Matt the White Rabbit, “AntiRacist Hitler” (2013)
A subversive animation short satirising open-borders immigration policies and multiculturalist agendas in Western countries, most of which also hypocritically support Israel’s own racist policies and genocide against Palestinians, this cartoon posits what would happen if Israel were forced to have similiar social policies imposed on it. The former German chancellor Adolf Hitler, having apparently been in hiding in Argentina for over half a century (which might explain his youthfulness and the unchanged moustache), returns to the West and announces before an amazed audience that he no longer believes in Aryan racial supremacy and now embraces multiculturalism and diversity. He vows to bring diversity to the whole wide world and selects Israel, bastion of Zionist exclusivity, as the place where to start. Miraculously elevating himself to head of the Israeli government (one assumes he had to send the entire fruitcake Knesset somewhere out of the way … maybe not remote railway terminuses in rural eastern and southern Poland), the new Hitler opens the country’s borders to all the displaced peoples of the world. Over time, the new arrivals remake Israel’s urban landscapes into their own, their languages replace Hebrew and they intermarry with Israel’s Jewish population until Israelis are no longer Jewish. The last remaining Jewish citizen in the country runs into Hitler’s office and exclaims that Israel is no longer Jewish, at which Hitler (barely looking up from eating lunch) murmurs that he had not foreseen such a scenario when he first opened the borders.
While the motivations behind the creation of “AntiRacist Hitler” could be racist and discriminatory towards non-white people, the way in which the new Hitler uses the “diversity” agenda and supporting social policies to eliminate Jews should at least give us all pause to consider how similar policies and programs have been used by Western governments in the past to undermine social democracy, workers’ rights and working conditions and to denigrate those protesting against the weakening of worker protections as fascist or racist. The outsourcing of manufacturing from Western shores to Third World countries offering cheap labour in conditions where workers’ rights are suppressed viciously can be seen as a parallel policy to open-borders immigration policies: ultimately everyone, local people, immigrants and overseas workers alike, stand to lose whatever rights they had and whatever social and industrial democratic progress they had previously made. Democracy overall has receded under the onslaught of the corporate state and the individuals and corporations supporting it.
Where the cartoon possibly falls short is in implying that Jews (or an elite made up of Jews) are actively encouraging multicultural “melting pot” or “salad bowl” societies in Western countries. Such a blanket assumption opens the door to racist infiltration into and eventual domination of individual countries’ historical narratives of how they initially encouraged immigration and what their original reasons for doing so were; in most cases, the reason was that governments determined sufficient manpower was lacking for their nations’ economic development and decided to import foreign workers to overcome worker shortages. In some countries such as Germany, these foreign guest workers were not expected to stay permanently and they and their families were supposed to return home when they had fulfilled their work contracts. To that end, the host countries failed to provide education for these workers in the host language, culture and history, and as a result these workers and their families ended up alienated and disadvantaged.
In other countries that imported foreigners to fill their factories, programs to assimilate these people and to teach them the languages of their host nations existed but since the 1970s when the neoliberal economic paradigm became supreme, such programs have been squeezed for funding. At the same time, the corporate world in these countries continually wants more foreign workers to come, regardless of the prevailing economic situation and whether there are enough jobs for both foreigners and locals. In many nations where manufacturing has now ceased to exist, the only way money can circulate is through financial bubbles including property bubbles … which means that people have to be persuaded to take out more mortgages … and if the present population is already saturated with excess debt, then immigrants and refugees are the next targets.
What would have made the cartoon’s message even more biting would be the fact that many of the poor flooding into the new Hitlerian Israel are people displaced by wars and invasions instigated by Israel through its lobbying activities in Western governments. The invasions of Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2011 onwards) by the US and its allies have the effect of removing political and economic challenges to Israel as the only or the most advanced / democratic country in the Middle East.
Ultimately the cartoon’s message is very simplistic and reduces a complex issue to a level where it and its creators might be accused of racism (unjustly perhaps) but its use of a known historical figure notorious for policies of genocide to demonstrate how superficially anti-racist social policies might in fact be racist, even fascist, is sobering and thought-provoking.