Eric Zuesse – The Two Types of Americans’ Racism

On the one hand is the type of racism that is condemned by Democratic Party mouthpieces such as CNN in their 20 July 2019 “Fact check: Trump falsely accuses Ocasio-Cortez of calling Americans ‘garbage’” (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/19/politics/fact-check-trump-aoc-garbage-omar-jews/index.html). Their article exposes the types of racism that the Republican Party has been promoting ever since the Democratic Party’s President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the early 1960s abandoned its Dixiecrats and went for a non-racist America. Dixiecrats then left the Democratic Party and became, and took over, the Republican Party, under Richard Nixon. This is the type of racism which that CNN article exposes. Donald Trump leads it today.

On the other hand, there is also a significantly different type of racism. One can see it if one selects “Best” as the display-option for the reader-comments at the popular independent – neither Democratic nor Republican – news-site Zero Hedge, at its (also) 20 July 2019 article, titled “Dave Collum Goes Deep On ‘Conspiracy Theories’: 9/11, Epstein, Pizzagate, JFK, & The Vegas Shooting” (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-20/dave-collum-goes-deep-conspiracy-theories-911-epstein-pizzagate-jfk-and-vegas). The article doesn’t so much as even mention either Pizzagate (https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/09/02/roots-pedophile-ring-conspiracy-theories/) or JFK (https://www.history.com/news/why-the-public-stopped-believing-the-government-about-jfks-murder), but only the others; so, the headline-writer there misrepresented the article somewhat. However, the other three were discussed in the article, and serious evidence was cited for each of the three conspiracy-hypotheses. The article itself discusses only conspiracy theories that are possibly true, and which both Republican and Democratic ’news’-sites nonetheless condemn and ridicule – which exposes those mainstream sites’ self-sustaining prejudices regarding 9/11, Epstein, and the Vegas massacre. None of those three hypotheses is actually impossible to be true. Also, none of them is bigoted in any way. However, the reader-comments to that article are overwhelmingly anti-Semitic (racistly anti-Jewish). Examples of this are the most up-voted comment, and its most up-voted response:

White Nat
Conspiracy theorist – just like anti-semite, racist, nazi and white supremacist – are baseless slurs designed to silence inconvenient facts and stifle opinions counter to the official narrative.
The day you cease to give a fuck what people call you is the day you gain your freedom.

SocratesSolves
That’s exactly right. And the people putting out the slurs have to be taken down now – the JEWS. They will be removed from the World Stage for all time – faster than the Twin Towers they brought down in their calculated 911 mass murder. It’s the same old crowd that killed Christ. For in truth, we were told just exactly who they were a long long time ago: The Synagogue of Satan. The same cult took the guns from Russians and genocided upwards to ninety million mostly white Christians. That’s what they’re up to in the false flags and combination false flags and murders in America. They want your guns – for then they can take your lives.

One of the replies there to “Socrates Solves” was the following, which had 11 down-votes and 1 up-vote, thus indicating that it was predominantly disfavored by the readers:

Snotweasel
Wow. Just wow. Can you guys believe this fucking antisemite??

Another negative comment there was my own:

The “Jew” thing as a conspiracy theory is for idiots. No conspiracy is between all members of any ethnicity, because that’s vastly too many people, and because no entirety of any ethnic group constitutes an organization, and because any conspiracy has to be by the leaders, not by a mass of people. An authentic conspiracy is between a few people. For example: conspiracies happen all the time within large corporations when the top people there, the people who have authority and power within that corporation, plan an operation against competitors. That’s normal business-operation, but even there, only the top people, the organizers, are in it, insiders to the operation. The rest of the employees just do what they are told to do – what they’re being paid and otherwise incentivized to do. What “White Nat” and “SocratesSolves” said is idiotic.

However, the vast majority of the reader-comments were not opposed to the Hitlerite ones, and most of them (like the ones that I was criticizing there) were irrelevant to what the article that they were supposedly commenting upon had actually said. Consequently, the reader-comments as a whole didn’t add much to what the ZeroHedge article asserted.

Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic, but he is – and now more clearly than ever – racist, in precisely the sense that the Democratic Party site CNN points out. Neither this nor any other type of racism was so much as even mentioned in the ZeroHedge article, but racism was the focus of its reader-comments, which were allegedly ‘about’ the article. Racism has nothing to do with any authentic conspiracy-theory. But it has lots to do with all fake ones that attribute conspiratorial group-action to some mass of people that is vastly too large and disconnected with one-another to have even possibly been participating in any actual conspiracy.

There are as many different types of bigotry as there are ethnicities and ethnic loyalties. All of them appeal to individuals of low intelligence and even lower compassion. In some countries, such as apartheid Israel and the former apartheid South Africa, and throughout Dixieland and Republican-Party America generally, enough bigoted individuals exist so as to be able collectively to control the political system, irrespective of the presence or absence of any conspiracy. Even in the parts of America that are not controlled by the Republican Party, other types of racisms are widely promulgated by the ‘news’-media, especially against Russians, as a hold-over from J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘commie’ scares and support of Hitler against Stalin. Today’s Democratic Party especially propagandizes for that type of far-right bigotry. It’s no less dangerous – only differently dangerous – than the type which today’s Republican Party propagandizes for.

Ideologically based bigotries are no less dangerous, and no less longlasting, than ones which have no ideological origin (such as against Blacks – or at least against the ones who refuse to play Uncle Tom). In every land, and in every time-period, the people who are the most dangerous are the ones at the top who are cultivating and taking advantage of some sort of bigotry by some sort of stupid psychopaths, in order to take, or hold, control, over a nation’s government. That stupidity, and that psychopathy, are sufficiently present in every country, so as to be able to be exploited by wealthy and powerful people in order to impose or increase dictatorship there. Democracy provides no protection against it. And authentic conspiracies can be leading such masses of fools, but the mass itself cannot possibly be a conspiracy.

Democracy provides no protection against racist fascism (the ideology – not the German political Party – nazism). The ideology of nazism can be directed against not only “the Jews” but against “the Christians” or against “the Muslims” or against “the Whites” or against “the Blacks” or against “the Italians” or against “the Russians” or against “the Poles,” or against any other non-‘us’.

A person of intelligence and compassion will be immune from such exploitation, because such a person recognizes that “us” are all sentient (and thus vulnerable) beings – even bigots. A democracy needs to represent everyone who resides on the nation’s land, regardless of whether anyone else approves of any given resident. That’s what a democracy is. It represents not only non-bigots, but the many different types of bigots. No democracy can be better than its population, but any democracy can become instead a dictatorship, in which everything goes to hell. That’s just the way things are, and always were. Democracy is precarious, everywhere. But not every failure of democracy is due to a conspiracy, and none is due to a conspiracy by a mass of people.

Originally posted at strategic-culture.org (https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/31/the-two-types-of-americans-racism/).

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 (https://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic/dp/1880026090/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1339027537&sr=8-9), and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q1H4EG).