Just don't say the n-word.
posted by Meatbomb on Nov 29, 2006 - 36 comments

"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear." He is one of America's great novelists, but you don't expect Philip Roth to be barreling up the best-seller list with a book that hasn't even been published yet. And yet "The Plot Against America" is in the top 3 at amazon.com. It spins a what-if scenario in which the isolationist and anti-Semitic hero Charles Lindbergh runs for president as a Republican in 1940 and defeats F.D.R. "Keep America Out of the Jewish War", reads a button worn by Lindbergh supporters rallying at Madison Square Garden. And so he does: he signs nonaggression pacts with Germany and Japan that will keep America at peace while the rest of the world burns. The Lindbergh administration hatches a nice plan to prod assimilation of the Jews. Innocuously called Just Folks, it's a relocation program for urban Jews, administered by an Office of American Absorption fronted by an obliging and pompous rabbi of radio celebrity. The teenage Roth character is shipped off to a Kentucky tobacco farm, to finally live among Christians. The book is about American Fascism, but while Roth is no fan of President Bush ("a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one"), he points out that he conceived this book (LATimes registration: sparklebottom/sparklebottom) in December 2000, and that it would be "a mistake" to read it "as a roman à clef to the present moment in America." (more inside)
posted by matteo on Sep 28, 2004 - 10 comments

Re-emergent American Eugenics Movement looks to unfinished business - The Tennessee primary win of an avowed Eugenicist Republican Congressional candidate underscores the longstanding association of the Republican Party with a resurgent American Eugenics Movement deeply linked to Nazi racial ideology and championed by the Manhattan Institute and the Nazi-associated Pioneer Fund
posted by troutfishing on Aug 7, 2004 - 54 comments

Nazis alive and well in England Far-right extremists have sent a "chill factor" across the country after they claimed a symbolic victory in English local elections
posted by scotty on May 3, 2002 - 14 comments