THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 24, 1994 TAG: 9410220021
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Richard Cohen
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
In Germany, a couple of years ago, I set out from Berlin for the Polish border to get a firsthand look at the refugees pouring in from the east. Some of them had been beaten, even killed, by neo-Nazi goons after arriving in Germany. My interpreter, sitting next to me in the car, explained why. The Freemasons were behind it all.
That hoary conspiracy theory, embedded in the European paranoid imagination, has now surfaced here. Thanks to Michael Lind, an editor at Harper's writing in The Washington Post, we have been directed to Pat Robertson, the television minister from Virginia Beach. Like my erstwhile translator, Robertson too finds Masons - in league with the usual money interests - to be responsible for all sorts of bad things, not the least of them being the Federal Reserve system.
``It is reported that in Frankfurt, Jews for the first time were admitted to the order of Freemasons,'' Robertson wrote in his 1991 book, The New World Order. ``If indeed members of the Rothschild family or their close associates were polluted by the occultism of . . . Freemasonry, we may have discovered the link between the occult and the world of high finance.''
And what a link it is. In a single paragraph (page 181) Robertson moves from 18th-century Germany to 20th-century America and the founding of the Federal Reserve system. His bankers are an odd lot. Greedy and manipulative, often Jewish and quintessential capitalists, they nevertheless bankroll international communism.
What strikes me about such nonsense is its disturbing familiarity. Conspiracy theories about the Freemasons have been around since 1717, when the first Grand Lodge was founded in England. Freemasonry differed from place to place; but since the organization was secret and, even more important, since it was hospitable to freethinkers and the occasional Jew, it drew the wrath of established religion and the secular authorities. But it is not that history to which I refer.
Instead, what comes to mind is Louis Farrakhan and his followers. They, too, posit a link between Jewish bankers and all things evil. Robertson never quite employs such language. Nevertheless, his book is so steeped in paranoiac conspiracy theory and so redolent with anti-Semitic code terms like ``European bankers'' that only a fool - or a neoconservative - could fail to get the message.
Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League devotes a good many pages to Robertson in its recent study of the religious right - a booklet that about 75 conservatives swiftly labeled an exercise in religious bigotry. Some of them furiously repaired to their word processors to attack the ADL while others chose the ultimate narcissistic rebuttal: an ad in The New York Times.
I can only guess that for conservatives the defeat of Bill Clinton and the Democrats is so important that, like the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II, certain awkward matters have to be overlooked in the desperate fight against a common enemy. This is precisely the argument some black leaders make about Farrakhan or, to go back some years, Democrats once said about the segregationists in their midst. All these arguments, though, are morally vacuous - even more so in Robertson's case since some of his defenders on the right are intellectuals. They should know better.
It would be rank prejudice to associate all conservative Christians with Robertson's views or to ridicule his religious beliefs. But neither his standing as a minister nor his religious sincerity should shield him from criticism of his political ideas. His is, after all, an awesome conglomerate with interests in broadcast properties worth about $1 billion. Robertson's two television operations, the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Family Channel, together reach over 50 million homes. He is a figure of consequence. He is also a crackpot.
But he is not an original. As his intellectual defenders well know, Robertson is 100 percent in the American tradition of paranoid politics, in particular Southern populism. The fixation with central banks, blended with nativism and anti-Semitism, is an old American dish. While its base is both regional and religious, it is neither region nor religion that its critics find abhorrent, but its intolerance instead.
Conservatives, though, prefer to look away - or, worse, shout ``religious bigotry'' when people like Robertson are criticized. But some of the same people call on African-American leaders to disassociate themselves from Farrakhan. If they are right about that - and they are - then they ought to apply the same principle to Robertson. He has more in common with Farrakhan than a glittering smile. MEMO: Mr. Cohen's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group,
1150 15th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071.
by CNB