I suppose it’s my own fault, because I sometimes can’t resist opening up tweets in which the anti-Semites tell us how the Jooooos really rule the world, that I keep getting more of their bovine feces. The United States is controlled by the Jews, the United Kingdom is controlled by the Jews, all of the Western world is controlled by Jews.

With the 3¼ day power outage, I wound up rereading Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War on my Kindle reader. With its internal light, it was about the only thing I could read in a dark house, unless it was by my single oil lamp.

The Winds of War is a historical fiction novel, with Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry serving in various roles, at the time of the subsequent page, from Chapter 22, American Naval attaché to Nazi Germany:

“There’s the live nerve,” (Wolf) Stöller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Führer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”

“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” (Victor) Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”

“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco. Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”

He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stöller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “der Jude, der Jude” without a sneer. There was no glare in his eye, such as Pug had now and then observed when Thoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day’s stock market report.

“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber, shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.

“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr Knopfmann.

“Yes \, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on eith his stock answers to anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and all the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious universal smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.

Stöller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”

That’s a rather long quote, but I think it important. After six years — at the time set in the novel — of Nazi propaganda, overlaid on Europe’s traditional anti-Semitism. Mr Wouk’s characters very believably accepted what they were being told.

And that’s what I’m seeing from today’s anti-Semitic social media postings. Like Alice, they can believe six impossible things before breakfast.

There’s an old trope that somehow, some way, Jews control everything in the world. If you follow that link, you’ll see plenty of sources on that silliness, and, interestingly enough, many of them predate the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is not Jewish, reported how that myth at least partially motivated an attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

Adolf Hitler wrote dictated in Mein Kampf:

To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung^[1]The Frankfurter Zeitung was a Jewish-owned newspaper founded in 1856. It survived until 1943, as Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels found it useful, after the Jewish writers, editors, and … Continue reading moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.^[2]Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 307–308.

While even the Nazis did not believe that the Protocols were anything but a fake, they used them extensively in their propaganda.

But now we’ve come full circle. The apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah, and the supporters of the ‘Palestinians’, have once again been spewing the line that the evil Jews control everything, manipulating President Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and pretty much all of the world’s leaders who are not attacking Israel.

How much of this is being swallowed by the pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-‘Palestinian’ supporters? I honestly don’t know, but I see this stuff all the time by accused groomer Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British pro-Palestinian propagandist, and several Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — accounts, many of which are probably bots — and though some try to differentiate between Zionists and Jews in general, a lot of the protesters just use the word Jew instead.

One final point, paraphrased from The Winds of War, and I cannot remember where in the book I saw it, but it’s in there: while the Nazis and other anti-Semites^[3]The Nazis had tremendous help from ordinary Europeans, not just Germans, but the public in all of the lands they conquered, in finding and rounding up the Jews for shipment to the concentration … Continue reading claimed that the Jews secretly ruled the world, when it came to the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t have enough power to even save themselves.