Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum
This claim remains unjustified in the article as they focused on the American right.
I really thought that as Americans we agreed that Hitler was bad, the Holocaust happened, and that the swastika was a symbol of hate. Maybe that was naive of me.
Exceedingly naive, yes. The US spent a long time pussy footing about during WWII before someone touched our boats. Prior to that American actions provided inspiration for Nazi atrocities, and following American pride fueled the space race with Nazi scientists. We never addressed our sordid past nor moved past our rampant systemic and individual racism. There has never been a point of uniform consensus on the badness of the Holocaust and symbolism of the swastika.
Henry Ford’s vehement antisemitism inspired Hitler.
Then in the mid 70s fascists got really popular globally for some reason. So much so that even David Bowie said he liked The National Front.
As far as I can tell “left antisemitism” is one threat a dude at UCLA made two years ago, and people who are mad at Likud for mass murder.
Neither the right nor the center consider it a problem.
You forget that the Nazis took their systems from American history. Genocide, medical experimentation, eugenics, concentration camps, disarmed and abused. All against minority groups, especially Native Americans.
Hitler was bad. Nazis are bad. But in the US, we have freedom of speech, which means that the government can’t punish anyone for saying those things directly. Those things need to be “punished” in the overall marketplace of ideas. Neo-Nazis are free to tout their shit without the government suppressing them, but the rest of us don’t have to listen (or repeat it).
However, there are two things happening which are making this more difficult. First, that generation which actually had to go to war to eradicate this ideology is dying off, literally. So there aren’t many people remaining who had to deal with the consequences of this firsthand.
Related to that, I draw a direct line to the fact that more speech is now filtered through public corporations, and public corporations are run for one reason only – to increase shareholder value. It used to be that the people who ran public companies also lived through WWII, and knew which lines they shouldn’t cross in the name of profit. They also knew that shareholders would back those decisions. But now, the people who run these companies have no moral compass other than Number Go Up. If Neo-Nazi shit drives eyeballs (and revenue), they don’t care. They will give it a platform.
I don’t see a way out of this unless we reverse that disasterous ruling that said that not only that corporations are people, but that corporations have the same inalienable rights as humans. Then, you also have to demolish the altar of shareholder value that these corporations worship. Yes, that is important, but so is morality. Corporate boards need the leeway to say “Yes, I know that Nazi shit generates revenue, but we will have none of it here”, and not have to endure shareholder lawsuits for possibly making the current quarter’s profit a smidgen lower.
