Having stumbled into a right wing message board freakout on AOL yesterday over the Juan Williams firing, I was caught off guard.
The conservative autobots, set, as they permanently are, on hysteria/freakout mode, were not only screaming about the "First Amendment" violation of a corporation terminating a senior analyst for racist remarks, but continued to invoke the man behind all of the funding:
George Soros.
Soros, to these weak, pathetic minds, is the international financier bogeyman behind a conspiracy to undermine America, and he's using the face of Barack Obama as the front for his operations.
It jogged my memory. Where had I heard this before? And then I remembered. In the brilliant 1980 movie directed by John Landis: The Blues Brothers.
Watch the following clip:
This 1980 film was commenting on a real event of the time, the controversy over the right of Nazis to march in Illinois.
But there was something else that grabbed me. And it was this line:
"The Jew... is using the black... as muscle... against you (white people)."
The ugliest conspiracy of the 19th and 20th Centuries, straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery (and greatest propaganda tool of the pre-Hitler rise in late 19th Century anti-Semitism in Russia, Poland, Germany and France) is that the international Jewish financier uses other people as front groups for master-plan manipulation.
As we've seen all week, the right wing has done an absolute freakout over the paltry 1 million George Soros decided to give the rather low key (but extraordinarily accurate) Media Matters for America.
The language from the hysterics on the right tracks exactly with 20th Century American Nazi and Klan movements about the twin anxieties of a Jewish/black power conspiracy.
Witness the many quotes:
Barack Obama, George Soros, Petrobas, And The Real Reason Why Obama Is Trying To Halt American Oil Production: A Crime Inc. Update
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By Gary P Jackson
We first reported on the fact that Barack Obama and his boss George Soros teamed up to make billions of dollars in the oil business, the day the $10 billion dollar gift to Brazil was announced almost a year ago. Sadly, outside of the blogs, no one has reported on this major scandal at all, except Glenn Beck, who has recently taken notice.
I mean how hard is this one to put together? You’ve got Nazi sympathizer George Soros, the self proclaimed “owner of the democrat party” purchasing controlling interest in Brazilian oil giant Petrobas, then just a couple of days later, Barack Obama “loans” the country of Brazil $10 billion, which is then given to …. wait for it …. Petrobas. Glenn keeps saying it’s $2 billion, but the commitment is for $10 billion.
Source.
Limbaugh: Soros has "bought the Democrat Party and Barack Hussein Imam Obama"
Source.
Limbaugh suggests Obama is a puppet: "Soros may be running Obama. Who the hell knows?"
Source.
Limbaugh speculates that Soros or a "consortium of countries" may have staged a run on banks in September to throw election to Obama
Source.
Or just watch the odious Glenn Beck, from June 17th, 2010:
(Key rant starts around 4:30)
Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and the rest of the right wing pundits are pedaling the exact same mythic strain of the 20th Century American Nazi party: "The Jew is using the black as muscle against you!!!"
Even more key to this is the notion of "The International Jew."
The above image is from Henry Ford, ancestor of the modern right wing racist, paranoid and vicious nativist movement. Ford's relentless drumming that "international Jews" would undermine America from within was one of many forces in the 1920s that led to immigration laws to limit "undesirables."
Before the 1920s, most foreigners who wanted to come to America were welcome. There were no immigration laws.
This paranoia and xenophobia ties into the third leg of the paranoid racist right wing trilogy: Immigration paranoia (aka hating Mexicans).
Much has been made about right wing racism against Muslims and Mexicans. Lost in the shuffle is their tying the whole thing to a deep rooted strain of profoundly dangerous anti-Semitism.
The "War on Christmas," the notion of "Coastal Elites," or the many strains of "Hollywood attacking Christianity" (dates directly to John Rankin and Joe McCarthy in the 1950s equating Jews and Communists, and then claiming they hide messages in media to brainwash Christian children), the notion of urban cosmopolitan liberal Jews who run the media and control the message (aka Rick Sanchez's infamous rant) all are just as profound a strain of xenophobic racism in the modern republican cult movement as any of the more obvious signs.
Soros is just one of the keys to seeing this ugliness revealed, but he is the most obvious.
Republicans will claim they don't know Soros is Jewish. But the ugly "moneylender" accusations, the labeling of him as a "foreigner" even though he's been an American for 50 years, are all part of the classic Henry Ford Dearborn Independent "International Jew" framing.
Am I calling the modern republican racist movement as aligned with the crypto Klan movement of Henry Ford's anti-immgration anti-Semitism of the 1920s and the American Nazi Party movement of the 1970s and 1980s?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Watching the Blues Brothers clip of Illinois Nazis from 1980 is just a touch more literal than watching the codes of ethnic slurs on Fox News today.