Fascism by Madeleine Albright

THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN A SOURCE OF HOPE TO MILLIONS since before its founding. Writing from Paris in 1776, Benjamin Franklin assured the Continental Congress, "All Europe is for us. Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind. " During the Civil War, especially in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, idealists from many corners of Europe crossed the Atlantic to join the crusade against slavery. In New York, an international brigade named in honor of Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi was formed to assist the army of Lincoln. Declared Garibaldi: "The American question is about life for the liberty of the world. " A less rosy assessment, from a very different source, came many years later: "The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery were destroyed by that war," lamented Adolf Hitler, "and with them also the embryo of a truly great America."

Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich. Nazi writers regularly pointed to America's anti-Asian immigration quotas and bigoted Jim Crow laws to deflect foreign criticism of their own discriminatory statutes. Even the German quest for Lebensraum found its model in America's westward expansion, during which, as Hitler noted, U. S. soldiers and frontiersmen "gunned down. millions of Redskins."