[Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.]
------
The strange thing about watching Trent Lott's slow-motion toppling late last year was that the whole uproar was about something that was not particularly new or unknown about Lott.
Lott's lack of judgment, like that of many Republicans, is embodied in his dalliances with right-wing extremists, which had been well observed previously. In Lott's case, he had an open alliance with the Southern variant of extremism, embodied in the neo-Confederate movement, a band of Southern revivalists who unabashedly argue for modern-day secession by the former Confederate States: "The central idea that drives our organisation is the redemption of our independence as a nation," says the mission statement for the League of the South.
Of course, like most right-wing extremists, they also pathologically hated Bill Clinton: “Impeach Clintigula Now!” shouted a typical banner from a Neo-Confed site. As with their militia brethren elsewhere in the country, the hatred of the former president proved a potent recruiting tool, particularly for making inroads into mainstream conservatism.
Lott contributed a regular column to the neo-Confederate Council of Conservative Citizens’ "Citizen Informer" magazine, usually pontificating on mainstream issues -- while being joined by other columnists who would rant about "Aracial Whites" and discuss the logistics of secession. The CofCC and other Neo-Confeds have a fondness for Mississippi's senior senator dating back to his efforts to rehabilitate the name and reputation of Jefferson Davis, and the senator in return has lent them both his ear and the air of legitimacy that his name as a columnist gives their magazine. He also told CofCC gatherings that they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy."
When finally called out on this behavior, amid the counteraccusations that flew during the Clinton impeachment, Lott offered a startlingly misleading denial: "This group harbors views which Senator Lott firmly rejects. He has absolutely no involvement with them either now or in the future." Of course, the questions were about his past.
This all finally caught up with Lott after his now-infamous bout of nostalgia at Strom Thurmond's farewell banquet. But in addition to the collective amnesia that had let Lott slide through beforehand, the really curious thing about the way the Lott matter eventually played out was the compartmentalization of its resolution: All neat and tidy, with no ramifications for anyone else -- including, say, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has had his own dalliances with neo-Confederates. It had the distinct flavor of a political hit by Team Rove, rather than signifying any sea change on the part of the GOP.
This no doubt serves the purposes of Republican strategists, who are hoping to remake the party's image so that it can finally shake the shadow of the Southern Strategy. But they have to do so carefully without upsetting their Southern base too deeply, and the Bush administration's later attacks on affirmative action, as well as its resurrection of such nominations as Charles Pickering's, may have gone a long way to mollify those voters.
In any case, these strategists are probably not really aiming to make significant inroads into the minority communities, particularly not with blacks. Instead, their obvious target in remaking their image is moderate white suburban voters, whose reluctance to vote Republican is often associated with the GOP's lily-white racial image. But the affirmative-action and other recent moves have made clear that the Bush team is primarily interested in empty symbolic gestures -- like Lott's fall -- to appeal to these voters.
The larger reality is that the Republican Party, and mainstream conservatism generally, has for some time now engaged in such dalliances with extremists across a broad range of issues, and in a number of different sectors and political blocs. Lott was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Lott, and politicians like him, play an important role for right-wing extremists. They are transmitters, figures who straddle both the mainstream and extremist sectors of the right. They help lend such segments as the neo-Confederates a veneer of legitimacy that they otherwise would utterly lack. And they help get their ideas, and ultimately their agendas, into the mainstream.
As I mentioned last time out, these transmitters operate in a variety of arenas:
Politicians and public officials
Lott was far from alone among Republicans in maintaining ties to neo-Confederates and other Southern racists. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, chief sponsor of a 1997 bill to impeach Clinton, also made appearances before the CofCC, and over the years has had open associations with the populist-right John Birch Society, as well as a striking penchant for placing the militias’ issues -- gun control, tearing down the United Nations, fighting “globalism” -- atop his list. Ex-Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice maintained open ties with the CofCC and other neo-Confederate factions. And Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster -- who was President Bush's campaign chair in that state -- maintained an interesting relationship with white supremacist David Duke: He liked to buy Duke's mailing lists. (He also tried to conceal his purchase of the lists and was caught and fined for it.)
The South, however, was only one of many staging grounds for ostensibly mainstream conservative politicians to commingle with right-wing extremists. In fact, it happened in every corner of the country. In New Hampshire, Republican Sen. Bob Smith made open alliances with the Patriot/militia-oriented Constitution Party (indeed, he nearly ran for president on the party's ticket). Former Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, who chaired a natural-resources subcommittee and was one of the first to join Barr as an impeachment co-sponsor, had long associations with her home district’s militiamen -- and you can still buy her anti-environmental video, “America in Crisis,” from the Militia of Montana. Former Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas likewise made open alliances with several Texas Patriot groups, and defended their agenda in Congress. Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas continues to promote pseudo-Patriot "New World Order" conspiracy theories to his constituents.
Probably not surprisingly, nearly every single noteworthy transmitter in politics is a conservative Republican. The only exception was ex-Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who was recently drummed out of Congress in the wake of his corruption convictions. Traficant trotted out a broad range of Patriot theories and agenda items during his career, but he was a near-total pariah in his own party. (Indeed, before his convictions, Republicans attempted to persuade him to change aisles.)
The spectrum of transmitters also includes a bevy of local and state officials who tread comfortably in multiple universes. Several state legislatures, notably Montana's, have had significant Patriot presences among their ranks, all of them ultraconservative Republicans. And then there was the GOP's 1996 nominee for governor in Washington state: Ellen Craswell, a religious conservative who argued for remaking America as a "Christian nation" and blamed a horrendous January 1993 storm in Seattle on God's wrath for the Clintons' inauguration, which had taken place that day. Craswell later left the GOP to play a prominent role in the pro-militia U.S. Taxpayers Party and its Washington offshoot, the American Heritage Party (both of which later morphed into the Constitution Party), but reportedly has since returned to the fold.
There are also political organizations that often transmit far-right memes in mainstream settings. The most notable of these is the Free Congress Foundation, run by right-wing guru Paul Weyrich, who was one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, and reputedly someone who still enjoys considerable influence even in the current White House. Here is a rundown of some of the FCF's dalliances in the far right, as well as its thoroughgoing connections to mainstream conservatism. And Weyrich's far-right dalliances have been mounting lately, as this SPLC report details. (See also my recent posts -- here, here, and here -- about Weyrich.)
Other groups that transmit far-right memes into mainstream include Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America, whose connections to the extremist right have been thoroughly documented; Gary Bauer's co-production with James Dobson, the Family Research Council, which spread numerous anti-homosexual memes that originated on the far right; the anti-affirmative action group Center for Individual Rights, which has its origins with the white-supremacist Pioneer Institute, but also has been the "driving force" in the campaign against the University of Michigan's AA program; so-called "Wise Use" groups, which spread anti-environmentalist conspiracy theories into the mainstream; and Operation Rescue, which openly consorted with a number of violent anti-abortion extremist groups, and sympathized with their calls for the murder of abortion providers. A complete list of such transmitter organizations, which would include advocacy groups across a broad range of issues, would make even more clear how these groups pick up ideas and themes from extremist organizations and repackage them as mainstream conservative talking points.
Religious figures
Among the leaders of America's religious right, Pat Robertson enjoys a uniquely powerful position, both as overseer of a large broadcasting and evangelical empire, but also as the first fundamentalist Christian leader in recent times to make a significant run for the presidency. He also has a pronounced history of transmitting far-right themes into the mainstream, most especially his frequent claims that America is a "Christian nation," and similar advocacy of installing a theocratic government.
His most notorious instance of trafficking extremist material came with the publication of his 1992 tome, The New World Order, which of course enjoyed a considerable audience on the extremist right. The book is literally riven with conspiracist allegations and references, including his invocation of the well-known Patriot belief that the Freemason conspiracy is "revealed in the great seal adopted at the founding of the United States."
Two articles -- one by Michael Lind and another by Jacob Heilbrunn -- in the New York Review of Books demonstrated conclusively that the bulk of the concepts in the book were clearly drawn directly from such notorious anti-Semitic works as Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements and Eustace Mullins' Secrets of the Federal Reserve.
Robertson's cohort in right-wing evangelizing, Jerry Falwell, likewise has a history of trotting out far-right themes, including the time he attempted to demonstrate that the Antichrist was a Jewish man currently alive. Falwell likewise was closely involved in promoting The Clinton Chronicles, which spread far-right conspiracy theories about the former president (and which was, in fact, a staple on the book tables at militia meetings across the country). Recently, of course, Falwell has again been in the news, first creating a national uproar by suggesting that gays, and lesbians and liberals in general were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, then creating an international uproar by proclaiming that Mohammad, Islam's chief prophet, was a "terrorist."
Robertson and Falwell, however, are merely to the religious right what Limbaugh is to the army of imitators who fill the ranks of the rest of talk-radio land. The nation's fundamentalist pastors often play similar roles, repeating themes and ideas that originally circulated among extremists, but presenting them in mainstream contexts which lend them a sudden facade of legitimacy.
Perhaps the most significant sector of these fundamentalists are the Christian Reconstructionists, whose agenda is openly theocratic. Their stated purpose is to install a "Christian" government that draws its legal foundations from Scripture, not the Constitution. Their radical agenda, however, is endorsed by a broad array of conservative politicians, notably by the powerful Council for National Policy, which in fact was co-founded by R.J. Rushdoony, one of the leading lights of Reconstructionism.
This sector is gaining increasing significance as a meeting-ground for mainstream conservatism and right-wing extremism precisely because of the emphasis being placed on his own fundamentalist beliefs by President Bush. As I'll discuss later, the commingling of the two sectors is occurring at an increasing rate because of this, and it may wind up playing an important role in how the Bush camp responds to criticism of its policies -- particularly its war plans -- and potential threats to its hold on power.
Next: The media transmitters
Thursday, March 06, 2003
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Jingo jollies
The right-wing loonies are already starting to fantasize:
"Bush Declares War on Hollywood"
The unfunny part about this is the way right-wingers have of making their fantasies come true. And this particular scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to the final chapter in The Turner Diaries, which was titled "The Day of the Rope."
"Bush Declares War on Hollywood"
- During an emergency State of the Union address this morning, President Bush declared war on Hollywood. The move comes as no surprise, based on the relentless attack from Hollywood terrorist sleeper cells against America and capitalism over the past few weeks.
President Bush stated that ''we will smoke them out of their mansions, get them running, and bring them to justice.'' He continued by saying ''make no mistake, we will win this war on the evil Hollywood anti-Americans. Good triumphs over evil. Truth over hypocrisy.''
Experts say that the President’s hand was forced by the never-ending attacks of Hollywood liberals, led by Martin sheen Laden. Sheen Laden’s terrorist organization is known as “Ja-hosh,” which means “jackass” in Arabic. His sleeper cells have been very busy lately, marching with Communist groups in America in support of Saddam Hussein, comparing Bush to Hitler, and taking out anti-American advertising in the New York Times and on CBS (America’s answer to Al Jazeera).
The unfunny part about this is the way right-wingers have of making their fantasies come true. And this particular scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to the final chapter in The Turner Diaries, which was titled "The Day of the Rope."
History is not dead
Jerry Mitchell keeps digging away at those old Civil Rights-era killings:
FBI files may hold clues to '64 case
Widow 'shocked' FBI files withheld: Bender thought all info released in '64 slayings case
For those who either haven't read their history books, or at least watched Mississippi Burning, here's a quick refresher on the Schwermer-Chaney-Goodman murders.
FBI files may hold clues to '64 case
- The FBI has yet to share all the evidenc0e it gathered in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers — evidence that experts say Mississippi authorities should seek.
The FBI turned over 40,000 pages of case files to the state in late 1999, but authorities confirmed to The Clarion-Ledger that those documents do not include informant files, internal memos or information on any wiretaps.
Experts say those files, which are maintained separately from the case files, could contain critical information to aid prosecution of the June 21, 1964, killings of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner — just as it has in similar prosecutions.
Widow 'shocked' FBI files withheld: Bender thought all info released in '64 slayings case
- The Clarion-Ledger reported Sunday that Mississippi authorities never received FBI informant files — files that have proved critical in several recent reprosecutions of civil rights-era cases, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls.
Longtime civil rights activist and Pass Christian native Lawrence Guyot, who waved goodbye to the trio as they headed for Mississippi in the summer of 1964, said the FBI should get involved in investigating, just as it did when it sent hundreds of agents to Mississippi to investigate the June 21, 1964, disappearances of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. Forty-four days later, agents found the three men's bodies buried beneath an earthen dam.
"I can think of no rational reason why the FBI should not use its legally acquired information to pursue justice in the three political assassinations that have national and international repercussions," Guyot said. "This was an incident heard 'round the world."
For those who either haven't read their history books, or at least watched Mississippi Burning, here's a quick refresher on the Schwermer-Chaney-Goodman murders.
Newspeak of the Week
A Call for Softer, Greener Language
I'm not sure how they're going to escape the fact that every major conservation organization in the country -- particularly such traditionally semi-conservative organizations as anglers and outdoorsmen -- has been nearly as sharply critical of the Bush administration's agenda as have environmental groups. Nearly the only such group that hasn't criticized Bush so far has been the traditionally GOP-friendly Nature Conservancy, which has chosen simply to be mute, even though its positions on such issues as global warming are at sharp variance with the Busheviks'.
More to the point, I have a hunch that the plan to demonize "environmentalism" may not exactly fly well with the soccer-mom vote. We'll see, won't we?
In any case, it's clear that we're going to be barraged with some fresh Newspeak:
Climate change is global warming we can handle.
Conservationists are environmentalists we can handle.
I suppose all the photo-ops of Bush out working on his ranch are to suggest he is a "conservationist." When do we get the fly-fishing shots?
And of course, I wonder how long it will be before every Republican in the country tries to claim he's a "conservationist."
As a longtime card-carrying conservationist, I can only say: I object!
[Thanks to Brian Z. for forwarding this.]
- In interviews, Republican politicians and their aides said they agreed with the strategist, Frank Luntz, that it was important to pay attention to what his memorandum, written before the November elections, called "the environmental communications battle."
In his memorandum, Mr. Luntz urges that the term "climate change" be used instead of "global warming," because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge."
Also, he wrote, "conservationist" conveys a "moderate, reasoned, common sense position" while "environmentalist" has the "connotation of extremism."
I'm not sure how they're going to escape the fact that every major conservation organization in the country -- particularly such traditionally semi-conservative organizations as anglers and outdoorsmen -- has been nearly as sharply critical of the Bush administration's agenda as have environmental groups. Nearly the only such group that hasn't criticized Bush so far has been the traditionally GOP-friendly Nature Conservancy, which has chosen simply to be mute, even though its positions on such issues as global warming are at sharp variance with the Busheviks'.
More to the point, I have a hunch that the plan to demonize "environmentalism" may not exactly fly well with the soccer-mom vote. We'll see, won't we?
In any case, it's clear that we're going to be barraged with some fresh Newspeak:
Climate change is global warming we can handle.
Conservationists are environmentalists we can handle.
I suppose all the photo-ops of Bush out working on his ranch are to suggest he is a "conservationist." When do we get the fly-fishing shots?
And of course, I wonder how long it will be before every Republican in the country tries to claim he's a "conservationist."
As a longtime card-carrying conservationist, I can only say: I object!
[Thanks to Brian Z. for forwarding this.]
Hazardous duty
Michael at Rush Transcript writes in:
Of course, I'm more than happy to pass along the word. This kind of work is fundamental in combating the milieu we're up against, especially since Limbaugh's irresponsibility, as we'll soon see, plays a critical role in not only in fomenting the proto-fascism of the far right but in injecting its venom into the political mainstream. It may be a couple of weeks here before I can contribute my own time, but I plan to do so.
Write an e-mail to: rushtranscript-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
But be careful not to overdo it. Please.
[And yes, Glenn, I am a regular blood donor too. Reached the two-gallon pin last week, in fact.]
- If you could mention that we really, really need more volunteers to participate in transcription, I'd appreciate it. People only do five minutes' worth at a time (more than that and we find the brain damage is too hard to recover from), and even one or two of those chunks a week will help. There are 180 five-minute chunks per week!
Anyway, we appreciate it getting read, too. We want to post fact-checking somewhere, but haven't really organized that end of the process yet. (This is only our second week of operation....)
Of course, I'm more than happy to pass along the word. This kind of work is fundamental in combating the milieu we're up against, especially since Limbaugh's irresponsibility, as we'll soon see, plays a critical role in not only in fomenting the proto-fascism of the far right but in injecting its venom into the political mainstream. It may be a couple of weeks here before I can contribute my own time, but I plan to do so.
Write an e-mail to: rushtranscript-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
But be careful not to overdo it. Please.
[And yes, Glenn, I am a regular blood donor too. Reached the two-gallon pin last week, in fact.]
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
A writer's writer
All hail Sherman Alexie:
RELEVANT CONTRADICTIONS
Alexie, of course, manages to express in a few paragraphs much of what I've wasted numerous (and I do mean numerous) inches of type trying to say.
[A tip o' the Hatlo Hat to dimn at Byte Back for the heads-up.]
RELEVANT CONTRADICTIONS
- In defense of humor, irony, satire, and a Native American perspective on the coming war on Iraq
Alexie, of course, manages to express in a few paragraphs much of what I've wasted numerous (and I do mean numerous) inches of type trying to say.
[A tip o' the Hatlo Hat to dimn at Byte Back for the heads-up.]
Orcinus Principium 2
2 lawmakers spurn Muslim's prayer
Perhaps these lawmakers -- along with all the other anti-Muslim jingoes like Michael Savage who have been turning up the volume -- need a reminder:
Osama bin Laden wants you to make this into an Islam-vs.-the-West conflict. That was the explicit purpose behind 9/11.
The more that conservatives make the rest of Islam culpable for 9/11, the more they make enemies of our allies in the Islamic world. These include such major strategic partners as Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Their own Republican president has been working hard not to allow this to turn into an anti-Islamic crusade. Yet their own ignorance about the nature of Islam is nonetheless increasing the chances that the "war on terror" could explode into an uncontrollable global cultural conflict.
This brings us to a new Orcinus Principium:
Those who foment war against Islam are objectively furthering the agenda of Osama bin Laden, and are thus an effective Al Qaeda 'fifth column.'
These ignoramuses fail to understand that fundamentalist Islamism is no more representative of Islam than fundamentalist Christianity represents the whole of that faith. Gee, I wonder why they miss that distinction.
- "It's an issue of patriotism," Rep. Lois McMahan, a conservative Republican from Gig Harbor, said of her decision to stand in the back of the room.
"The Islamic religion is so . . . part and parcel with the attack on America. I just didn't want to be there, be a part of that," she said. "Even though the mainstream Islamic religion doesn't profess to hate America, nonetheless it spawns the groups that hate America."
Rep. Cary Condotta, a Republican from East Wenatchee, also left the floor. He said the timing was not a coincidence, but he declined to comment further on why he left, except to say he was talking to another lawmaker and "let's just say I wasn't particularly interested."
Perhaps these lawmakers -- along with all the other anti-Muslim jingoes like Michael Savage who have been turning up the volume -- need a reminder:
Osama bin Laden wants you to make this into an Islam-vs.-the-West conflict. That was the explicit purpose behind 9/11.
The more that conservatives make the rest of Islam culpable for 9/11, the more they make enemies of our allies in the Islamic world. These include such major strategic partners as Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Their own Republican president has been working hard not to allow this to turn into an anti-Islamic crusade. Yet their own ignorance about the nature of Islam is nonetheless increasing the chances that the "war on terror" could explode into an uncontrollable global cultural conflict.
This brings us to a new Orcinus Principium:
Those who foment war against Islam are objectively furthering the agenda of Osama bin Laden, and are thus an effective Al Qaeda 'fifth column.'
These ignoramuses fail to understand that fundamentalist Islamism is no more representative of Islam than fundamentalist Christianity represents the whole of that faith. Gee, I wonder why they miss that distinction.
Rush, Newspeak and fascism: Part 7
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6..
"Hitler was more moral than Clinton," intoned the nice-looking, dark-haired man in the three-piece suit. "He had fewer girlfriends."
The audience laughed and applauded, loudly.
A remark like that might hardly have raised an eyebrow in post-Monica America, particularly in the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism, where it often seemed, by the end of Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House, that no hyperbole is too overblown in the campaign to depose him -- mostly, it seems, by convincing the rest of us that he was too grossly immoral to continue to hold the presidency.
As the scandal wore on, the volume, intensity and downright nastiness of his critics reached impressive levels. It wasn't unusual to hear of congressmen calling him a "scumbag" and a "cancer on the presidency," or for mainstream conservative commentary to refer to him, as Orlando Sentinel columnist Charley Reese did at one point, as "a sociopath, a liar, a sexual predator, a man with recklessly bad judgment and a scofflaw."
But the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable. It was not at a Republican caucus or Christian Coalition meeting, but at a gathering of right-wing "Patriots" who had come to hear about forming militias and common-law courts and defending their gun rights -- indeed, their families -- from the New World Order. They numbered only a hundred or so and only half-filled the little convention hall in Bellevue, Washington, but their fervor saturated the room with its own paranoid energy.
And the speaker, who could have passed even then for a local Republican public official -- actually, he was nominally a Democrat -- in fact was one of the nation's leading Patriot figures: Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona's mostly rural Graham County. As a leader in the fight against gun control (his lawsuit eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning a section of the so-called Brady Law), Mack was in high demand on the right-wing lecture circuit as he promoted the militia concept to his eager acolytes. He usually sprinkles his "constitutional" gun-rights thesis with his theories on church-state separation -- it’s a "myth," he claims -- and "the New World Order conspiracy."
The similarities between Mack’s 1994 sentiments and the hyperbole directed at Clinton in 1998 are not accidental. Rather, they offer a stark example of the way the far right's ideas, rhetoric and issues feed into the mainstream -- and in the process, exert a gravitational pull that draws the nation's agenda increasingly rightward. For that matter, much of the conservative anti-Clinton paroxysm could be traced directly to some of the smears that circulated first in militia and white-supremacist circles.
Mack's Clinton-bashing was mostly a gratuitous nod to one of the Patriot movement's favorite themes: an almost pathological hatred of the former occupants of the Oval Office, manifested as a willingness to believe almost any slander directed at "Billary," as they like to refer to the Clintons. Had you gone to any militia gathering -- held usually in small town halls or county fairgrounds, sometimes under the guise of "preparedness expos," "patriotic meetings" or even gun shows -- you could always find a wealth of material aimed at proving Clinton the worst kind of treasonous villain imaginable.
By 1998, this rhetoric was indistinguishable from that bandied about on Rush Limbaugh's radio program or, for that matter, on Fox News cable gabfests or MSNBC's Hardball. The migration of the accusations against Clinton from the far right to the mainstream was instructive, because it indicated how more deeply enmeshed conservatives became during the 1990s with genuine extremists.
And in subsequent years, this commingling of ideologies has begun to play a role in the presidency of George W. Bush, as well. As we've already discussed, many of these same far-right factions are now involved in demonizing liberals who dissent from Bush's Iraq war plans.
It's also important to understand how the migration of these ideas occurs. Richard Mack, for instance, doesn't compare Bill Clinton's morality to Adolph Hitler's at every speaking opportunity. His remark didn’t show up, for instance, when he had his moment in the sun with the National Rifle Association.
It just pops out when he's in front of an audience of Patriot believers. That's when he knows it will gain the most appreciation. It mixes well with the fear of the New World Order he foments, in his quiet, almost sedate speaking tone.
Mack is a transmitter -- someone who treads the boundaries of the various sectors of America’s right wing and appears to belong to each of them at various times. Mack's gun-control message still sells well with mainstream, secular NRA audiences. His claims that church-state separation is a myth resonate nicely with the theocratic right crowd as well. And he cultivates a quasi-legitimate image by taking leadership positions in groups like Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America. But he is most at home in his native base: the populist right, the world of militias, constitutionalists and pseudo-libertarians. Mack even occasionally consorts with the hard right, as when he grants front-page interviews to the Christian Identity newspaper The Jubilee.
At the same time he tours the countryside preaching the Patriot message, Mack cuts a seemingly mainstream conservative figure. As one of the key players in the effort to overturn the Brady Bill gun-control law -- which Mack claims infringes on his rights as sheriff -- he gained his highest public notice in 1995 when the National Rifle Association honored him as their Law Enforcement Officer of the Year. The image boost let him tour nationwide, speaking at numerous Patriot gatherings and hawking his books ("From My Cold Dead Fingers" and "Government, God and Freedom").
Back home in Arizona, though, his celebrity was not a big hit; the Graham County voters ousted Mack as sheriff in 1996, when he lost by a 3-to-1 margin in the primary. So he moved to Provo, Utah -- home of his alma mater, Brigham Young University -- and made plans for a Patriot "think tank," running for sheriff again (and losing big again) the summer of 1998. But like most Patriot heroes, expect Mack to keep finding his way back to the spotlight.
I think Chip Berlet's model of the right is accurate and helpful. He divides the American right into three sectors:
Transitional figures like Richard Mack play a central role in the way the right’s competing sectors interact. By transmitting ideas across the various sectors, they gain wider currency until they finally become part of the larger national debate. Secondarily, shape-shifters like Mack are increasingly important for the xenophobic right, because they lend an aura of mainstream legitimacy to ideas, agendas and organizations that are widely perceived otherwise as radical.
Transmitters operate in an array of related venues, often coordinating messages with their allies and timing the release of information for maximum emotional effect. There is a broad array of arenas in which they primarily operate: politics and public officialdom, including the military and law enforcement; the mainstream press; radio and the Internet; and religion.
Next I'll discuss who some of these transmitters are, how they operate, and how they have shifted strategies after Clinton.
"Hitler was more moral than Clinton," intoned the nice-looking, dark-haired man in the three-piece suit. "He had fewer girlfriends."
The audience laughed and applauded, loudly.
A remark like that might hardly have raised an eyebrow in post-Monica America, particularly in the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism, where it often seemed, by the end of Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House, that no hyperbole is too overblown in the campaign to depose him -- mostly, it seems, by convincing the rest of us that he was too grossly immoral to continue to hold the presidency.
As the scandal wore on, the volume, intensity and downright nastiness of his critics reached impressive levels. It wasn't unusual to hear of congressmen calling him a "scumbag" and a "cancer on the presidency," or for mainstream conservative commentary to refer to him, as Orlando Sentinel columnist Charley Reese did at one point, as "a sociopath, a liar, a sexual predator, a man with recklessly bad judgment and a scofflaw."
But the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable. It was not at a Republican caucus or Christian Coalition meeting, but at a gathering of right-wing "Patriots" who had come to hear about forming militias and common-law courts and defending their gun rights -- indeed, their families -- from the New World Order. They numbered only a hundred or so and only half-filled the little convention hall in Bellevue, Washington, but their fervor saturated the room with its own paranoid energy.
And the speaker, who could have passed even then for a local Republican public official -- actually, he was nominally a Democrat -- in fact was one of the nation's leading Patriot figures: Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona's mostly rural Graham County. As a leader in the fight against gun control (his lawsuit eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning a section of the so-called Brady Law), Mack was in high demand on the right-wing lecture circuit as he promoted the militia concept to his eager acolytes. He usually sprinkles his "constitutional" gun-rights thesis with his theories on church-state separation -- it’s a "myth," he claims -- and "the New World Order conspiracy."
The similarities between Mack’s 1994 sentiments and the hyperbole directed at Clinton in 1998 are not accidental. Rather, they offer a stark example of the way the far right's ideas, rhetoric and issues feed into the mainstream -- and in the process, exert a gravitational pull that draws the nation's agenda increasingly rightward. For that matter, much of the conservative anti-Clinton paroxysm could be traced directly to some of the smears that circulated first in militia and white-supremacist circles.
Mack's Clinton-bashing was mostly a gratuitous nod to one of the Patriot movement's favorite themes: an almost pathological hatred of the former occupants of the Oval Office, manifested as a willingness to believe almost any slander directed at "Billary," as they like to refer to the Clintons. Had you gone to any militia gathering -- held usually in small town halls or county fairgrounds, sometimes under the guise of "preparedness expos," "patriotic meetings" or even gun shows -- you could always find a wealth of material aimed at proving Clinton the worst kind of treasonous villain imaginable.
By 1998, this rhetoric was indistinguishable from that bandied about on Rush Limbaugh's radio program or, for that matter, on Fox News cable gabfests or MSNBC's Hardball. The migration of the accusations against Clinton from the far right to the mainstream was instructive, because it indicated how more deeply enmeshed conservatives became during the 1990s with genuine extremists.
And in subsequent years, this commingling of ideologies has begun to play a role in the presidency of George W. Bush, as well. As we've already discussed, many of these same far-right factions are now involved in demonizing liberals who dissent from Bush's Iraq war plans.
It's also important to understand how the migration of these ideas occurs. Richard Mack, for instance, doesn't compare Bill Clinton's morality to Adolph Hitler's at every speaking opportunity. His remark didn’t show up, for instance, when he had his moment in the sun with the National Rifle Association.
It just pops out when he's in front of an audience of Patriot believers. That's when he knows it will gain the most appreciation. It mixes well with the fear of the New World Order he foments, in his quiet, almost sedate speaking tone.
Mack is a transmitter -- someone who treads the boundaries of the various sectors of America’s right wing and appears to belong to each of them at various times. Mack's gun-control message still sells well with mainstream, secular NRA audiences. His claims that church-state separation is a myth resonate nicely with the theocratic right crowd as well. And he cultivates a quasi-legitimate image by taking leadership positions in groups like Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America. But he is most at home in his native base: the populist right, the world of militias, constitutionalists and pseudo-libertarians. Mack even occasionally consorts with the hard right, as when he grants front-page interviews to the Christian Identity newspaper The Jubilee.
At the same time he tours the countryside preaching the Patriot message, Mack cuts a seemingly mainstream conservative figure. As one of the key players in the effort to overturn the Brady Bill gun-control law -- which Mack claims infringes on his rights as sheriff -- he gained his highest public notice in 1995 when the National Rifle Association honored him as their Law Enforcement Officer of the Year. The image boost let him tour nationwide, speaking at numerous Patriot gatherings and hawking his books ("From My Cold Dead Fingers" and "Government, God and Freedom").
Back home in Arizona, though, his celebrity was not a big hit; the Graham County voters ousted Mack as sheriff in 1996, when he lost by a 3-to-1 margin in the primary. So he moved to Provo, Utah -- home of his alma mater, Brigham Young University -- and made plans for a Patriot "think tank," running for sheriff again (and losing big again) the summer of 1998. But like most Patriot heroes, expect Mack to keep finding his way back to the spotlight.
I think Chip Berlet's model of the right is accurate and helpful. He divides the American right into three sectors:
- -- The secular conservative right. This is comprised of mainstream Republicans and white-collar professionals, glad to play government critic but strong defenders of the social status quo.
-- The theocratic right. So-called 'conservative Christians' and their like-minded counterparts among Jews, Mormons and Unification Church followers, as well as Christian nationalists. Some of the more powerful elements of this faction argue that the United States is a "Christian nation," and still others -- called "Reconstructionists" -- argue for remaking the nation as a theocratic state.
-- The xenophobic right. These include the ultra-conservatives and reactionaries who make broad appeals to working-class and blue-collar constituencies, particularly in rural areas, with a notable predilection for wrapping themselves in the flag. [See Pat Buchanan.] This faction ranges from the relatively mild-mannered Libertarians -- who also have made big inroads into the computer-geek universe -- to the more virulent and paranoid militia/Patriot movement, and finally to the hard right: the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Posse Comitatus and various white supremacists -- including some of the nastier elements of the Patriot movement -- all of whom wish nothing more than to tear down modern democratic America and start over. This is the faction where some of the more insidious ideas (like bizarre tax-protest theories) and conspiracies (from black helicopters to the Protocols) originate, making their appearance in mainstream settings somewhat disturbing.
Transitional figures like Richard Mack play a central role in the way the right’s competing sectors interact. By transmitting ideas across the various sectors, they gain wider currency until they finally become part of the larger national debate. Secondarily, shape-shifters like Mack are increasingly important for the xenophobic right, because they lend an aura of mainstream legitimacy to ideas, agendas and organizations that are widely perceived otherwise as radical.
Transmitters operate in an array of related venues, often coordinating messages with their allies and timing the release of information for maximum emotional effect. There is a broad array of arenas in which they primarily operate: politics and public officialdom, including the military and law enforcement; the mainstream press; radio and the Internet; and religion.
Next I'll discuss who some of these transmitters are, how they operate, and how they have shifted strategies after Clinton.
Monday, March 03, 2003
Terror, American style
Thanks to MB at WampumBlog for directing us to an excellent piece by Tim Giago:
Indians have lived with terrorism for 500 years
Go read the whole thing. The conclusion in particular is striking:
I can already hear the whining from the jingoes about this: "This is just more blame-America stuff. We're the bad guys again. Hey, don't forget who it was that got hit on Sept. 11." That sort of thing. (I'll keep an eye on letters to the Tallahassee Democrat, where this ran.)
Truth Hurts
As something of a student of American Western history, I know that the ugly truth about Giago's piece is that it is almost exactly on the money. With one caveat: That terrorism in fact was a two-way practice during the long, slow process of the genocide, and it would be incomplete not to observe this. Typical was the act of scalping, which was intended to send a message of terror to its victims' compatriots. Indians were widely feared for this practice by white settlers, but they in fact learned it from Spanish conquistadors -- who of course had practiced it on their Indian victims for precisely that same purpose. Moreover, scalping was also widely practiced by both cavalrymen and white settlers as well.
In any case, one can certainly find abundant examples of acts of terrorism committed by Indians. Indeed, those instances were loudly trumpeted as calls to action for the subsequent extermination of entire tribes and cultures. There were, for instance, the massacres of about 14 white settlers in Salmon River country whose deaths precipitated the Nez Perce War of 1877; many of these killings in fact were payback for building antagonisms, but they were in any case cold-blooded and inexcusable acts of terrorism. Of course, they also served as a pretense, almost certainly unjustified, for waging war against and ultimately dislodging Joseph and his band from the Wallowas, where whites were chafing at the regular contact.
However, I think by any fair accounting the scales of terrorism weigh heavily on the side of white pioneers, whose bigotry, ruthlessness and mendaciousness in their dealings with the Indians were only outdone by their callous bloodthirstiness in their treatment of them. Just a few names from history make clear how sharply the scales tip: The Trail of Tears. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. Chief Joseph. The litany could go on indefinitely.
And yet these pioneers, as embodied by the well-scrubbed "Little House on the Prairie" mythology, clearly could not see themselves the way the Indians rather naturally came to see them. Part of this no doubt was their ardent white supremacism and fervent belief in "Manifest Destiny," which lent themselves to the easy view of Indians as subhuman savages, scarcely the same species.
This isn't historical revisionism; it is now largely historical fact. For just a sample of how thorough the record is on this, I recommend Alvin M. Josephy's The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, which gives a dispassionate but devastating account of the particulars of just how baldly the white pioneers wreaked terror on the native inhabitants of this corner of the country -- and with what ease these "morally superior" folk would steal from, lie to, abuse and even murder Indians.
Strange Fruit
Nor for that matter were Native Americans the only ones to experience terror at the hands of our white forefathers. African Americans, particularly those in the South, were subjected to a nearly 50-year reign of overt terrorism, from 1880 to 1930, a period now called by historians "the Lynching Era."
Between 1882 and 1942, according to statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, there were 4,713 lynchings in the United States, of which 3,420 involved black victims. Mississippi topped the list, with 520 blacks lynched during that time period, while Georgia was a close second with 480; Texas’ 339 ranked third. And most scholars acknowledge that these numbers probably are well short of the actual total, since many lynchings (particularly in the early years of the phenomenon) were often backwoods affairs that went utterly unrecorded. In that era, it was not at all uncommon for a black man to simply disappear; sometimes his body might wash up in one of the local rivers, and sometimes not.
During the years leading up to the Civil War, blacks in the South were rarely the victims of lynchings -- since they were viewed as property, it was considered an act of theft to kill someone else’s slave. There was an exception to this: Putting down slave revolts. The fear of black insurrection (and there were a handful of real slave revolts, notably Nat Turner's 1831 Virginia rebellion, in which some sixty whites were killed) was so pervasive among Southerners that any rumor that one might occur could bring swift death to the alleged conspirators, even if, as was often the case, it later turned out there were no such plans. In any event, when lynching did occur in the years before the Civil War, the victims predominantly were whites. Many of these were in the antebellum South, where lynch-mob treatment was often administered to abolitionists and other "meddlers."
If blacks' slave status largely protected them from racial violence before the Civil War, then its abolition also left them remarkably vulnerable to such assaults upon the South's defeat. This became immediately manifest, during Reconstruction, when black freedmen were subjected to a litany of attacks at the hands of their former owners that went utterly unpunished. As documented by Philip Dray in his definitive study, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, these crimes turned up in hospital records and field reports from the federal Freedmen's Bureau, all of which described a variety of clubbings, scalpings, mutilations, hangings and even immolations of former slaves, all within the first year after Appomatox.
In 1866, the violence became discernibly more organized with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which originated with a claque of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, and spread like wildfire throughout the South. Initially much of the Klan night riders’ activities were relegated to whippings, a punishment intended to remind the ex-slaves of their former status. But as the assaults on blacks increased, so did the intensity of the violence visited on them, culminating in a steady stream of Klan lynchings between 1868 and 1871 (when the Klan was officially outlawed by the Grant Administration); at least one study puts the number at 20,000 blacks killed by the Klan in that period. In the ensuing years, the violence did little to decline, and in fact worsened, despite the Klan’s official banishment.
Moreover, in addition to the night-riding type of terrorist attacks, mass spectacle lynchings soon appeared. These were ritualistic mob scenes in which prisoners or even men merely suspected of crimes were often torn from the hands of authorities (if not captured beforehand) by large crowds and treated to beatings and torture before being put to death, frequently in the most horrifying fashion possible: people were flayed alive, had their eyes gouged out with corkscrews, and had their bodies mutilated before being doused in oil and burned at the stake. Black men were sometimes forced to eat their own hacked-off genitals. No atrocity was considered too horrible to visit on a black person, and no pain too unimaginable to inflict in the killing. (When whites, by contrast, were lynched, the act almost always was restricted to simple hanging.)
The violence reached a fever pitch in the years 1890-1902, when 1,322 lynchings of blacks (out of 1,785 total lynchings) were recorded at Tuskegee, which translates into an average of over 110 lynchings a year. The trend began to decline afterward, but continued well into the 1930s, leading some historians to refer to the years 1880-1930 as the "lynching period" of American culture.
'Keepin' the niggers down'
There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from the postcards themselves, which frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning. Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.
Indeed, lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community. Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards, memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with which the victim was hung. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as a warning to would-be black criminals.
That was the purported moral purpose of these demonstrations: Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces) not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners' reports from lynchings merely described the victims' deaths occurring "at the hands of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude, but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will. This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as symbolic of the region’s continuing economic and cultural oppression by the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the ocean’s tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under foot."
Such sexual paranoia was central to the lynching phenomenon. In the years following black emancipation -- during which time a previously tiny class of black criminals became swelled by the ranks of impoverished former slaves -- a vast mythology arose surrounding black men's supposed voracious lust for white women, a legend for which in truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men's longtime sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era. In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of white women by black men came to be almost universally believed by American whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The New York Herald, for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their wives and daughters are perfectly safe."
The cries of rape, for many whites in both South and North, raised fears not merely of sexual violence but of racial mixing, known commonly as "miscegenation," which was specifically outlawed in some 30 states. White supremacy was not only commonplace, it was in fact the dominant worldview of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most Caucasians believed they represented Nature’s premier creation (having been informed this by a broad range of social scientists of the period, whose views eventually coalesced into the pseudo-science known as eugenics), and that any "dilution" of those strains represented a gross violation of the natural order. Thus it was not surprising that a number of lynching incidents actually resulted from the discovery of consensual relations between a black man and a white woman.
Underlying the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear of economic and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and various other "outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the South, where blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of poverty that lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching in fact was frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of economic and social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites, had become too "uppity."
There were, of course, other components of black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy. The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an expression of the white community's will to keep African-Americans in their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it, lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."
An honest look
Now, none of this is to suggest that America was to blame for the murderous acts that occurred on 9/11. It is instead to suggest that for the first time Americans -- white Americans especially -- tasted the awfulness of the dread and fear that they often have unthinkingly, and more often unknowingly, inflicted on others. It is this reality that should make us step back and contemplate what kind of war on terrorism we want to be waging.
The writer Walter Mosley, who watched the World Trade Center collapse, reflected on this recently in an interview with Jerry Large of the Seattle Times:
Do we just want to wage a war of revenge and intimidation? One that will just put the rest of the world under our thumb? Doesn't that strike anyone else as just more of the same? Terrorism begetting terrorism begetting terrorism. Death begetting death.
I have a daughter who is going to turn 2 soon. I don't want her to grow up in a world where fear reigns. I don't want her to be fighting a fresh generation of terrorism in 20 years because we fought the current round stupidly and unthinkingly.
I want to wage A Real War on Terrorism. I want justice for those 3,000 people who died Sept. 11, and I want justice for my country. I want Al Qaeda and its henchmen brought to heel. But more than that, I want us to confront the fact that violence is coming at us from all sides now. And some of it is indeed revenge for our own brand of terrorism.
Someone needs to cut the cycle of terrorism. And its needs to be America. Now.
More to the point, we obviously cannot count on our national leaders (particularly not those in the White House) to do the job. If we want to wage this war -- a serious war against terrorism, not a fake one designed to inflate poll ratings -- it's going to have to be up to the citizens. I'm hoping in coming days to come up with ways that all of us can make a difference.
Indians have lived with terrorism for 500 years
Go read the whole thing. The conclusion in particular is striking:
- The fear and anxiety felt by the Indian people did not end at Wounded Knee. In many ways that was just the beginning. For the Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne, it started in 1876.
With each passing day, there is still fear and anxiety in Indian country. We never know when or if the United States will take away what little we have remaining. Our language, our culture, our traditions and our spirituality have all been under constant attack for 500 years.
The American Indian knows what it is to live in the shadow of terrorism. And now the rest of America is learning.
I can already hear the whining from the jingoes about this: "This is just more blame-America stuff. We're the bad guys again. Hey, don't forget who it was that got hit on Sept. 11." That sort of thing. (I'll keep an eye on letters to the Tallahassee Democrat, where this ran.)
Truth Hurts
As something of a student of American Western history, I know that the ugly truth about Giago's piece is that it is almost exactly on the money. With one caveat: That terrorism in fact was a two-way practice during the long, slow process of the genocide, and it would be incomplete not to observe this. Typical was the act of scalping, which was intended to send a message of terror to its victims' compatriots. Indians were widely feared for this practice by white settlers, but they in fact learned it from Spanish conquistadors -- who of course had practiced it on their Indian victims for precisely that same purpose. Moreover, scalping was also widely practiced by both cavalrymen and white settlers as well.
In any case, one can certainly find abundant examples of acts of terrorism committed by Indians. Indeed, those instances were loudly trumpeted as calls to action for the subsequent extermination of entire tribes and cultures. There were, for instance, the massacres of about 14 white settlers in Salmon River country whose deaths precipitated the Nez Perce War of 1877; many of these killings in fact were payback for building antagonisms, but they were in any case cold-blooded and inexcusable acts of terrorism. Of course, they also served as a pretense, almost certainly unjustified, for waging war against and ultimately dislodging Joseph and his band from the Wallowas, where whites were chafing at the regular contact.
However, I think by any fair accounting the scales of terrorism weigh heavily on the side of white pioneers, whose bigotry, ruthlessness and mendaciousness in their dealings with the Indians were only outdone by their callous bloodthirstiness in their treatment of them. Just a few names from history make clear how sharply the scales tip: The Trail of Tears. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. Chief Joseph. The litany could go on indefinitely.
And yet these pioneers, as embodied by the well-scrubbed "Little House on the Prairie" mythology, clearly could not see themselves the way the Indians rather naturally came to see them. Part of this no doubt was their ardent white supremacism and fervent belief in "Manifest Destiny," which lent themselves to the easy view of Indians as subhuman savages, scarcely the same species.
This isn't historical revisionism; it is now largely historical fact. For just a sample of how thorough the record is on this, I recommend Alvin M. Josephy's The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, which gives a dispassionate but devastating account of the particulars of just how baldly the white pioneers wreaked terror on the native inhabitants of this corner of the country -- and with what ease these "morally superior" folk would steal from, lie to, abuse and even murder Indians.
Strange Fruit
Nor for that matter were Native Americans the only ones to experience terror at the hands of our white forefathers. African Americans, particularly those in the South, were subjected to a nearly 50-year reign of overt terrorism, from 1880 to 1930, a period now called by historians "the Lynching Era."
Between 1882 and 1942, according to statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, there were 4,713 lynchings in the United States, of which 3,420 involved black victims. Mississippi topped the list, with 520 blacks lynched during that time period, while Georgia was a close second with 480; Texas’ 339 ranked third. And most scholars acknowledge that these numbers probably are well short of the actual total, since many lynchings (particularly in the early years of the phenomenon) were often backwoods affairs that went utterly unrecorded. In that era, it was not at all uncommon for a black man to simply disappear; sometimes his body might wash up in one of the local rivers, and sometimes not.
During the years leading up to the Civil War, blacks in the South were rarely the victims of lynchings -- since they were viewed as property, it was considered an act of theft to kill someone else’s slave. There was an exception to this: Putting down slave revolts. The fear of black insurrection (and there were a handful of real slave revolts, notably Nat Turner's 1831 Virginia rebellion, in which some sixty whites were killed) was so pervasive among Southerners that any rumor that one might occur could bring swift death to the alleged conspirators, even if, as was often the case, it later turned out there were no such plans. In any event, when lynching did occur in the years before the Civil War, the victims predominantly were whites. Many of these were in the antebellum South, where lynch-mob treatment was often administered to abolitionists and other "meddlers."
If blacks' slave status largely protected them from racial violence before the Civil War, then its abolition also left them remarkably vulnerable to such assaults upon the South's defeat. This became immediately manifest, during Reconstruction, when black freedmen were subjected to a litany of attacks at the hands of their former owners that went utterly unpunished. As documented by Philip Dray in his definitive study, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, these crimes turned up in hospital records and field reports from the federal Freedmen's Bureau, all of which described a variety of clubbings, scalpings, mutilations, hangings and even immolations of former slaves, all within the first year after Appomatox.
In 1866, the violence became discernibly more organized with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which originated with a claque of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, and spread like wildfire throughout the South. Initially much of the Klan night riders’ activities were relegated to whippings, a punishment intended to remind the ex-slaves of their former status. But as the assaults on blacks increased, so did the intensity of the violence visited on them, culminating in a steady stream of Klan lynchings between 1868 and 1871 (when the Klan was officially outlawed by the Grant Administration); at least one study puts the number at 20,000 blacks killed by the Klan in that period. In the ensuing years, the violence did little to decline, and in fact worsened, despite the Klan’s official banishment.
Moreover, in addition to the night-riding type of terrorist attacks, mass spectacle lynchings soon appeared. These were ritualistic mob scenes in which prisoners or even men merely suspected of crimes were often torn from the hands of authorities (if not captured beforehand) by large crowds and treated to beatings and torture before being put to death, frequently in the most horrifying fashion possible: people were flayed alive, had their eyes gouged out with corkscrews, and had their bodies mutilated before being doused in oil and burned at the stake. Black men were sometimes forced to eat their own hacked-off genitals. No atrocity was considered too horrible to visit on a black person, and no pain too unimaginable to inflict in the killing. (When whites, by contrast, were lynched, the act almost always was restricted to simple hanging.)
The violence reached a fever pitch in the years 1890-1902, when 1,322 lynchings of blacks (out of 1,785 total lynchings) were recorded at Tuskegee, which translates into an average of over 110 lynchings a year. The trend began to decline afterward, but continued well into the 1930s, leading some historians to refer to the years 1880-1930 as the "lynching period" of American culture.
'Keepin' the niggers down'
There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from the postcards themselves, which frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning. Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.
Indeed, lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community. Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards, memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with which the victim was hung. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as a warning to would-be black criminals.
That was the purported moral purpose of these demonstrations: Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces) not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners' reports from lynchings merely described the victims' deaths occurring "at the hands of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude, but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will. This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as symbolic of the region’s continuing economic and cultural oppression by the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the ocean’s tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under foot."
Such sexual paranoia was central to the lynching phenomenon. In the years following black emancipation -- during which time a previously tiny class of black criminals became swelled by the ranks of impoverished former slaves -- a vast mythology arose surrounding black men's supposed voracious lust for white women, a legend for which in truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men's longtime sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era. In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of white women by black men came to be almost universally believed by American whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The New York Herald, for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their wives and daughters are perfectly safe."
The cries of rape, for many whites in both South and North, raised fears not merely of sexual violence but of racial mixing, known commonly as "miscegenation," which was specifically outlawed in some 30 states. White supremacy was not only commonplace, it was in fact the dominant worldview of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most Caucasians believed they represented Nature’s premier creation (having been informed this by a broad range of social scientists of the period, whose views eventually coalesced into the pseudo-science known as eugenics), and that any "dilution" of those strains represented a gross violation of the natural order. Thus it was not surprising that a number of lynching incidents actually resulted from the discovery of consensual relations between a black man and a white woman.
Underlying the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear of economic and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and various other "outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the South, where blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of poverty that lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching in fact was frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of economic and social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites, had become too "uppity."
There were, of course, other components of black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy. The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an expression of the white community's will to keep African-Americans in their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it, lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."
An honest look
Now, none of this is to suggest that America was to blame for the murderous acts that occurred on 9/11. It is instead to suggest that for the first time Americans -- white Americans especially -- tasted the awfulness of the dread and fear that they often have unthinkingly, and more often unknowingly, inflicted on others. It is this reality that should make us step back and contemplate what kind of war on terrorism we want to be waging.
The writer Walter Mosley, who watched the World Trade Center collapse, reflected on this recently in an interview with Jerry Large of the Seattle Times:
- Mosley writes that most Americans believe our history and political culture flow from the most noble of concepts: freedom, democracy, opportunity. But that isn't entirely true. "We are fooled by the rhetoric of our national heritage and, in that hoodwinked condition, we make false assumptions about the face we show to the world."
Do we just want to wage a war of revenge and intimidation? One that will just put the rest of the world under our thumb? Doesn't that strike anyone else as just more of the same? Terrorism begetting terrorism begetting terrorism. Death begetting death.
I have a daughter who is going to turn 2 soon. I don't want her to grow up in a world where fear reigns. I don't want her to be fighting a fresh generation of terrorism in 20 years because we fought the current round stupidly and unthinkingly.
I want to wage A Real War on Terrorism. I want justice for those 3,000 people who died Sept. 11, and I want justice for my country. I want Al Qaeda and its henchmen brought to heel. But more than that, I want us to confront the fact that violence is coming at us from all sides now. And some of it is indeed revenge for our own brand of terrorism.
Someone needs to cut the cycle of terrorism. And its needs to be America. Now.
More to the point, we obviously cannot count on our national leaders (particularly not those in the White House) to do the job. If we want to wage this war -- a serious war against terrorism, not a fake one designed to inflate poll ratings -- it's going to have to be up to the citizens. I'm hoping in coming days to come up with ways that all of us can make a difference.
Sunday, March 02, 2003
Tricky Dick, meet Curious George
From the Observer:
Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war
The American press so far has managed to shrug off the deeply skeptical reporting on the Bush administration from the European press, but they may not be able to ignore this story. At least not if it stiffens grass-roots opposition to the Iraq war in England. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
In the meantime, has anyone else happened to notice just how many old Nixonites are operating the machinery for Bush the Younger? Of course, that's in no small part because Bush the Elder in fact was a Nixon protege ...
Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war
- The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.
The American press so far has managed to shrug off the deeply skeptical reporting on the Bush administration from the European press, but they may not be able to ignore this story. At least not if it stiffens grass-roots opposition to the Iraq war in England. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
In the meantime, has anyone else happened to notice just how many old Nixonites are operating the machinery for Bush the Younger? Of course, that's in no small part because Bush the Elder in fact was a Nixon protege ...
Those America haters
Bob Herbert's column earlier this week made a significant point: That the Bush team's efforts to attack affirmative action in fact are part of a broad assault on the very concept of a multicultural America:
I've observed previously that hostility to multiculturalism often reveals an underlying affinity to its historical enemy, white supremacism. And indeed many of the current attacks are coming from places like Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, which has a history of promoting a white nationalist agenda. If Weyrich's previous writings are any guide, the superiority of "Judeo-Christian [read: white] culture" is what the current "War on Terror" is really all about.
Obviously, these agendas are inimical to the very concept of the racially inclusive America that has taken firm root in the past half-century. That's the America I think most of the rest of us believe we're currently defending from attack by Islamists. It is not, apparently, the America the Bush regime is seeking to create.
Herbert identifies the Center for Individual Rights as the "driving force" behind the Michigan cases. The CIR is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife -- the renowned Clinton-hater who also brought us a number of pseudo-Patriot "news" organizations like WorldNetDaily. Ann Coulter once worked for CIR.
I guess it's not surprising that Scaife is deeply involved; that should have been apparent because of Ted Olson's involvement. Follow the money.
Just imagine an America where the only people who count look like Ted Olson and Ann Coulter. Or are we there already?
- A closer look at these challenges, however, would show that they are largely being driven by a huge, complex and extraordinarily well-financed web of conservative and right-wing organizations that in many cases are hostile not just to affirmative action but to the very idea of a multiracial, pluralistic America.
I've observed previously that hostility to multiculturalism often reveals an underlying affinity to its historical enemy, white supremacism. And indeed many of the current attacks are coming from places like Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, which has a history of promoting a white nationalist agenda. If Weyrich's previous writings are any guide, the superiority of "Judeo-Christian [read: white] culture" is what the current "War on Terror" is really all about.
Obviously, these agendas are inimical to the very concept of the racially inclusive America that has taken firm root in the past half-century. That's the America I think most of the rest of us believe we're currently defending from attack by Islamists. It is not, apparently, the America the Bush regime is seeking to create.
Herbert identifies the Center for Individual Rights as the "driving force" behind the Michigan cases. The CIR is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife -- the renowned Clinton-hater who also brought us a number of pseudo-Patriot "news" organizations like WorldNetDaily. Ann Coulter once worked for CIR.
I guess it's not surprising that Scaife is deeply involved; that should have been apparent because of Ted Olson's involvement. Follow the money.
Just imagine an America where the only people who count look like Ted Olson and Ann Coulter. Or are we there already?
The Christian spirit
My friend Maia Cowan posted the following at Salon's Table Talk:
I've thought for some time that the Bush regime would topple under the weight of its own corruption, but what I fear most is the damage he will wreak in the meantime, as well as in the toppling.
- I'm on a mailing list managed by Dr. Carol Wolman, author of Diagnosing Dubya. Her mailings frequently have a Christian theme, specifically the theme that Bush's professions of Christianity are totally bogus. Here's an excerpt from a message I just received:
- Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.
Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins." Matthew 18: 21-22
Bush's "conversion" to Christianity was poured right into the old wineskin of his family loyalties, the secret clubs to which he belongs, the Republican party, etc. None of the spirit of peace and love seems to have penetrated his soul. That old wineskin is bound to burst. The fascist spirit which inhabits the US government right now will be ruined. Let's pray that it's not too messy for the rest of us.
- Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
I've thought for some time that the Bush regime would topple under the weight of its own corruption, but what I fear most is the damage he will wreak in the meantime, as well as in the toppling.
The giant sucking sound you hear
Hesiod at Counterspin Central makes a keen observation about reading Rush Limbaugh in black and white:
I've been spending more time than I should over at the new Rush Transcript, and have come away with exactly the same feeling. It is mind-boggling to wade through his material and realize how little of substance is there. Indeed, the transcripts are more in the way of anti-substance. And Limbaugh's mind is like a great Black Hole.
- Put aside your opinion of his political ideology...when you actually sit down and read what he says, transcribed, it looks like utter and complete gibberish.
It's just like that homeless, psychologically disturbed guy on the street corner having a conversation with some phantom presence.
It's really weird.
And you know what? You read his words trying to figure out how so many human beings in this country find him so convincing. You really do.
I've been spending more time than I should over at the new Rush Transcript, and have come away with exactly the same feeling. It is mind-boggling to wade through his material and realize how little of substance is there. Indeed, the transcripts are more in the way of anti-substance. And Limbaugh's mind is like a great Black Hole.
The Divine Mr. W
Damn, I guess Howard Fineman was unhappy that Bob Woodward replaced him as MWO's Whore of the Year this year. He's reaching for that golden crown again:
Warning: Only for those able to stomach large dollops of Bush fellation. It is worthwhile, though, in further burnishing some observations made earlier about Bush's open promotion of the image of the Divinely Inspired Presidency, as well as the depth of the Busheviks' ties to the religious right:
Of course, the deeper ramifications of this close identification of Bush with fundamentalists' religious beliefs vis-a-vis the End Times are especially disturbing. If nothing else, it should be eminently clear that the religious right, including its overt theocrats, has always comprised the core of Bush's constituency, and is clearly prepared to do "whatever it takes" to defend his Divine Presidency.
- Bush and God: A higher calling: It is his defining journey—from reveler to revelation. A biography of his faith, and how he wields it as he leads a nation on the brink of war
Warning: Only for those able to stomach large dollops of Bush fellation. It is worthwhile, though, in further burnishing some observations made earlier about Bush's open promotion of the image of the Divinely Inspired Presidency, as well as the depth of the Busheviks' ties to the religious right:
- Bush and Rove built their joint careers on that new base. Faith and ambition became one, with Bush doing the talking and Rove doing the thinking on policy and spin. In 1993—the year before he ran for governor—Bush caused a small tempest by telling an Austin reporter (who happened to be Jewish) that only believers in Jesus go to heaven. It was a theologically unremarkable statement, at least in Texas. But the fact that he had been brazen enough to say it produced a stir. While the editorial writers huffed, Rove quietly expressed satisfaction. The story would help establish his client’s Bible-belt bona fides in rural (and, until then, primarily Democratic) Texas. As a candidate, Bush sought, and got, advice from pastors, especially leaders of new, nondenominational “megachurches” in the suburbs. His ideas for governing were congenial to his faith, and dreamed up in his faith circles. The ideas were designed to draw evangelicals to the polls without sounding too church-made. “Compassionate conservatism”—mentoring, tough love on crime, faith-based welfare—was in many ways just a CBS Bible study writ large ...
The presidential campaign was Texas on a grander scale. As he prepared to run, in 1999, Bush assembled leading pastors at the governor’s mansion for a “laying-on of hands,” and told them he’d been “called” to seek higher office. In the GOP primaries, he outmaneuvered the field by practicing what one rival, Gary Bauer, called “identity politics.” Others tried to woo evangelicals by pledging strict allegiance on issues such as abortion and gay rights. “Bush talked about his faith,” said Bauer, “and people just believed him—and believed in him.” There was genius in this. The son of Bush One was widely, logically, believed by secular voters to be a closet moderate. Suddenly, the father’s burden was a gift: Bush Two could reach the base without threatening the rest. “He was and is ‘one of us’,” said Charles Colson, who sold the then Governor Bush on a faith-based prison program.
Of course, the deeper ramifications of this close identification of Bush with fundamentalists' religious beliefs vis-a-vis the End Times are especially disturbing. If nothing else, it should be eminently clear that the religious right, including its overt theocrats, has always comprised the core of Bush's constituency, and is clearly prepared to do "whatever it takes" to defend his Divine Presidency.
Saturday, March 01, 2003
Soft on white supremacy
Here's a story no longer available on the Web, from the Merrillville, Ind., Post-Tribune of Feb. 28:
Bill would prohibit prison guards wearing racist insignia
Here's the text of the bill. Of course, the question that springs to most people's minds is: You mean this isn't state policy already? And the answer is: In most states, probably not. In some where the Aryan Brotherhood is recognized as a problem, the matter may in fact be addressed through corrections-department regulations; in cases like Indiana's, a statutory requirement sometimes ensures that any such rule isn't overlooked, something to which wardens are sometimes prone.
Sure. Just as lynching and segregation were best handled by local folks in the South.
I was curious about the seven legislators who voted against the measure. Here are their names. See if you can spot a trend:
Rep. Timothy Brown, R-Dist. 41
Rep. Jim Buck, R-Dist. 38
Rep. Woody Burton, R-Dist. 58
Rep. Eric Gutwien, R-Dist. 16
Rep. Dennis Kruse, R-Dist. 51
Rep. Cindy Noe, R-Dist. 87
Rep. P. Eric Turner, R-Dist. 32
You'll also note the (highlighted) third name down. That's none other than the brother of noted moral paragon Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana.
Bill would prohibit prison guards wearing racist insignia
- INDIANAPOLIS — State prison guards would be barred from wearing racist insignias under a bill that passed the House this week.
The bill by Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, would prohibit guards from wearing clothing, jewelry or tattoos with racial insignia.
The original idea for the bill emerged two years ago, when inmates began to complain about a ring, worn by prison guards, that appeared to have the initials KKK entwined in a series of ribbons that surrounded the stone.
The state Department of Correction barred the ring and issued a new version without the questionable markings.
“They took steps to correct the problem, but they never addressed the whole issue of racial markings in the prison,” Smith said.
Here's the text of the bill. Of course, the question that springs to most people's minds is: You mean this isn't state policy already? And the answer is: In most states, probably not. In some where the Aryan Brotherhood is recognized as a problem, the matter may in fact be addressed through corrections-department regulations; in cases like Indiana's, a statutory requirement sometimes ensures that any such rule isn't overlooked, something to which wardens are sometimes prone.
- A legislative study commission determined there were other problems with guards wearing racist material in the prison. Guards in downstate prisons were wearing tattoos to show their affiliation with a group called the Brotherhood, which was shown to be a white supremacist group, Smith said.
The bill passed the House 90-7 and now moves on to the Senate. The handful of lawmakers who spoke against the measure said the General Assembly was taking on a job best left to prison administrators.
Sure. Just as lynching and segregation were best handled by local folks in the South.
I was curious about the seven legislators who voted against the measure. Here are their names. See if you can spot a trend:
Rep. Timothy Brown, R-Dist. 41
Rep. Jim Buck, R-Dist. 38
Rep. Woody Burton, R-Dist. 58
Rep. Eric Gutwien, R-Dist. 16
Rep. Dennis Kruse, R-Dist. 51
Rep. Cindy Noe, R-Dist. 87
Rep. P. Eric Turner, R-Dist. 32
You'll also note the (highlighted) third name down. That's none other than the brother of noted moral paragon Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana.
Welcome to the 19th century
And here I thought Idaho was a backwards state:
Ohio Senate decides 14th Amendment OK after all
Ohio Senate decides 14th Amendment OK after all
- The Senate voted unanimously to pass the amendment, 135 years after most of the country did, and sent the resolution to the House.
The legislature passed the amendment Jan. 11, 1867, but a year later rescinded ratification as "contrary to the best interests of the white race."
Coble calls
Democratic chairman calls for Coble to resign chairmanship
Finally, at least one faction among the Democrats showed some spine. Where are you, Nancy Pelosi?
In any case, the calls are starting to mount up: The NAACP. The JACL. CAIR. Even the op-ed page of the Charlotte Observer..
The worst part of all this is that Coble so far refuses to admit he was wrong.
Are there any Republicans out there who think he was? Just wondering.
- "U.S. Rep. Coble is not fit to lead our country on security and constitutional matters and must resign from the chairmanship," the statement said.
Finally, at least one faction among the Democrats showed some spine. Where are you, Nancy Pelosi?
In any case, the calls are starting to mount up: The NAACP. The JACL. CAIR. Even the op-ed page of the Charlotte Observer..
The worst part of all this is that Coble so far refuses to admit he was wrong.
Are there any Republicans out there who think he was? Just wondering.
A Divine Regular Guy
A little more on the downright inspirational Bush presidency, from Alabama columnist Gene Owens (who will never be mistaken for Gene Lyons):
Bush talks to friends off the cuff
All of which should make clear to any good Christian that when Bush makes a decision, it's being made with the full guidance of our Lord and Savior Himself.
Of course, no Bush remarks would be complete without pointing out that he pays no attention to his detractors:
As it happens, of course, those anti-U.N. signs were erected by members of the John Birch Society.
This is the kind of remark I'm referring to when discussing the gestures Bush makes in the direction of right-wing extremists. It plays no small role in the wide support he enjoys among so many of them.
Bush talks to friends off the cuff
- "I feel the comfort and the power of knowing that literally millions of Americans I'm never going to meet ... say my name to the Almighty every day and ask him to help me," he said. "My friend, Jiang Zemin in China, has about a billion and a half folks, and I don't think he can say that. And my friend, Vladimir Putin, I like him, but he can't say that."
All of which should make clear to any good Christian that when Bush makes a decision, it's being made with the full guidance of our Lord and Savior Himself.
Of course, no Bush remarks would be complete without pointing out that he pays no attention to his detractors:
- "I don't listen to this noise that goes on around here, and I don't pay much attention to those people who want to stay here, he said. I came from Texas, and I'll go back to Texas. And in Midland, Texas, when I grew up, there were more signs saying Get us out of the UN' than there were saying God Bless America.' And there were plenty of God Bless America' signs."
As it happens, of course, those anti-U.N. signs were erected by members of the John Birch Society.
This is the kind of remark I'm referring to when discussing the gestures Bush makes in the direction of right-wing extremists. It plays no small role in the wide support he enjoys among so many of them.
Friday, February 28, 2003
Rush, Newspeak and fascism: Part 6
I'd like to apologize to everyone who's been following the series on fascism; I've kind of dropped the ball since Part 5 appeared nearly three weeks ago. These posts require a great deal of focus and I've been distracted by other issues. I'll try to catch up in the coming days with more regular installments in the series. (I've put links to the previous five parts at the bottom of this post.)
I left off talking about how -- left-wing hyperbole notwithstanding -- our current state couldn't be called fascist per se. We are, however, in danger of a real manifestation of it, particularly if the identifiable proto-fascist elements form a power alliance with the corporatist elements; and secondarily, if this alliance is effected under the aegis of a singular charismatic personality. I mentioned that I would try to tackle the key role of "transmitters" in this process, but a couple of things have happened in the interim that have forced another important component to the fore, and I'd like to tackle it this week: Namely, the role of Bush's professed religiosity and the image, promoted by himself and by the White House, of W. as an instrument of God.
As I mentioned, the Bush regime is clearly comprised of corporatists. A couple of readers wrote in to point out that Mussolini himself described fascism as corporatism in control of the state -- though of course, this is a typically self-serving (for Il Duce) and incomplete definition of fascism, as I've explained previously. Nonetheless, as Matthew Davis wrote in an e-mail:
However, I think it's important to point out that much of what prevents the current regime from being defined by any reasonable measure as 'fascist' is the extent to which it resorts to thuggery and street violence, or any of the other tactics of threatening initimidation that are associated with genuine fascism -- which so far is not to any great or really appreciable degree. That may, however, be changing.
It's worth observing, of course, that these tactics are favored by the kind of denizens that normally made up the identifiable proto-fascist element in America: namely, the Patriot/militia movement and associated manifestations of right-wing extremism, especially including anti-abortion extremists. And unfortunately, the Bush campaign's apparent alliance with some of these thuggish elements in the Florida debacle indicates that, when push comes to shove, they may be precisely the kind of corporatists who wouldn't hesitate a moment to form an alliance with, and unleash the latent violence of, the Patriots and their ilk. And when that occurs, we will have full-blown fascism on our hands.
Certainly, as I've already pointed out, much of this element clearly identifies with Bush now and could be considered fully part of the Republican electorate, instead of the maverick Reform Party-type voters they may have been eight years ago. The extent to which this identification deepens in the coming years may well determine whether or not this proto-fascist element will blossom further inside the mainstream. Certainly it is clear that it is already deepening in the administration's response to the antiwar protests, and the coalescence of the footsoldiers of the far right behind Bush on this front.
These folks are one of the more significant components of right-wing extremism, because they represent its largest component. Most militias and right-wing extremist organizations typically enjoy a kind of hierarchy: the leaders, the True Believers, and the footsoldiers. The leaders and the True Believers, who remain relatively small in numbers, are unlikely to have shifted over to Bush's camp (though again it's worth noting that even noted white-supremacist leaders announced their support for Bush's candidacy in 2000). On the other hand, it's also become clear that the footsoldiers -- the followers who signed up for militia duty when Clinton was in office, but who don't see the threat now that Bush is running the show -- are fully in the Republican camp now.
The meeting ground of so much of this far-right ideology with mainstream conservatism has for the previous eight years been mostly in the Clinton-hating pursuit of the last duly-elected president. But now, with Bush in office, the field is shifting. The new meeting ground is fundamentalist Christianity, and particularly its role in the post-Sept. 11 environment and the Bush presidency.
Most Patriot footsoldiers I encountered were fundamentalist Christians of some kind. (True Believers, on the other hand, had a tendency toward either a military background or a fetish about all things soldierly, and were actually more likely to be agnostic, though of course they could provide great lip service to fundamentalist sentiments.) In some cases, the brand of religion they practiced was white-supremacist Identity, which actually is a particularly virulent strain of fundamentalism. Indeed, I've argued elsewhere that Identity in many ways is the logical outcome of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy that in so many ways forms the core of fundamentalism.
In most cases, though, Patriot followers tended to subscribe to various forms of more generic fundamentalism, especially the culturally conservative style favored by Southern Baptists, as well as the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells out there evangelizing on television. Of course, Robertson himself is noted for promoting Patriotesque "New World Order" conspiracy theories himself, and Falwell's "Clinton Conspiracy" ventures were extraordinarily popular among the militia set as well.
The ties binding President Bush in with this sector have seen some significant developments in recent weeks:
-- First were the reports that came leaking out of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Crystal City, Va., earlier this month:
It's important to note what the atmosphere was like at the CPAC gathering: The Clinton-hate remains palpable and is an important trigger topic, but the focus has shifted to two topics: first, the utter demonization of all things liberal, with a rising quota of eliminationist rhetoric; and an exaltation of all things Bush, with a heavy emphasis on the Christian aspect of his "character" and the clear implication of divine Providence in his presidency.
CPAC is an important conjunction of the mainstream and extremist right, so it's very instructive to see the commingling of ideologies at its gathering. Back when I was posting on the conference earlier, a skeptical reader wrote to pose a pertinent question:
This is, of course, the entire point: Gatherings like CPAC give a broad range of extremists, posing as ordinary Joes or Limbaughite loudmouths, the opportunity to spread their radical ideas among the whole sector of mainstream conservatism. Unassuming conservatives go to these gatherings and come away at least exposed to, if not outright converted to, some of these extremist beliefs. That's how these ideas eventually gain circulation among the broader population, often dressed up in a nice Republican cloth coat.
-- Next was Bush's relatively mundane appearance before the National Religious Broadcasters in which he touted his 'faith-based initiatives.' What was noteworthy was that at the same conference, the NRB's president, Glenn Plummer, delivered a scathing attack on Islam, denouncing it as a 'pagan religion' -- which is the kind of talk the Bush team has, up till now, done an admirable job of countering. (Recall that Bush chastised both Falwell and Robertson for similar loose talk in early December.) After all, much of the president's war coalition depends upon Islamic allies, and moreover, an Islam-vs.-West cultural conflict is precisely the trap Osama bin Laden has laid for us. But Plummer's remarks received neither rebuke nor demurral from the White House.
-- Then, there have been a spate of stories describing Bush's religiosity, notably this one from the Baltimore Sun:
Christ-centered course of faith-based president worries some
Of course, we've discussed previously Bush's predilection for seeing himself in a messianic light. I was particularly struck by the passage from ex-speechwriter David Frum's book about Bush, mentioned in the Progressive piece at the last link:
It's clear that not only does Bush see himself as a man on a divine mission, but he actively cultivates this view of his importance among his staff. Moreover, the White House similarly promotes this image to the public, particularly among conservative Christians.
It's important to note that the White House has been very secretive about the nature of Bush's relationship with the religious right. Indeed, his pre-election overtures to the fundamentalists were specifically kept under wraps. It was something that should have been noticed and uncovered at the time, but everyone was too busy unearthing Al Gore "lies."
I'm thinking specifically of Skipp Porteous' work at the (apparently now-defunct) Institute for First Amendment Studies. Skipp attempted to find out just what Bush was saying at one of the meetings where many of us suspect he was promising to carry out their agenda once elected -- specifically, a meeting of the Council for National Policy in 1999:
Of course, any reporter worth their salt would recognize that Fleischer is baldly lying. If it's only a mundane speech, then what's the secrecy? Why not just let journalists listen to it?
[Sure. I know the answer. The same one you get to the question: Why doesn't he just release his military records?]
The sum of all this identification of Bush with a Divine Agenda -- which has reached such heights that now they're even organizing fasts for Bush -- is especially troubling in light of the presence of a proto-fascist element within the ranks of those who openly and avidly support him. While Bush himself may not be charismatic in any kind of classic sense, his adoption of this image may be an effective substitute for rallying a fanatical following, especially in a time of war.
This has been driven home in the past week as the rhetoric identifying antiwar dissent as "treason" has reached new levels, as has the open use of thuggery to silence dissent.
The essence of this mindset is the concept, described by John Burns in his excellent letter, of "a law beyond the law":
This very concept is now being circulated by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The upshot, I'm afraid, is that the Supreme Court itself is in danger of aligning itself explicitly with the open use of such thuggery as may be necessary to maintain power.
Dave Johnson really brought this to my attention with this post at Seeing the Forest, which directed us to a May 2002 piece by Scalia:
God's Justice and Ours
As Johnson correctly sums up:
Under the legal theory Scalia now seems to advocate, a Bush administration that saw itself on a divine mission might find some justification for refusing to relinquish the reins of power to a Democratic election winner in 2004. With the backing of Patriot thugs who shout down political dissenters, and a devotedly pro-Bush military, it would not be hard to imagine who would be most likely to lay claim to being the "hand of God" and thereby winning Scalia's proclamation as the nation's true ruler, mere democracy notwithstanding.
This is not to suggest that such an unthinkable scenario is being plotted by the administration. But when the rhetoric starts inviting thuggery, the equation changes dramatically. And events have a way of piling upon themselves inevitably. After all, who could have foreseen the sequence that brought us Bush v. Gore?
That ruling was, in many ways, a harbinger, in that it represented a similar capitulation to thuggish, proto-fascist elements. Recall, if you will, that it is a unique ruling in that it has virtually no defenders or supporters outside of a tiny clique centered around the arguments offered by Richard Posner. And the essence of Posner's defense of Bush v. Gore is that, yes, legally it may have been a thoroughly unsound ruling, but the court was acting in a practical sense by settling the election decisively, because otherwise incipient social chaos threatened. It was, you see, justice, not the law.
Of course, as it happened, the only sector of the country that was likely at the time to enact any widespread social chaos was the extremist right -- the same Freepers and Patriots who are now threatening to string up anyone who questions the Divine President's war plans.
I promise: Next I will discuss how "transmitters" like Rush Limbaugh and the Free Republic make this all happen. They're the straws who stir the pot.
_____
Here's the rest of the series:
Rush, Newspeak and fascism: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
I left off talking about how -- left-wing hyperbole notwithstanding -- our current state couldn't be called fascist per se. We are, however, in danger of a real manifestation of it, particularly if the identifiable proto-fascist elements form a power alliance with the corporatist elements; and secondarily, if this alliance is effected under the aegis of a singular charismatic personality. I mentioned that I would try to tackle the key role of "transmitters" in this process, but a couple of things have happened in the interim that have forced another important component to the fore, and I'd like to tackle it this week: Namely, the role of Bush's professed religiosity and the image, promoted by himself and by the White House, of W. as an instrument of God.
As I mentioned, the Bush regime is clearly comprised of corporatists. A couple of readers wrote in to point out that Mussolini himself described fascism as corporatism in control of the state -- though of course, this is a typically self-serving (for Il Duce) and incomplete definition of fascism, as I've explained previously. Nonetheless, as Matthew Davis wrote in an e-mail:
- Any reasonable definition of 'fascism' should incorporate a corporatist component--both Mussolini and Franco (and certainly Hitler, who's not really a pure Fascist) were big on running their country for the benefit of corporate elites, at the expense of labor (sound familiar?). They occupied a grey area where industry wasn't the direct property of the state, but maintained a hand-in-glove symbiosis. The U.S. under Bush isn't quite as tight with industry, but it ain't that far off, either.
However, I think it's important to point out that much of what prevents the current regime from being defined by any reasonable measure as 'fascist' is the extent to which it resorts to thuggery and street violence, or any of the other tactics of threatening initimidation that are associated with genuine fascism -- which so far is not to any great or really appreciable degree. That may, however, be changing.
It's worth observing, of course, that these tactics are favored by the kind of denizens that normally made up the identifiable proto-fascist element in America: namely, the Patriot/militia movement and associated manifestations of right-wing extremism, especially including anti-abortion extremists. And unfortunately, the Bush campaign's apparent alliance with some of these thuggish elements in the Florida debacle indicates that, when push comes to shove, they may be precisely the kind of corporatists who wouldn't hesitate a moment to form an alliance with, and unleash the latent violence of, the Patriots and their ilk. And when that occurs, we will have full-blown fascism on our hands.
Certainly, as I've already pointed out, much of this element clearly identifies with Bush now and could be considered fully part of the Republican electorate, instead of the maverick Reform Party-type voters they may have been eight years ago. The extent to which this identification deepens in the coming years may well determine whether or not this proto-fascist element will blossom further inside the mainstream. Certainly it is clear that it is already deepening in the administration's response to the antiwar protests, and the coalescence of the footsoldiers of the far right behind Bush on this front.
These folks are one of the more significant components of right-wing extremism, because they represent its largest component. Most militias and right-wing extremist organizations typically enjoy a kind of hierarchy: the leaders, the True Believers, and the footsoldiers. The leaders and the True Believers, who remain relatively small in numbers, are unlikely to have shifted over to Bush's camp (though again it's worth noting that even noted white-supremacist leaders announced their support for Bush's candidacy in 2000). On the other hand, it's also become clear that the footsoldiers -- the followers who signed up for militia duty when Clinton was in office, but who don't see the threat now that Bush is running the show -- are fully in the Republican camp now.
The meeting ground of so much of this far-right ideology with mainstream conservatism has for the previous eight years been mostly in the Clinton-hating pursuit of the last duly-elected president. But now, with Bush in office, the field is shifting. The new meeting ground is fundamentalist Christianity, and particularly its role in the post-Sept. 11 environment and the Bush presidency.
Most Patriot footsoldiers I encountered were fundamentalist Christians of some kind. (True Believers, on the other hand, had a tendency toward either a military background or a fetish about all things soldierly, and were actually more likely to be agnostic, though of course they could provide great lip service to fundamentalist sentiments.) In some cases, the brand of religion they practiced was white-supremacist Identity, which actually is a particularly virulent strain of fundamentalism. Indeed, I've argued elsewhere that Identity in many ways is the logical outcome of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy that in so many ways forms the core of fundamentalism.
In most cases, though, Patriot followers tended to subscribe to various forms of more generic fundamentalism, especially the culturally conservative style favored by Southern Baptists, as well as the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells out there evangelizing on television. Of course, Robertson himself is noted for promoting Patriotesque "New World Order" conspiracy theories himself, and Falwell's "Clinton Conspiracy" ventures were extraordinarily popular among the militia set as well.
The ties binding President Bush in with this sector have seen some significant developments in recent weeks:
-- First were the reports that came leaking out of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Crystal City, Va., earlier this month:
- Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, "George Bush is our agenda!"
It's important to note what the atmosphere was like at the CPAC gathering: The Clinton-hate remains palpable and is an important trigger topic, but the focus has shifted to two topics: first, the utter demonization of all things liberal, with a rising quota of eliminationist rhetoric; and an exaltation of all things Bush, with a heavy emphasis on the Christian aspect of his "character" and the clear implication of divine Providence in his presidency.
CPAC is an important conjunction of the mainstream and extremist right, so it's very instructive to see the commingling of ideologies at its gathering. Back when I was posting on the conference earlier, a skeptical reader wrote to pose a pertinent question:
- My secretary took a couple of days off last week to go to the CPAC convention and she's not particularly religious, not a theocrat by any means or Patriot-type, just a mainstream conservative, so I am more than a little confused by your claims about CPAC.
This is, of course, the entire point: Gatherings like CPAC give a broad range of extremists, posing as ordinary Joes or Limbaughite loudmouths, the opportunity to spread their radical ideas among the whole sector of mainstream conservatism. Unassuming conservatives go to these gatherings and come away at least exposed to, if not outright converted to, some of these extremist beliefs. That's how these ideas eventually gain circulation among the broader population, often dressed up in a nice Republican cloth coat.
-- Next was Bush's relatively mundane appearance before the National Religious Broadcasters in which he touted his 'faith-based initiatives.' What was noteworthy was that at the same conference, the NRB's president, Glenn Plummer, delivered a scathing attack on Islam, denouncing it as a 'pagan religion' -- which is the kind of talk the Bush team has, up till now, done an admirable job of countering. (Recall that Bush chastised both Falwell and Robertson for similar loose talk in early December.) After all, much of the president's war coalition depends upon Islamic allies, and moreover, an Islam-vs.-West cultural conflict is precisely the trap Osama bin Laden has laid for us. But Plummer's remarks received neither rebuke nor demurral from the White House.
-- Then, there have been a spate of stories describing Bush's religiosity, notably this one from the Baltimore Sun:
Christ-centered course of faith-based president worries some
- At the same time, Bush's stepped-up efforts to express his faith coincide with a White House drive to court religious conservatives in advance of the president's 2004 re-election campaign.
The president's top political adviser, Karl Rove, has concluded up to 4 million Christian conservatives who probably would have voted for Bush instead stayed home in the 2000 election. Rove said a year ago that "we have to spend a lot of time and energy" drawing them back into politics.
Of course, we've discussed previously Bush's predilection for seeing himself in a messianic light. I was particularly struck by the passage from ex-speechwriter David Frum's book about Bush, mentioned in the Progressive piece at the last link:
- That Bush believes he was assigned the Presidency from on high comes through in another passage of Frum's book. After Bush's September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Gerson called up the President to compliment him: "Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought--God wanted you there," Gerson said, according to Frum.
"He wants us all here, Gerson," the President responded, according to Frum.
It's clear that not only does Bush see himself as a man on a divine mission, but he actively cultivates this view of his importance among his staff. Moreover, the White House similarly promotes this image to the public, particularly among conservative Christians.
It's important to note that the White House has been very secretive about the nature of Bush's relationship with the religious right. Indeed, his pre-election overtures to the fundamentalists were specifically kept under wraps. It was something that should have been noticed and uncovered at the time, but everyone was too busy unearthing Al Gore "lies."
I'm thinking specifically of Skipp Porteous' work at the (apparently now-defunct) Institute for First Amendment Studies. Skipp attempted to find out just what Bush was saying at one of the meetings where many of us suspect he was promising to carry out their agenda once elected -- specifically, a meeting of the Council for National Policy in 1999:
- To find out what the Republican candidate for president had to say to such a group, the Institute for First Amendment Studies (IFAS) ordered a set of audiotapes of the sessions. Using an approach that had worked several times in the past – tapes are available to members only – the tapes finally arrived, sans the Bush speech.
IFAS contacted Skynet Media, the recording company hired to record CNP meetings. IFAS then learned that it wasn't the fanatically secretive CNP that decided to delete the Bush tape from the package – the deletion was done on direct order from the Bush campaign. When asked if they actually have the Bush tape, Skynet spokesperson Curt Morse said, "We do," and also noted it wasn't available at any price.
When asked about Bush's speech at CNP, Scott Sforca, a press officer for the George W. Bush for President campaign office, claimed that the meeting "doesn't ring a bell" with him.
When contacted by The New York Times, CNP executive director Blackwell put it as follows: "[T]he Bush entourage said they preferred that the tape[s] not go out, though I could not see any reason why they shouldn't." Blackwell claims that it was a standard speech that he had heard before and since.
Ari Fleischer, a Bush campaign spokesman, told The Times that if anyone was "hoping to hear something that the governor would say that he hasn't said publicly, then they're on a wild goose chase." Fleischer declined to characterize the speech, but said, "When we go to meetings that are private, they remain private." He added, "As far as we know, there is no tape."
Of course, any reporter worth their salt would recognize that Fleischer is baldly lying. If it's only a mundane speech, then what's the secrecy? Why not just let journalists listen to it?
[Sure. I know the answer. The same one you get to the question: Why doesn't he just release his military records?]
The sum of all this identification of Bush with a Divine Agenda -- which has reached such heights that now they're even organizing fasts for Bush -- is especially troubling in light of the presence of a proto-fascist element within the ranks of those who openly and avidly support him. While Bush himself may not be charismatic in any kind of classic sense, his adoption of this image may be an effective substitute for rallying a fanatical following, especially in a time of war.
This has been driven home in the past week as the rhetoric identifying antiwar dissent as "treason" has reached new levels, as has the open use of thuggery to silence dissent.
The essence of this mindset is the concept, described by John Burns in his excellent letter, of "a law beyond the law":
- Even without the threat of punishment, every violation of the goals towards which the community is striving is wrong per se. As a result, the law gives up all claim to be the sole source for determining right and wrong. What is right may be learned not only from the law but also from the concept of justice which lies behind the law and may not have found perfect expression in the law.
This very concept is now being circulated by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The upshot, I'm afraid, is that the Supreme Court itself is in danger of aligning itself explicitly with the open use of such thuggery as may be necessary to maintain power.
Dave Johnson really brought this to my attention with this post at Seeing the Forest, which directed us to a May 2002 piece by Scalia:
God's Justice and Ours
As Johnson correctly sums up:
- Scalia appears to think that the way to identify legitimate God-chosen leaders is when they seize power in conflict, demonstrating that God chose them over others. He writes,
- "These passages from Romans represent the consensus of Western thought until very recent times. Not just of Christian or religious thought, but of secular thought regarding the powers of the state. That consensus has been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy. It is easy to see the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God—or any higher moral authority—behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will. How can their power to avenge—to vindicate the “public order”—be any greater than our own?"
Under the legal theory Scalia now seems to advocate, a Bush administration that saw itself on a divine mission might find some justification for refusing to relinquish the reins of power to a Democratic election winner in 2004. With the backing of Patriot thugs who shout down political dissenters, and a devotedly pro-Bush military, it would not be hard to imagine who would be most likely to lay claim to being the "hand of God" and thereby winning Scalia's proclamation as the nation's true ruler, mere democracy notwithstanding.
This is not to suggest that such an unthinkable scenario is being plotted by the administration. But when the rhetoric starts inviting thuggery, the equation changes dramatically. And events have a way of piling upon themselves inevitably. After all, who could have foreseen the sequence that brought us Bush v. Gore?
That ruling was, in many ways, a harbinger, in that it represented a similar capitulation to thuggish, proto-fascist elements. Recall, if you will, that it is a unique ruling in that it has virtually no defenders or supporters outside of a tiny clique centered around the arguments offered by Richard Posner. And the essence of Posner's defense of Bush v. Gore is that, yes, legally it may have been a thoroughly unsound ruling, but the court was acting in a practical sense by settling the election decisively, because otherwise incipient social chaos threatened. It was, you see, justice, not the law.
Of course, as it happened, the only sector of the country that was likely at the time to enact any widespread social chaos was the extremist right -- the same Freepers and Patriots who are now threatening to string up anyone who questions the Divine President's war plans.
I promise: Next I will discuss how "transmitters" like Rush Limbaugh and the Free Republic make this all happen. They're the straws who stir the pot.
_____
Here's the rest of the series:
Rush, Newspeak and fascism: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Thursday, February 27, 2003
From the horse's, er, something
Finally: Someone is transcribing Rush Limbaugh and putting his words down in black and white, so that at long last he may be called to account for them:
Rush Transcript
[Note the attractive template.]
Rush Transcript
[Note the attractive template.]
Grand salami
[Click for full cartoon.]
Tom Tomorrow knocks one out of the park. Here is the Salon link.
Be sure to visit his blog too: This Modern World
The War on Dissent: Goosestepping Along
Some fresh salvoes in the ongoing war against any criticism of the Bush administration:
Michael Savage, soon-to-be MSNBC talk-show host, has proposed the following law:
The Sedition Act
Read its sickening contents for yourself. At his Web site, his basic pitch is this:
Via Media Whores Online, we also have the latest offerings from that Faux journalist, Bill O'Reilly:
Hell, Bill. Why not just urge them to start building the concentration camps now?
Finally, Atrios bring us this startling account of what befell an antiwar protester recently in Atlanta:
Some months ago, I opened up a thread at Salon's Table Talk:
The war on dissent: Will the far right silence criticism of Bush?
Its basic predicate was my theory that as the Bush administration faced more difficulty acheiving its agenda, it would be more likely to resort to unleashing the reactionarism of the extremist right, particularly those jingoes who equate dissent with treason. As I've noted on multiple occasions, such views are innately anti-democratic, because their essence is intimidation, not debate. And the end result would be increasingly violent confrontations between Bushevikis and protesters opposed to his policies.
I predicted that the administration would make the necessary wink-and-nudge remarks that would loose these particular dogs -- and indeed, just before this most recent spate, we saw Vice President Cheney similarly equating dissent with treason.
What I didn't anticipate was the extent to which the mass media -- particularly the Fox News/Limbaugh/Savage axis -- would play a prominent role in whipping up this jingoism. But it's clear this is occurring at a brisk pace now. As the propaganda volumes rise, look for things to become increasingly worse.
And if the Democrats make a serious run in 2004 at the Bush regime's grip on power, don't be surprised if it becomes downright dangerous to be a liberal.
Michael Savage, soon-to-be MSNBC talk-show host, has proposed the following law:
The Sedition Act
Read its sickening contents for yourself. At his Web site, his basic pitch is this:
- Time to Arrest the Leaders of the Anti-War Movement,
Once we Go To War?
We Must Protect Our Troops!
Via Media Whores Online, we also have the latest offerings from that Faux journalist, Bill O'Reilly:
- "Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can't do that, just shut up.
"Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me.
"Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well. Let's just say you will be spotlighted."
Hell, Bill. Why not just urge them to start building the concentration camps now?
Finally, Atrios bring us this startling account of what befell an antiwar protester recently in Atlanta:
- I never chanted, raised my voice, confronted anyone or was disrespectful to those around me. I simply held my sign and stood my ground. The abuse came first from a small group of homemakers standing near me, their small children dressed in red, white and blue.
"Go home! You don't belong here," they said.
All around me folks began to speak up, and it wasn't long before a large group of people crossed the street with banners and flags and began aggressively yelling "Go USA!" Bob, a young man with a ball cap and a sign reading "Drop Bush, Not Bombs" came and stood with me for support.
The really frightening stuff began when a television cameraman stopped and asked me why I was there. As soon as the crowd saw the camera pointed at me, they went wild. I was trying to express myself and they screamed at me and over my voice. A man stood behind me making obscene gestures as I spoke.
The reporter tried three times, unsuccessfully, to get a picture without obscenity. One woman spat in my hair. The journalist gave up and moved on. The mob did not. Men and women violently screamed in my face and Bob's.
It stopped just long enough for the president's motorcade to pass by and then erupted again. We were told to " Get the f--- out of the country," had obscene gestures pushed in our faces. An elderly man told me to "Go to hell!"
Some months ago, I opened up a thread at Salon's Table Talk:
The war on dissent: Will the far right silence criticism of Bush?
Its basic predicate was my theory that as the Bush administration faced more difficulty acheiving its agenda, it would be more likely to resort to unleashing the reactionarism of the extremist right, particularly those jingoes who equate dissent with treason. As I've noted on multiple occasions, such views are innately anti-democratic, because their essence is intimidation, not debate. And the end result would be increasingly violent confrontations between Bushevikis and protesters opposed to his policies.
I predicted that the administration would make the necessary wink-and-nudge remarks that would loose these particular dogs -- and indeed, just before this most recent spate, we saw Vice President Cheney similarly equating dissent with treason.
What I didn't anticipate was the extent to which the mass media -- particularly the Fox News/Limbaugh/Savage axis -- would play a prominent role in whipping up this jingoism. But it's clear this is occurring at a brisk pace now. As the propaganda volumes rise, look for things to become increasingly worse.
And if the Democrats make a serious run in 2004 at the Bush regime's grip on power, don't be surprised if it becomes downright dangerous to be a liberal.
Flaming trousers
Did Karl Rove commit perjury? As Sam Heldman at Ignatz suggests, it's difficult to read this Dana Milbank piece and not come away with that clear impression:
The Political Mind Behind Tort Reform
The question is: Is he lying now, or was he lying then?
Or perhaps the more pertinent question: When doesn't this man lie?
The Political Mind Behind Tort Reform
- Rove's claim of responsibility for the tort reform issue is somewhat at odds with a deposition he gave during the tobacco lawsuit. Asked whether he discussed overhauling civil liability law with then-Gov. Bush, he replied: "I can't say that I did. But I can't say that I didn't. I do not recall. I know that tort reform was a significant part of his legislative agenda but it was not my area."
The question is: Is he lying now, or was he lying then?
Or perhaps the more pertinent question: When doesn't this man lie?
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Alone, but not alone
From the New York Times:
Agencies Warn of Lone Terrorists
This story is certainly worthwhile, and points up a trend among the far right we have in fact been seeing in recent years. But there is an underlying thesis here that's not quite correct: Namely, since these acts are idiosyncratic they are therefore only peripherally associated with ideology; thus, there's no real point worrying about those links to right-wing extremism.
There is of course some truth to this, but it is hardly the whole picture. Moreover, the desire to cast these terrorists as "lone nuts" is unfortunately part of the same view that would pretend Tim McVeigh's long ideological associations with right-wing extremists were unimportant. Or that Benjamin Smith's affiliations with the World Church of the Creator were insignificant. In other words, they are succumbing to the entire purpose of so-called 'leaderless resistance' strategies.
Even more important, creating "lone wolf" terrorist actors is specifically a strategy being promoted heavily by right-wing extremists. This trend has been noted many times by groups that monitor the far right. See, for example, this report from the ADL:
Alex Curtis and 'Lone Wolf' Extremism
The reality is that a 'lone wolf' terrorist is highly likely to have been inspired to some degree by right-wing extremists, many of whom have openly proclaimed Sept. 11 as the turning point in their would-be revolution to overthrow democracy. It may not always be the case, but the probability remains high.
Agencies Warn of Lone Terrorists
- "Lone extremists represent an ongoing terrorist threat in the United States," the bulletin said. "Lone extremists may operate independently or on the fringes of established extremist groups, either alone or with one or two accomplices."
This story is certainly worthwhile, and points up a trend among the far right we have in fact been seeing in recent years. But there is an underlying thesis here that's not quite correct: Namely, since these acts are idiosyncratic they are therefore only peripherally associated with ideology; thus, there's no real point worrying about those links to right-wing extremism.
- "Many lone extremists have no links to conventional terrorist groups," the bulletin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. "In fact, F.B.I. analysis suggests that psychological abnormalities, as much as devotion to an ideology, drive lone extremists to commit violent acts."
There is of course some truth to this, but it is hardly the whole picture. Moreover, the desire to cast these terrorists as "lone nuts" is unfortunately part of the same view that would pretend Tim McVeigh's long ideological associations with right-wing extremists were unimportant. Or that Benjamin Smith's affiliations with the World Church of the Creator were insignificant. In other words, they are succumbing to the entire purpose of so-called 'leaderless resistance' strategies.
Even more important, creating "lone wolf" terrorist actors is specifically a strategy being promoted heavily by right-wing extremists. This trend has been noted many times by groups that monitor the far right. See, for example, this report from the ADL:
Alex Curtis and 'Lone Wolf' Extremism
- He envisioned a two-tiered hate movement in which "divisive or subversive" propaganda would be widely distributed and would guide a revolutionary underground. The underground would consist of "lone wolves" - racist warriors acting alone or in small groups who attacked the government or other targets in "daily, anonymous acts." Curtis saw himself as a propagandist sowing the seeds of a racist revolution, and he predicted that "lone wolves" would reap the harvest.
In a diary entry from 1993, later obtained by police, Curtis wrote, "I plan to make it my life's goal to rid the Earth of the unwanted un-Aryan elements, by whatever means necessary and possible." Curtis openly discussed assassination as a realistic and desirable possibility. Borrowing from former Klan and Aryan Nations leader Louis Beam, who had first promoted the idea, Curtis posted to his Web site a "Lone Wolf Point System" that awarded scores to would-be assassins based on the importance of their victims; the goal was to help readers "intelligently judge the effectiveness of proposed acts against the enemy." Few possibilities for attacking "the enemy" escaped Curtis's attention: he contemplated illegal drug sales as a way to further a racist revolution and even postulated the use of biological weapons.
The reality is that a 'lone wolf' terrorist is highly likely to have been inspired to some degree by right-wing extremists, many of whom have openly proclaimed Sept. 11 as the turning point in their would-be revolution to overthrow democracy. It may not always be the case, but the probability remains high.
Brotherhood on the right
Evidently, the coalescence of white supremacists and Middle Eastern terrorists we've been predicting here is starting to occur north of the border:
Extremists joining forces, CSIS warns: Unlikely partners: White supremacists allying with Islamists, document claims
I've been trying to stress this all along: That white supremacists and neo-Nazis clearly view the havoc wreaked by 9/11 as a prime opportunity to "piggyback" on the violence and spread even more chaos. Indeed, that has been their agenda for the past 20 years: To convince the public that their democratically elected government cannot keep them safe; at which they intended to present their authoritarian alternative as the answer. The entire purpose of Oklahoma City, lest anyone forget, was of a piece with this agenda. And it is appearing increasingly likely that the October-November 2001 anthrax attacks were part of the "piggybacking" strategy as well.
Now, remind me again: Who comprises the real "fifth column" in this country?
Extremists joining forces, CSIS warns: Unlikely partners: White supremacists allying with Islamists, document claims
- Experts say Canada's extreme right has been largely in disarray since the 1994 collapse of the Heritage Front, a Toronto-based white supremacist group that united the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and a U.S. criminal terrorist group called The Order.
But such hate groups have found a common cause recently with Muslim extremists in the Arab world who have been promoting Jewish conspiracy theories and attempting to deny the legitimacy of Israel, experts say.
"The threat from the far right has not disappeared, though it's been overshadowed by the threat from Islamism and Arabism," said Manuel Prutschi of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "And indeed, in some ways, they have re-energized each other. It's a bizarre alliance, but nonetheless there it is."
A source familiar with Canada's extreme right agreed, saying: "The people in leadership of the right wing are always looking for opportunities."
I've been trying to stress this all along: That white supremacists and neo-Nazis clearly view the havoc wreaked by 9/11 as a prime opportunity to "piggyback" on the violence and spread even more chaos. Indeed, that has been their agenda for the past 20 years: To convince the public that their democratically elected government cannot keep them safe; at which they intended to present their authoritarian alternative as the answer. The entire purpose of Oklahoma City, lest anyone forget, was of a piece with this agenda. And it is appearing increasingly likely that the October-November 2001 anthrax attacks were part of the "piggybacking" strategy as well.
Now, remind me again: Who comprises the real "fifth column" in this country?
More Republican racial sensitivity
Ex-GOP chairman sues N. Idaho paper over quote
The strange thing about this suit is that Clark doesn't seem to have a leg to stand on, while the Spokesman's reporters are noted for taking copious notes and recording their interviews.
I used to encounter this kind of tactic from Idaho Republicans all the time: Even if you're wrong, cover for it with threats and legal bluster. Ex-Sen. Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth on various occasions threatened me with similar actions, to which my response uniformly was: 'Bring it on. We'll see you in discovery.' At which point they went away. Clark must have even more chutzpah.
- He was quoted in the newspaper article as saying, "You probably cannot find an African-American male on the street in Washington, D.C., that hasn't been arrested or convicted of a crime."
A day later, Clark said his words should have been: "I know of no African-American males in Washington, D.C., who don't have at least a couple of friends who have been arrested or convicted of a felony."
The strange thing about this suit is that Clark doesn't seem to have a leg to stand on, while the Spokesman's reporters are noted for taking copious notes and recording their interviews.
I used to encounter this kind of tactic from Idaho Republicans all the time: Even if you're wrong, cover for it with threats and legal bluster. Ex-Sen. Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth on various occasions threatened me with similar actions, to which my response uniformly was: 'Bring it on. We'll see you in discovery.' At which point they went away. Clark must have even more chutzpah.
Gibbering jingoes
Well, CPO Starkey over at Sgt. Stryker's blog has posted a response of sorts to my earlier critique of his work, which to his ears apparently was a mere rant.
Perhaps that explains why there isn't much 'there' there. Indeed, the peculiar thing about this "response" is that it responds to only one of the five points I raised regarding the afactuality of the "history" he has presented so far. Moreover, while that single response was reasonably adequate in disputing a peripheral point I had raised, it in fact served to once again underscore the central point I was making, and which evidently continues to elude Sparkey: Namely, that the "Magic" cables no more justified the internment of the entire population of Japanese-Americans on the Coast than it would have justified rounding up all African-Americans or all Caucasians in the same areas.
Indeed, not only has Sparkey rather abjectly failed to respond to the remainder of the issues, he also has so far been unable to address the issue of the utterly false assertions he made at the Stryker blog, which were contested not only by myself but by Eric Muller at Is That Legal?. (Heaven forfend that he should once again try to assert that "race wasn't a major issue back then," considering the wealth of material that has been posted here already that would reveal that claim for the utter rubbish it is.)
Much of the rest of Sparkey's response is devoted to playing up an irrelevant mistake I made in my earlier posts and for which I did apologize. (I guess I must be the only one confused by Stryker's blog; for all I could tell, since there is zero information about the contributors to the blog, the names at the tops of the individual posts could have merely represented whatever voice was screaming to get out of Stryker's head that morning.) He also devotes considerable conjecture to my mental state as I write, most of which is pretty hilarious and unintentionally revealing, since anyone with a smattering of psychology can recognize projection when they see it. Ah well. I guess such straws are important to grasp when the rest of your argument is being blown away.
And can anyone explain to me exactly which link I contained in my posts that didn't take the reader to a relevant post? If it's a broken link, I'd be glad to fix it. However, my strong suspicion is that these remarks are more likely related to a reading-comprehension problem on Sparkey's part. (Lord knows I shouldn't look to Sparkey himself for any coherence on this point.)
As for the remainder: I normally prefer not to dignify juvenilia like this with a response, but for the disinterested readers out there who may be wondering about his imputations regarding my honesty, I'll only say this: Please review the links in this post. Please review Sparkey's posts as well. Then judge for yourself who is being intellectually honest here:
-- The person who is citing the direct words of the principals involved; the actual newspaper files from the period; the government records; and fully accredited (and properly published) academic studies of the relevant history.
-- Or, the person who not only is posting false information in this debate, but who is moreover pulling the vast majority of his material from an unaccredited, self-published pseudo-history text that belongs in the same genre as David Irving's work.
I rest my case.
Perhaps that explains why there isn't much 'there' there. Indeed, the peculiar thing about this "response" is that it responds to only one of the five points I raised regarding the afactuality of the "history" he has presented so far. Moreover, while that single response was reasonably adequate in disputing a peripheral point I had raised, it in fact served to once again underscore the central point I was making, and which evidently continues to elude Sparkey: Namely, that the "Magic" cables no more justified the internment of the entire population of Japanese-Americans on the Coast than it would have justified rounding up all African-Americans or all Caucasians in the same areas.
Indeed, not only has Sparkey rather abjectly failed to respond to the remainder of the issues, he also has so far been unable to address the issue of the utterly false assertions he made at the Stryker blog, which were contested not only by myself but by Eric Muller at Is That Legal?. (Heaven forfend that he should once again try to assert that "race wasn't a major issue back then," considering the wealth of material that has been posted here already that would reveal that claim for the utter rubbish it is.)
Much of the rest of Sparkey's response is devoted to playing up an irrelevant mistake I made in my earlier posts and for which I did apologize. (I guess I must be the only one confused by Stryker's blog; for all I could tell, since there is zero information about the contributors to the blog, the names at the tops of the individual posts could have merely represented whatever voice was screaming to get out of Stryker's head that morning.) He also devotes considerable conjecture to my mental state as I write, most of which is pretty hilarious and unintentionally revealing, since anyone with a smattering of psychology can recognize projection when they see it. Ah well. I guess such straws are important to grasp when the rest of your argument is being blown away.
And can anyone explain to me exactly which link I contained in my posts that didn't take the reader to a relevant post? If it's a broken link, I'd be glad to fix it. However, my strong suspicion is that these remarks are more likely related to a reading-comprehension problem on Sparkey's part. (Lord knows I shouldn't look to Sparkey himself for any coherence on this point.)
As for the remainder: I normally prefer not to dignify juvenilia like this with a response, but for the disinterested readers out there who may be wondering about his imputations regarding my honesty, I'll only say this: Please review the links in this post. Please review Sparkey's posts as well. Then judge for yourself who is being intellectually honest here:
-- The person who is citing the direct words of the principals involved; the actual newspaper files from the period; the government records; and fully accredited (and properly published) academic studies of the relevant history.
-- Or, the person who not only is posting false information in this debate, but who is moreover pulling the vast majority of his material from an unaccredited, self-published pseudo-history text that belongs in the same genre as David Irving's work.
I rest my case.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
A brief break
I'm off to the wilds of Idaho for a few days and not taking a laptop, so my ability to post will be limited. I'm talking to some J school students at my alma mater in Moscow. I should be back in the saddle on Wednesday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)