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| America's top Hitler's American model |
So the basic summary of this book was intriguing to me. Author James Q. Whitman basically lays out a simple truth: The Nazi party looked to American race laws (specifically all those racist ones in the south) for "inspiration" for their own cool racist laws. I like that this book can outrage anyone, whether you're angry that America was once a place that Nazis could take inspiration from or you're mad that the Nazis stole all our ideas on what to do with black people. There's something for everybody!
The book is short. Only 161 pages before it gets to extended notes and indexing. Guess how many pages I got through before I stopped fucking reading this book? 142. Like, holy shit. If James Q. Whitman pussyfooted around issues any harder, his feet would start a menstruation cycle. The guy can't go four god damn paragraphs without meekly apologizing and reminding everyone that he's not trying to be offensive or hurt anyone with what he's saying. Like yeah, we get it. It might be tough for some people to keep an open mind to something like this. You don't have to remind us and apologize for it literally all the god damn time.
I counted. In 161 pages, Whitman pussyfoots and overly clarifies himself on the issue a total of 71 fucking times. Estimating for words used on this pussyfooting against the approximate count of total words, Whitman expends around 15% of the book making sure he clarifies that just because the Nazis drew inspiration from USA race laws that this doesn't mean the USA was as bad as the Nazis. Wanna know how many times you really need to lay that out? This might shock you Whitman, but the answer is: FUCKING ONCE.
This might sound like an odd complaint but if you read the book for yourself you'll realize how weird and distracting it is that Whitman keeps pulling his narrative aside to gently and calmly remind us that the USA isn't evil and that the Nazis were only drawing from the most racially stunted areas of the country during a more simple time in our history. If Whitman ever had to kill anyone, he'd probably delicately dab them with a cotton swab while softly mumbling the same things over and over until they die of exposure to James Q. Whitman. He spends so much unnecessary time clarifying and re-clarifying and reminding us that his book isn't villianizing Americans and it's honestly really annoying after a point.
But the real kicker is that the book is just painfully god damn boring and meandering. Whitman's constant reassurance that Americans aren't shit would be a lot easier to overlook if the book itself wasn't such a painful slog. There's some moments of interesting history tidbits here and there but for the most part the entire 161 pages is seriously just Whitman retreading the same god damn point: Nazis borrowed from American race law. The first 30-odd pages are pretty interesting but it seriously gets harder and harder to read after the initial chapters simply because the book runs out of shit to say.
Have you ever written a lengthy article on the internet and thought to yourself, "wow i just wrote a book lmao". Yeah, well, Whitman did the same thing when he wrote a FaceBook post about Nazi lawmaking, only he unironically decided he had just written a book- he only needed to "plump it up" a bit. So Whitman cracked open a paragraph generator, fed it the words "Nazi", "America", "Hitler", "Law", "Racist", "Jew" and "Woops!" and then randomly generated his entire stupid fucking book.
While I can appreciate what small amount of actual history there is in the book, a gross amount of the writing is just Whitman constantly explaining the same damn thing over and over ad nausea. After the first fifty pages, you get it. The Nazis borrowed from Jim Crow-era laws when deciding how to define which citizen classified as a "Jew" and how Jew-German interactions in marriage and other affairs would work. That's the end of the fucking book, Whitman. You can't just write another 100+ pages saying THE SAME GOD DAMN THING. You can't do that! It's against the law! Maybe! Whitman is the literary equivalent of an asshole who has to post on Twitter every single day about vaping. We get it, Whitman, you inhaled liquid coolant vapors and then the ensuing brain damage made you think your two page thesis paper was worth being an entire book.
It gets worse (Better? Eh, nah. It gets worse.) when Whitman tries to shock us with a tantalizing and steamy factoid: that America was too extreme in some regards for Nazi lawmakers. This is somewhat true, but the fact ends up being so mundane that it's barely worth being a footnote let alone A WHOLE SECTION OF THE FUCKING BOOK. For instance, Nazi lawmakers decided some laws concerning segregation in the American south were either slightly too extreme or too off-point for what they wanted. Interesting, yes. Worth dozens of pages re-establishing the same god damn point? Hahahahahahahahahahahano.
As I write this, I find that Hitler's American Model is a slightly difficult book to properly review. It's a little hard to put into the right words just how boring and hard to get through it is (it's boring enough that suffice to say I actually couldn't get through the last 20 pages or so). I find that despite how hard I try, I end up just sort of repeating the same things over and over (the book is overtly apologetic and pussyfoot and hammers on the same exact point over and over). W-wait... Oh no. Was this Whitman's plan the whole time?! To write a boring book that would leave everyone complaining over and over about the same thing?? Whitman you fucking fiend. You've decided that if you have to write a shitty book retreading a single point, then you're going to make everyone retread a single point.
Evil didn't die with the Nazi party. It merely got better at hiding. You win this round, Whitman, you god damn asshole.
FINAL POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:
4/10
It's interesting enough to warrant being a Wikipedia article, at least? Good luck fighting all the way through it, though.
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