Disingenuous Basterds: The oligarchs' long campaign to depict their critics as Nazis
Source: PandoDaily
... What’s being missed in much of the media outrage over Perkins’ letter is the fact that his sentiment isn’t new, or original. In fact, it’s actually quite mundane.
... You can find lots more of this Third Reich-flavored tripe by just Googling “Obama” and “Hitler.” If you broaden out your search beyond National Socialism to include all forms of violent white supremacy, you’ll find even more, including AIG CEO Robert Benmosche declaring that anger over his bailed-out company’s bonuses was “just as bad” as lynchings of African Americans in the Jim Crow South. And if you go one step further and look for all the claims that the rich are oppressed, you will find a seemingly endless supply of statements to that effect.
The point here – beyond simply deploring aristocrats for their gross insensitivity to those who lost family during the Holocaust and Jim Crow – is to understand all these outbursts not as anomalies, but as statements that are part of a larger narrative.
That deceptive narrative is what I called in my first book The Myth of the Persecuted Billionaire, and what Thomas Frank later called a trick designed to make us “pity the billionaire.” In the plutocrat-glorifying fable, the Tom Perkinses comprise the rag-tag team from “Inglourious Basterds” – the underdogs bravely defying the scourge of oppression and genocide.
The objective of this hideous mythology should be obvious. Rather than permit any honest discussion about the serious problems that accompany rampant economic inequality, the winners of that economic system aim to manufacture story lines that depict themselves – not the poor – as victims on par with history’s most persecuted peoples. It is, as Frank says, the great “hard-times swindle” of the modern era – and it is everywhere.
Read more: http://pando.com/2014/01/26/disingenuous-basterds-the-oligarchs-long-campaign-to-depict-their-critics-as-nazis/
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