Book: Prequel

Rachel Maddow's book on the rise of fascism in America was published, and delivered to me, today.

Can't wait.

The Reconstruction is way more detailed than I want, and tough sledding.  Rachel's always a thrilling read.

1/4 way through on the first sitting. It does not disappoint.

Rachel makes the point, which I'd never really heard before but makes sense in retrospect, that the worldwide rise of anti-semitism in the 1930s was largely (partially?) fueled by needing someone to blame for the Great Depression.

I always heard it was a combination of widespread crop failures caused by poor soil stewardship, coupled with rampant stock market speculation caused by unregulated markets. But of course, the class of people who benefited from the Depression, who made their fortunes buying up distressed properties and businesses, were the ultra-wealthy who became obscenely wealthy afterward. Then WWII put the industrial train back on its tracks, and who benefited from the immense public expenditure for war matériels? These same Captains of Industry. Who were largely Jewish.

A lot of well-to-do businessmen of Jewish extraction immigrated to the US during the Twenties and Thirties as Europe became inhospitable. They were only seeking opportunity, the American Dream, but like the carpetbaggers seventy years before, the natives looked on these new interlopers as vultures tearing apart their carefully-crafted lifestyles.

Well, that doesn't quite jibe with history. Anti-semitism was already well established before the First World War.

Jews were well hated for more than a thousand years. It's relatively recent that people have started to treat them decently, in some places.

Why is that, anyway?  I never understood antisemitism.  I mean Jewishness is a religion, not a race, isn't it?  I mean, there are Ashkenazi Jews who have some common  physical characteristics due to long breeding isolation, but not all Jews are Ashkenazi. Most persecuted minorities have a readily-identifiable defining characteristic, like dark skin or eyes without epicanthic folds.  But Jews?  Many of them, most of them* look like anybody else.  How can you discriminate if you can't identify?

And the book is called "Prequel" not "Prelude," my mistake.  It arose out of the research Rachel did for her podcast "Ultra," about the tail end of the plot detailed here.

It should be read by every sitting member of Congress, Republicans included. Today they're carrying water for Putin instead of Hitler, but the parallels are eerie.

*Huh.  Maybe not:

Wikipedia wrote:

It is estimated that in the 11th century, Ashkenazim comprised 3 percent of the global Jewish population, while an estimate made in 1930 (near the population's peak) listed them as comprising 92 percent of the world's Jewish population.[32] However, the Ashkenazi population was largely destroyed as a result of the Holocaust that was carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, which affected almost every Jewish European family.[33][34] Immediately prior to the Holocaust, the worldwide Jewish population stood at approximately 16.7 million people.[35][better source needed] Statistical figures vary for the contemporary demography of Ashkenazi Jews, ranging from 10 million[1] to 11.2 million.[2] Israeli demographer and statistician Sergio D. Pergola, in a rough calculation of Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews, implies that Ashkenazi Jews made up 65–70 percent of Jews worldwide in 2000.[36] Other estimates place the Ashkenazim as comprising upwards of 75 percent of the global Jewish population.

Quote :

Approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. This number represented 1.7% of Europe's total population and more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population. By 1945, most European Jews—2 out of every 3—had been killed.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/jewish-population-of-europe

So 66% of 60% is 40%, world Jewish population perished in WWII. 40% of 16.7m is 6.68m, which sounds about accurate. "Largely destroyed" seems inaccurate though.

Rachel is WITHERING in her criticism of J. Edgar Hoover, who was many times presented with evidence of Nazi spies and operatives inside the U.S. borders, and chose to do nothing. Hoover was convinced communists were a threat to U.S. democracy but not Nazism.

Despite lots of evidence to the contrary.

Chapter Fifteen, of twenty-two, begins the story that Rachel told in her "Ultra" podcast. I wonder which came first, the book or the podcast?  At any rate, they intersect.

O. John Rogge put a bunch of seditionists on trial in 1944, and the trial turned into a circus with over 500 motions for a mistrial, 72,000 objections from defense council, 7 defense lawyers being fined for contempt and one jailed for 90 days. In seven months the trial generated over 3,000,000 words in transcript, 17,879 pages weighing 150 pounds.

In the middle of it all the judge died of a heart attack and the trial had to be declared a mistrial.

Rather than start the case all over again -- with WWII now concluded, and nobody wanting to relitigate the past -- and ESPECIALLY with several high-profile still-sitting  Congressmen newly implicated in Nazi plots by captured documents at the Nuremberg trials -- the Justice Department decided to let the whole matter drop.

Quote :

It is our long and continuing American tradition to carefully avoid reckoning for the grandest of American sins, especially when they involve alleged (or actual) illegal activity by government officials. Lincoln's "malice toward none" of the Confederate insurrectionists in the aftermath of the Civil War; Ford's full and unconditional pardon of Nixon after Watergate; Obama's reluctance to prosecute anybody for systemized, well-lawyered torture practices during the post-9/11 wars.

Truman received Rogge's final 396 page report, and classified it "Top Secret" so it would never become public knowledge.

The above paragraph may be the most carefully-crafted sentence in Rachel's whole book.

Afterward Rogge went on a speaking tour, discussing the gist of his now-buried report on Nazi infiltration into the US government, which got him summarily fired.  Apparently at the insistence of one of the implicated Senators, who was friendly with Harry Truman.

The Attorney General, Tom Clark, who fired Rogge at Truman's insistence later served on the Supreme Court.

In the Amazon reviews there are several one star reviews, all unverified (and so doubtless not purchasers of the book) which state "poorly written" or "poorly researched" or "all lies."  Each of these MAGA reviews has dozens of "likes."

Grammar, spelling and punctuation are not strong suits for these people. And none of them have last names.

Heh-heh-heh, this is interesting. Amazon refused to print my review, because (without naming any names) I drew the obvious parallel between Rachel's story of 1940 and today. I did not use any "Profanity, Harassment, Hate speech, Sexual content, Illegal activity or Private information" which are their criteria for rejecting reviews, so it HAD to be the reviewer's agreement with the author's unspoken "leftist" views (Rachel herself leaves it up to the reader to draw the parallels).

As I say, there are now over a hundred right-wing reviews calling the book "biased" without any evidence of having read it.

So, I'm trying a new tact. I wrote what I called a "meta-review" and said that Amazon's fear of reprisal, their terror at crossing swords with fascistic elements today, is EXACTLY what happened in 1938-1940. I said, "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

We'll see if THAT review makes it past the censors.

Rachel mentions, deep in her book, that all of the white nationalist, all the of anti-semitic, all of the anti-Black screeds that she mentions fueling the hysteria in 1940... they're all still available on Amazon. Today.