On page 270 of Satan at the Fountainhead: The Israel Lobby and the Financial Crisis, Caleb Maupin defines the source of 19th century European anti-Semitism as: “....the reason for rising poverty as well as the decline of traditional values….”
Maupin tells us this kind of anti-Semitism no longer exists: revulsion over the Holocaust wiped it out. (Strangely, pages 270-271 are the only pages in his book where Maupin mentions the Holocaust. He brings it up only to rule contemporary concerns about rising anti-Semitism as out-of-order.)
But this book exists as an example of that old anti-Semitic wine in trendy new “anti-Zionist bottles.” It is a resource and a rationalization for a Jew-hatred of the 21st century.
Anti-Semitism is not a historical question superseded by events. Jew-hatred is a default setting of capitalism in all historical periods. It is used to deflect, disorient, and demoralize those seeking a scientific understanding of class exploitation and a road forward in the fight against the dictatorship of capital. Poverty, war, racism, union-busting, and the pornographication of bourgeois politics are laid safely at the feet of a wealthy cabal of international Jewish puppeteers, shielding the capitalist ruling class of each nation.
Maupin’s book rings few changes in this poisonous old canard. His Jewish bankers and their useful gentile idiots are rebranded as “Zionists.” They are linked with high-tech companies like Intel and GE, and low-wage companies like Starbucks and McDonalds.
All the tentacles of this Zionist octopus are united in one goal: exploiting and stealing money from US workers and using it to fund the exceptionalist colonial/settler/racist state of Israel. US workers who lost good-paying factory jobs in Detroit and Cleveland and must now work for a pittance at Wal-Mart should blame the Zionists. Workers whose families used to be “middle class” but now live in crumbling cities devastated by austerity budgets should blame the Zionists. Black workers whose kids are killed by cops (who share training/methods with Israeli cops) should blame the Zionists.
Satan at the Fountainhead says there is no connection between Jewish people and contemporary Zionism. Zionism, according to the book, is the political expression of a usurous policy of the wealthy, “draining” (in the vampiric sense?) resources to fund and defend Israel. (Apparently it is just a coincidence that Zionism and Israel are solely synonyms for Jew.)
The villains in Satan at the Fountainhead have names:
Jewish United Fund, Israel Lobby, Caterpillar, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, among others. (To underscore Rand’s “Zionist” identity, Maupin frequently refers to her as Allisa Rosenbaum. Leo Strauss becomes Leopold Strauss for the same reason.)
Who are the heroes in the fight against this Zionist conspiracy to destroy the United States? First and foremost, Maupin proposes Franklin Roosevelt. This clearly underscores the intentional dishonesty of Satan at the Fountainhead. FDR is presented as the friend and ally of US workers: defender and promoter of labor unions, opponent of Jim Crow, and fighter against Wall Street usurers. (Popular Front Stalinism and fascist anti-Semitism may not be exactly two sides of the same coin, but it's hard to see the daylight between them the way Maupin stacks his rhetorical deck.)
One does not have to be a reader of Farrell Dobbs and Art Preis to know is Maupin is deliberately deceiving his readers about FDR. But Dobbs, for instance, is a good place to start if you want to see the type of working class movement that can be built to defeat the Jew-haters and the dictatorship of capital, and fight for independent labor political action and worker’s power.
The most insidious thing about Satan at the Fountainhead is the miseducation it gives to workers and youth looking for real answers and a real way out of today's slow-burning worldwide crisis of capitalist production and trade. It promotes the age-old pro-capitalist line that economic crises are not the normal workings of the capitalist system. It promotes the idea that electing someone like FDR to defeat the Israel Lobby would restore the “good wages” of middle class jobs.
Jay Rothermel
6 March 2016
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Recommended reading:
A good place to start for workers and youth in struggle is with this statement:
DC socialist: ‘Workers need to fight Jew-hatred!’
http://www.themilitant.com/2015/7904/790402.html
The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation By Abram Leon
http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.128/.f?sc=7&category=53
Teamster Politics By Farrell Dobbs
http://www.pathfinderpress.com/Teamster-Politics-Dobbs?sc=7&category=55
N.B. I sent away for the book and read it (“so you won't have to”).
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