The outlet’s editor insisted that any resemblance between the piece and the Nazi leader’s infamous 1939 Reichstag speech was unintended
October 29, 2025 14:59
A conservative magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard University, has been suspended by its own board of directors after it published a piece that allegedly echoed the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
In its September issue, the Harvard Salient featured a piece criticising Islam and mass immigration by a student named David F.X. Army.
Army’s article included the phrase “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” which some readers suggested bore a resemblance to a speech made by the Nazi leader before the Reichstag in January 1939.
Railing against the measures imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler said at the time: “The German nation does not wish its interests to be determined and controlled by any foreign nation. France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans.”
Meanwhile, Army’s op-ed also stated that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe” and called for the return of values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own,” which appeared to echo the ethnonationalist “blood and soil” that was employed heavily by the Third Reich.
While the Salient is independent from the town’s famous university, copies of the magazine were placed in undergraduate dormitories as part of an agreement with the college.
Its student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has also written three opinion pieces of its own criticising Army and the Salient.
Following the public outcry, the Salient’s board said: “The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material – material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands.
"The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organisation. It is our fiduciary responsibility to investigate these matters fully and take appropriate action to address them.
"We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review."
However, Salient editor Richard Y. Rodgers defended the piece, saying that Army “did not intentionally quote Adolf Hitler, nor did any member of our editorial staff recognise the resemblance prior to publication”.
"The article was a meditation on how nations and cultures preserve coherence in an age of rootless cosmopolitanism and global homogenisation. To confuse a defence of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer.”
And, in his own opinion column for a later edition, Rodgers criticised the response to Army’s piece, saying: “Together, the coverage forms a coherent script. The conservative scholar becomes the reactionary theorist. The traditionalist student becomes the bigot.
"‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponised cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.”
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