as fecklessly and ruthlessly as Hitler would later use and abuse racist Germans in Germany, the Saar (plebescite), Memel, Leipzig, Poland, Italian Tyrol, Sudetenland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
See Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, multiple citations.
The meaner these states could be painted against their German minorities, in defiance of democcratic principles and the rights of man Hitler was willing to espouse, the better Hitler's excuse later to free these enslaved Germans from their oppressive captors.
Sound familiar?
It was Lincoln's propaganda strategy for invading the South, freeing enslaved negroes merely opportunistically, whom he frankly could have cared less about and considered a permanently inferior race. His moderate gradualism was as false as Hitler's pacifism.
Holzer, The Lincoln-Doublas Debates, The First Complete Unexpurgated Text, multiple citations, and a few works on the Civil War.
There should be no illusions about who knew what.
The analogies between the clashes along the Mississippi River territories and elsewhere between North and South, years before Lincoln's election, and the Spanish Civil War, are stark in their implications, although the one a military coup gone badly, and the other a self evidently sectional political outcome.
Bobbitt called Lincoln's Union the first Nation State, and the first Nation State of Terror.
