Now I don't know how much you can quote and still be in 'fair use' territory, but the quickest and by far the most effective way for me to tell you why I dearly love Fred Reed is to copy a chunk of what he says. This is from a column this summer on Zionism and Israel:
Although I am a Southerner, and like being one, I detested the apartheid practiced in the South. I was there. Don’t tell me ‘bout dem happy niggahs plunking dat ol banjo undah dee big oak tree. It was ugly. Jews, I note, didn’t like it either, and in fact led the movement for civil rights.
If I didn’t like brutal repression (which it was) engaged in by my own people, why am I supposed to like it when engaged in by Israelis? And why do Jews, who didn’t approve of it in the South, support it in Israel? Why don’t they tell Israel to stop it? They could.
Repressive custody of others does no make nice people. My family (the Venables) for two centuries lived in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In the early Fifties, as desegregation gained ground, we were the resistance, the Power Structure, the AIPAC of the region. Those with an idea of history may remember that Prince Edward shut down the public schools to avoid contact with blacks. The reasons given were many, some better than others, but ultimately the system was just wrong.
I spent a fair amount of time listening to my parents and relatives drinking bourbon in stately living rooms in Farmville, the county seat, and talking race. I know how their heads work. I know the grinding hatred, the contempt that dripped from every sentence, the herdishness as they confirmed each other’s snarling.
They sounded exactly like American Zionists speaking of Arabs. There was the same insistence on racial inferiority, on the filthiness of blacks or Arabs, their historical uselessness, their incapacity to fit into a civilized world, their sexual appetites. There is nothing Jewish in this. It is the normal moral sewerization that results from the relation of masters to slaves. Prison guards have it. South Africans had it. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. The underclass are always vermin, and the masters always become moral monsters. The Nazis, early Likudists, had identical notions of Jews.
I find myself wanting to say to AIPAC: What are you clowns thinking? How do you see the end game? You support a goose-stepping government in colonizing the West Bank to the point that it is irreversible. Then what? Your choices are extermination of your Arabs, ethnic cleansing on a horrific scale, or South Africanization. And how well did that work?
Because Jews have a well-earned reputation for being intelligent, one might make the mistake of expecting them necessarily to behave intelligently. No. Brains only provide the means to be more elaborately and ornately stupid. The smart merely make more complex mistakes. Historically, horrendous misjudgements have usually been the children of good minds. When you mix acuity with fanaticism, you get an ungodly stew almost certain to end in disaster. This may be worth thinking about.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Fascisms.shtml
There. Wasn't that just right? And even when Fred happens, as even the best must, to be ever so slightly mistaken on some matter, he never fails to be amusing. Even his meanness is always, you can tell, done in a spirit of good clean fun. Or rotten dirty fun, which of course is the best kind.
Now I gotta run and make a deposit in the quote bank. "Brains only provide the means to be more elaborately and ornately stupid" is a keeper.
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