Showing posts with label Nazi Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi Germany. Show all posts

Thursday, November 01, 2018

Alles Alte ist wieder neu


Adolf Hitler, 1940.


Adolf Trump, 2018.

Friday, September 01, 2017

Peace, love and understanding . . . by any means necessary

Newsweek

I am not exactly a Weekly Standard kind of reader. But I read Matt Labash's long piece about how antifa went apeshit on the Patriot Prayer people at a Berkeley "protest" (and by protest, I mean riot), and you should, too.

The takeaway from this story -- and from spending any random three minutes on Facebook or media comment threads -- is that America never will defeat the fascism of Donald Trump by adopting the violent Stalinism of "social-justice warriors" like antifa and all the other toxic granola of the radical left.

The other takeaway is that Donald Trump was unknowingly more right than we're willing to admit. Not right -- just more right than we thought. There are no "very fine people" among the Nazis and other white supremacists.

Likewise, there are none among antifa or other left-wing hate groups, which these assembled fanatics most certainly represent. The sulfurous, Satanic stench coming from each camp smells about the same, because the Nazis and the "antifascists" are about the same. The difference between the opposing vortices of hatred is a mere matter of targeting methodology -- one determines who is subhuman based on race and ethnicity . . . the other, ideology.

Given free run of the United States, each would leave a trail of corpses behind it as the fanatics rampaged their way toward their Father Below.

Below, a sampling of what Labash saw in what must be the first American insane asylum to actually incorporate:



On the walk up to the square, Joey’s several paces ahead, seemingly in another zone, not even noticing the protester in the “Nasty Woman” shirt who starts filming him, as though she’s doing surveillance. After all the hype, he is now so infamous in Berkeley his face is instantly recognizable, and people act like it’s Jesse James walking into a bank. They elbow each other, scandalized.

From the moment we hit the square, the “Nazi” catcalls start. Whatever’s happening on the stage seems to cease to exist, and the energy around us turns very dark, very fast. Joey, Tiny, and Pete start walking with greater purpose, on the balls of their feet, almost like fighters entering a ring or Christians entering the Coliseum, except instead of facing one lion, they’re facing thousands. As the chants rain down (“Nazis are here! .  .  . F— you! .  .  . F—ing fascists!”), we near the stage thinking we might find some kind of buffer zone, since the police knew that some of Joey’s original rally-goers would show up. But there isn’t one. Our progress is halted when we run up into a small clearing snug up against a barrier. And behind that barrier, near the park’s “Peace Wall,” is a wall of human blackness.

A hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn. It looks like we’ve interrupted al Qaeda tryouts. Joey, Tiny, and Pete all raise their hands high in the air, and flash peace signs, a conciliatory gesture. But nobody here wants peace. Not with fascists on the scene. As Joey nears the barrier, one of the ninjas swings and misses. Then the barrier topples, and they pour over, chanting, “Fascists go home!”

As I’m reading the action into my recorder, antifa slides around me on all sides, nearly carrying me off like a breaking wave. The boys are about 20 yards off and walk backwards. Pete catches a shot right on his stars’n’stripes dome from a two-by-four and goes down, blacking out for a second. Tiny, trying to protect everybody, pulls him up with his massive Samoan hand and pushes him out of the scrum. The mob ignores Pete, as he’s just an appetizer. Joey is the entree.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Don't you just love it?

There's more.
War is peace. Love is hate.
First he catches a slap in the head, then someone gashes him with something in his ribs. He keeps his hands up, as though that will save him, while he keeps getting dragged backwards by his shirt, Tiny trying to pull him away from the bloodthirsty ninjas. Someone crashes a flagpole smack on Joey’s head, which will leave a welt so big that Tiny later calls him “the Unicorn.” Not wishing to turn his back on the crowd, a half-speed backwards chase ensues, as Joey and Tiny are blasted with shots of bear spray and pepper spray. They hurdle a jersey barrier, crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way while antifa continue throwing bottles at them. The mob stalks Joey and Tiny all the way to an Alameda County police line, which the two bull their way through, though the cops initially look like they’re going to play Red Rover and keep them out. No arrests are made. Except for Joey and Tiny, who are cuffed.

A crack reporter for the Los Angeles Times will later write that they were arrested for charging the police, which couldn’t be less true. A Berkeley cop tells me they were arrested for their own safety (and weren’t charged). When I catch up and reach the police line, the cops won’t let me past to follow my subjects. My reportorial dispassion has worn thin. I yell at the police for doing nothing, for standing by while two men could’ve been killed. One cop tells me there’s a thin line between solving one problem and being the cause of more, as though they’re afraid to offend antifa. I am sick at what I just witnessed. Angry, even. I wheel around on some protesters, asking them if they think it’s right to beat people down in the street. “Hell yeah,” says one. I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them, as though being offended justifies this. A coward in a black mask says: “They’re f—ing Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.”

All around me, good non-antifa liberals go about their business, pretending none of this has happened, carrying “Stand Against Hate” signs. There’s the sound truck with preachers in clerical garb, leading a “Whose streets/our streets” chant. There’s the gray-haired interdenominational “Choral Majority” singing peace songs: “There’s no hatred in my land / Where I’m bound.” I want to vomit on the Berkeley Peace Wall.

I’m made even more sick when I look down the road and see a punching, kicking mob form a circle around a new victim. By the time I roll up on them, an older man in camo-wear spits out from the maelstrom. As he runs to safety, an antifa thug runs up behind him, sucker-punching him as hard as he can in the back. I will go home that night and watch several more cold-blooded beatdowns on YouTube that I didn’t personally witness.
SAY WE ACTUALLY get rid of Trump and stem the tide of Trumpkin fascism in this country. What are we going to have left?

This?

What, then, will we have gained? Or, rather, will we have saved ourselves from the frying pan only to find America in the fire?

Remember, Communist tyrant Josef Stalin killed even more people than Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler. File under: Facts, Inconvenient.

We're supposed to embrace the ideological thugs and bullies to rid ourselves of the fascist ones? Really? When members of the Resistance glibly proclaim "By any means necessary!" are they aware they're coming out in favor of gulags in the name of staving off concentration camps?

I am a Catholic. Not a "progressive" Catholic or a "conservative" Catholic which, in my book, means you're leaving some Catholic out to better accommodate your politics.  I am just Catholic in search of the authentic freedom that lies in my faith's tension between justice and mercy -- between dogma and "God created mankind in his image."

And, as a Catholic, this is what I know as surely as I know fire burns and ice freezes: Die-hard Trumpkins hate my guts, because "libtard." The left's "social-justice warriors" hate my guts, because "hater." Verily, in the open-air insane asylum that is the United States today, from Berkeley to Baton Rouge, there is no greater love than to hate.

For all the right reasons, of course.


Eventually, this, too, shall pass. Someday for America, in the words of the old hymn,
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord I pray
(There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, my Lord,
no trouble, trouble I see)
There will be peace in the valley for me
UNFORTUNATELY, that day probably will come because we've all killed one another. It will be the cold peace of those who rest six feet deep.

God bless America.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The look of hate is in our eyes


This is what white privilege looks like.

In GQ magazine, documentarian C. J. Hunt says the "video of this part-time Nazi, this junior secessionist, is a perfect portrait of the very white privilege the so-called 'alt-right' decries as liberal fiction."

I cannot disagree. When you're a little chickenshit Nazi who gets separated from his volk in a big, bad race riot, gets chased, then caught by a bunch of anti-fascist counterdemonstrators but gets to walk away alive -- walk away unmolested in any way except for the debasement he has visited upon himself -- because he can strip off his "uniform" and beg for mercy, saying he's not a real white supremacist . . . that's some serious white privilege.

It also is proof positive that Donald Trump's "alt-left" holds all kinds of moral high ground over the "very fine" Nazis our catastrophe-in-chief assures us he knows all about. The Nazis, you see -- the ones who are so tough en masse but turn into sniveling little cowards when alone and cornered -- would not have had mercy on someone who couldn't "pass" by taking off a white polo shirt.

Don't believe me, watch this.
 

I AM someone who thinks, as a rule, "identity politics" is unhelpful in holding this diverse and troubled country together. I also think it's a losing political proposition unless, of course, you are someone as evil and as shameless as Donald Trump, who managed to identify enough of the dispossessed,  the angrily conservative, the hypocritically religious and the blatantly white and fascist to cobble together a barely winning coalition.

But I also say this as a middle-aged white Southerner who's lived in the Midwest for more than half my life. The parts of my identity that I can't strip off like a polo shirt are not likely to get me killed.

Not if I stumble across a Nazi rally, and not if I get pulled over by an Omaha cop.


"White privilege isn’t just an easy bank loan or the cumulative effects of discriminatory housing policy," Hunt, the documentary filmmaker, said in his GQ article.
It's also the privilege to disappear. The privilege to terrorize a community and return to your regular life with the ease of peeling off a polo shirt. The privilege to come to someone else’s town, invoke the symbols and slogans used to terrorize Jews, African-Americans, and countless other races in history’s darkest chapters, and pretend it’s simply your way of showing ethnic pride. It’s the privilege to engage in terror “for fun,” and the privilege to walk away. For most of my life, I've thought of racism as the vestiges of a dying generation. It's far more terrifying to behold a sea of young people for whom white supremacy is just a rec-league sport.
YOU DON'T have to surrender to the relative tribalism of identity politics to admit what is as plain as day, yet as invisible as mountain air to your average white Trump voter: If people aren't looking at you funny . . . or following you around as you shop for fear you'll steal something . . . or blowing your brains out during a traffic stop . . . or trying to make it as difficult as possible for you to vote . . . or assuming that anything you've ever achieved had to be at their expense . . . or beating the crap out of you in a parking garage because of the color of your skin, you're probably not endangered, threatened or have that much cause to feel aggrieved.

And when you see those things actually happening to folks of color, they probably are . . . and have cause to. Be aggrieved, that is. 

To recognize the bleeding obvious today, all one needs is just a bit of empathy, a quality that also happens to be in exceedingly short supply and, when acquired, usually is applied highly selectively.

The standard American conceit is that we're better than this. Obviously, we're not. Maybe we've backslidden in recent years; maybe we never were.

Alton Sterling protest, 2016 / Reuters
WHAT KEEPS me up every night is that I see this country becoming more and more like the Louisiana I knew as a child and a teenager. That's not a good thing. That's a racist, hateful thing.

Surely, it's one of two things -- that we have profoundly regressed as a people, or that we've dropped a societal façade so convincing that it caused us to become somnambulant.

To the great detriment of my mental health, I sometimes read the comments on Facebook pages for various Louisiana media outlets, generally on stories having to do with race or Confederate statues . . . or protests against Trump. If someone, like myself, is perverse enough to read that crap, it's reasonable he's going to be alarmed. It's bad out there . . . or on there, as the case may be -- even accounting for the propensity of nuts and those full of resentment to number among the most constant commenters.

On a Baton Rouge TV station's Facebook post about Monday's protest in Durham, N.C., where leftist protesters tore down a Confederate memorial, there were at least three "kill them all" comments, several more calling them "animals" (contemporary Southern replacement for the N-word), hundreds of demands to lock them all up, several commenters eager for the commencement of civil hostilities . . . and at least one fellow as sure as his 1861 ancestors that the filthy lib'ruls would surrender as soon as the first shot was fired.

Because that's exactly what happened after Fort Sumter, right?

MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS bring me to another rumination about identity and "white privilege."


We all know what Trump did Saturday. What he reluctantly -- and unconvincingly -- said Monday. How the Trump Train came off the tracks on Tuesday and the president angrily threw his true colors in the face of the assembled White House press corps, revealing himself to be a Nazi-sympathizer. (Really, there's just no other way to put it.)

The coastal media elites seem to think that's the end of him, then.

New Orleans, 1960
Those of us still enough in touch with "flyover country," particularly the Deep South, know better. In the American South, as objectively awful as Trump's words are -- and as awful as he is -- if the 2020 presidential election were tomorrow, he'd probably win in a cakewalk. It would be reasonable for you to ask, at this juncture, "What the f***?"

The eff is pretty much this: Large swaths of the United States are now fully fascist in every way but name. And the Deep South always has been.


When I was growing up, having been born toward the end of Jim Crow (1961) and having lived nowhere else but Baton Rouge until early 1983, I didn't realize that, because I knew nothing else. None of us did -- at least none of us white folk.

I went to legally segregated public schools until 1970. Yes, 1970. In 1970, neighborhood schools was a desegregation plan. White people still lost their shit. Very Trumpian, actually.


"Degenerate Music" exhibit catalog
Between something like 1963 and 1970, desegregation was a "freedom of choice" plan for blacks to go to all-white schools in their attendance district, starting with 12th grade and adding a grade to the plan every year. For an elementary kid like I was, the biggest threat one's parent could make against your misbehaving self would be to "send you to the nigger school."

I imagine parents are still making that threat today -- education is still that segregated there. Only now, starting when the feds ordered busing in 1981, whites have almost totally abandoned the public schools; they're 90 percent nonwhite. When I graduated in 1979, they were roughly 67 percent white.

Likewise, Baton Rouge itself has been largely abandoned by whites. A city that was more than 60 percent white in the early '80s now is majority minority. What was a unified parish (county) school district has turned into four school districts, as suburban cities broke away and formed their own. Unincorporated suburbs in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish want to incorporate as a new city so they can form a new (mostly white) school district. This, of course, would gut Baton Rouge's tax base. A couple of years ago, St. George activists fell short after a terrible and bitter battle that got worldwide news coverage.


Yet, they will not go away. The battle likely will resume as soon as electoral law allows.

Someone could argue that, in parts of the United States, we're fighting a civil war right now, just without the shooting (so far).

IN MY HOMETOWN,  there is white privilege. It is deeply institutionalized in law and in custom. Like a white polo shirt, my people -- white Southern people -- could take it off. But they will not. Is that, broadly defined, not the heart of fascism?

Was not the antebellum South, with its brutality, master-race theorizing and chattel slavery, not a spiritual progenitor of Nazism? Did not the postwar Jim Crow South, -- that of ritualized brutality, culturally internalized racist beliefs, de jure segregation and government-enforced second-class citizenship for blacks -- provide a legal blueprint, if not the legal blueprint, for Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws of 1935?

That's exactly what a Yale law professor argues.

From the introduction to James Q. Whitman's book, Hitler's American Model:

Moreover, the ironic truth is that when Nazis rejected the American example, it was sometimes because they thought that American practices were overly harsh: for Nazis of the early 1930s, even radical ones, American race law sometimes looked too racist.
PRIVILEGE. Fascism by the name "Americanism" -- or "Southern heritage" . . . or any other damn thing but what it was. That's the all-American world in which I was reared, and which exists even today, in pockets, from sea to shining sea, and almost unbroken from Virginia to Texas.

Yet we are shocked, shocked there are Nazis among us. That white supremacy once again is ascendant.

Yet we wonder how the hell an amoral, racist -- and dangerous -- buffoon like Donald John Trump became the 45th president of the United States.


To me, the issue in this country isn't whether the United States will go fascist; the issue is whether a) the South ever will QUIT being fascist, or b) the rest of the country will become fascist, just like the former Confederate states.

The answer to that question, only God, through His tears, can see.

Sunday, July 02, 2017

Amerika uber alles


Civil war once again will come to this land. It's looking like it will be sooner rather than later.

That's the good news.

To watch this National Rifle Association recruitment video, which is quite literally Hitlerian in its language and in its demonizing, is to realize that civil war is the preferred option to the genocidal call to action which lies between every hissed line of the ad. Civil war at least presumes that one has a fighting chance.




WHAT DOES NOT have a fighting chance is the United States of America. As we approach the 241st anniversary of its birth, the former land of the free and home of the brave lies in hospice care. The attending physician, no doubt, is a descendant of Josef Mengele.


*   *   *

MORE: An earlier NRA effort also was decidedly Nazilike.

Friday, November 04, 2016

Alles, was alt ist neu wieder



A young Donald Trump supporter in Sanford, Fla., (motto: "Arbeit Macht Frei") figures it's the Zionists keeping America down. And only Trump can Make America Jew-free Great Again.

Oh, there's also this.

"Follow Alex Jones at infowars.com. The Young Turks is not the best network to follow -- the truth is with David Duke and Alex Jones."

David Duke, of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan infamy, is back in politics, by the way. He's running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Yeah, I think we've seen this act before. Started badly, ended worse -- 60 million dead, all told.

And der Führer, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo didn't even have a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

Really, no matter how much a candidate disavows the support of Nazis and Kluxers -- and Trump grudgingly has . . . eventually . . . more or less -- is it really that difficult to grasp that there's something horribly wrong with any candidate the spiritual heirs to Hitler can heil?

Thursday, May 26, 2016

It Sounded Better in the Original German, Part 437


When the Nazis did propaganda, at least they did it with a certain panache.

I think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will here. Yes, it was morally toxic propaganda for Nazi Germany, but it also was artistic toxic propaganda for Nazi Germany.

Now we come to morally toxic propaganda for the National Rifle Association, as conceived by . . . Charlie Daniels. (What? The devil went down to Fairfax?) Whereas Triumph des Willens put the world on notice that Germany was back, Germany was united and Germany would mess you up -- Danke, mein Führer! -- Charlie looks more like . . . how should I put this?

Perhaps (and I out myself as the kind of commie pinko fag that Charlie don't cotton to by my use of the word "perhaps") the NRA's Triumph des Schmucks could best be described merely by asking you to hold my beer before exhorting a restless nation "Hey, y'all! Watch this!"




THEN INSERT random slurs about your "Muslin" president (He ain't mine!) and pointy-headed lib'ruls, all the while you're picking a fight with the Iranians, because . . . Iranians!

The overall effect? God, we're a bunch of violent, overarmed, redneck dumbf***s! Wanna fight?

In this Age of Trump, it is cold comfort, I suppose, to consider that while this bunch of schmucks has the potential to cry havoc, it has neither the smarts nor des Willens to triumph. If this be der neuen Amerika, our self-destruction will be the world's reprieve.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Nation-building in Afghanistan


Nation-building in Afghanistan always has been a dicey proposition.

Actually, it's always been a failed one. Didn't work so well for the British way back when, and we know what happened to the Soviet effort a couple of decades or so ago.

The American attempt hasn't been going so well, either -- and that's before one starts to wonder exactly what the hell kind of nation we intend on building there, a question raised by this pair of
MSNBC stories:

Days after the Marines apologized for a flag resembling the Nazi “SS” symbol, new questions are being raised about an Army base in Afghanistan reportedly called “Combat Outpost Aryan.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which first raised the controversy over the “SS” photograph, is now demanding that the outpost be renamed and the circumstances surrounding the naming of the base be investigated.

MRFF founder Mike Weinstein told msnbc.com that he was contacted by numerous U.S. and Afghan soldiers who were upset about the name of the base and wanted it changed. He said he felt compelled to go forward with a complaint.


(snip)


The Department of Defense, however, has said it's all a misunderstanding. A military spokesman told the Army Times that the base name was due to a misunderstanding and a misspelling. The spokesman said the name was actually "Combat Outpost Arian," named for a historical Persian tribe from western Afghanistan. Commander William Speaks told the Huffington Post that the word "Arian" is frequently used by Afghans, and pointed to the name Ariana Airlines.

Weinstein called the military's explanation completely bogus. "At first they said it didn't exist, and now they are saying it does exist but that it is a different name."

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the Marine Corps on Friday to re-investigate and take appropriate action against the Marine snipers who posed with a logo resembling a notorious Nazi symbol.

The top Marine officer apologized for the incident and ordered his commanders to look into the use of such symbols by snipers and reconnaissance Marines and make sure they are educated on how inappropriate such actions are.

The rapid-fire announcements came on the heels of demands from a leading Jewish organization and others for President Barack Obama to order an investigation into the incident and to hold the troops accountable

Panetta met with Marine Corps Commandant James Amos on Friday to discuss, among other things, a spate of problem incidents involving Marines that have surfaced in recent months. A U.S. defense official said Panetta approved of the actions being taken by Amos to address the problems. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private.

An initial Marine investigation into the matter concluded that the troops would not be disciplined because there was no malicious intent. The Marines mistakenly believed the "SS" in the shape of white lightning bolts on the blue flag were a nod to sniper scouts — not members of Adolf Hitler's special unit that murdered millions of Jews, Catholics, gypsies and others, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, California.


NO DOUBT the Obama Administration is thanking Eros that at least the Marines aren't flying the gold-and-white banner of the Vatican and refusing to take up a collection to supply the natives with free Trojans and a lifetime supply of the morning-after pill.

Because we all know that U.S. military personnel glorifying past, militaristic champions of the perfectibility of the human race -- by any means necessary -- is small potatoes compared to fighting the good fight against religious, anti-contraceptive superstition and unscientific backwardness.

Your United States government will get around to that after it's done eradicating the Real Enemy.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Now, a message from der Führer


Before American TV, British TV, French TV or any other regular television service, there was Deutscher Fernseh-Rundfunk -- the state TV service in Nazi Germany.

Nazi TV went on the air from Berlin in 1935, beating the BBC's regular television service by a year. And, amazingly, hundreds of 35-millimeter movie reels of programming survive, some of which we get to see in the above Spiegel TV documentary from 1999.

Creepy? You bet.

BUT WHAT'S INTERESTING is how the Nazi leadership had serious doubts about television's effectiveness as a propaganda tool. Obviously, they couldn't foresee the day when Hollywood got a hold of the idiot box and changed the world.

Which brings me to my point. Television is a lousy propaganda tool if you're all about convincing the crowd instead of that one person glued to the tube. If you're all about overt propaganda, TV is about as effective as screaming on a street corner.

No, TV -- and radio, in a different way -- is all about showing. It's about entertaining, and it's about distracting. Ultimately, though, it's about relationships.

On television and radio, the most effective messages are subliminal, not direct. You build a relationship, you humanize your subject . . . then you slip in your message. Don't preach, show.

Apparently, the Third Reich's leadership, in this case, couldn't think inside the Box. Watching the old Nazi TV clips, it reminded me of an evil version of EWTN.

Der Führer couldn't see television's possibilities for spreading his lies. And today, the Catholics (for one) can't figure out how to use it -- or radio, for that matter -- to tell the truth.

Both are often painful to watch.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Kulturekampfers für Obama



Translation:
"60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Gimme that old-time anti-Semitism. . . .



Oftentimes, it gets real weird real fast in the Catholic ghetto.

So weird that a generation of Catholics -- adrift in a Marty Haugen present and groping in the dark for a glorious lost Church it never knew -- will grab onto any crazy damn thing that brings to mind what it must have been like in the Good Old Days. Some turn to websites full of alleged signs, wonders and prophesies of how Mary warned that Jesus said that the Father's about to kick some cosmological ass and avenge the offended sensibilities of the True Faithful in this vale of tears.

OTHERS FIND a bishop who talks a good orthodox game and gives him the kind of fealty they ought to be reserving for Christ . . . even when the prelate turns out to be a better wolf than he is a shepherd. As we have witnessed again and again since 2001 in the Scandals.

And others, still, go around trying to rehabilitate notoriously nutty, anti-Semitic radio priests from the 1930s. Yes, I mean that demagogue of the Depression-era airwaves,
the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin.

Unsurprisingly, I stumbled across this last phenomenon because of the
Catholic Blog Awards. It's that time of the year in the Catholic blogosphere, and various members of "St. Blog's Parish" are campaigning for Best Whatever of 2008.

The awards are administered by
cyberCatholics.com, based in Abbeville, La. (Oh, Lord, why are all these things in my home state?) And if you go to the cyberCatholics.com home page -- which advertises nominations for the Catholic Blog Awards, incidentally -- and if you scroll down a bit, you will see a column of "guest contributors."

Actually, make that guest contributor. All of the highlighted articles (for example, "Wikipedia is Marxist!") are by the same Canadian guy, Stephen Volk. One of them, naturally, is
a press release for the website FatherCoughlin.com:

For everthing [sic] there is a season! Knowing that "Satan" means "slander," it's time to call a firm halt against the decades of unwarranted liberal slander towards Father Charles Coughlin…

While this man should by now be hailed as one of America's great heroes - who tirelessly fought for the poor during the Great Depression - his name is still being sloshed in the mud of liberal propaganda.

I have read many first editions by and about Father Coughlin. It is easy to conclude that he was never an antisemite. Absolute nonsense. But in the charisms of the Church he did have powerful, powerful God-given Gifts of Wisdom, Discernment and Knowledge:

"I do ask , however, an insane world to distinguish between the innocent Jew and the guilty Jew as much as I would ask the same insane world to distinguish between the innocent gentile and the guilty gentile."

Is this not completely fair? Or does the Bible not say, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

To clear up decades of confusion, www.FatherCoughlin.com is now open! As a Grand Opening Gift to you, go now to download your FREE complete book by Father Charles Coughlin, "Am I an AntiSemite?" Then check back often for FREE download of all his radio programs!

Why the urgency? Because today's "political correctness" is cultural Marxism.

Once again, we need strong, visionary leadership to prayerfully and boldly combat this before our civilization is left in ruins!

WAS FATHER COUGHLIN an anti-Semite? Here's a clue, from a Time magazine article, dated Nov. 14, 1938:

In Switzerland four years ago a book went on trial—the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—in a suit brought and won by the Swiss Jewish Community against two booksellers (TIME, Nov. 12, 1934). This notorious work, first published in Russia 33 years ago and circulated more or less surreptitiously throughout the western world since then, purported to expose a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization, dominate the earth. The Protocols, as the Swiss court found, have been repeatedly proved a fraud.

(snip)

Yet in the past two months Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin, rabble-rousing radio priest, has published the Protocols in his weekly Social Justice. Brushing aside the matter of their authenticity, Father Coughlin repeatedly stressed their "factuality," quoted Henry Ford (a onetime believer in the Protocols) : "They fit in with what is going on." Father Coughlin's point, buttered with many a some-of-my-best- friends-are-Jews disclaimer of antiSemitism, has been that Jews are to blame for Communism, that the aims of the Protocols closely resemble those of Communism—and of the New Deal, the C. I. O., numerous other Coughlin bogies.

Last week a fellow priest went to bat against the authenticity of the Protocols and, inferentially, against Jew-Baiter Coughlin. He was Rev. Michael Joseph ("Mike") Ahern, jovial, witty Jesuit, head of the geology department at Weston College near Boston. On his Sunday radio Catholic Truth Period, Father Ahern drew upon European Catholic sources to demolish the Protocols.

He closed his talk with a quotation from a recent talk by Pope Pius XI which, although published in European Catholic papers, has not been publicized in the U. S.* Said the Pope: "It is not possible for Christians to take part in antiSemitism. We fully acknowledge that everybody has the right to defend himself, protect himself against whatever threatens his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are all Semites spiritually."

OF COURSE, the careful historian must consider his primary-source material. After all, this article was in Time, and Time was part of the media and -- as Coughlin often told his radio audience -- the press is dominated by the Jews.

Or so true anti-Semites would have us believe.

While Coughlin was serializing the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" -- a modern-day favorite of Islamic radicals everywhere -- in his national newspaper, something big was about to happen in Nazi Germany. The night of Nov. 9 - 10, 1938, came to be known as
Kristallnacht.

A month later, Coughlin continued a series of radio talks proposing that the Nazis weren't right, necessarily,
but they had their reasons for going after the Jews. Make sure you click on Undercover Black Man's audio links.

Here's what, again, Time reported about the first of Coughlin's post-Kristallnacht radio programs
in its Nov. 28, 1938, edition:
Although all week U. S. radio had been speaking with thunderous unanimity against Nazi pogroms, Father Coughlin made resounding reservations when he joined the chorus. Nazi persecution of Jews was bad, he said, but communist persecution of Christians was worse. Admitting that his sources were Nazi, he said that 56 out of 59 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the U. S. S. R. were Jews. He also accused Kuhn, Loeb & Co. of giving financial aid to the Bolshevik Revolution, attributed that accusation to a British White Paper.

Promptly Station WMCA (Manhattan) spoke for itself, followed its broadcast of the speech with more than the usual disclaimer of responsibility. Said the WMCA announcer: "Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered certain mistakes of fact."
BOY, THOSE LEFTIST media Jews really had it in for that preacher of the True Faith, didn't they?

Or perhaps it's just that some "Catholic" websites have a weakness for lunatic-fringe "contributors" who specialize in defending the indefensible. Like the egregious media offerings of a demagogue Catholic priest from long ago, in some mythical gilded age when everything that called itself Catholic must have been really, really Catholic.

I shudder to think of what future generations in some dystopian remnant Church might latch onto from this present era of American Catholicism. Note to Catholics of the future: The music of Marty Haugen and David Haas --to name only a couple of bad composers of my time -- sucks now, and it'll suck then, too. Be forewarned.


The Catholic ghetto is a strange and interesting place. And the things Catholics in the cultural feedback loop get caught up with brings to mind a thought that, frankly, scares the crap out of me -- everything we do is a witness to the faith. And I have proven myself lousy at this "witness" thing over and over and over again.

You see, the Catholic cultural ghetto is just like the Evangelical ghetto, or the bar-scene ghetto, or the hip-hop ghetto, or any kind of popular-culture ghetto. There's a pearl to be found here and there (for example, the glories of the gin-and-tonic or black-and-tan within the bar-scene ghetto), but there's a lot more junk and stupidity to be found there.

For example, getting stupid drunk and throwing up all over your pants and shoes after too damn many gin-and-tonics or black-and-tans.

So, while all these Catholic blogs in the Internet section of the Catholic ghetto are competing for Best Whatever in the Catholic Blog Awards -- all in good fun, it must be said -- somebody who knows squat about the Church or what she really stands for . . . what Christ really stands for . . . is going to start following the links and seeing what's there.

If we're lucky, they might find an alleged image of the Blessed Mother on a piece of burned toast.

If we're not, they'll find some wingnut making apologies for a Jew-hating priest from Radio Days past on a website called cyberCatholics.com, which runs the Catholic Blog Awards, which lots of Catholic bloggers want to win.

And in the name of truth, justice and good taste, they'll look elsewhere for . . . well . . . truth, justice and good taste.