Date: July 24, 2006 9:36:45 AM PDT
Subject: If old loves die hard, then ancient hatreds must be about immortal.
Iridescent cuttlefish said...
Shrubageddon (and the quiet little post on nanotech riding to the rescue) reminded me of my own overarching POV--that 9/11 and the imperial adventures in the Middle East are basically pretexts and diversions in late-stage capitalism’s final assault/last gasp before the façade maintained by technological suppression and artificial scarcity crumbles--which somewhat escaped my focus as I read Jeff’s water hijinks post, because something else was ‘clicking’ for me. It involves, as S intimated, quite a few of the ideas running through the recent threads here (the Vatican pedophilia cover-up, the issue of fake antisemitism, etc) as well as my own current reading. It’s actually only a sort of fuzzy epiphany, as it raises more questions than it answers, and yet something feels vaguely right about it.
Here’s how it happened: I’m plowing through a hugely fat, rather dry and overly careful historical analysis called “The Third Reich in Power,” the 2nd volume in the unfinished trilogy by Cambridge prof Richard J. Evans, who is solid, stolid and definitely not in any sense “radical”. In fact, I had been getting a bit annoyed at the short shrift he gave to the role of the transnational corporations in Hitler’s ascension, when suddenly bells started ringing in his treatment of how the Nazis dealt with the threat they perceived the Catholic Church to be. Evans’ take was that Goebbels personally took over after an earlier effort to emasculate the Church by restricting parochial school attendance and Catholic youth group membership (which were seen as competition for fascist state indoctrination and the Hitler Youth respectively) completely backfired, sending many thousands of pissed off Catholics into the streets of Oldenburg, as well as swastika flags into the gutters and even a wave resignations from the Nazi Party, which had never happened before.
Hitler was apparently so angry that he wanted to round up all the priests and send them to Sachsenhausen with Martin Niemoeller (author of the famous “When they came for the Communists I did nothing..” speech), but Goebbels was nervous about such a move because Niemoeller was already getting them very negative international press and because they still hadn’t annexed Austria, which was nearly universally Catholic. So, in a brilliantly calculated maneuver, Goebbels dug up a few cases of alleged pedophilia, combined them with rumors of rampant homosexuality in the German monastaries, inflated the numbers involved and cooked up a prodigious scandal where none had been before. He also utilized photo op field trips where kids who weren’t even Catholic were whipped into a Salem-style hysteria, screaming (in front of reporters) not to let the sex fiends get their hands on them. Within a few months parochial attendance went from 95% in Oldenburg to 5%, the local Hitler Youth group mushroomed overnight, Catholic monastaries, lay buildings and finances were confiscated, and many hundreds of priests and monks were (quietly) led off to various concentration camps.
I’m not in any way saying that the story of the pedophilia cover-up in recent discussions is related, but hysterical denunciations and faked repressed memories do happen occasionally, in wave-like patterns. The question this raises is who could be orchestrating the faked ones and why? I once knew a teacher who was Salem-ed, the very strictest teacher in my grade school, and even though the kid recanted (her father was later charged with the identical crimes) the teacher was broken, shamed out of the profession. Innocent, even. There’s tremendous power in the mob.
The other mob I thought of was the current wave of real and/or imagined antisemitism. Evans also touched on this, describing the Propaganda Ministry’s efforts to inflame the nascent and deeply-rooted antisemitism in Germany into a force which could be reliably used to intimidate, cajole and generally brainwash segments of the population which weren’t quite down with the program enough for Goebbels. In this case, Evans’ account immediately caused me to understand what’s been happening at the site where I used to be a regular (Information Clearinghouse). I had already been challenging some of the more rabid Jew-biters for their obvious manipulation by the likes of Rense and others of his ilk, but the owner of that site, the good and homorable Tom Feely had to shut his comment field down before I really realized what was going on there. It wasn’t just the same phrases and vitriol lifted from Rense that sank ICH—it was precisely the same stuff that Goebbels cooked 70 years ago. Today I was linking through a bunch of unfamiliar blogs and websites which had large comment fields running, and I found the same posters spouting the same crap who had just shut down ICH. They didn’t even bother changing their handles!
I don’t know that any of this stuff is being pumped by the Israeli cell phone scammers, but it’s big, and I think I’m guessing better why this is happening. Like all good deceptions, it’s got at least two faces. It provides convenient evidence for accusations of antisemitism, which can get “undesirable” sites and other organizations shut down and/or discredited, and it also builds a very easy, very familiar scapegoat for when things go sour. If old loves die hard, then ancient hatreds must be about immortal. I have no doubt that Jews are getting used, set up for some kind of fall, but I still can’t get my head around why they would let themselves be used in this way, unless they’re just being sold out by their “leaders,” the same as the rest of us. All signs seem to point, as others here have noted, to the “Christian” Zionists, although that particular endgame is still unclear to me. Why would Israel let its already tarnished image be shat upon by this Lebanese horror? Or, again, is it simply because, as Amos Elon declared as he left Israel in digust, that the people in charge there now are so far gone in the madness of fascism and religion and that, like in the States, the citizen-consumers don’t really have any voice, any representation at all? (Well, I appear to have answered my own question--we're all getting dicked around and led by the nose, obviously--but if anyone has any further thoughts on this, I'd be interested...)
12:50 AM
