Marcellus revealed another of the IHR’s true agenda items with his warning that acceptance of the Holocaust myth resulted in a radical degeneration of accepted standards of human behavior and a lowering of the “self-image of White people.” These racist tendencies, which the IHR has increasingly kept away from the public spotlight, are part of the extremist tradition to which it is heir.{23}
The IHR’s ideology can be directly linked to its founder and primary supporter, Willis A. Carto, who was also the founder and treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, a well-established ultra-right organization that has a direct connection with other antisemitic publications, including the American Mercury, Washington Observer Newsletter, and Noontide Press. Only the most superficial attempt has been made by either the IHR or any of these publications to camouflage the connection between them. In fact, at one point the IHR, Noontide Press, and the American Mercury all shared the same post-office box.{24} This antisemitic network is known for its anti-Israel publications, many of which contain details of a “World Zionist conspiracy.” In some of them Israel is referred to as a “bastard state.”{25}
Carto was born in 1926 in Indiana. After serving in the army he attended college and then moved to San Francisco to work for a finance company as a debt collector. For a short while he was associated with the radical, right-wing John Birch Society, until he had a falling out with its founder, Robert Welch. According to a former editor at the Liberty Lobby, Carto’s antisemitic activities were too extreme even for Welch, a known antisemite, who personally fired him.{26} In 1958 he organized a “pressure group for patriotism,” which eventually emerged as the Liberty Lobby. A former chairman of the Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy acknowledged that by the 1980s its annual income was close to four million dollars. The lobby’s antisemitic, anti-Zionist newspaper, Spotlight, claims a circulation of more than 330,000. When it reached this goal in 1981 it celebrated by holding a gala reception at the National Press Club in Washington.
The Liberty Lobby has been described as so extreme that it is “estranged from even the fringes of the far right.”{27} The investigative columnist Drew Pearson described Carto as a Hitler “fan” and the Liberty Lobby as “infiltrated by Nazis who revere the memory of Hitler.” The Wall Street Journal is also among those who have identified Carto and the Liberty Lobby as antisemitic.{28}
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) believes Carto to be the most important and powerful professional antisemite in the United States. According to the ADL, the Liberty Lobby stands at the helm of a major publishing and organizational complex that for more than two decades has propagated antisemitism and racism in the United States.{29} The Wall Street Journal and the ADL are not alone in their assessment. When Carto and the Liberty Lobby sued the Wall Street Journal for calling them antisemites, the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against them and concluded that it would be difficult to imagine a case in which the evidence of antisemitism was “more compelling.”{30}
Some of the strongest condemnations of Carto and the Liberty Lobby have come from conservative and right-wing political groups in the United States. Scott Stanley, the managing editor of American Opinion, the publication of the John Birch Society, believes Willis Carto responsible for preserving antisemitism as a movement in the United States. In 1981 William F. Buckley described the Liberty Lobby as “a hotbed of antisemitism” centered around the “mysterious” Carto, who “regularly poisons the wells of political discourse.”{31} The conservative weekly Human Events condemned the Liberty Lobby as an organization that exploited racist and antisemitic sentiments and Carto as someone who has long maintained sympathy for Hitler’s Germany. Buckley’s National Review, which accused Carto of always having “his eyes on Jewry,” warned that it was not only Carto’s antisemitism that was dangerous but his philosophy of pure power, which was alien and fundamentally hostile to the American tradition.{32} The conservative columnist R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator, condemned the lobby as an organization that always attracted a “colorful collection of bigots and simpletons” who make an art of applying conspiracy theories to every problem that vexed the public.{33} Not surprisingly Carto denied these charges. Examination of what he has written, said, and done, however, reveals otherwise.
Willis Carto’s political vision is encapsulated by three things: contempt and revulsion for Jews, a belief in the need for an absolutist government that would protect the “racial heritage” of the United States, and a conviction that there exists a conspiracy designed to bring dire harm to the Western world. The articles, journals, and books brought out by the Carto nexus of publications consistently focus on predictable themes: the ignoble Allied treatment of Nazi Germany; Jewish responsibility for the ills of the Western world; the grotesque misdeeds of the “bastard” state of Israel; and the existence of a conspiracy perpetrated by a “high elite,” consisting mainly of people with Jewish names, to control American foreign and financial policy. Jews besmirch Germany’s good name and support the Communists’ attempt to impose their system on the Western world. At the heart of every serious problem facing the United States—civil rights, energy, defense, racial integration—are Jews manipulating matters for their own benefit.
Nevertheless, the Jews are not Carto’s sole target. Carto believes that at the root of civilization’s problems are the “Jews and Negroes.”{34} In 1955, in a letter to the racist author Earnest Sevier Cox, Carto bemoaned the fact that so few Americans were concerned about the “inevitable niggerfication of America.”{35} Racial purity is the lens through which much of Carto’s view of the world is viewed. In 1962 he advocated a racial view of history and argued that racial equality would be easier to accept if there were “no Negroes around to destroy the concept.”{36} Carto’s sentiments are reminiscent of the German right wing’s fear of “foreignization,” (überfremdung). In an attempt to protect the United States from what Carto considered the danger posed to it by African Americans, he organized the Joint Council for Repatriation, which was designed to return all blacks to Africa. Shortly before the creation of the Liberty Lobby in 1957 Carto predicted to Judge Tom P. Brady, a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court and founder of the anti-civil-rights White Citizens Council, that the lobby would be a tremendous asset to the repatriation scheme. In a fashion that would become typical of his organizational methodology, Carto was intent on keeping the link between the two secret: “You can see that there must never be an obvious connection between the two, for if there is, either would kill the other off.”{37} But the Joint Council for Repatriation did not envision just the repatriation of African Americans. It also aimed to deliver the strongest imaginable blow to the power of organized Jewry.{38} During World War II, Carto argued, it had been the Jews’ influence on American policy that was responsible for blinding the West to the benefits of an alliance with Hitler. Treacherous Jewish “propaganda and lies” had led to Hitler’s defeat, which for Carto constituted the “defeat of Europe. And of America.”