Bigotry and Collapse

Freeacre

I gotta hand it to James Howard Kunstler. His regular Monday “Clusterfuck Nation” piece this morning pointed directly at the elephant in the room that no one has been mentioning – anti-Jewish prejudice in the face of the Israeli assault on Palestine, err… Gaza, and the meltdown on Wall Street.

Kunstler has defended Israel’s heavy military response to having Hamas send rockets their way and wounding or killing some of their citizens. And, yes, if one of my relatives had been wounded or killed there, I would be angry as well. But, the whole thing just seems so reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto and the extermination of the Jews in Germany as well as the war in Vietnam, that it is just unnerving. Seeing phosphorous bombs in the sky over neighborhoods and burned and blown up civilians overwhelming the hospitals is atrocious. I thought the point of all those Jewish memorials was to “never let this happen again.” It is appalling to me that Israel would be engaging in this behavior. So, I don’t support Israel. God knows, I don’t and didn’t support the war in Iraq or Afghanistan either.

The Palestinians have been a pawn in a larger game in the Middle East ever since I can remember. Their misery could have been mitigated by other surrounding Persian or Arab countries, but it hasn’t been. Israel could have reached out and made peace with these people. With all the billions we have sent Israel in military aide, we could have probably sent every Palestinian through graduate school. Everybody could help them and nobody does. Apparently it is in the interests of the militarists and tribalists of one sort or another to keep this travesty going on. There seem to be no “good guys” in this fight. It was reported that Hamas went through Gaza and executed 35 El Fatah political prisoners in case they might get sprung out of jail and support Israel. Then they went to the El Fatah relatives and shot them in the legs and crushed their hands. Personally, I don’t get how one can support either side.

But on the other hand, the hate mail that Kunstler has received goes way beyond any objection to the war. You really have to read it to believe it. Click on “hate mail” in the essay. It is truly personal, sickening and obscene.

He looks at it this way;

“…Lately, public Jew-hating has made a comeback in the USA among two distinct groups: one is the extreme right-wing crypto-Nazi step-child of the old John Birch Society bunch, the idiots who believe the world is a web of conspiracies against wholesome Christian white folks. As a young newspaper reporter with an interest in political pathology back in the early 1970s -- a heyday for extremism -- I used to cover the Birchers' antics (and study their belief system, if you could call it that). Their paranoid ideology has survived the decades marvelously intact, complete with all the colorful leitmotifs including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Orders of the Illuminati narrative, the Bilderburgers conspiracy story of world domination, and a Jesus-soaked crusade against "socialism" that has mutated far beyond the quaint sepulcher of John Birch into a broad mostly Southern evangelical, Nascar-tinged, aggressive apocalypticism.
Lately, another large cohort on the political Left adopted the Palestinians as their "pet oppressed minority group du jour." This branch of Jew-haters emanated out of the humanities departments of the universities, when the faculty got bored with the Nazi holocaust, or wished to stake out some new turf in the arena of multiculturalism for the sake of academic advancement.”


Well, that seems to me to be a somewhat self-serving discount of humanities departments in general. I mean, given the prevailing prejudice against any sort of Persians, Arabs (and, let’s face it, most of us don’t know the difference between them any more than we know the differences between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Rwanda), “sand niggers” and “towel heads,” any sympathy toward any people who are Muslim probably is a baby step in the right direction.

But, what about this prejudice against Jews, Muslims, (and, for that matter), Blacks, Christians, gays, or whomever serves their purposes, on the internet sites? I am starting to see it all over the place. I don’t know when it started, but at sites like “The Truthseeker” and Steve Quale more and more I found myself skipping over stories that denigrate blacks, feminists and Jews to find stories criticizing Bush or anticipating The Crash. Suddenly, these aggressively evangelical writers are uniformly sympathizing with Palestinians?? Since when?

Since they joined up to bring on the Apocalypse, that’s when. Now, there’s a conspiracy theory that even Kunstler can sink his teeth into.

And, what’s happened to Rense? Look at the over-the-top mud-slinging at Obama. Is that political or ideological outrage or just flat-out racist, foaming at the mouth bullshit? I can hardly find a decent UFO story anymore between the Obama as a gay, Anti-Christ, secret Muslim diatribe, and the Jew baiting financial stories. You would think that I just wandered into a chat room of the Ku Klux Klan.

And, as the financial and resource collapse continues to unfold, I fear that it will get even worse. To quote Kunstler once again:

“My own theory-du-jour goes something like this: The current orgy of Jew-hating is prompted by rage actually derived from the perceived "Jew-run" Wall Street companies who have now utterly wrecked the US economy -- Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, et cetera, not to mention the Jewish players leading the cast of this show -- Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Sandy Weil, Bernie Madoff, et al., a veritable Jew-O-Rama of money-grubbing (i.e. a Jewish trait) scoundrels who have utterly pranged the American Way of Life in order to hide their private billions in the Cayman Islands. These Jew villains, the story goes, have taken Little Debbie Snack Cakes out of the mouths of millions of squalling KMart-Shoppers-in-Training! And must now be called out to punishment! The fear and anger over the losses on Wall Street -- and the personal accounts of millions of investors -- is being deflected (for the moment!) onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”



Ho, ho , ho…. Kunstler has a way of expressing himself that does, indeed, invite abuse because he is so bitingly sarcastic. But, nobody has been a harsher critic of Greenspan, Rubin, Madoff, et al, than Kunstler, despite the fact that they are Jews. He has been critical of their policies, not their ethnicity. But, this debacle on Wall Street is going to bring out the anti-Semites like flies to road kill. The same thing goes for Obama. Every neo-Nazi white supremist knuckle-dragger out there is going to be bent out of shape over the election of Obama. Even those of us who don’t consciously realize our own racism or bigotry are going to find ourselves invited to or engaging in pity parties and blame games that we normally wouldn’t participate in. And, a lot of them are going to be racist.

Now, maybe in the long run, this will be a good thing. It will give us a way to deal with the “shadow” side of ourselves as a people and hopefully get over it. Shed some light on it. Fix it. Heal it. But, right now, it looks like a tragedy in the making.

I remember back in the anti-Vietnam days and the civil rights struggle, the Minute Men militia gathered around a water tower in a small town next to my home town. They were convinced that the “white panthers” in Detroit were going to drop acid (LSD) into their water supply. We hippies thought they were nuts. We knew a few of those “white panthers.” Therefore, we knew that there was no way in hell these guys were a threat to anybody. Plus, can you imagine how much acid it would take to affect a town’s water supply? The militia was delusional.

The same thing is happening now. Even I am confused. Maybe I am delusional. With the world-wide banking and corporate mergers, the global politics, the trillions of dollars of debt servitude spread around, the poisoning of the environment, etc. etc, it is difficult not to believe in a conspiracy of evil doers. Hell, MULTIPLE conspiracies at multiple levels. GALACTIC forces. I have to admit that I do believe that there is serious shit going on and there are conspiracies to be reckoned with. One could start with the Harvard School of Business… but, I digress.

Anyway, my point is, that we need to be careful not to become the small minded, hard-hearted, poisonous, rabid intolerant jerks that we despise. We need to remember that for every miscreant, criminal, or cretin of a certain race or religion, hue, or gender, there are ten more who are good, honest, kind, hard-working, talented folks who are a blessing to us all. As times get tougher and money gets tighter and suffering increases, we could start to turn on each other in an orgy of hatred and blame. This would be a mistake of tragic proportions.

We have the opportunity to reach out to each other in tolerance and understanding. We need to be focusing on what we have in common, not what is different. We need to oppose wicked stereo-typing, even when it is seemingly deserved.

Once the Bushistas are out of office, I believe that it will be time to shift gears and look for the positive people and policies that we can support. Because if we just continue to take a negative attitude, it will be aimed at whomever is still standing. That won’t be fair and it will interfere with what really needs to be done.

We have a planet to save. We have a world to change. Battles will need to be fought. Let’s make them the right ones.