It’s nice to see that antisemitism’s on the rise again! There’s something comforting about the stuff that doesn’t change. Even the more unpleasant stuff, like jock-itch and/or athlete’s foot. They’re awful and they itch, of course, but they’re familiar, too, and reassure us that the world is as it’s always been.
Can you recall that rally down in Charlottesville a few years back? (The one that had “fine people on both sides”?) A mob of white supremacists, each with a Tiki torch, was slowly moving up the street that night. As they approached the microphones you heard a garbled chant. At first it was hard to decipher the words:
“Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”
“What does that even mean?” I thought. Back then, I hadn’t yet heard of the “Great Replacement” theory, which has grown better known of late. It says: Subversives who detest us and our normal way of life have sworn to bring the whole thing crashing down. The two key tactics they employ are seeing that illegal immigrants keep pouring in, diluting this great nation’s voting base, while also adding to the voting rolls those folks whose credit scores are low and skin is darker than your mom’s. And who contrived this scheme and yearns to see our world fall down? The *&^%$#@ Jews, of course! Who else?
Whenever there’s some “secret plot” which we’re advised to fear, it’s both fun and traditional to blame it on The Jews – the world’s Eternal Boogie Men. They carry the baton, today, for monsters who, when you were young, lived underneath your bed. (Watch out! Watch out! Don’t let your hand hang down!)
In his small book, The True Believer (1951), longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer notes that fervent movements often cite a bygone age (which sometimes didn’t exist in fact) – a time when things were much, much better than they are today. The former grandeur has been lost, or ruined by our enemies, and we must strive to get it back; to Make Croatia Great Again!
We must unite because the hills and ballot box are rife with parasites, whose object is to dismantle our precious way of life. All visionary movements, to succeed, Herr Hoffer says, must name and blame a common enemy, must emphasize the notion that the world is dangerous, and that those fiends will rob us of whatever we hold dear unless we patriots stand up and put them in their place. (A place with lots of barbed wire, of course.)
How perfectly familiar it all is. For centuries, in Europe and some places further east, the Jews were gaily slaughtered in pogroms. Their farms and homes and wealth were seized, and laws forbade that they own land again. Then, in the end, for centuries, they were simply kicked out.
Well, If you can’t own land or real estate, how are you gonna make a buck and keep the wife and little vermin fed? You have to find some other gig, a pushcart on Delancey St., or Wall Street or in Hollywood, or newspapers and media, which, as St. Nicky (Fuentes) and his sidekick Screwloose Ye attest, are completely infested with Jews. And, don’t forget the doctas, lawyas, CPA’s and anarchists, the nudists and the Bolsheviks, and civil-rights- and Queer – provocateurs – those troublemakers, in a word.
If you live in a world where you are second- or ninth-class, you’d have to be inert or dumb to just put up with it. Excuse me if I disappoint conspiracy enthusiasts: Ours isn’t a plot to take over the world. It’s more a scheme just to survive and, maybe, prosper if we can, despite the many doors, over the years, slammed in our face. Some folks complain that Jews are “clannish;” that we stick together and will not let others in. Perhaps. But if the door slammed in your face is to the Zyklon shower-stall or crematorium, with whom, beside them other Jews were you expecting us to schmooze?
Abuse or mistreat anyone and they’ll regard you with mistrust – even hostility. Around and ‘round the planet goes. And, where it stops, nobody knows. (But, as you know, it never really ends.) That’s why, of course, we should be friends. Until we stop despising, dissing, and excluding them, no matter who they are this week, the animus, suspicion and resentment cannot end, and none of us will get the love and peace we say we seek