Same country, different planets...

The right lives in another world. You already knew that, of course. Every day I receive further indicators that many of our citizens think in terms that have only a tangential relationship with life-as-she-is-lived. Just today, WesternPac sent the following absurd headline into my inbox:

Senators Who Think the UN Should Control American Guns

I don't think that a single senator wants the United Nations to control our gun laws.

The reference here goes to the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which is, of course, about the international trade in arms. In other words, this treaty attempted to make life harder for those who, like Viktor Bout, profit from selling machine guns to drug thugs and terrorists. The Western Pac email conveys the impression that this treaty was intended to allow blue-suited UN teams to come marching into into South Carolina and disarm citizens.

Morris dances. I had a look at Dick Morris' hilariously (and non-ironically) titled Here Come the Black Helicopters, which made it to the NYT bestseller list. I can't believe that this guy once had the attention of serious people!

An early chapter tries to convince the reader that UN-enforced gun control will soon hit America, just as the WesternPac email warns. But that's only the opening act. Morris has created a 21st century analogue to all of those crankish John Birch Society pamphlets I used to read -- the ones that talked about the dangers of the United Nations, about the conspiracy of "the globalists" who seek to snatch away our national sovereignty. Here are a few more chapter titles:

"No war without UN approval"
"UN supremacy over our courts"
"Toward a Global EPA"
"Taxing the US without our approval"
"Globalist conquest of space"

Books of this sort used be found discarded at bus stops alongside the Jack Chick comics. Now they are bestsellers.

The "globalist" meme goes back to the pre-1933 Nazis. They preferred to apply the term "internationale" to anything they didn't like, because that word, in German ears, had a greasy and threatening ring. One recalls the title of the Henry Ford's infamous book, The International Jew. Joe Stalin's preferred term for the same group was the cosmopolitans.

Once you decode the euphemisms, it's pretty easy to see what we're really dealing with here. Like the Birchers before them, Morris and WesternPac are giving us a repackaged version of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The J-word has been cut out and lots of I-love-Israels and I-hate-Islams have been tossed in. But at root, it's the same stuff, albeit with different Semites playing the globalist/internationalist/cosmopolitan villains. (Morris, I should note, is a Jewish convert to Catholicism.)

The people who actually buy books like these are, I'm sure, sincere supporters of Israel, and they would probably despise my criticisms of that nation's policies toward the Palestinians. And yet those who have bought into Morris' conspiracy theory can, I think, be prettily easily re-programmed to accept the "internationalist" conspiracy theory in its traditional form, as it was once expressed by folks like Elizabeth Dilling, Nesta Webster, William Guy Carr, Cleon Skousen and their pals. It's just a matter of dropping the other shoe.

Morris differs from the folks mentioned above in one key respect. He focuses on the UN (which, as all sane people know, has very limited power) but never talks about the pernicious influence of the Wall Street finance capitalists who have made life so miserable in Greece, Spain, Ireland -- and here at home.

When we talk about institutions like Goldman Sachs, we're talking about something real. We're talking about something that has nothing to do with race or religion, and everything to do with greed. Greed knows neither deity nor DNA. Morris won't mention the Wall Streeters -- genuine globalists with genuine power -- because some of those financiers toss money at the tea partiers who constitute the main audience for books like these.