I’ve already heard plenty of right-wingers claim that Black people are the ones who are really responsible for slavery because some people in Ghana and elsewhere sold their fellow Africans to European colonialist traders. And we all know women are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the prevalence of rape. So yeah, I guess “Jews were the real Nazis” fits right in to that mindset.
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Please note well: even if Hitler had Jewish ancestry, and even if he knew that this was the case, then that makes him a hypocrite, not Jewish.
That whole “one drop of blood” thing was their fetish, not a real thing.
There is a place for propaganda which is not self consistent.
In Stage 2 propaganda, the point is to be so self contradictory that it’s like a Zen Koan of hatred. For those who are against you, it’s meant to break down their sense of what truth even means. For those who support you, whether or not it makes sense is irrelevant, so long as it feeds your sense of righteous anger and makes the other side cry.
(Counter against this: “No, I’m not missing anything: this is gibberish. They’re trying to gaslight me.”)
In Stage 3 propaganda, the point is that it doesn’t make sense, and what are you going to do about it? Huh? No? No, I didn’t think so. It’s about reinforcing that they can say and do whatever they want, and there’s nothing you can do about it. They have all the agency and you have no power.
(Counter against this: “They’re lying, and when they tell me there’s nothing I can do about it, that’s also a lie.”)
In Stage 4 propaganda, the point is that it doesn’t make sense, because what’s the point of being able to tell people what they’re allowed to believe or not, if they might believe it anyway just because it’s true? How could you tell if they believe it because you told them to?
(Counter against this: “There are four lights.”)
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I vaguely recollect that crank Lyndon LaRouche had written some nonsense about how Jewish culture was somehow responsible for spawning the Nazis or the holocaust or something equally grotesque. But I’m not sure how much that sort of indirect, convoluted nonsense connects to “‘Nazi’ is a powerful slur, so we’re going to continue using it even though we’re the fascists and they’re Jewish” flavor of insane projection.
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Roger Rabbit: “… I’d hate me too!”
Russia’s credibility devouring itself
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Umm yeah, that must be why Hitler when to a convent school as a child.
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People in Predappio are bad because mussolini was born in Predappio.
(Less than 250 people are living there, so there are few bad people anyway following this argument)
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That’s a pretty standard antisemitic trope, FWIW. No doubt LaRouche repeated it, but I wouldn’t give him credit for coming up with it.
The Russians have always had a spot in their heart for a good antisemitic conspiracy theory.
ETA: PS, I’ve noticed that here and in some other threads people have written “anti-semite” instead of “antisemite”. Could we not do that please? Here’s why:
The term “anti-Semite” was invented in Germany in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr in his pamphlet “The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism” to refer to the anti-Jewish manifestations of the period and to give Jew-hatred a more scientific-sounding name.
(I used to write it with the hyphen, but have been working hard to stop. TBH, the term “Jew-hatred”—which some of the Jewish periodicals I read have moved to —is more descriptive and less anodyne, but I find it hard to write.)
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I think a large part of the reason for this is blood libel spread by the Russian Orthodox Church. For example:
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I don’t think this will go well for Russia. They will alienate Israel this way.
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Just to be clear, the reason for the Jew hate was not this blood libel story, the hatred was the reason Jews were blamed for the death. However, I think that you are correct in that historically the Russian hate grew as the Empire spread and incorporated countries with larger Jewish populations.
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You are right about this, because antisemitic hate far predates this particular blood libel story, but that story was, and still is used as a tool to amplify that hate.
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Oh, now that’s really intelligent! Accuse Israel of being antisemitic!
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Thread on Russian antisemitism, how Russians blame Jews for everything bad and why many Russians believe that Hitler was Jewish.
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