Pat Buchanan out at MSNBC

[caseymoz]

44. Did you read the qualifier?

I couldn't quite find a term for it, so I used a neologism. So I'll explain: I meant antisemitic in the same sense Pope Pius XII was, as opposed to the Adolf Hitler school of antisemitism.

I was raised as a Catholic in a solidly Catholic home, and a Catholic extended family. I know what I'm talking about. Patrick Buchanan considers the Jews "a stubborn, stiff-necked people" (a meme that has gone from one echelon of the Catholic hierarchy to the other and back for centuries), who just won't listen to the truth. He's suspicious of them; he thinks they're privileged and manipulative but that's tempered by a sympathy that never recognizes full equality. The suspicion can, with little reinforcement and encouragement, turn into downright bigotry that destroys any sympathy whatsoever.

It's the sort of person who would struggle to save Jews from the concentration camp, but would be agreeable to confiscating from and segregating them. The sort of person who would see the silver lining of the holocaust as being all the Jewish converts to Catholicism. They would say Hitler was wrong about that Holocaust and WWII thing, but they sure understand why he was pissed at the Jews. And like Pius, it's the sort of person who would call Hitler evil, but might have praise Franco and Salazar. They're not exactly Holocaust deniers, but you mention six million Jews were murdered, they'll say, yeah, but the Gypsies suffered worse.

These are my relatives. Buchanan's views on Jews are the same as my Dad's. You talk to many Catholics, and this is the attitude that you'll find. And to them, this isn't a description of bigotry. This attitude is normalized with them they don't discuss it outside their families enough to notice that there's anything off about it.

It's the sort of Catholic influenced very much by Pius XII papacy, when this was the dominant attitude, and definitely the dominant one among students in Catholic schools when I attended them. So please don't tell me that some aren't like this. I know they aren't. But how many have you talked to about this? Really? It's not an active hatred, but a side-effect of having a thought process receptive to doctrines they can't question.