I've mentioned Jackson a few times on this blog.
Here is part of the transcript of the fourth episode, Spectacle:
Newsreel Announcer: Thirty in all charged with scheming to establish a Nazi government in the United States.
Maddow: But despite their participation in that conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and feed it to the American people, no criminal charges were ever brought against any members of Congres s for that. We just let it be and moved on.
And so a bunch of powerful forces and figures who’d been involved in America First before the war, they got to work on this brand new project after the war, coming to the defense of the now-defeated Nazis. Here’s historian John Jackson.
Jackson: Henry Regnery was part of the isolationist crowd before World War II.
Maddow: Henry Regnery was a prominent member of the America First Committee before the war. He was from a very rich family. His father had co-founded and funded America First. Henry Regnery, the son, helped found a right wing magazine called Human Events.
Reporter: The war crimes trial of 20 former top Nazi and German military leaders opened at Nuremberg.
Maddow: Just one day after the Nuremberg trial started, the magazine railed against that prosecution as a quote, travesty of justice. Regnery then launched his own conservative publishing company, which is still around to this day. The first books he published argued that the Nazis were being treated very unfairly, that the supposed atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were really no worse than what anyone else did.
Jackson: He was searching around for authors who would make that case, that equivalent sort of atrocities were committed by the allies as the axis powers. The problem was most of these people that Regnery publishes in the late 40s, early 50s were fascists, were aligned with the fascist cause, with Hitler’s cause.
As a result I was checking out Fardels Bear and I had forgotten how much good stuff Jackson has on Arthur Jensen. I will be talking about that soon.
