"Hitler was right" and "Hitler did nothing wrong" are statements and internet memes either expressing support for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler or trolling. [1] [2] The ironic or trolling uses of the phrase allow those on the alt-right to maintain plausible deniability over their white supremacist views. [3]
In 1947, amidst a national outrage and widespread anti-semitic rioting over the execution of two British officers by the Irgun in an event known as The Sergeants affair, angry mobs in North Wales wrote the words "Hitler was right" on Jewish properties. [4] [5] In Eccles, a crowd of around 700 people were told by former sergeant major John Regan that "Hitler was right. Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child. What are you afraid of? There's only a handful of police." He was fined 15 pounds for the statement. [6]
Colin Jordan, leader of the British National Socialist Movement, argued in a 1962 speech titled "Hitler was right". Some witnesses recalled seeing banners stating "Hitler was right". [7] [8] In the early 1960s, Canadian neo-Nazi activist David Stanley distributed "Hitler was right" leaflets. [9] In Germany in the 1960s neo-Nazis were convicted for distributing "Hitler was right" leaflets. [10]
One of the most well known controversies relating to the 2001 Durban Conference on racism was the unfurling of a giant sign saying Hitler was right among a crowd of 20,000 protesters. [11] [12] [13]
On June 29, 2011, a user posted on 4chan Hitler Did Nothing Wrong [14] and the phrase has continued to be used since January 30, 2012. [15] After the statement went viral, the site was pulled and accompanied with an apology, but the site quickly went back for a while. [14] The meme was originally on Mountain Dew's 2012 campaign, where in August 2012, 4chan users attacked a third-party sponsored Mountain Dew campaign called "Dub the Dew" [16] on the contest with the name Hitler Did Nothing Wrong, which was a failure. The write-in contained Nazism, the statement as well as the Holocaust joke to climb to the top of the list, and the company shut down the contest. [17] Adweek compared the incident to another recent campaign hijacked under similar circumstances, where musician Pitbull was sent to perform in Kodiak, Alaska, in a Walmart promotion. [18] [19] [20] An analysis by USA Today found that Teespring was selling T-shirts reading "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" and one with an image of Bill Cosby paired with the slogan "drinks on me ladies". [21] After the huge controversy, an American Clothing website still continues to sell T-shirts with Nazi Slogans. [22]
A bullfighting stadium in Pinto, Madrid was vandalized by neo-Nazis in 2013 with the phrase (Spanish : ADOLF HITLER TENÍA RAZÓN, lit. 'ADOLF HITLER WAS RIGHT') accompanied with a swastika, prompting a condemnation from the town's mayor, a People's Party member. [23] [24] The incident was noted by both a Pew Research Center report [25] and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor's chapter on Spain. [26]
The concept of "Hitler as a Hero" was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the top sixth most anti-Semitic slur in 2013, with the subject's entry stating that "'Hitler was right' has emerged as a rallying cry not only for neo-Nazis but increasingly among some Arabs and Muslims." [27]
The Microsoft chatbot Tay was trained in 2016 by internet users to use phrases such as "Hitler did nothing wrong" and "Hitler was right I hate the Jews". It was taken offline because of these statements. [28] [29] [30]
People tweeting "Hitler was right" has been cited as an example of fascism on social media. [31] A 2017 ProPublica investigation revealed that Facebook allowed advertisers to target users using antisemitic ad categories including "Hitler did nothing wrong". [32]
In 2018, conspiracy theorist Steve West won the Republican primary for a district in the Missouri State House after stating "Hitler was right". The Missouri Republican Party did not endorse West. [33] United States Rep. Mary Miller was criticized for stating the day before the 2021 United States Capitol attack that "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'” [34]
Welsh criminal Austin Ross went on a campaign of vandalistic acts and hate crimes from 2012 to 2018 which involved the defacement of locations across Newport, Wales. Ross carried out at least two arson attacks and regularly covered buildings with posters saying that "Hitler did nothing wrong." [35]
In 2021, Palestinian BBC journalist Tala Halawa was fired after it was discovered she had tweeted "#Israel is more #Nazi than #Hitler! Oh, #HitlerWasRight #IDF go to hell. #prayForGaza." during the 2014 Gaza War. In response to her suspension Halawa apologized for the tweet but insisted that she was the subject of character assassination by the Israel lobby. [36] [37]
On October 20, 2021, posters carrying the phrase were posted on the walls of a synagogue in Carmichael, California, by the far-right Aryan Nations terror group. [38]
The Anti-Defamation League stated that it found 17,000 tweets using a variation of the phrase "Hitler was right" posted between 7 and 14 May 2021 during the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis. [39] According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, which cooperates with the ADL and Rutgers University, Iran-affiliated Twitter accounts posted antisemitic comments such as "Hitler was right" and "kill all Jews" 175 times per minute during the conflict. [40]
Neo-fascism is a post–World War II far-right ideology that includes significant elements of fascism. Neo-fascism usually includes ultranationalism, racial supremacy, populism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment, as well as opposition to liberal democracy, social democracy, parliamentarianism, liberalism, Marxism, capitalism, communism, and socialism. As with classical fascism, it proposes a Third Position as an alternative to market capitalism.
Neo-Nazism comprises the post–World War II militant, social, and political movements that seek to revive and reinstate Nazi ideology. Neo-Nazis employ their ideology to promote hatred and racial supremacy, to attack racial and ethnic minorities, and in some cases to create a fascist state.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is a Jewish human rights organization established in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier. The center is known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating anti-Semitism, tolerance education, defending Israel, and its Museum of Tolerance.
Fascist has been used as a pejorative epithet against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.
Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the SS, or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been employed for a wide variety of reasons since Hitler's rise to power. Some Nazi comparisons are logical fallacies, such as reductio ad Hitlerum. Godwin's law asserts that a Nazi analogy is increasingly likely the longer an internet discussion continues; Mike Godwin also stated that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.
This is a list of topics related to racism:
Different opinions exist among historians regarding the extent of antisemitism in American history and how American antisemitism contrasted with its European counterpart. In contrast to the horrors of European history, John Higham states that in the United States "no decisive event, no deep crisis, no powerful social movement, no great individual is associated primarily with, or significant chiefly because of anti-Semitism." Accordingly, David A. Gerber concludes that antisemitism "has been a distinctly minor feature of the nation's historical development." Historian Britt Tevis argue that, "Handlin and Higham’s ideas remain influential, and many American Jewish historians continue to present antisemitism as largely insignificant, momentary, primarily social."
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Metapedia is an online wiki-based encyclopedia. Its views have been described as fascist, far-right, white nationalist, white supremacist, anti-feminist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-semitic, Holocaust-denying and neo-Nazi.
Patrol 36 was a neo-Nazi skinhead organization in Israel, consisting of 9 members, led by Eli Bonite, alias "Ely the Nazi". The group's members were Russian immigrants that had Jewish roots aged 16 to 21. According to The Daily Telegraph, the men's families were allowed to settle in Israel under the Law of Return.
National Action was a British right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi terrorist organisation based in Warrington. Founded in 2013, the group is secretive, and has rules to prevent members from talking about it openly. It has been a proscribed organisation in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000 since 16 December 2016, the first far-right group to be proscribed since the Second World War. In March 2017, an undercover investigation by ITV found that its members were still meeting in secret. It is believed that after its proscription, National Action organised itself in a similar way to the also-banned Salafi jihadist Al-Muhajiroun network.
The Daily Stormer is an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement. Its editor, Andrew Anglin, founded the outlet on July 4, 2013, as a faster-paced replacement for his previous website Total Fascism, which had focused on his own long-form essays on fascism, race, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. In contrast, The Daily Stormer relies heavily on quoted material with exaggerated headlines.
Triple parentheses or triple brackets, or an echo, often referred to in print as an ( ), are an antisemitic symbol that has been used to highlight the names of individuals thought to be Jews, and the names of organizations thought to be owned by Jews. This use of the symbol originated from the alt-right-affiliated, neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff, whose editors said that the symbol refers to the historic actions of Jews which have caused their surnames to "echo throughout history". The triple parentheses have been adopted as an online stigma by antisemites, neo-Nazis, browsers of the "Politically Incorrect" board on 4chan, and white nationalists to identify individuals of Jewish background as targets for online harassment, such as Jewish political journalists critical of Donald Trump during his 2016 election campaign.
Jack Andrew Renshaw is a British convicted child sex offender, terrorist and former spokesperson for the neo-Nazi organisation National Action. He was an economics and politics student at Manchester Metropolitan University and an organiser for the British National Party (BNP) youth wing, BNP Youth. On 12 June 2018, Renshaw pleaded guilty to preparing an act of terrorism, with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper, and to making a threat to murder a police officer.
The London Forum is a loose organisation of far-right individuals based in London but with regional headquarters across the United Kingdom. Emerging in 2011 out of a split within the British far-right, meetings were regularly held by the organisation. These have been met with significant protests by anti-fascist activists and have been infiltrated by journalists, most notably a 2015 investigation of the group by The Mail on Sunday with the help of Searchlight, an anti-fascist magazine that focuses on the British far-right.
Since the foundation of the Conservative Party in 1834, there have been numerous instances of antisemitism in the party, from both Conservative party leaders and other party figures.
The international Jewish conspiracy or the world Jewish conspiracy has been described as "the most widespread and durable conspiracy theory of the twentieth century" and "one of the most widespread and long-running conspiracy theories". Although it typically claims that a malevolent, usually global Jewish circle, referred to as International Jewry, conspires for world domination, the conspiracy theory's content is extremely variable, which helps explain its wide distribution and long duration. It was popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century especially by the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Among the beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy are Jewish Bolshevism, Cultural Marxism, Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, White genocide conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial. The Nazi leadership's belief in an international Jewish conspiracy that it blamed for starting World War II and controlling the Allied powers was key to their decision to launch the Final Solution.
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their country and see Zionism as the least complicated method of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.
Europa: The Last Battle is a 2017 English-language Swedish ten-part neo-Nazi propaganda film directed, written and produced by Tobias Bratt, a Swedish far-right activist associated with the Nordic Resistance Movement, a European neo-Nazi movement. It promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial, and has been promoted across multiple social media platforms.
In the early 21st century, antisemitism was identified in social media platforms with up to 69 percent of Jews in the US having encountered antisemitism online according to the 2022 report released by "The State of Antisemitism in America". Jews have encountered antisemitism either as targets themselves or by being exposed to antisemitic content on their media page.