See, SnowdropExplodes has a follow-up on the cartoon business from last week, trying to explain one last time why some people were having their "racism!" buttons pushed by it (hint, it's not always black and white, yeah?) by digging up some good ol' Der Sturmer cartoons.
Anyhoo, not to bash one's head against that particular brick wall any more, so meanwhile: I was at the source he got some of the images from, Caricatures from "Der Stuermer," 1928-1932, I saw this one at the top of the page and thought, well now, here's something that speaks to the Bill O'Reilly in us all, isn't there:
link (can't upload the photo, but you'll see what I mean)
Title: "German Christmas"
Caption: The German Christmas angel has her hands tied by the swindling world bank Jews. Meanwhile, the department store Jew, behind the mask of Christmas cheer, is doing a booming business. (December 1928)
Explanation: The angel is bound by bands named taxes, credit stops, Dawes tribute and Lugano. The Jew is selling beauty creams and pornographic books.
Note that last one. There's a lot of that theme there, too: porn as sinister corrupting force. Hey, who knows: maybe the "porno-iarchy" is really just one more part of the Zionist International Conspiracy after all; hell, most everything is, isn't it?
"We did it, signed, Morty"
--Lenny Bruce on the Crucifixion
11 comments:
Belle--Yeah, the War on Christmas business has well-documented white supremacist and anti-semitic roots. It goes back at least to the anti-semitism of the Father of Christian Reconstructionism, RJ Rashdoony. He was the first, to my knowledge, to write about the alleged "threats against Christmas" for a US audience. I'll try to dig up some links.
Anyway, James Dobson et al have tried to repackage the whole thing to look mainstream and relatively harmless (Notwithstanding, of course, that a theology which suggests that all of the Jews who don't convert after the Rapture will be thrown into eternal hellfire is inherently anti-semitic.).
Anyway, thanks for pointing out the cartoon. It's particularly...telling, really.
So, Rushdoony was a defender of American slavery and a Holocaust denier, and he has an unsettling number of followers in current American politics. Dobson and others would never have come about without him, but they've tried to clean up his theology to make it seem more palatable. This is an informative post:
http://racistchurches.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/rj-rushdoony/
I'm trying to dig up some of what he said about Christmas, but haven't been able to find it online. It's definitely documented in Michelle Goldberg's book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. I can't quote it because I just loaned it out to my mom, but it's there.
SPLC has written on them:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=591
Yeah, I had been meaning to write about Rushdoony/Reconstructionists et al for a while. scary shit. compared to the more mainstream fundamentalists, they're still largely off the mainstream radar (and Rushdoony himself is daid as of a coupla years ago), but the influence is--they -should- be better known about, you know?
Thanks so much for the links.
One of the headiest things I remember about being Christian (of course, I was Christian at like 12 years old) was that Christianity told you that you were persecuted, a potential martyr, without actually being persecuted (or compromising your safety).
It tells you that being Christian is something that the world doesn't want you to be, while safely ensconcing you in one of the most powerful religions on Earth.
It's not unlike privilege, actually...
Gee, what else does that remind me of...-think think think-
I gotta say, I don't really get that one. Maybe I should; I'm sure there's been a point in my life where I got off on that particular fantasy, i.e. romanticizing being persecuted, but I can't really think what or when that would've been. I mean, it's not -fun-, even imaginary persecution, ime: the masturbatory pleasures of being Special sort of pale compared to the constant vigilance and suspicion and, well, -not really having any friends or real connections.-
...I suppose that one -would- make a lot of sense at 12 years old, though, since that mentality's basically SOP for the adolescent anyway. It's the purported adults still stuck in this sort of thing that I worry about...
Okay, so, this is the most informative essay that I've found on the War on Christmas thus far. By Michelle Goldberg:
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/21/christmas/index.html
Turns out that Henry Ford was the first American to sound the alarm bells about an alleged threat to Christmas. See his tellingly entitled 1921 tract, "The International Jew."
Growing up in Ireland our Christmas cheer was always leavened a little bit by the ubiquitous icons depicting the lives of the saints.
Talk about the earliest and most enduring form of hardcore, you could tell from their expressions they'd never agreed on a safe word.
I often think of Tommy Tiernan's marvelous observation that if the figures in a Catholic Church could talk you'd hear nothing but the screams of a charnel house.
Can’t pin this one on Morty, is what I’m saying.
Aw.
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