http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jschell8/English... nothing illustrates the radicalism of the new right better than the recent attack by the Fox News commentator Glenn Beck on the financier and philanthropist George Soros. Soros is of Hungarian and Jewish origin, and Beck’s attack, called “The Puppet-Master?”, recycles, almost in carbon copy, the tropes of the most virulent anti-Semitic ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the first half of the twentieth century.
Beck, who denies that he is anti-Semitic, is a conspiracy theorist of classic vintage, though the content of his alleged conspiracies is, to put it bluntly, weird. True, some of it is classic McCarthyite red-baiting. Of Obama’s White House, he says, “there are communists, Marxists, revolutionaries all around this president.”
Stranger still is his attack on, of all people, US President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson is fingered as the originator of “progressivism,” which in turn, is – believe it or not – also identified as the point of origin of Nazism and Bolshevism. Beck regularly likens Obama’s policies to those of Hitler. (Recently, Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder and president, said of the management of mild, sober National Public Radio, “They are, of course, Nazis.”)
Wilson, Hitler, and Obama are linked by a chain of highly permissive association altogether typical of conspiracy theorizing in general, and of its anti-Semitic variety in particular: Wilson was a “progressive”; some progressives dabbled in eugenics (never mind that some conservatives did as well); the eugenics movement influenced Hitler; Obama, too, is a progressive. Therefore progressives, Hitler, and Obama are the same!
Of all this we can say what the political thinker Hannah Arendt said of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Its effect is to “reveal official history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influence of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade…”