If we look beyond the opponents of genocide who are so shamefully smeared with the label “antisemite,” but if we still treat “Semite” as meaning “Jew,” then the identity of a leading actual antisemite might surprise many people.
Very few, I’ve found, are aware that the policy of Nazi Germany for years was to pursue the expulsion of the Jews, not their murder, that the U.S. government led the world’s governments in holding public conferences to discuss who would accept the Jews, that those governments — for open and shamelessly Anti-Semitic reasons — refused to accept the Nazis’ future victims, and that Hitler openly trumpeted this refusal as agreement with his bigotry and as encouragement to escalate it. I’m not aware of a single popular history text that includes the fact that the U.S. and British governments, throughout the war, repeatedly refused to evacuate the Jews or any other at-risk groups simply because they found it inconvenient.
U.S. immigration policy, crafted largely by antisemitic eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin — themselves sources of inspiration to Nazi eugenicists — severely limited the admission of Jews into the United States before and during World War II. On the Fourth of July, 1938, New York Times foreign correspondent, columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote: “It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings around our consulates in Vienna and other cities . . . How deeply do we believe in our Declaration of the elementary rights of man? Whatever other nations do, can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination . . . ?” I’m not sure that question has yet been answered.
The U.S. government rewrote history after the war, turning a war that had had nothing to do with rescuing people from Nazi camps into a war that one can now only imagine as having included propaganda posters about Uncle Sam wanting YOU to save the Jews. Even those who imagine the enemy of the United States to have been Russia still imagine the war that way. The State Department’s actual refusal of a visa to Anne Frank’s family has been completely replaced with a story of the nobility of the U.S. military and its mythical effort to rescue her.
But the U.S. government didn’t just rewrite history. It also created a standard for going forward — one that always had a disturbing catch to it. The standard was, of course, “never again!” But what was to be never again? Not mass-slaughter, which was clearly acceptable in Korea or Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. A hint could perhaps be found in what we were taught had happened, the thing that could never be repeated, the mass-slaughter that bore some distinguishing characteristic that rendered it unforgivable rather than a “service” for which to thank our “service members.”
The thing that had happened, we were taught over and over and over again, was the killing of 6 million Jews in camps. Not 9 million human beings killed in camps, of whom 6 million were Jews. Not 60 million people killed in war, of whom 9 million were killed in camps, of whom 6 million were Jews. But 6 million Jews. Full stop.
That was what must never happen again. And yet the U.S. government and U.S. establishment have made it more and more likely to happen again. They’ve spent decades creating an Apartheid timebomb, a bitterness factory doomed to demographic death spirals. And the hate state has been created not only within the borders of Palestine but also throughout the airwaves and online connections of Pentagon-dominated media outlets the world over.
“Only police lives matter,” doesn’t end well. “Only Israeli lives matter” doesn’t end well. It doesn’t end well for Israelis or for any of the rest of us.
Dominating the planet with bases and weapons and checkbooks carries responsibilities with it, including the responsibility not to generate such gut-wrenching resentment and bigotry that reconciliation would require decades of doing everything right — that is to say doing everything in just about the reverse manner of how it’s been done.
So, there are a great many actual antisemites to choose from, and vast numbers of opponents of Zionism — including courageous Israelis — wrongfully smeared as such, but when and if the smoke clears, I think a historical ranking of leading actual antisemites will be incomplete without the chosen — sorry, I mean the indispensable — nation.
