In times when the current batch of scoundrels seems dispiriting, it's sometimes reassuring to review those who preceded them, and today's outrages seem less unique, less apocalyptic.
Try reading Henry Ford's The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. It's on line. It has been said to have inspired Adolph Hitler and others, and if you've ever read Mein Kampf you have to believe it did.
What is really creepy about Ford's book is the apparent even handedness, something that sounds, at first, like genuine sympathy and even admiration for the Jew and the position in which the Jew finds himself. The Jew's Biblical law forbade him from lending money at interest, to other Jews, forcing him to focus his money lending on Gentiles. The Jew was dispersed and despised among nations of the world, without a homeland in Palestine, and he was treated cruelly, so he had to be resourceful to survive. So, there is a sort of pseudo there-but- for-the-Grace-of-God tone, in the opening.
And then there is the scholarly pose--not all Jews are rich. Some live in poverty. (But even impoverished Jews wield power.) Not all financial institutions are run by Jews. Jews in this country are heavily out numbered, only 3% of the population.
But what he does, having painted this picture of a really threatened "race," is to say, well, this is a creature with the morals of a cornered rat.
Then he goes on to describe the characteristics found in this species of vermin: A distaste for manual labor. A desire to always handle the money, not to learn the craft which begets the money. The Jew is not an engineer who loves to solve humanity's problems; he is a parasite, who attaches himself to the engineer to profit from the vitality of the really admirable human beings.
There are three volumes and hundreds of chapters, and the really creepy part is thinking about the obsessiveness of this man. I mean, this hater really loved his work.
You can sort of imagine a serial killer of prostitutes, a man who just can't stop thinking about them.
Of course, as is so often the case, the things which Ford finds most loathsome in "The Jew" are the very things he must have sensed, on some level, to be very close to his own essence--the obsession with money, commerce, control, power. Even the focus on the Jew's avoidance of manual labor is intriguing--Ford, raised on a farm, sought out work which did not require so much brute strength. His own manual labor was limited to tinkering with engines.
There are echoes of Ford in Rush Limbaugh, right down to the patina of reasonableness, and of course, there is the obsessive joy in rolling around in his mouth the hateful names and fondling in his mind the hateful images.
It's a sort of primer of hate. Not the sort of mindless skinhead with the tatoo swastika on his forehead type of hater, but a tweedy hater, who might invite you to sit down in his parlor and drink tea with him, and just when you are thinking he's not such a bad guy, brings forth this rather scholarly sounding, thoughtful, pure venom.
I don't know much about Mr. Ford. I need to read more, although it's going to be tough. But I know he paid his workers better than most employers, hoping they'd buy his cars. He was inventive and had real virtues as a manager. He was one of the first to imagine an economy of mass production and mass consumption. In some ways, that just makes your skin crawl all the more: You can imagine meeting the guy, shaking his hand in his office, looking into his smiling face, and thinking: This genial guy wants to gas millions of people.
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