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Frist They Came for the Jews
I see a theme in the following diaries read on dKos or elsewhere:
Forced Confessions: Third Time The Charm (by bellatrys on why the Salem Witch Trials hold a key to our present disaster)
Bush Administration tells girls to sit down and shut up (by lorraine, one of the more thoughtful diarists on dKos)
An Ex-Theocrat Speaks: They’re Crazy Like Foxes (by bellatrys, this link was posted in one of the threads but the discussion was then focusing on unions)
all summed up by Bob Johnson‘s post (Bob Johnson is one of dKos’s official clowns, so a fully humorless post from him is really striking…)
It’s the Jews
Do you worry? Are you scared? Or are “they” overreaching? Or is it that “It can’t happen here”?
But go read the links anyway.
b- also important to note that both von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky (along with John Heartfield) were exposing the Weimar rearmament, in violation of the peace treaty…that’s what got von Ossietsky tossed in prison (by the Weimar). The Nazis just transferred him to a concentration camp…and the Nobel was an attempt to save his life.
(If someone wants to provide a link or explain picture hosting services to me, I have color versions of Heartfield’s dada montages…such as the one of Hitler in the link, and the cover of Deutschland. Deutschland Uber Alles, by Heartfield and Tucholsky.
I found a link to the book cover with an article here
re: Johnson’s post. In the US, I think Jewishness is a “problem” for the talibornagains in the same way that Jews were associated with Bolshevism and Republicanism (as in the social democracy that Germany tried to implement after WWI.) The anti-semitism in Europe was deeper than the issue of social democracy, of course, and also deeply tied to Christianity as a state religion, in various forms, over the ages.
For the American talibornagains, I think they fetishize an idea of the “Jew” as a component of their apocalyptic vision for the world. Of course, real humans don’t fit this fetish, but that’s not the point…instead of Ford’s “International Jew,” it’s the “Idealized Jew” who will be converted (or die a horrible death…oops) when Jesus is revealed to them as the Messiah. For now, Jews who are “with them” on making Israel safe for the apocalypse are okay.
But something that’s frequently overlooked in the US is that so many of the Jews and social democrats, etc. fleeing the Nazis ended up in Hollywood…so the “moral pollution” the right wing rails about coming from Hollywood reminds me of the Nazi concept of “Decadent Art.” Of course, what comes out of Hollywood is popularized entertainment, not, for the most part, art.
The assault from the right in America is really not aimed at Jews, it seems to me, except in the way that they align with other liberals in their support of academic freedom and issues of social justice and all that. They’re one among many…godless ex-protestants are as much of a problem…and homosexuals, no matter what their ethnicity are more of a target than Jews, imo. Also, as the two female posters noted, control and limitation of females is big on the agenda…whatever their ethnicity. In the south, they also have the history of rationalizing slavery via the Bible…something the Reconstructionists are doing again…though I don’t think it’s limited to blacks.
It seems that Frist’s decision to align himself with the theocrats and declare that liberals are against Christianity, has unleashed a firestorm, at least in blogland. It is outrageous.
I would hope that non-theorcratic Christians would gather outside of this meeting to protest the hijacking of their faith by theocrats. Frist has agreed to demonize more than half the nation (because he’s mistaken if he thinks all conservatives are theocrats or even Christian.)
Frist, btw, grew up in a wealthy enclave (Belle Meade) in Nashville, TN that used to ban Jews from their country club, long into the recent past. Most of the people there, however, have nothing but disdain for the sorts of people that Falwell speaks to and for…it’s a matter of class revulsion. Frist is willing to use their belief, however. I would imagine his faith is as substantial as Bush’s or (we will fuck them) Rove’s.
Nashville, for you Europeans, is a very class conscious city (and most would deny it to their core.) Country music and the Southern Baptist Convention are located there. In addition, there is Frist’s world of Belle Meade and Montgomery Bell Academy (private boy’school) or Harpeth Hall (private girl’s school)…places funded by banking and insurance and, now things like Frist’s health care biz. The two meet in the way that old money meets new money in a Henry James novel.
An telling example is the “Swan Ball” and the “Swine Ball” — the first is the rich debutante’s Tiffany jewelry encrusted big day in the sun versus the people’s get drunk and listen to loud music acknowledgement thumb-to-the-nose of the class division.
Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 17 2005 14:35 utc | 7
just for the yuks value (insert pun here) from a hagiography of George I (and no mention of his dad’s biz association with the biggest Nazi financier..strangely…
Eager to make his own career, Bush turned down the Wall Street job that Brown Brothers, Harriman had offered him (despite its policy against hiring employees’ relatives). Instead, he approached his father’s friend Neil Mallon, the president of Dresser Industries, a petroleum company for which the senior Bush served as a director, and secured a position as a trainee at Ideco, Dresser’s oil-drilling equipment division, in Odessa, Texas. For some months he did such odd jobs as cleaning and painting machinery. Within a year he was transferred to California, where he worked as an assembler in the factory of another Dresser subsidiary. Next he worked as a traveling salesperson, peddling Ideco drill bits. When, in 1950, Ideco promoted him to a higher-level sales job, he settled with his family in Midland, Texas, and soon became heavily involved in community and church activities.
In 1951 Bush resigned from Ideco to enter the independent oil business. With the help of hundreds of thousands of dollars from an uncle and additional thousands from other backers, he and his Midland neighbor John Overbey established the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Co. The partners dealt in oil properties: after learning from hired geologists the locations of land under which oil deposits were likely to lie, they would buy the oil rights from the landowners and then solicit investments for drilling for the oil. Deal-making suited Bush, who has a knack for quickly establishing a rapport with individuals. In 1953 the partners joined William and Hugh Liedtke to form Zapata Petroleum, and their financial fortunes took a significant turn for the better. Within a year the output from wells Zapata had drilled on an 8,100-acre plot exceeded 1,000 barrels of oil daily. Bush retained his stake in the corporation until 1959. Meanwhile, in 1956, he and the Liedtkes formed the Zapata Off-Shore Co., a pioneer in the construction of offshore drilling platforms. After the Liedtkes left that partnership, Bush moved the company’s offices, and his family, to Houston. As Off-Shore’s president until 1964 and chairman of the board from 1964 to 1966, he traveled throughout the world to sell its oil-drilling services. Zapata Off-Shore grew into a multimillion-dollar concern, and when he sold it, in 1966, he became a millionaire.
From < a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.03E.Hallib.Iraq.htm">Truthout:
In 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton’s acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., which exported equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.
The subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts — later blocked by the United States — to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War.
(Dresser was facing extensive litigation from asbestos lawsuits, as I remember….let me go find a link…)
ah, from the Wapo
…let’s talk about Halliburton’s well-executed $5 billion escape from its asbestos problems, most of which Cheney created when he orchestrated Halliburton’s purchase of Dresser Industries in 1998. Few people connect this problem with Cheney, but they should, given that he was in charge at the time and got a raise as a result of buying Dresser.
Kevin Phillips (R. turned I), in American Dynasty, argues that Harriman, Bush, and other industrialists of the turn of the gilded age invested in Hitler in the same way they invested in the Bolsheviks…no political intent, just biz. In the same way that Cheney, at Halliburton, invested in Iraq. Because there is, of course, no personal responsibility when you’re a corporation. If, however, you are an individual who would do these same things, you would be tried for giving aid and comfort, I would assume.
other corporate heroics here (Barrick gold mines, Iran-Contra, buying workers alive, just biz as usual…)
And this whole subject is a minefield of conspiracy theories, so I was trying to stick with reputable sources. I find the whole “skull and bones” hysteria and the LaRouche-ites totally uncredible. Yes, skull and bones is an elite society at an elite institution that is known for its recruitment by the CIA. Who you know and where you are is as much a part of most “success” stories as what you can do…especially in the “land of liberty and equality.” Skull and Bones is a fast track network for the elitist wing of American society, and has served to exclude minorities, women and lots of other “undeserving” for decades. But the occultism that ties them to Nazis and the Dalai Lama and the Knights Templars seems like a fever dream to me, that detracts from the real issues of access and affirmative action and accountability by corporations to democracy.
Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 17 2005 19:35 utc | 14
I will provide you with a very rare glimpse into my personal life and experience. I usually reserve such digressions for more intimate audiences, but but this is a very good bar and the topic demands it. So I will abandon the academic I am now and part time humorist to tell you of Diogenes the preacher of many years ago. After a sherry, of course.
In the early 1970’s, at the odd cross roads of the free love and Jesus movements, that I came of age with an undying curiosity about spiritual things. A nun at my church tried to convince my I was a psychic, my older sister had me send a month at a commune of American Sufi Movement, and I began reading the Bible. The Bible (and a pile of, at that time, very convincing tracts) won my young soul and I became a solo Christian (there are solo Wiccans, so why not?), unsure of any church or movement and very much interested in developing my faith. I bounced from prayer group to church as a 19 or 20 year old. taking it all in and I was as ignorant as the day was long. For example, convinced that I needed to be baptized, I stopped at a Baptist Church in New Hampshire I had never been to before because “that’s what you guys do, it says so on the door!” Believe it or not the elderly pastor baptized me that night. I was as innocent as any Christian Candide in a very confusing world and there were plenty of Panglossses to help me along, especially the Pentecostals!
I was as sincere as naitivity can make me with the intellectual power of a high school education and a year of college (where I watched at least two professors sleep with the one girl I had a consistent crush on). But a Christian I was now. I read the Bible through numerous times (It takes around 15 hours to read the New Testament). The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible I took on one book at a time. I was a pest at all family gatherings. And I explored almost every kind of church from fundamentalist to Greek Orthodox, trying to understand how this faith worked.
So at the ripe old age of 21, I settled on a non-denominational church that had a pastor as young as I was and stayed there for almost 8 years. Now why share this with you? Well for one thing I got to meet many of these religious right bigshots back when they were little shots and more importantly, I witnessed the afterbirth of the Religious Right early in the Reagan Years.
Back then we met at Yale University in one of the lecture halls. And this church grew. Rare in the inner city. Rarer still was the amazing mix. Rich folks from Woodbridge and Hamden, Blacks from Congress Ave and Dixwell Ave who were burned out of the Cadillac cult and needed something different, Hispanics, old Catholic ladies from a Charismatic Catholic church, recovering drug addicts, Muslims from various countries curious about Chritianity, gays and lesbians, the mentally ill seeking exorcisms (my claim to fame: I led George Bush’s cousin in a exorcism where we all coughed out our demons in paper bags back in 1979!)and a host of folks in various stages of drug and alcohol recovery or relapses. It was slice of the whole world and about 350 people meet twice a week to figure out what it meant to be a Christian (Oh yes, and a number of Yale Divinity School students and undergraduates). I often wonder if Bush was around Yale at that time.
The thing that characterized this church and fascinated me was the complete lack of condemnation towards those who were different. Lesbians embraced men during the greeting part of the service. Blacks hugged Hispanics. We all knew that no one was perfect, that all lives were characterized by struggle and that the goal of a Christian was to help others along the Way. We were politically inactive, having concluded that voting and prayer were two personal matters best left to individuals and that politics, being the pandering profession that it was, was too “carnal” or “of the flesh” (yes, those were the words we and many others used back then)for a Christian to get involved with. It required deception as well and that was dangerous.
That ended early in 1982, when our young pastor was invited to a three day Ronald Reagan “prayer breakfast and conference” in Washington D.C. He was flattered and went with the church’s blessing.
The Sunday after he returned, the world turned upside down. No one expected it. A usually kind hearted (if not long winded) pastor turned into a right wing hate machine, repeating in his sermon (several times in case we missed them) the most outlandish and insulting language I ever heard. I remember portions well. I didn’t hear things like this again until the early days of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.
“God has called us as a church to destroy the evils of the liberal welfare state and its hand outs for laziness.”
“God has annointed this church to stand as a wall and defense against the evil manipulations of the hairy legged lesbo-feminists of the teachers unions and the secular humanist educators.”
There were then cracks about blacks being on welfare, welfare laziness, the ungodliness of Democrats in general, and “taking the country back for God.” And within two weeks, almost every black, Latino, homosexual (though they were not singled out in the sermons), poor person, and student was gone. For good. The church split two or three more times in the next few years, leaving me a lost and stranded soul. My view of the church was increasingly assaulted by demands of 1000% loyalty, shameless pandering and financial matters that I will not elaborate upon. When I think of the turning points of my life (and there have been many), nothing determined the course of the next 23 years as that one out of the blue offensive right wing sermon.
From there I drifted from church to church over the next few years and then decided to sell my businesses and continue my education (I thank God for women who push you on to do this (my late mother) and bear the consequences of that decison (one hell of a mate). Though I originally considered studying for the ministry I soon declared a double then triple major (theology, history, linguistics). And I did well. Then I got talked into grad school and a Ph.D program. I progressively moved to the left (contrary to Horowitz, I was a Republican grad student and never encountered discrimination in grad school. We all got our asses kicked by professor after professor). I completed my Ph.D in 1998. I now teach Ancient History (primarily Church and Roman history and World History. Once in a while when I get the bug I teach a Greek or Coptic class for fun.
I didn’t become a Democrat until I was teaching at a fairly well known southern institution in 2000 and George Bush’s goons roughed up two of my students who simply brought a sign into an open meeting that read, “Mr Bush: What is your position on the Environment?” It was one of two dozen questions on signs that students brought in. They were knocked to the ground, their sign was ripped up and they were ejected. There was quite an uproar since me department had invited the chimp to campus. I am now a moderate Democrat, but anger is moving me further to the left. It is not the best motivation, but it has made me politically active.(Sherry #3 now). I now teach in a northern state hard hit by Bushanomics and very happy as a liberal Methodist in an open and affirming church.
Why am I writing this? I think because I enjoy the illusion of the bar and miss the many good conversations and stories of grad school. But more seriously the idea of Frist’s “Judgement Sunday” has brought flooding back into me that sea of faces shocked by the relentless right wing semonizing/demonizing back when the religious right was young and Sun Myung Moon wasn’t funding it. That shock and my reaction to it defined my life to this point more than other personal event. I can only hope that when this travesty of both government and faith is perpetrated upon congregations across America that honest people will react with the kind of revulsion and disgust that I felt two decades ago. Good night friends and bar keep. Say hi to Billmon.
Posted by: diogenes | Apr 18 2005 4:48 utc | 19
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