THE MURDER of 6 million Jews by German National Socialists during World War II has made people in the United States and Europe sensitive to any aspersion of Jews.
Pat Buchanan, for example, cannot express his opinion that Wall Street has sold out the little man or that U.S. foreign policy serves interests not strictly our own without incurring the whiff of anti-Semitism.This sensitivity contrasts with the tolerance of violent accusations against white males and the rich. Epithets that would be unthinkable as descriptions of Jews are routinely applied to white males and millionaires.
Steve Forbes' Republican primary opponents are permitted to engage in rhetoric that is not much different from language that accompanied the actual communist genocide against class enemies in Russia and China.
Communists murdered tens of millions of people for class reasons. It is as stupid to deny this holocaust as it is to deny the Jewish Holocaust. The rhetoric associated with the one should be as reprehensible as the rhetoric associated with the other.
Like German anti-Semitism, the demonization of the white male is an intellectual movement. When University of Pennsylvania professor Houston Baker, president of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association, declares that "white male Western initiatives have been the most globally insidious and unmercifully bloody manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and racism ever known," he calls to mind University of Berlin professor Heinrich von Treitschke who declared in 1879 that "even in circles of the most highly educated, there resounds as if from one mouth: The Jews are our misfortune!"
Name-calling has a purpose: delegitimization. Lenin dehumanized class enemies as vermin, snakes and leeches. Hitler described Jews as maggots, parasites and eternal bloodsuckers. The negative characterizations of Jews listed in Gregory Martire and Ruth Clark's anti-Semitism index are routinely applied today to white males.
Like Jews, white males are criticized for controlling the media, banking and the government, for having too much power and for discriminating against others by hiring only their own kind.
A few years ago Time magazine showed the flavor of our time by depicting on its cover the white male as a pig in a business suit.
How can it be that people who are so sensitive to Buchanan's criticisms of Wall Street and U.S. foreign policy find little offense in the violent depictions of whites? Under U.S. racial classifications, Jews are whites. The same quotas against whites apply to Jews. It was an "overrepresented" Jewish woman who was dismissed from her Piscataway, N.J., teaching job to make way for a black. And it is the U.S. Department of Justice that maintains that her firing for racial reasons does not constitute discrimination.
The comparison of the delegitimization of the American white male today with the delegitimization of class enemies in Russia and race enemies in Germany annoys those who emphasize that American blacks underwent a holocaust of their own. But it is whites, not blacks, that law makes second-class citizens today. Ever since the Griggs (1971) and Weber (1979) Supreme Court decisions, white males have been denied equal protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It has been said many times that ideas have consequences. One cannot forever instill hatred against an "oppressor class" without consequences.