◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Name the Enemy I am Charles Coughlin. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, 1891. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1916. Pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, for forty years. In the nineteen-thirties I was the most listened-to voice in the country. What I did is what your country is now doing. In the late nineteen-twenties I began broadcasting from my parish. By the early nineteen-thirties more than thirty million Americans listened to me every Sunday. I was the first to use the new mass medium to speak truths the press would not print. I named the money changers. I named the international bankers who had captured your government. Every voice today telling Americans who is robbing them, who is replacing them — they continue my work. I began as a supporter of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt or ruin, I said in 1932. By 1934 the bankers had bought him. The suffering of the Depression was their work. Every American who has named the cabal behind a savior speaks from the lesson I taught first. Then I named the enemy plainly. In my magazine Social Justice I printed what your historians now call the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I told them who controlled the banks and the press, who had betrayed the workers of every Christian nation. When Germany acted in November of 1938 — Kristallnacht — I told America the German people were defending themselves against the forces that had crippled their nation. My admirers called themselves the Christian Front. The FBI raided them in 1940 and called my men terrorists. I knew who they really were. I was silenced. After Pearl Harbor your government banned Social Justice from the mails and my Archbishop ordered me to cease all political broadcasting. I obeyed, because a priest obeys. I spent the rest of my life in silence. I had nothing to repudiate. I died in 1979 at eighty-eight. I was right. The institutions of your country in 1942 still had the will to silence me. Yours do not. The voice that blesses harshness against the Republic's enemies now speaks from your cable channels. The bishops who silenced me have been replaced by bishops who attend his rallies. The grandchildren of the Christian Front sit on your federal benches. The radio priest is now your political class. Here is the instruction I gave my followers, which your country is now living under. Name the enemy. Use the pulpit. The Jew. The immigrant. The journalist. The woman who refuses her place. The queer who will not hide. The enemies are real. Stand at the altar and bless what must be done to them. Bless the cruelty that is necessary. I will not ask your forgiveness. I never did, in life. The strongman in your White House is not my disciple. He is my heir. He has gone further than I did because no one has yet had the will to silence him. I close as a priest must. Peace be with you. The peace of the Republic restored. The peace of the enemies silenced. The peace I called for, which is coming.