Kay: Beck's Strange Soros Obsession
Jonathan Kay writes in the National Post:
Every radicalized political movement has its anti-Christ. Stalinists had Trotsky. 9/11 conspiracy theorists have Dick Cheney. Islamists have Israel. And now the radical, populist right, led by Glenn Beck, has George Soros.
Militant conservatives oppose the Hungarian-American financier because he is liberal, and because he is rich, and because he uses his money to finance left-wing causes. Yet many philanthropists match this description. For Beck and his imitators, Soros is special: They have made him the Emanuel Goldstein in their daily Two Minutes’ Hate.
On his FOX News show this week, Beck profiled Soros on a segment he called The Puppet Master, which FOX aired with creepy black-and-white newsreel-style graphics. Beck warned viewers of a shadowy “structure” being installed in America by saboteurs seeking to transform the country. “All the paths, time after time, really led to one man,” Beck declared, pointing to a flowchart. “George Soros, one guy.”
Soros’ fingerprints, Beck declared, were on the “crisis collapsing our economy,” as well as a plot to create a “One World Government.” The FOX News hosts also believes that “Not only does [Soros] want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”
According to Beck’s conspiracist narrative, there seems to be no sin that cannot somehow be laid at Soros’ feet — even, the crimes of the Nazis.
Soros is Jewish. When the Nazis occupied his native Hungary, Soros, like some other Jewish children, was recruited to help deliver deportation notices to Jewish families. Out of this fact has grown a mythology that paints Soros (who was 14 when this happened) as a full-blown Nazi collaborator. Beck wallowed in this material during his FOX broadcast.
Of course, lots of people casually throw around Nazi references these days. The anti-war left likened Bush to Hitler during the Iraq War, and the Tea Party movement returned the favour with Obama.
Yet there is something especially unsettling about Beck’s smear on Soros. Despite Beck’s upbeat, high-energy, everyman schtick, his case against Soros unwittingly taps into some very dark ideological currents. The idea that a secret cabal of all-powerful financiers and “puppet masters” is deliberately seeking to crash the world’s economies and thereby create a “one-world government” has been kicking around right-wing conspiracist circles since the publication of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — in which the fictional Jewish “Elders” are shown as plotting to render “all the goy States to bankruptcy,” and to create a “Super-Government Administration.” This similitude helps explains why the Anti-Defamation League described Beck’s rants against Soros as “offensive” and “horrific.”
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