you an American or a black American, same for Jewish American. Catholics were subject to this too on some level once upon a time. Could the egalitarian symbolic reassurances of the founding documents of America continue to be believed in if you had a complete separation of the subgroups of humans based on phenotype in America?
I don't necessarily view it as a far fetched idea and maybe it would have had more purchase in the civil rights period without the great migration preceding it. Some of the Black migration westward after civil war to Kansas actually fits this narrative, at least as it was presented by people like Ken Burns.
In the 2004 movie King Arthur, Arthur's "knights" have the back-story that they are Sarmatians guarding the northern Roman frontier.
"...that agency leads to grim ends for the Twymon family."
But, Why were they like that?
Also, my theory is that, when "there goes the neighborhood" and ethnic tensions rise along side crime, its preceded by some sort of financial disaster.
If that were not the case, the minority ethnic groups that might've arrived would've been of a better quality culture.