"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Monday, December 17, 2007

Father Coughlin was a Leftist

A little bit of American history you won't read in your history textbooks

As the Great Depression dragged toward the end of its first decade in 1938, Father Charles Coughlin released the latest issue of his newspaper Social Justice. It reprinted that most notorious and persistent of anti-Semitic tracts, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Coughlin's decision to disseminate the spurious conspiracy tale to his millions of followers was not just the same old Jew-hatred, even if part of his financing came from Henry Ford. It marked Coughlin's transformation from an ardent New Dealer, who had coined the phrase "Roosevelt or Ruin," to a divisive demagogue.

The through-line from Coughlin the social democrat to Coughlin the biased provocateur was populism. The same ideology that had led him earlier in his public career to attack corporate power and unmediated capitalism, to champion labor unions and activist government, also enabled him to search for a scapegoat.

Source

The above was written by a modern-day Leftist and so pretends that antisemitism was a departure from the Leftist "New Deal" ideas of FDR but we see quite to the contrary here.

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ELSEWHERE

Readers of EDUCATION WATCH should get a pleasant surprise now that Mike Pechar is also posting there. His style is notably lighter than mine.

Astounding: A major Australian bank is offering university scholarships to students who want to study "the development of Shariah compliant financial products and services". The scholarship is called the "Sheikh Fehmi El-Imam Scholarship". Sharia law of course forbids the charging of interest. I would like to see how long the bank lasts if it adopts that principle!



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