IS THERE A curlE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM?
425
right down to David Duke. The Nazis, on their road to power in the
Weimar Republic, did splendid work for the unemployed, feeding thou–
sands of hungry workers who had been abandoned to their fate. On this
matter I must respectfully take issue with Saul Bellow, who, in his elo–
quent remarks last night, suggested that Hitler offered the German peo–
ple little more than Jew-hating. To the contrary, he offered them a so–
cial revolution that promised to end a ghastly depression and restore
stability and purpose to a society that was wallowing in moral degener–
acy and political instability. Let us not deceive ourselves: Hitler delivered
on his promises, albeit at a cost no civilized people should be willing to
pay.
And here at home the Ku Klux Klan, in its palmy days, performed all
sorts of discreetly praiseworthy services for poor whites, and occasionally,
even for poor blacks. From Mussolini and Hitler to pale imitators like
Duke, vicious political movements have been able to say - with a mea–
sure of truth - that they speak for the dispossessed and wretched of the
earth, on whom the Establishment and the public have turned their
backs. In view of the bloody history of our century, we no longer ac–
cept such excuses for whites and should ask ourselves why we accept
them for blacks. And since most such racist and anti-Semitic movements
have arisen from among those with legitimate claims
to
being sorely op–
pressed and excluded from power, the argument that black racism is an
ol\.)'moron reveals itself as untenable, not to say mendacious.
Anti-Semitism is by no means the only form of bigotry that demands
vigilant monitoring and vigorous counterattack. The growing assault on
the Roman Catholic and neo-evangelical Protestant churches should not
go unnoticed. And what should we say of the equanimity with which
the Democratic Party politicians, the media, and too many others bore
the disgraceful, blatantly anti-Italian campaign mounted by Robert
Abrams during the last senatorial election here in New York? But expe–
rience has taught Gentiles
to
be especially sensitive to anti-Semitism, not
only because the Holocaust properly haunts our consciences, but also for
a more selfish reason: anti-Semitism almost invariably opens the flood–
gates to other atrocities and therefore threatens all of us.
It is time to resurrect the slogan, No
pasaran!
and mount a relentless
counterattack. The place to begin is in our political parties. The
Republican Party,
to
its everlasting credit, repudiated and isolated David
Duke. The Democratic Party must do the same for those who cotton to
Farrakhan and others like him. The crime of McCarthyism was not that
it practiced guilt by association. Guilt by association is an honorable and
necessary rule in politics. (Try living without it sometime.) The crime of
McCarthyism was that it applied the rule irresponsibly, dishonestly, and
