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submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

(Alternative link.)

By the end of 1940 and following the defeat of France, the former Bas‐Rhin and Haut‐Rhin departments were annexed to the [Third Reich’s] territory and Strasbourg progressively became the new administrative and political centre of the Gau Oberrhein, which united Baden and annexed Alsace.

This borderland territory of the Rhine area was perceived as a fundamental space in the Nazi policy, which intended to reshape racial European frontiers. Alsace was meant to become a Western march built for the defence of Germanness. Thus, the Alsatian lands were subjected to Germanization policies that affected [Roma and Sinti] within this territory.

(Emphasis added.)

Note the class backgrounds of the victims:

mainly musicians, basket‐makers, fairground artists and trailer dwellers linked to the travelling worlds of this transfrontier area between France, Germany, and Switzerland: Sinti, Manouches, Roma and Yenish experienced familial dislocations and endured persecution policies throughout the war.

In the same way that antisemitism benefited petty bourgeois gentiles, the oppression of Roma and Sinti must have benefited petty bourgeois whites: here you have a minority soaking up the worst of capitalism’s economic pressures, simultaneously reducing economic competition (for the white petty bourgeoisie) and freeing up space for future settlers. But Fascist capitalists’ motivations for oppressing ethnic minorities is a topic that I’d prefer to save for another day.

The rest of this paper is an examination of the evolution of a white supremacist policy in a territory under Axis control. It is pretty dry, so it might not be your cup of tea, but it’s good that somebody analysed this.

[Alternative excerpt]

The study of the implementation of the genocidal policies in annexed Alsace underlines the methods used by [Axis] repressive forces to project onto this borderland space their own conception of [Roma], product of their racial imaginary and former police methods.

Registration of presumed [Sinti and Roma], gathering of individual and familial data, transmission of records from Strasbourg to Berlin, inquiries into genealogical materials, and selections for deportation: these police and bureaucratic operations show how brutally [Axis] racial ideology found its own spatial expression in a recently annexed Western European borderland territory.

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this post was submitted on 31 May 2023
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Capitalism in Decay

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Fascism is capitalism in decay. As with anticommunism in general, the ruling class has oversimplified this phenomenon to the point of absurdity and teaches but a small fraction of its history. This is the spot for getting a serious understanding of it (from a more proletarian perspective) and collecting the facts that contemporary anticommunists are unlikely to discuss.

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