That Jonathan Rauch review of Heather Cox Richardsons book reminded me of this post I wrote in my first month as a blogger. Rauch had written, If you wanted a simple criterion to demarcate America’s enemies, you could do worse than ask a single question: Is this country, movement, or ideology antisemitic? Since at least the 1930s, the Axis of Evil and the Axis of Antisemitimism [sic] have been basically congruent (imperial Japan and Asian Communism being the major exceptions). I responded: Simple is the operative word here. Let’s start with those exceptions. Imperial Japan occupied a not insignificant portion of America’s attention during World War II. Asian Communism produced the only wars America fought, officially and semi-officially, between 1945 and 1991. Moving beyond the exceptions, Italian fascism, the second prong of that original Axis, was not an anti-Semitic movement (Primo Levi, let’s not forget, was initially a Fascist, like many Italian Jews.) Throughout the Cold War, but particularly after Vietnam, the United States engaged in proxy wars with all manner of non-Asian Communisms and socialisms, especially in Africa and Latin America. None of these were anti-Semitic movements. And of course the United States opposed Bolshevism from the very start, even though in the early years the Reds were far friendlier to Jews than were the Whites, and Eastern European Communism had a much more complicated relationship with anti-Semitism than Rauch seems to realize. So, on the one side, you have Nazi Germany, some fitful decades in East European history, Iraq (twice), and radical Islamist terrorism (setting aside the question of the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism). On the other side, you have Italy, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Angola, Namibia, Laos, and more. And, remember, in some of these cases the US was supporting regimes that were extraordinarily anti-Semitic. (Argentina has three main enemies, declared a spokesperson for the junta. Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.)
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:57:45 +0000
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