So far, our ethnic parallels have been limited largely to America, but of course, ethnic persecution happens elsewhere; certainly one of the most egregious non-American examples would be the persecution in Hitler’s Germany of ethnic others, particularly Jews. Although American hippies are not being systematically slaughtered, the manner in which American bigots think about hippies is disturbingly similar to the way German anti-Semites of the Nazi era viewed Jews: the bane of the nation.

A former Nazi prison guard explained that Germans were "taught to hate" the Jews and that he saw them " . . . as criminals, as subhumans and as the cause of our nation's decline" (Rees); of course, that the counterculture is responsible for America‘s alleged decline has become a trite truism. The phrase "dirty Jew" came as naturally to many Germans as the phrase "dirty hippie" comes to many Americans today. And just as Jews were blamed by German anti-Semites for Germany's loss in WW I, hippies (regularly seen as synonymous with the anti-war movement) are popularly blamed for America's loss in Vietnam. "Patriotic" gentile Germans of the era saw Jews as traitors, as the enemy within, part of a larger "international Jewish conspiracy" attacking their homeland; increasingly, "patriotic" Americans, prodded by government propaganda linking any and all "drug" use with terror, see hippies as aligned with an international terrorism attacking our homeland, as a Trojan Horse.

Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels once said that jazz, which he associated with Jews, was "the music of the subhuman"; just so, the James Watts and Lyndon LaRouches of America believe rock, which they associate with hippies, degrades youth, and of course thousands of preachers claiming to be Christian denounce a "Satanic" rock 'n' roll in their minds associated with "the counterculture."

And the Nazis used anti-Semitism to bring out the bully in society. Jews were seen as meek (Baron 133), as easy victims whose perceived pacifism only proved their weakness and inferiority--the exact attitude many Americans have towards hippies. Likewise, the Nazis didn’t see Jews as real Germans. Though Hitler’s Jewish victims had often been German for generations, the Third Reich saw only aliens; just so, many Americans don’t see hippies as real Americans. Just as the Nazi state formulated laws to identify and repress Jews, to criminalize that people, so America’s current drug-testing policies seem designed to identify and repress hippies, and for forty years, governmental policies have criminalized the counterculture. And just as German science was whored by the Nazis, much American science has been bent to the will of the War on Drugs: the Nazis measured Jewish skulls to prove Jewish inferiority; America’s drug researchers tell us marijuana makes adolescent males grow breasts. Both groups of scientists acted/act as part of a crusade for moral and physical health, for national strength and purity.

If you asked a "patriotic" German of the period about morality, she or he would likely have framed her or his answer in terms of evil being represented by Jews and goodness being represented by the supposed antithesis of Jews: "Aryans," the so-called “master race," themselves. They would likely add that those actively persecuting Jews were the most moral of all since they were on a crusade against evil. And just as those "moral" Germans thought their nation could only be lifted up when the Jews had been eliminated, so many of today’s most "moral" Americans believe hippies are evil, that the very survival of the nation depends on the "cancer" of the counterculture being eliminated--America has problems because America has hippies. Thus, just as a majority of Germans came to believe that for the good of the nation, Jewish culture had to be suppressed, many Americans have come to feel the same about the counterculture.

So generally, the way that many non-hippie Americans, particularly those on the right, have come to view hippies much resembles the way "loyal" Germans came to view Jews.

Listen carefully to the ravings of this far-rightist; she’s a University of Maryland member of the Adelphi sorority who‘s written a letter to the editor in support of "the courageous stand" earlier taken by one J. Arthur Gorham III. You might argue she and he are unimportant, but I’d be willing to bet that most newspapers in America have at one time or another published a similar screed, that in many ways, the two hippie haters here are typical:

It’s about time that someone [Gorham] has had the nerve to voice their opinion on the perversions and the lewdness running rampant in this University. Too long the decent self-respecting Americans have been content to allow the social degenerates, especially on our campuses, to engage in their hideous acts, causing shame to those of us who wish to lead a decent life. It’s high time that the pimps, prostitutes, homos, hippies, and other degenerates are eliminated, so that honest God-loving citizens can return this wayward society to the moral one it once was (emphasis added; Hill).

Substitute Jews for hippies, and the passage reads like something out of Nazi Germany.

Here's a passage from a column by Paul Jackson (associate editor of the Canadian Calgary Sun) that appeared in December 2004; it's entitled "Blame hippies: Sixties counterculture eroded moral foundations of society." In it, Jackson is echoing and paraphrasing the ideas (and emotions) in a video/DVD called The Siege of Western Civilization, produced and marketed by one Herb Meyer, a former high-ranking CIA official in the Reagan Administration:

. . . The Siege of Western Civilization . . . is currently the big talking point amongst conservatives across this continent. Meyer . . . notes western civilization is under attack both from outside and within our borders. . . .
Today, he sees the internal threat to our moral foundations stemming from the "hippie" counterculture of the 1960's. The hippie movement spurned all that centuries of western civilization had spent building and safeguarding. Hippies rejected material success, and military strength. They loathed the consumer society, and the moral values of the day. It really was sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll with no thought to the consequences of where their actions would take them. The historic Fourth of July holiday was abandoned in place of "Earth Day" or some other such nonsense. There was no God. . . .
What they do, says Meyer, is subvert the foundations of our free society.
We are now in the second American civil war, against those who want to put the American Revolution in reverse. . . .The values in our society are rapidly being eroded. To Meyer, western civilization has been living off its accumulated capital, and now it's being spent recklessly, with the end result being our own annihilation. That's why Meyer believes time is quickly running out for us unless we quickly tackle both the enemy outside our borders [Muslim 'extremists'] and the enemy within [hippie culture]. . . . wake up now to the relentless undermining of our way of life.

Meyer himself adds, "We need to understand these threats, now, so we can set in place the right policies to lift this siege we are under--to save our country and by doing so to rescue Western Civilization itself."

No, these aren't members of the American Nazi Party; rather, they sound like neoconservatives, the right-wing of the Republican Party. True, Meyer calls for no extermination of hippies, yet in their characterizations of the counterculture, he and Jackson sound like Nazi ideologues discussing Jews sometime in the mid-1930's when the Holocaust likely hadn't yet been envisioned. "If the Jew did not exist," said John-Paul Sartre, "the anti-Semite would invent him" (qtd. in Levin 39). And Jackson's and Meyer's take on hippiedom illustrates the same phenomenon: Just about everything bad that in their eyes it's possible to be has been projected onto the counterculture--if it's bad, it's hippie; if it's hippie, it's bad. To them, the counterculture is the antithesis of virtue, the enemy within who they are pitted in a life-or-death struggle against--they are defending themselves and all that's good against "annihilation."

And the logic of "us or them" leads inexorably to this ferocious, nightmarish conclusion: "If the choices are you annihilate us, or we annihilate you, we're going to annihilate you." That's how Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables" ended up in Nazi ovens. And like the anti-Semites of the Third Reich, these bigots see themselves as the saviors of their nation, the defenders of Western Civilization. Theirs is the language of smug moral superiority, the language of ethnocide, the language of aggression rationalized as self-defense.

Of course, if you asked a German Nazi, "Why are you attacking Jews?" he or she would have sputtered in astonishment, "We attack them?! Are you insane? They’ve attacked us! The Jews subvert the flower of our youth with their degenerate music! The Jews have betrayed our nation, stabbed us in the back! The Jews mean to destroy us!" And you would look at that person and think, "My God, you’ve turned reality on its head."

That same confusion of aggression with self-defense seems to run through the heads of hippie-hating Americans. You can see it in the aforementioned Al Capp cartoons: "Ignoble Savages" first shows us hippie protestors (and again, all of Capp's protestors are portrayed as hippie) brutally assaulting campus officials--breaking protest signs over officials' heads, beating them with baseball bats, choking them, setting fires. An ineffectual police officer looks on then walks away as a protestor exults, "He won‘t dare lay a finger on us!!" Later, after gangster thugs have taken over Harvard, they don brass knuckles to brutalize the demonstrators; one fleeing hippie whines, "The new administration's playing dirty!! They're--sob!--treating us like we treated them!!"

To live in Capp's world, you would think that at Kent State, hippie protestors had shot four National Guardsmen dead and gone unpunished, that at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, exclusively hippie demonstrators had manhandled police, that hippies were--with impunity--bullying and beating on America. Sadly, tens of millions of Americans did live in Capp's world. They daily read such fascistic propaganda, soaked it up, and reveled in scenes of richly deserved violence against marauding "hippies" they saw as attacking all that was great and good in America.

Decades later, Forrest Gump presented a similarly skewed view: during an anti-war protest at the Capitol Mall, a policeman pulls the plug on a demonstrator's bullhorn; a female protestor, looking very "feminist" unfeminine in a tee-shirt and army helmet--a sterotype "hippie protestor"--grabs a truncheon and chases him. But to anyone familiar with anti-war protests of the time (to anyone in touch with reality), the scene would seem to turn reality on its head--helmeted, truncheon-wielding "hippie protestors" pursuing frightened, fleeing, unarmed police?

And today, we can see this same inversion in the neoconservative coverage of the influential Washington Times. As noted above, the Times is ever bashing "the counterculture" yet rationalizes itself as only responding to a concerted hippie "assault" on America.

Like our Nazi's notion of "Jewish aggression" against Germany, here we have a grotesquely distorted fantasy world; yet, in the minds of many, a wicked "counterculture" has viciously assaulted innocent America; thus, violence against hippies is the righteous violence of self-defense.

So, it's not just that the elements of an ideology of counterculture annihilation are in place (though perhaps in nascent form), it's that in much of America, the emotions are there too. In one scene of PBS's "Auschwitz: Inside the Third Reich," a Nazi officer has ordered a group of prisoners to lie face down; as he walks about, periodically shooting a victim in the back of the head, he’s screaming verbal abuse, sometimes kicking them--he's in a rage (Rees). Jews, Slavs and ethnic others assaulted by Nazi predators routinely marveled at their sadism. We see it in Hitler's personality: he was immensely vindictive--the Jews were to be punished, and there would be no mercy, not a speck. Sick with hatred, the Nazis felt no punishment they inflicted could be too harsh, no cruelty too perverse--the Jewish "criminals" deserved it; they had it coming. And that, fellow humans, is how we go off the deep end, how we become truly, irrevocably evil.

I put it to you that in much of America, particularly in neoconservative America, people blame and hate hippies with some of the same intensity that many gentile Germans blamed and hated Jews in the early 1930's, that they seek to persecute us with much the same virulence. Regarding early hippies, sociologist Michael E. Brown comments: "Most journalists reviewing the 'hippie scene' with any sympathy at all seem to agree with Newsweek that 'the hippies' . . . have been subjected to varieties of cruelty that ought to be intolerable" (103). Torgoff describes the political atmosphere in 1989:

Senator Phil Gramm and Congressman Newt Gingrich wanted to round up masses of drug users, herd them onto military bases that would be converted into prisons, and make them pay the court costs. [Can you say concentration camp?] . . . Police Chief Daryl Gates of Los Angeles declared that casual drug users should be "taken out and shot" because they were guilty of "treason." The Delaware State Legislature debated bringing back the whipping post for drug users . . . . (428)

Think angry, hippie-hating Americans aren't as capable of cruelty as the Nazis? Consider the sanctimonious--murderous--comment of neoconservative idol William Bennett: "I have no problems with beheading marijuana users . . ." (qtd. in Herer 122-23). Were they alive today, Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi leaders would nod approvingly at "zero tolerance." They would feel a bond with Bennett and the neocons, they would agree on the need for stringent measures against "degenerates destroying the nation," and they would burn with the same righteous indignation against "subhuman low-lifes."

Interesting, isn’t it? When Islamic fundamentalists behead people, it's seen as evidence of barbarism, of "Islamofascism"; when Bennett advocates beheading hippie types, it's seen as evidence of virtuous character and moral greatness. Rationalize it though society will, this is the language of hate; this is the language of madness.

No, as mentioned, America hasn’t begun practicing mass murder on hippies--and hopefully never will--but it is deeply involved in a concerted program of state-sponsored ethnocide, and the most reactionary elements in America today are fueling and feeding off of anti-hippie prejudice, hating hippies, much the way the Nazis of the 1930’s fueled and fed off of anti-Semitism, hated Jews. Sadly, whenever such a dynamic is in place, it always has the potential to spin truly out of control, pulling us all into the abyss.