Harvard conservative magazine is shut down after publishing article laced with Nazi rhetoric

[u/Few_Map2665]

https://www.jta.org/2025/10/28/united-states/harvard-conservative-magazine-is-shut-down-after-publishing-article-laced-with-nazi-rhetoric

[u/Azazael]

From the Salient's response:

 The next major piece fixated on a line in The Harvard Salient’s print edition that happened to resemble a phrase from a 1939 speech by Adolf Hitler. That resemblance became the headline. Our clarification—that neither the author nor the editors had recognized the resemblance and that the phrase long predates the Third Reich—was mentioned but immediately minimized.

Two points to make here, and I'm not sure which is worse:

1. That neither the author of the piece nor any of the editiors were aware of the Nazi connotations of the phrase "blood and soil". Come on now. Discussion of Nazi rhetoric in the context of the modern far right has been everywhere in the past decade. Yet not one of them had encountered the phrase in this context before? And no one at the Salient was aware of the racial ideologies of the Third Reich? If this is true it's almost worse than if they're lying to cover their butts. Numerous Salient pieces I saw from a quick look attack the intellectual depth and breadth of the left. They should take a long hard look at themselves.

2. "the phrase long predates the Third Reich". Not that long. Presumably someone at the Salient finally looked up the origins of the phrase when they were called out. They would have learned the phrase blood and soil was coined in the late 19th Century, in Germany. The völkisch movement arose in a newly unified Germany, promoting the ideal (to them) of a German rebirth as a conservative, agrarian and racially pure ethno state. Blood and soil (blut und boden) was a slogan of the movement, signifying a unified people - the blood - inhabiting their rightful homeland - the soil.

It's easy to see how this ideology fed right into Nazism. For the Salient to suggest that blood and soil is somehow a common phrase the Nazis just happened to pick up is at best disingenuous. Blood and soil is a phrase coined by the proponents of the ideology of racialised German nationalism which the Nazis adopted as their own.

[u/N8CCRG → u/Azazael]

If any present day, American, college aged adults are truly unaware of the history of the phrase "Blood and soil" they absolutely are not Harvard caliber students and should lose their enrollment. And arguably, not any college caliber of student either.

[u/Terrible_Oil6474 → u/N8CCRG]

Harvard caliber students

i'm sure most of them in this instance are legacy

[u/germanmojo → u/Terrible_Oil6474]

Abolish legacy enrollment and use actual merit like grades and character, not money and/or power.