Politics & Power Quote by Julius Streicher

Streicher’s line is engineered to sound like a neutral demographic observation while doing the oldest antisemitic trick in the book: converting presence into conspiracy. The phrase “almost entirely” is doing covert propaganda work. It smuggles in the claim of total capture without needing proof, inviting the listener to fill the gap with suspicion rather than evidence. “Diplomatic representatives” also isn’t incidental. Diplomacy is the symbolic nerve center of a state - who speaks for a nation, who supposedly “pulls strings.” By targeting envoys instead of, say, factory owners, Streicher aims at legitimacy itself: the idea that America’s voice abroad is not truly America’s.

The subtext is a two-step delegitimization. First, it implies Jews are foreign by nature, incompatible with national loyalty. Second, it casts U.S. foreign policy as inherently duplicitous, directed by an alien bloc rather than elected institutions. That framing turns geopolitical frustration into a racialized explanation that’s simple, emotionally satisfying, and unfalsifiable. If America opposes Nazi Germany, the cause can’t be German aggression; it must be “Jewish influence.”

Context matters because Streicher wasn’t a casual bigot; he was a professional inciter, the publisher of Der Sturmer, and a central amplifier of Nazi antisemitism. In the 1930s-40s, Nazi propaganda needed an external villain to match its internal persecution. “The Jews” became the bridge between domestic repression and international conflict: a story that justified exclusion at home and aggression abroad. The line isn’t mistaken analysis; it’s narrative sabotage, designed to make democratic representation feel like occupation.