QUOTE(Herschelkrustofsky @ Sat 5th April 2008, 1:12am)
The trademark technique of the Chip 'n' King team is the process of divining "hidden meanings" in their quarry's writings. LaRouche is somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, because his writing contains many obscure references which may tend to baffle the layman, and Chip 'n' King exploit this to insinuate that every reference to a banker, an aristocratic family, or for that matter, the U.K. or Venice, is an instance of veiled anti-Semitism. Ironically, of course, this really does trivialize anti-Semitism.
I'm not sure it trivializes anti-semitism itself, so much as it trivializes anti-anti-semitism... which in some ways is even more tragic, if only because it's so unnecessary, so self-defeating, and there's so few people actually doing it relative to the amount of damage they're causing. And of course, WP allows them to do the damage without even having to pay their own web-hosting fees.
I've pointed all this out before, but IMO it bears repeating: Larouche has so many targets of derision, and so few figures of admiration, that to accuse him of "anti-semitism" is a little like accusing Darth Vader of "anti-Ewokism." It really amounts to ideological cherry-picking.
I could cite passages where Larouche bashes Martin Luther too, in essentially the same way that SlimVirgin, Mantanmoreland, and the rest of 'em have done on Wikipedia for
years. So why aren't
they accused of being "Larouchies"?
Maybe I'll catch hell for saying this, but excessive demonization of anti-semites, and making everyone think they're some sort of huge threat to everything, only attracts people who want to be demonic and hugely threatening into the cause of anti-semitism. It really just
empowers them, when it's actually far better to make fun of them (assuming you can't simply throw them all in jail). Lots of people want to be evil and scary, but very few people want to be buffoons... And attempting to demonize people like Larouche, while it may give folks like Chip Berlet a nice, warm, self-satisfied feeling, really just brings Larouche and his followers more useless attention. I mean, the guy runs for President every four years and gets what, 200 votes?
I might even go so far as to say that Jewish people, and Jewish-Americans in particular, were probably better off when
Hogan's Heroes was still on TV than they are now, at least as far as cultural attitudes are concerned. Who would want to be a Nazi when your role models are Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz, and your own guard dogs like your prisoners more than they like you?