Last Friday, I was face to face with the members of the Pacifica Forum for the first time. I had seen Valdas Anelauskas speak at an anti-Pacifica event hosted by a number of the University Jewish professors and by Eugene’s Jewish community at large. This was not my first time protesting the Forum’s presence on Campus, but it was the first time I was inside one of their meetings, and it was worse than I expected. 
Anelauskas compared our demonstrations to that of the Bolsheviks and Trotskyites. He went on to say that the Soviet Union (led mostly by the Jews) was worse than the Nazis in terms of war crimes. His argument about the Soviet Union was that the Soviets were worse than the Nazis because the Soviet Union killed more people. Let’s get one thing straight: There are no apples and oranges here. There is only war crime, and war crime does not become more or less justifiable based on the number of victims.
I asked him throughout the entire speech to define communism, but he did not do so. He just threw the word around the same way Glenn Beck does with the intent of causing fear with an empty buzzword. Then after the speech, I yelled at him: “I have a question!” I wanted to ask him why America, the most corporate-friendly nation in the world, would suddenly become communist? No one would answer my question, and I was told that I would have to write it down and put it in a suggestion box (which might as well have been a paper shredder). I realized that I had been going about this process the wrong way: You cannot reason with these people. And our anger only fuels their hate.
Lately, I have had a song stuck in my head. It’s “Springtime for Hitler” from Mel Brooks’ film “The Producers.” And yesterday it got me thinking about something Brooks believed: Hitler didn’t own up to any of his crimes and instead took the easy way out by killing himself. Brooks, a New York Jew, never got the chance to dish out his revenge while Hitler was alive. So he did the only thing he could do, make people laugh at him.
“If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win. That’s what they do so well; they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter — they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.”
Brooks is right. We can shout all we want, but all they will do is shout louder. What we need to do instead is point and laugh. As Anelauskas’ speech closed in on the one-hour mark, I felt that he needed to close out his speech. I shouted “Wrap it up!” several times and started to irk some of the Forum’s sympathizers. I later said, “Wrap it up, you have lost your audience! We don’t even care at this point.” A Forum patron yelled at me, and I knew I was starting to royally piss them off. Also during his speech, he kept citing all these anti-Semitic books, to which I would say: “He’s just trying to plug his book!” He made a point about Sen. Joe McCarthy being an “American hero.” And I laughed as hard as I could, and a couple of people joined me.
I am angry with the Forum; and I know that so many of you are angry at the Forum; and I know that so many people in the community, the administration, the Department of Public Safety, and the many student unions who feel threatened by its presence (we are with you LGBTQA!) are angry at the Forum. But we know the only people who take what they say seriously are the people in the Forum. So we can shout as loud as we want and have their followers put them on a pedestal, or we can point and laugh and watch them sink lower into their own hateful filth.
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