Stuart Seldowitz, a former US State Department official in the Israel and Palestinian office section from 1999 to 2003, has become a viral Internet celebrity of sorts. He was fired from his consulting job after being recorded hurling racist insults, engaging in an Islamophobic tirade at a halal food stall vendor. Belligerent and obnoxious, he sneered at the unnamed vendor ‘Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?’ Seldowitz was an Obama administration national security council official as well.
In another shared video, referring to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, stating “if we killed 4000 Palestinian kids? It wasn’t enough.” It is shocking enough when a purportedly educated man, a senior government official, expresses that kind of hateful sentiments. However, his bigotry is neither isolated nor aberrant in the foreign policy circles of the Washington beltway. His vitriolic sentiments, while extreme, demonstrate the ideological continuity that marks the bipartisan consensus underlining the extremism of US foreign policies.
Seldowitz is not the first former US government employee to engage in racist tirades. In many ways, he reminds me of convicted Watergate felon and rabid extremist G Gordon Liddy (1930 – 2021). The latter, a former FBI agent and lawyer, gained notoriety for his role in the Watergate scandal. His conviction for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping did not prevent his career resurgence as a political commentator and sought-after speaker.
His sentence commuted by the Carter administration – from twenty to eight years – he applied and was granted parole in 1977. So what is the point of all this, you ask? Liddy went on to write books, give speeches and broadcast his right wing extremism over the airwaves for the next two decades. In his autobiography, Will, published in 1980, Liddy wrote of his childhood admiration of Hitler and the Waffen SS.
Claiming that the attempted French reconquest of Indochina was going well in the early stages of the post-World War 2 order, its effectiveness attributable to the participation of veterans from the Waffen SS. The French colonial war was hobbled, Liddy felt, by the withdrawal of Waffen SS soldiers after the public outcry at their presence.
He stated that as a child, he felt energised when listening to Hitler’s speeches. He confessed that whenever he stood for the pledge of allegiance in school, he had to suppress the urge to snap out his right arm in emulation of the Hitler salute. This could be explained away by boyish enthusiasm, except that Liddy held on to racist and extremist views well into adulthood.
Regarding the Vietnam war, Liddy expressed the view that if he were in charge, he would have drowned half the nation, and starved the other half. His views, adapting to the times, became no less extremist. Denouncing Obama as a communist, and environmentalism as a form of pagan Al Qaeda-type fanaticism, he never let up in his war of words against opponents he perceived as too left leaning. He was a Donald Trump before Trump.
Ever the unapologetic criminal and Nixon loyalist, Liddy suggested that the European Muslim population could be decimated by applying Riddex, a type of infestation control. He was quite gung-ho about taking out the Muslim community, at least over the airwaves.
Ultranationalist and far right forces are used not only domestically, but also in foreign policy, by the Washington political establishment. Liddy’s expression of admiration for the Waffen SS, while shocking to us, was not that out of place in Cold War Washington. It was not that long ago when Washington was singing the praises of veterans from the SS.
In 1958, Time magazine’s front cover featured a grey-haired, avuncular scientist, with a rocket launching into space in the background. That man was Wernher von Braun, Nazi German scientist, rocket engineer and space enthusiast. He was also a former member of the Waffen SS. Familiar to American audiences as the rocket man, hosting a Disney special on space travel in 1955, his transfer of loyalty from Nazi Germany to the United States was uninhibited by official scrutiny, to say the least.
His ideas and vision, while forming the basis for the Apollo missions to the Moon for the United States, originate from a criminal undertaking. Building rockets for the German military in Europe, thousands of slave labourers died in concentration camps making what became the V-2 missiles. The gregarious, suave rocket expert of NASA had come a long way, and found friendly benefactors in the US military industrial complex.
It is only in recent times that historians are grappling with the consequences of a space programme that largely owes its success to a former Nazi. Employing former ultranationalist personnel in the service of American imperial interests is longstanding US policy. Ukrainian and Baltic Nazi collaborators found gainful employment in the service of US intelligence institutions after the war.
Seldowitz’ hateful statements are the direct product of a political climate conducive to Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. Right wing foot soldiers are adept at using multicultural sympathies to attract domestic support for their causes, but recycle the officially sanctioned and axiomatic bigotry of the US foreign policy establishment. Antiracism is not just a nice idea, but a practical basis on which to fight the ugly virus of racism in our society.
Antipodean Atheist 