XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc
From: hotmail@hotmail.edu
Bradley K. Sherman wrote:
>Try to keep up with reality, KG:
> | ...
> | Trump's denial that he had read Hitler's memoir came after
> | he has made a series of incendiary remarks in recent weeks
> | referring to his political opponents as "vermin" and saying
> | illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."
> |
> | There's no question that language echoes that Hitler used
> | to describe his enemies, but there may have been some
> | question about whether Trump knew he was using the same
> | words Hitler used to justify his murderous and genocidal
> | rule of Nazi Germany.
> |
> | Now, after backlash that his words echoed Hitler's,
> | however, there is no doubt.
> | ...
>ings-analysis/story?id=105810745>
>
> --bks
>
Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!
Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed With Jews
Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the
president says.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters
The "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about
protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy
of "white culture" and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the
Confederacy.
So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like "Jews will not
replace us"?
The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-
Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like
"blood and soil, " a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. "This city is run by
Jewish communists and criminal niggers, " one demonstrator told Vice News'
Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue,
Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic
rifles stood across the street, according to the temple's president. Nazi
websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure,
congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of
the building when they were done praying.
A collage featuring Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, several other people, and
the Statue of Liberty atop a black-and-white Star of David
An illustration of three kids playing with long ropes around their waists
An illustration of a child with a hand imprint on his face.
"This is an agenda about celebrating the enslavement of Africans and their
descendants, and celebrating those that then fought to preserve that
terrible machine of white supremacy and human enslavement, " said Jonathan
Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL. "And yet,
somehow, they're all wearing shirts that talk about Adolf Hitler. "
For these demonstrators, though, the connection between African Americans
and Jews is clear. In the minds of white supremacists like David Duke,
there is a straight line from anti-blackness to anti-Judaism. That logic is
powerful and important. The durability of anti-Semitic tropes, and the ease
with which they slide into all displays of bigotry, is a chilling reminder
that the hatreds of our time rhyme with history and are easily channeled
through timeless anti-Semitic canards.
The University of Chicago historian David Nirenberg has spent his career
studying anti-Jewish movements and beliefs. Recently, he spoke to a group
of students about anti-Semitism on college campuses. "At the end of the ...
talk, I said, 'I wouldn't rush from all this material to thinking that this
anti-Semitism is as dangerous as its early 20th-century predecessor, '" he
told me. "Seeing the images of the Virginia protest, I must admit, I kind
of felt otherwise. ... It certainly made me feel that books and ideas that
I had treated as very marginal in our society are not as marginal as I
might have hoped. "
Anti-Semitism often functions as a readily available language for all
manner of bigotry—a Rosetta Stone that can translate animus toward one
group into a universal hate for many groups. "Ever since St. Paul,
Christianity and all the religions born from it—Islam, the secular
philosophies of Europe, etc. —learned to think about their world in terms
of overcoming the dangers of Judaism, " said Nirenberg. "We have these
really basic building blocks ... for thinking about the world and what's
wrong with it ... by thinking about Judaism. "
In the world sketched by white supremacists, Jews hover malevolently in the
background, pulling strings, controlling events, acting as an all-powerful
force backing and enabling the other targets of their hate. That's clear in
statements made by people like Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who
proudly marched with other white supremacists in Charlottesville. Jewish
Zionists, he complained to a gathered crowd, control the media and American
political system.
"The extreme right considers many people their threat. But it always,
always, always comes back to the Jews. "
Anti-black and anti-Jewish sentiment have long been intertwined in America.
When the Jewish factory worker Leo Frank was wrongfully convicted of murder
and lynched in 1915, two new groups simultaneously emerged: the ADL, which
fights against bigotry and anti-Semitism, and the second Ku Klux Klan,
which began by celebrating Frank's death. Later in the 20th century, Nazis
became a natural model for white-supremacist movements in the United
States, said Marjorie Feld, a professor of history at Babson College. The
logic of white supremacy was similar: Hatreds became universalized through
common archetypes. Jews were seen by white supremacists as capitalists
undermining local businesses. Black Americans fleeing the South in the
Great Migration were seen as taking away crucial labor. Catholics were seen
as immigrants stealing American jobs.
After the Holocaust, neo-Nazi movements were largely consigned to the
country's political fringe, although they never fully left the American
landscape. In 1978, for example, a Nazi group pushed to demonstrate in
Skokie, Illinois, deliberately selecting an area densely populated by
Holocaust survivors. The proposed march caused a national uproar, and the
American Civil Liberties Union famously defended the group's First
Amendment rights in court. Eventually, they ended up demonstrating in
Chicago.
The Charlottesville demonstration differed from the planned Skokie march in
two important respects, Nirenberg said. First of all, there's a political
context for the "Unite the Right" demonstration. It fits into debates over
free speech and college campuses as the front lines of cultural battle, he
said. The Skokie march was also widely and vigorously condemned by
political leaders. "That strong, clear commitment to certain values of
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