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SPEAKING FREELY
A paranoid style of
politics
Richard L Cravatts
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click
here if you are interested in
contributing.
"Antisemitism," wrote
Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A
Rumor About The Jews, "is the stupid answer to a
serious question: how does history operate behind our
backs?"
For a wide range of ideological
extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for
why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is
a philosophical world view and interpretation of history
that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the
unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and
frantic outlook, characterized by historian Richard
Hofstadter as "the paranoid style" of politics, which
shifts responsibility from the self to sinister,
omnipotent others - typically and historically the Jews.
From neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, white
supremacists, and the religious right in America, the
old "world domination" mythology exploited so
effectively by Henry Ford in The International
Jew, "this grasper after world control, this actual
possessor and wielder of world control", is finding new
life and attracting new audiences on the Internet, in
books, newsletters and magazines, and from university
lecterns and church pulpits.
"The central
image," said Hofstadter of this defective way of looking
at how history works, "is that of a vast and sinister
conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of
influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way
of life ... [The] enemy is clearly delineated,"
Hofstadter observes, much in the way the Jew is depicted
in the vicious forgery gaining renewed interest of late,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: "He is a perfect
model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister,
ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.
Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the
toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim
of his past, his desires, his limitations."
And
the one characteristic of Jews which defines the
thinking of the paranoid style is the seemingly
limitless control he wields across every aspect of
financial, social and political life. "Very often,"
Hofstadter says, "the enemy is held to possess some
especially effective source of power: he controls the
press; he directs the public mind through 'managed
news'; he has unlimited funds ... he is gaining a
stranglehold on the educational system."
Hofstadter wrote these observations nearly 40
years ago, coming as they did in the wake of McCarthyism
and a fear of a communist threat. But the very
distortions and misinterpretations, both of history and
of current events, delineated by Hofstadter in the
1960s, parallel with eerie precision the conspiracy
theories about Jews being promulgated today.
William Pierce, for instance, head of the
neo-Nazi National Alliance and author of The Turner
Diaries, typifies the language of nearly hysterical
concern when he warns that "the Jewish control of the
American mass media is the single most important fact of
life, not just in America, but in the whole world today.
There is nothing - plague, famine, economic collapse,
even nuclear war - more dangerous to the future of our
people." Not only is the problem serious, but, according
to Pierce, "the control of the opinion-molding media is
nearly monolithic. All of the controlled media -
television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, motion
pictures - speak with a single voice, each reinforcing
the other." The Jews have all the power and influence,
and other groups, such as white Aryans, have thereby
been marginalized by "the eternal outsiders, the eternal
parasites whose strength always has been in their
ability to manipulate and deceive rather than in their
ability to build things".
A similar accusation
came from Willis Carto, founder of the right-wing,
recently bankrupt Liberty Lobby, who used Ford's
euphemistic language of hate to charge Jews with being
"far more dangerous to the nation than communists ever
were ... An extremely powerful lobby has developed among
the community of international traders. Their loyalty is
only to their money, wherever it may be and derived from
whatever source. These capitalists are the greatest
advocates of free trade and are implacable enemies of
national sovereignty."
David Duke, one-time
Klansman, former Louisiana gubernatorial candidate, and
now president of a group calling itself the
European-American Unity and Rights Organization,
similarly accuses Jews of having no loyalty to America;
in fact, because of their predominant influence on
foreign policy and the way the media reports it, they
are, in his view, essentially liable for terrorism and
Middle East tensions as well.
"The Jewish Lobby
and the Jewish-dominated media are very careful not to
let the American people fully understand the real reason
for the Iraqi war or the true issues in the Palestinian
question," Duke revealed shortly after September 11,
1991. "They don't want us to know the real reasons why
Americans are so hated - because it is the Jewish bosses
of American foreign policy who are the ones responsible
for this growing hatred of America." And why has
terrorism come calling? "The primary reason we are
suffering from terrorism in the United States today is
because our government policy is completely subordinated
to a foreign power: Israel and the efforts of world-wide
Jewish Supremacism."
And who was both the cause
and the beneficiary of the September 11 attacks? The
Zionists. "Ironic isn't it, that although Zionist
criminal actions led to this terror, only the Zionists
will benefit from it. Of course, they reason they
benefit because the American mass media is completely in
their hands and it will never ask the proper questions
of why these horrendous events are happening."
Mark Weber, director of the Institute for
Historical Review, a think tank whose principal
professional obsession is denying the Holocaust,
revealed a slight lack of objectivity about Jewish
affairs when he echoed Duke's theory of geo-politics,
"As long as the 'very powerful' Jewish lobby remains
entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic
Jewish distortion of current affairs and history, the
Jewish-Zionist domination of the US political system,
Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict
between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the
Israeli threat to peace."
Not content to use the
actual events of history to make a case against Jewish
world domination, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation
of Islam created a brand new explanation of how Jews
dominated the slave trade, neatly proven in a piece of
pseudo-scholarship, half-truths, distortions and
misrepresentations called, sensationally enough, The
Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The
book proposes, among other findings, that "Jews have
been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal
endeavor ever undertaken against an entire race of
people, a crime against humanity, the black African
holocaust."
The fact that, for instance, only
one-tenth of 1 percent of the 11,000 19th century
Southern slaveholders were Jews is curiously ignored in
this study, as is the fact that Muslim merchants, not
Jews, were the predominant slave traders in Africa.
Nevertheless, in Farrakhan's view, the Jews bear the
bulk of the responsibility: the Jews "were participants
in the entrapment and forcible exportation of millions
of black African citizens into the wretched and inhuman
life of bondage for the financial benefit of Jews."
Not only that, asserts Khalid Muhammad, Nation
of Islam spokesman, the Holocaust that decimated
European Jewry was brought on by the Jews themselves, a
result of their "manipulation" of German society.
"Everybody always talks about Hitler exterminating six
million Jews," Muhammad mused in 1993 at New Jersey's
Kean College. "But don't nobody ever ask what did they
do to Hitler? ... They went in there, in Germany, the
way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted,
they usurped, they turned around, and a German, in his
own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get
money. They had undermined the very fabric of the
society."
Pat Robertson, the high-profile
televangelist, has his own view of history, particularly
when it comes to what he revealed in A New World
Order as "a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing
less than a new order for the human race under the
domination of Lucifer and his followers." In Robertson's
world view, some force and some group has been
nefariously working behind the scenes to shape world
affairs and coalesce all power in one central force.
"There has to be some other power at work which has
succeeded in molding and shaping United States public
policy toward one clear goal - world government - from
generation to successive generation," Robertson wrote.
"It is my firm belief that the events of public policy
are not the accidents and coincidences we are generally
led to believe. They are planned."
It is the
unfortunate recurrence of history that when social
upheavals, cultural and religious uncertainty, economic
woes, and war threaten us, those who think that history
is controlled look to the controlling force to blame for
circumstances - as a historic trend, that blame has
fallen to the Jews, just as it still does for the
frustrated, marginalized intellectual periphery of
contemporary political thought. For Hofstadter, the
principal result of the paranoid style of politics is
when ideologues, who feel "they have no access to
political bargaining or the making of decisions ... find
their original conception of the world of power as
omnipotent, sinister and malicious fully confirmed".
"We are all sufferers from history," Hofstadter
concludes, "but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since
he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the
rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."
Richard L Cravatts, PhD, writes
frequently on law, public policy issues, real estate
development, entrepreneurship and housing.
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click
here if you are interested in
contributing.
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