Summerbook #8: Jewish Space Lasers

By -


 Jewish Space Lasers: the Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild

Well I sure can't resist THAT title.  I love the Jewish Space Lasers meme/joke.  And it does make a good tail end to this history, which is really about over 200 years' worth of vicious conspiracy theories/anti-Semitism, in which the Rothschilds formed a convenient scapegoat but had nothing much to do with any of it.  Almost anyone would have done.

A couple of things first: Mike Rothschild is no relation, not that anyone into conspiracy theories believes that, but he even tells a little bit of his own family history.  I read and loved his previous book, The Storm is Upon Us, about the QAnon stuff.  And, if you are unfamiliar with the origin of the phrase "Jewish Space Lasers," it dates back to 2018, when Marjorie Taylor Greene (not yet as prominent in politics as she is now) tweeted, blaming the Camp Fire on Rothschild-owned weather-controlling lasers from space, and theorized that the fire was set deliberately to clear land for a California rail project.  You can see my posts from the time at those links, because (if you've been here that long) I live right next to the Camp Fire area, and I can tell you that we don't need fancy lasers to start a horrifying wildfire; it's much easier than that.  And, the town of Paradise is on the way to precisely nowhere, and nobody would put a railway project there.  

Now, on to the actual Rothschilds!  Our intrepid author gives us a solid history of the family in chapters that (after the introductory bit) tells the wild tales and then lets us down with boring reality.  Did a Rothschild get early news of the British victory at Waterloo and then spread rumors of a defeat in order to crash the markets and take over Britain's economy?  No.  Did the French Rothschilds deliberately cause awful train accidents?  No, trains were just dangerous in the early days.  Did the family control every war and profit on both sides?  No, and WWII was devastating, obviously.  Did they control the American economy from the very start??  No, nobody wanted to go live in a backwater, and they didn't understand Americans, and other people like J. P. Morgan did.   But they sure did make great villains for innumerable pamphlet scribblers!

 My favorite sentence:

....and who besides the Rothschilds could simultaneously be accused of funding the works of both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx? 

Also available in Goyim Squad;
the Corps welcomes all!

 

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more