And Now: Anti-Semitism
(The Nation) -- by Jonathan Schell --
When Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently accused investor and philanthropist George Soros, who is of Jewish and Hungarian origin, of running a "shadow government" whose aim is to destroy the American political system, he was drawing on a rich tradition of anti-Semitic attacks.
It's indeed amazing how often, in the past hundred years or so, the most deranged people, movements and governments have found their way, with a kind of dreary consistency, to anti-Semitism as the explanation for their activities. Hitler (much mentioned by Beck), of course, placed his attack on the Jewish people at the core of his political program—a fact that for all its familiarity still has the power to astonish. When the exercise of great power is involved, something in most of us would like to think that rational motives—even if only ruthless self-interest, for instance—are at work. Such rooted, commonplace impulses would at least promise to set some limits on whatever wickedness was afoot. That they can be overridden by crazier considerations raises a possibility that is more distressing: that, in the old nihilist formulation, "anything is possible."
What is it about this particular piece of insanity that has had such power to derange? The burden of the question was captured in a well-known joke that circulated in Hitler's time: "The Nazis are planning to kill all the cyclists and the Jews."
"Why the cyclists?"
"Why the Jews?"
Whatever the answer, anti-Semitism has not been confined to the right. The century's other colossal monster, Stalin, found his way at the end of his life through all the thickets of Marxist dialectic to anti-Semitism. After a series of anti-Semitic trials in the early 1950s in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe (the accused were charged with Zionism and "cosmopolitanism"), Stalin began laying the ground for a broad anti-Semitic purge, which was cut short only by his death.
While it's impossible, of course, to assign any single or simple cause to the recurring appeal of anti-Semitism for demagogues, one reason appears to be that by the beginning of the twentieth century it had developed into a full-dress conspiracy theory, set forth by the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, according to which Jews were secretly planning to subvert all existing governments and take over the world. A clear advantage for totalitarian regimes was that the fictional conspiracy provided the ideal justification for perfectly real conspiracies mounted by those regimes to achieve world domination. There was no better guide to what they planned to do than what they professed to fear.
But to achieve this mirror effect, in which reality responded to and aped fantasy, something prior was needed. The totalitarians had to cut themselves off from actual events—to achieve what Hannah Arendt called "the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality." Anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories, by purporting to account for the inner workings of history itself, were ideal for the purpose. Indeed, one might say that they provided the gold standard for divorce from reality—for organized insanity that rests not on mere inattention to truth or failure to fact-check but on the systematic replacement of reality with a more satisfying world of fantasy.
In those cases, conspiracy theories are appealing not despite their nonfactuality but precisely because of it. When the longing for illusion—a hardy perennial in political life—arises, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which almost flaunt their defiance of the actual world, are ready and waiting to satisfy the need. Casting off factuality is then not a burden but a release from a burden—a palpable liberation from the ever-difficult, ever-frustrating effort of seeing things as they are.
All of which brings us back to Glenn Beck. He takes to a new level the style of right-wing entertainer-demagogue pioneered by such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. He can switch in an instant from weepy, self-abasing recovering alcoholic to stern moralist and scold, from clown to revival preacher ("God gives me hints of stuff"), from Woody Woodpecker to bespectacled professor. Most demagogues have something of the clown about them, but in Beck this is deliberate; it is controlled. At the same time, his political importance is undeniable. He is one of the most revered figures of the Tea Party, which stands astride the Republican Party, which is about to assume control of the House of Representatives. The Republican Party, in turn, has been exhibiting in especially aggressive form the kind of denial of fact and reality that is one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism. The most striking case in point is that the great majority of newly elected Republicans are, in one form or another, deniers of what is, together with nuclear danger, the greatest peril confronting the nation as well as the human species: man-made global warming...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
Notice how Jonathan Shell fails to mention that The Nation Institute, which is part and parcel of The Nation magazine for which he wrote this article, is funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute. How convenient for Judeofascist Lefty Zionist Soros that The Nation magazine is willing to attack those who criticize him and his predatory globalizationist polices as anti-Semitic simply because he's Jewish.
By declaring Soros a stand-in for Jews, isn't The Nation magazine itself engaged in anti-Semitism by conflating Jewry with an individual, predatory Jew and then extrapolating criticism of his political actions as anti-Semitism? What a very Zionist ploy, similar to how Jewish nationalists conflate themselves with every Jew worldwide by declaring Israel "the collective Jew," and then declaring those who resist its aggression to be anti-Semitic.
Shell writes: "A clear advantage for totalitarian regimes was that the fictional [Jewish nationalist] conspiracy provided the ideal justification for perfectly real conspiracies mounted by those regimes to achieve world domination."
What Shell is saying here is that there was never any Jewish nationalist/Jewish Bolshevik (Zionist) conspiracy to utilize Communism to take over the world (which is an outright lie), but declaring there was one was useful to Hitler, and eventually Stalin as well; thus, those who engage in Zionist "conspiracy theories" are exploiting anti-Semitism on behalf of their own totalitarian agenda.
This is rich, coming from the statist-totalitarian liberal Nation magazine, which has lined up in support of every Judeofascist-Left and statist-authoritarian diaspora Jewish nationalist initiative from Soros' predatory globalization agenda to Judeofascist neocon Michael Chertoff's TSA thugs terrorizing American air travelers under the auspices of "national security" -- a state of affairs from which Soros has managed to profit as well.
Shell is fond of black humor jokes revolving around the supposed persecution of politically predatory Jewry, so I've got a good one for him.
How can you tell if a hack journalist is complicit with the totalitarian Zionist agenda?
He denies there's such a thing as Judeofascism, and he's not a libertarian.
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Zionist Soros-backed Nation magazine's "organic" vision for America
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