What do Don Mills and Auschwitz have in common? |
Fear of “the other” has been a staple of fascist thought and is dominating much of the political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
... Peter Levenda discoursed on how immigration from Europe, both Catholic and Jewish, melded with other events in the post-World War I period to mobilize fascist sentiment and activism.
Reacting to the advent of the Soviet Union, abortive Marxist revolutions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, large scale immigration of Catholics from Ireland and Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe, powerful elements of the U.S. power elite embraced fascism and eugenics ideology.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the potential threat of Communism was magnified in the eyes of many powerful American industrialists, financiers and corporate lawyers. Germany’s success in putting down the Marxist revolutions within its own borders, as well as the business relationships between corporate Germany and its cartel partners in the U.S. business community inclined many influential American reactionaries to support fascism.
By the same token, these same elements came to despise Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “Jew Deal,” as it was called by his enemies. American Jews were seen as hiring Jewish immigrants and thus denying “real Americans” jobs and economic well-being.
Attacking Roosevelt as a Jew and a Communist, American fascists embraced a cognitive and rhetorical position not unlike the view of Barack Obama as a “Kenyan Muslim,” and, consequently, a “traitor.” (more...)
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Some local relevancy:
Yes there are fascists in the GTA. I've encountered them for close on half a century.
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