How Hitler Got Started

Submitted by Robert Alexander (United States), Jan 31, 2003 at 06:34

I was a small boy when Hitler came to power in Germany.I remember it vividly--and Father Coughlin was broadcasting from 60 miles to the NW of my family home. We listened to him "religiously" every Sunday.

No, my parents weren't Nazis. We were Jewish.

But all you write reminds me of the incidents in those days. Coughlin was probably the most respectable of America's popular anti-Semites. The rest, it must be said in America's defence, were almost entirely isolated rabble.

But what a difference today! The Jewish President of Harvard being forced by his students to allow a long washed-up American poet--I recall him as well from my later youth, long before he turned, in his dotage, into an anti-Semite to keep himself some limelight long after his small cult success during the late 1940s.

And the Harvard Liberal Union, no less--largely started and maintained by Jews--was Jones's lever to open up the campus to him.

The next time around, those half-way anti-Semites in York might well have their way. Then at McGill three-quarter 7anti-semites will keep you from speaking at all--if anyone dares invite you in the first place. And you'll be more afraid than you were at York.

And so it builds up--I imagine much the same as it did in Germany until it was beyond control--until it comes down, for the best of us, to setting up a few word-monuments against the inevitable ruins; or, more prosaically and more bitter-sweet: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Hope this helps ease the pain of martyrdom that seems to be where you're heading.

Ho-hum, the editors will say with a yawn: we have a life to lead, papers to get out--and this stuff does sell papers and bring up tv-news ratings. I like Jews--well, most of the time. Or I did. I don't know why, I just don't see them much anymore.

But if they won't keep their mouths shut about every little thing, what do they expect? They're just asking for it.
They always do. And the rest of us have our lives to leadyou know--

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