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Israel/Zionism See other Israel/Zionism Articles Title: HBO's "The Plot Against America" (Or, The Jewish Bolshevik Zionist Guide for Dummies) “Fear” is the first word of The Plot against America, the Philip Roth novel which just got re- cycled as an HBO series by David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Corner, The Wire, and Generation Kill. “Fear,” Roth tells us, “presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” The memories in question are Roth’s, of growing up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. The fear comes from the one alteration of history that turns these memories into what Roth referred to in an interview with Robert Siegel on NPR as “a kind of false memoir.” The premise of the novel is that Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940. Everything else in the book follows from that premise and from Roth’s ethnic paranoia and his ethnic bigotry. The most significant thing about Roth’s book is the fact that it’s fiction. The Plot against America is a Jewish fantasy, which is interesting first of all for what it tells us about Roth personally but also because of what it tells us about the ethnic group which has accepted his paranoid Jewish fantasy as something to be taken seriously by people other than psychiatrists and cultural pathologists. To give an early example of the kind of fear which pervades the novel, seven-year-old Philip sees a German beer garden on a trip to Union, New Jersey, the town his father is thinking of moving the family to take advantage of a promotion at the insurance firm where he is employed. What follows is the 71-year-old’s bigotry projected into the mind of his seven-year-old name-sake. What ordinary Americans might consider “the homey acre of open-air merriment smack in the middle of town” was in fact some-thing “called a beer garden.” and before you know it the beer garden becomes the American equivalent of Auschwitz according to the following logic: “the beer garden had something to do with the German-American Bund, the German American Bund had something to do with Hitler, and Hitler, as I hadn’t to be told, had everything to do with persecuting Jews.” The beer garden was the place where Americans drank “the intoxicant of anti-Semitism. That’s what I came to imagine them all so carefully drinking in their beer garden that day—like all the Nazis everywhere, downing pint after pint of anti-Semitism as though imbibing the universal remedy.” All this passes through the mind of an allegedly seven-year-old child while driving past in a car. Roth’s book is some indication that anti-Semitism is the universal remedy, but not in the way that Roth indicates. Charges of anti-Semitism have become the universal remedy to unwelcome discourse. They are also the universal remedy to an accurate history of the 20th century. As evidence of the anti-Semitism which was raging in America on the eve of America’s entry into World War II (and also of unwelcome discourse which got silenced), Roth cites Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines radio speech at an America First rally; in fact, he gives the entire speech in an appendix to the book. This is a mistake, at least from the point of view of what Roth wants to achieve, because it says the opposite of what Roth wants Lindbergh to say. In the speech we read, among other things, Lindbergh’s statement; “No person with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany,” This does not sound like the raving of an anti-Semite. Lindbergh’s point was that three groups were trying to get America into the War at the time —the Roosevelt administration, the English, and the Jews—and that the Jews “would be the first to feel its consequences” because “tolerance cannot survive war and devastation.” It was the last time that anyone in public life in America singled out Jews as a group for criticism. Lindbergh and America First were silenced after the Roosevelt administration entered the war, and they have been demonized ever since. Roth’s book is one more contribution to that demonization. If Lindbergh was talking about Europe, however, he was profoundly right in a way that no one could have understood at the time. War provided the cover for the annihilation of large numbers of Jews in Europe. If Lindbergh was talking about America, he was wrong because—pace, Mr. Roth—there were no pogroms in America. So which Lindbergh is Philip Roth talking about? He is talking about the Lindbergh in his mind, a fictional prop that is dragged out to justify Roth’s hatred of the goyim and his deep ambivalence toward an America that, even more than Renaissance Poland, has been the paradisus Judaeorum. The ambivalence comes out best in an argument between Roth’s parents. Roth’s father is outraged by the programs of President Lindbergh, shouting “This is our country,” Roth’s mother, on the other hand, responds by saying, “Not anymore. It’s Lindbergh’s. It’s the goyims’. It’s their country.” In other words, the book revolves around the unhealthy dichotomy—it’s our country/it’s their country—without any understanding of why the dichotomy is unhealthy. Roth’s book is exactly what he says it is. It is a “false memoir.” It is a distortion of history for political and racial purposes. It is also an exercise in bigotry and slander. Anything is justified because Roth considers his foes the embodiment of evil and as fully worthy of the hatred he lavishes on them. Roth is no longer promoting sexual liberation, as he did in Portnoy’s Complaint, but the hatred and bigotry are still there, even if the twisted humor is gone. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: All (#0)
Grab you favorite beverage, hot or cold, and enjoy. Excellent bookmark.
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