The drift of the Republican Right to full-fledged Nazism continues. In this video, The Young Turks anchors Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola comment on another piece of racism by Ted Nugent, ageing rocker, pervert, draft dodger, and pillar of the N.R.A. Nugent has been severely criticised and there have been demands that he should issue an apology after he posted a piece on Facebook asking the rhetorical question who the people demanding gun control were. He called these people the enemies of freedom. And guess what? The people he chose were all Jews. He even stuck little Israeli flags next to their faces, and accused some of being Israeli agents. Uygur points out that he’s wrong about many of those, whom he identifies as Israelis. Most of the men and women he’s fingered as Mossad agents or whatever aren’t. They’re simply American citizens. And quite often they’re distinguished American citizens, whose patriotism should be unquestioned. One of them is a general and the president’s chief of staff. Another is the governor of New York state. These are foul libels.
He’s also maligned the victims of the Holocaust. There’s another post in which Nugent states that he pondered why so many Germans were taken in by Adolf, and so many Jews went quietly to their deaths. This is under the headline, ‘Soulless Sheep to the Slaughter’.
Uygur and Iadarola point out that this pretty much a natural progression. The Right has always hated the Jews. They started off attacking Mexicans and Blacks. Now they’ve moved on to Muslims when they’ve become massively unpopular. And now, inevitably, Nugent has started on the Jews after following those bandwagons.
And this is particularly rich from Nugent. Nugent was so terrified of serving in the Vietnam War that he emptied his bowels in his pants for a week or so, in order to have himself declared mentally unfit. The Turks state they don’t blame him for not wanting to fight in Vietnam. They wouldn’t have wanted to either. But he’s been trying to make up for it ever since by trying to present himself as a supermasculine advocate for hunting and gun rights.
They also point out that it’s simply not true that Jews in Nazi Germany went quietly to their deaths. Many stood up and resisted, fighting extremely hard for their lives and those of their families and communities. But they were butchered anyway, right down to the last man and woman, because the Nazis had superior fire power. So calling the victims of the Shoah ‘soulless sheep’ is a gross lie, and not just a terrible insult to the victims of one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century.
There’s also a party political aspect to this. American Jews traditionally tended to vote Democrat. Many of them were also staunchly behind NAACP and the campaign for Black Civil Rights in America. As teacher, they tended to work in the Black schools, and generally lived and worked in closer contact with Blacks than other sections of the American population. And Nixon was also paranoid about them. Despite the fact that Kissinger was Jewish and there were other Jewish Americans on his staff, Nixon was obsessed with there being a Jewish plot against him, and distrusted Jews because of their traditional left-wing leanings.
This anti-Semitism had died down somewhat after the American Right decided they were going to back Israel after the victories of the Six Day War in the 1970s. In the 1990s, members of the Likud party worked for the Republicans, helping to draft plans for a future invasion of Iraq. But now with a rising tide of anxiety about immigration from Mexico, the threat of Islamist terrorism some parts of the Republicans are once again falling back into hatred of the Jews. And as The Turks themselves point out, it always ends with the Jews.
This is frightening. Nugent’s a disgrace, and should apologise immediately. And the whole drift towards racism and Fascism in America, Britain or wherever needs to be stopped. Before anyone dies in pogroms and race riots.
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