"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 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 some elements of the otherwise tolerant 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 that 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 forty 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 Mid-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 11th. "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 11th 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 Mr. Duke's theory of geopolitics: "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 U.S. 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 one percent of the 11,000 Southern slave-holders 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 on 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 that 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."
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Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., writes frequently on law, public policy issues, real estate development, entrepreneurship, and housing.
From neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, White Supremacists, and some elements of the otherwise tolerant 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 that 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 forty 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 Mid-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 11th. "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 11th 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 Mr. Duke's theory of geopolitics: "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 U.S. 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 one percent of the 11,000 Southern slave-holders 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 on 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 that 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, Ph.D., writes frequently on law, public policy issues, real estate development, entrepreneurship, and housing.