When American Conservatives met Russian Nationalists: a love story from the Cold War

The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, of a rightwing group who spend a lot of time producing and decrying fake news, and a center-right group of Eloi who have produced a fake consensus history and spend a lot of time contrasting the present barbarians with the beautiful normality of once upon a time.

The murder of 11 mostly elderly Jews in Pittsburgh has produced a lot of articles about how anti-semitism could be happening in Dreamland, of all places. But anti-semitism is, as Rap Brown might put it, as American as apple pie. A minor story this week about Trump sponsored anti-semitism gained some attention: Radio Marti, a government funded propagandastation that broadcasts to Cuba, took up the cudgels of American whitenationalists (and Hungarian anti-semites and the rightwing government of Israel) against George Soros. Soros is a billionaire with liberal leanings, and hence must be thoroughly scourged as a cosmopolitan, a secret Nazi accomplice when he was 12, etc., etc. He’s today’s Rothschild, with the difference that in the 19^th century a Zionist country with a total contempt for liberal Jewish culture did not yet exist to add its noise to the moronic inferno.

This news story, however, pinged my memory of the good old days, specifically, the old entanglement of American propaganda outlets and anti-semitism during the Cold War. So I went into the archive and looked up some of the material, and I thought, wow, here’s an unexpected predecessor of exactly those gang colors worn by members of the Trump gov today!

For the rest, go here.