Atlantic contributor and sportswriter Jemele Hill said Sunday that the United States was "nearly as bad as Nazi Germany."
"Been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, 'Caste,' and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are," Hill tweeted.
Been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, 'Caste," and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are. Can’t encourage you enough to read this masterpiece.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 23, 2020
Wilkerson's social history book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents compared the Nazi Third Reich to the United States and received rave reviews. Hill, a frequent MSNBC guest who also has a weekly talk show on Vice TV, used this to argue the Nazis actually learned their genocidal tactics from studying America.
"What would you call it when a country that murdered millions of Jews learned their systems of genocide by watching America, and studying our history of racialized slavery, and great knack for racial terrorism?" she wrote.
What would you call it when a country that murdered millions of Jews learned their systems of genocide by watching America, and studying our history of racialized slavery, and great knack for racial terrorism?
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 24, 2020
The Third Reich was engineered with the purpose of exterminating Jews and conquering other nations, as Adolf Hitler outlined in his writings and speeches. Hitler's philosophy was that Germans were a "master race" who had the right to dominate the entire planet, and he constructed a war machine to accomplish this. He turned Germany from a republic into a brutal dictatorship, but was defeated by the allied forces led by the United States.