Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [74]
Father Charles Coughlin, known as the grandfather of hate radio for his anti-Semitic radio show, lunched with Ford once a month and later called him “a sincere man who knew the truth when he saw it.”15 On his radio show, Coughlin railed against the “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers,” whom he blamed for the Great Depression. After Hitler’s massive pogrom against the Jews in 1938—called Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”) because of the shattered glass from the windows of Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes—Coughlin accused the Jews of asking for it, claiming, “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.”16
But the Nazis didn’t stop at broken windows, and the horrors of the Holocaust ruined the good name of anti-Semitism forever after. After Coughlin’s speech, some radio stations canceled his programs. In 1939, the Roosevelt administration took regulatory action to force Coughlin off the air; in 1942, the Catholic Church eventually shut him down completely by threatening to defrock him. These days, you can’t even spin a conspiracy theory about evil Jewish financiers without being accused of anti-Semitic bigotry. As William Engdahl complained:
Anyone who dares to criticize Soros or any of his associates is immediately hit with the charge of being “anti-Semitic”—a criticism which often silences or intimidates genuine critics of Soros’s unscrupulous operations. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith considers it a top priority to “protect” Soros from the charges of “anti-Semites” in Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe.17
But it’s hard to avoid charges of anti-Semitism when you criticize a wealthy investor as a “Court Jew,” especially when the investor in question was a victim of the Nazis, having lost most of his friends and extended family in the Holocaust. Unless he wasn’t a victim . . . unless he was actually a Nazi himself . . . yeah, that’s the ticket. Engdahl wrote:
Soros admitted in a radio interview that his father gave him Nazi credentials in Hungary during the war, and he looted wealthy Jewish estates. Further research showed that this operation was probably run by the SS.18
Apparently, the Hungarian official who took the fourteen-year-old Soros in during the war was called upon to inventory a large estate that the Nazis had confiscated from a wealthy Jew. He took Soros along with him, and the adolescent Nazi collaborator spent his time wandering the grounds and trying to find a place to urinate where no one would notice his circumcised penis.19
In addition to fabricating Rothschildian plots and treating “anti-Semitism” with scare quotes, Engdahl employed one other trick from the Dearborn Independent. Like Ford’s “international Jewish financiers,” Engdahl represented Soros as a man whose lack of national identification freed him from the moral constraints of mere mortals:
Soros is American only in his passport. He is a global financial operator, who happens to be in New York simply because “that’s where the money is.”20
And so, Soros joined his Rothschild predecessors as a global supervillain willing to sow worldwide chaos and destruction in order to enrich himself and his crew. Engdahl continued:
The political agenda of Soros and this group of financial “globalists” will create the conditions for a new outbreak of war, even world war, if it continues to be tolerated.21
Engdahl published his article in the Executive Intelligence Review, the comically misnamed journal of archcrackpot Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche soon adopted Soros as his favorite new evil mastermind. Taking Engdahl’s “Court Jew” slur literally, LaRouche dedicated a 1997 issue of the Executive Intelligence Review to documenting the Soros-Queen Elizabeth II drug cartel. The lead article was titled “George Soros: Drug Pusher for the Queen.”22 Subsequent issues also