As America moves toward the concrete reality of a President Obama, it may want to brace itself for a spate of domestic terrorism and homegrown violence. Because even before Obama's election, it was clear that some of the more violence-prone sectors of the Far Right were winding themselves up for just such an eventuality.
The prospect of an Obama presidency sent the racist Right into a frenzy as early as June 2007, when a Klan leader from Indiana named Ray Larsen promised that he would be assassinated before taking office. Things reached a fever pitch by the summer of 2008. On the Web, white supremacists were speculating wildly about what it meant to their movement.
Three white supremacists, reportedly plotting to assassinate Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, were caught a week before (though they were not charged with engaging in the plot). A week before the election, two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in Tennessee, charged with plotting to assassinate Obama at the culmination of a killing spree in which 102 black people were to be killed.
Earlier that summer, a 60-year-old militiaman named Bradley T. Kahle of Troutville, Pennsylvania, was arrested along with four other Patriots for plotting to attack local government buildings. The FBI confiscated hundreds of weapons, including hunting rifles, cannons, homemade bombs, and rudimentary rockets. Before the bust, Kahle told undercover agents "words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" according to their arrest affidavit. Kahle also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people.
These are all individual actors or small groups, obviously. But just as obviously, they are part of something larger as well.
Bringing things more up to date, Sara Robinson, David's blogmate at Orcinus, provided the following list in a Thursday diary:
Wednesday, January 21 -- the day after the inauguration -- 22-year-old Keith Luke goes on a rape and killing spree in his Boston neighborhood. He rapes and kills one woman, and kills the sister who tries to help her. He then goes out onto the street and shoots a passing homeless man. Police intercept him on his way to a local synagogue, where he tells them he intended to "kill as many Jews as possible during bingo night." He also tells investigators that he was fighting the extinction of the white race, and had stockpiled 200 round of ammunition to that end.
Tuesday, February 10 -- In Belfast, Maine, radioactive "dirty bomb" materials are found in home of James Cummings, who had been killed by his wife after years of domestic violence. Cummings was an admirer of Adolf Hitler; a large collection of Nazi memorabilia and a filled-out application for the National Socialist Movement were found on the scene.
Thursday, February 26 -- In Miramar Beach, FL, 60-year-old Dannie Baker walks into a neighboring townhouse where 14 Chilean students -- all in the US legally -- are gathered. He fires, killing two and wounding five. Those who know Baker describe him as a mentally ill man obsessed with the fear that immigrants are taking over the country.
Sunday, April 5 -- Budding white supremacist and recently discharged veteran Richard Popalowski shoots and kills three police officers following a standoff in Pittsburgh. They were responding to a domestic disturbance call. He believed they had been sent by the Obama Adminstration to take away his guns.
Tuesday, April 28 -- US Army Reservist Joshua Cartwright shoots and kills two sheriff's deputies in Fort Walton Beach, FL. His wife called police from the emergency room after he beat her. In the incident report, his wife reported that her husband believed the U.S. Government was conspiring against him, and was severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.
Wednesday, May 6 -- Stephen P. Morgan of Middletown, CT kills former NYU classmate Johanna Justin-Jinich, whom he had been harassing since at least 2007. A diary found in his belongings included an entry: "I think it's ok to kill Jews and go on a killing spree" and "Kill Johanna. She must Die." Justin-Jinich was Jewish, and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Sunday, May 31 -- Dr. George Tiller is shot to death while ushering at his Lutheran church in Wichita, KS. His killer, Scott Roeder, is captured by police within hours. Roeder is found to have ties to several violent right-wing groups, including the Montana Freemen and the Sovereign Citizen movement. He had also been committing acts of vandalism against abortion clinics for years, most recently just days before the assassination.
Wednesday, June 10 -- Well-known anti-Semitic blogger James Wenneker von Brunn walks into the national Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and opens fire, killing a security guard. Von Brunn had been prominent in Holocaust denier circles for several decades, and considered Holocaust museums to be a crime against white history.
This is not normal, Sara goes on to point out:
you have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks. And the chattering classes are finally beginning to realize what those of us who've been faithfully watching the right wing for years were telling them a year ago: there's nothing isolated about any of this.
David and Sara are much more than list-makers, of course, acting both as careful reportorial chroniclers of fact and as analysts of the complex dynamics of the ever-evolving architectures of hatred and incipient violence.
The current wave of conservative disownership of the violence they've spawned is thus refuted by their work at Orcinus and elsewhere over a period of years at three different levels, at least. First, the simple compilation of evidence--such as Sara and Dave's lists above. Second, it's refuted by detailed examinations of individual and group history. Projection and denial are such ubiquitous features of the hard right that they've written countless diaries unmasking similar claims of innocence in the past. Third, they pass from analyzing specific individuals or groups to describing regular structural/functional features of how the movement as a whole operates and changes over time. David's descriptions of eliminationism, and the function of "transmitters" such as Limbaugh, who move extremist memes into the conservative mainstream are examples of this third level of refutation.
Who's The Fascist? The Historical Framework For Denying Von Brunn's Rightwing Identity
Consider, for example, this passage from "Projecting Fascism", the first section of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism", which does an excellent job of providing insight into how Rush and others inspired by him have been working long and hard to transfer the odious associations of fascism onto liberals and Democrats:
Limbaugh has in recent months been one of the national leaders in the right-wing campaign to characterize opposition to President Bush's questionable policies as "anti-American," a campaign that is closely associated with broader conservative attacks on the underlying ideals of multiculturalism. But Limbaugh has taken the rhetoric another step by associating liberals with Nazis and other fascist regimes.
Consider, for instance, this essay, which appeared on Limbaugh's Web site on April 17, 2003:
Little Dick Promises Fascism If Elected
Congressman Dick Gephardt (D-MO), a Democratic presidential candidate, wants to repeal President Bush's income tax cuts under the guise of helping employers provide health insurance to workers. Yes, if employers agree to pay 60% to 65% of health care costs, Big Brother will steal some money out of those employees' paychecks and give it to the company. Dickonomics sees the government funding and controlling private
businesses!
That's fascism - a term thrown around by people who don't have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas, but Gephardt's plan has features of that discredited ideology. Merriam-Webster: "Fas • cism: A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." [Italics added.]
This is a classic case of Newspeak - diminishing the range of thought (it's telling that Limbaugh originally filed this under "Making the Complex Understandable") by nullifying the meaning of words.
Democracy, according to Limbaugh, is fascism.
In fact, even as he ironically sneers at "people who don't have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas," he resorts to the notoriously inadequate dictionary definition of fascism in order to stand the meaning of the word on its head.
Observe how Limbaugh abuses the definition he gives here by only emphasizing a couple of its aspects (centralized government and economic regimentation - neither of which are actually applicable here, no more so than they would be to a hundred thousand other government programs) and utterly ignoring those aspects of it that clearly are not present in Gephardt's proposal (exalting nation and often race above the individual, forcible suppression of the opposition - traits which, in fact, are often present in Limbaugh's own diatribes).
Any serious consideration of Limbaugh's accusations of incipient fascism on the part of Gephardt will recognize that at the core of his argument is the suggestion that the current American bureaucracy itself, and indeed the bulk of Western civilization, particularly in its ability to tax and redistribute income, is
"fascist" - a claim that any reasonable person can see as plainly false.
The current wave of denial that Von Brunn is a rightwinger, and attempts to reinvent him as a leftist are all more or less similar to this--intellectually shoddy beyond belief, but propounded with a sense of infallible certainty.
And, of course, it's not limited to the right. Chris Matthews may poo-poo Rush Limbaugh, but he and his pet guests are not very far off in letting the rightwing off the hook. Here's Chris Cillizza, from Hardball on Thursday:
CHRIS CILLIZZA, "THE WASHINGTON POST": No. Chris, you know me well enough to say-to know that I almost never say politics isn't involved in something. But I do think trying to see this in the left/right split in the political world is a mistake. This is a guy who is clearly, deeply disturbed. The fact he had some writings about President Obama on his car I don't think he's a product of the conservative movement, or a product of the liberal movement. He's just kind of a loon.
A more ignorant statement would be hard to imagine in light of all that Neiwert has written. But, really, an anti-Semetic gun nut? You don't need Neiwert for this. Just about any Jew who's not a neocon knows where this is coming from.
Next, Matthews does his Pavlovian push-back thing, and Cillizza bounces right back, re-affirming that this has nothing to do with politics:
MATTHEWS: Wait a minute, are you saying that if you're an extremist politically, you have something wrong with your head?
CILLIZZA: No, not at all.
MATTHEWS: It sounds like you're saying because he is a far, far right person, who doesn't like the government, who really wants to destroy it, you're saying that's a psychological problem that can be dealt with with therapy? Or is it a strong, hard right view?
CILLIZZA: No, I'm saying this is something we mistake, we misanalyze by trying to put him in any kind of context of politics. I think it does a disservice to people who call themselves disservice [sic]. And it does a disservice to people who call themselves liberals, from the left or the right, to try and put this within an ideological spectrum.
And, by the same token, people who protested Bush taking us to war with bin Laden's sworn enemy in 2002-2003 weren't political either, right? They were all just suffering from "Bush derangement syndrome," right? Because that's precisely the sort of idea that pops out of Cillizza's Versailles mindset. Anything that doesn't fit withing the "court politics" paradigm really can't be understood in terms of a political spectrum.
Or mayn it can, Matthews opined the next day, as kovie noted in a quick hit, "Tweety: Far-Left = Far-Right".
Oliver Stone? Just like Von Brunn, only from the left. Shooting film, shooting people--[Michael Westen voice]--It's all the same.
What makes Matthews' thinking just like that of rightwingers who deny Brunn and Roeder as their own? Simple: he thinks associationally: A is like B in ways x,y,z. Are these deep similarities or superficial ones? Are there differences that overwhelm the similarities? Are there logical or historical reasons that the two should or should not be considered truly similar? All such questions simply play no part in the process of associational thinking.
The Big Lie of the Anti-Abortion Movement: You're Not Supposed to Take it Seriously!
In her "Morning No" diary this morning, Natasha linked to a diary at slacktivist about how Evangelicals came to embrace anti-abortion activism. It's a good account, but it leaves something out--the key role of fighting against integration. It's an understandable ommission, because that's not diractly about anti-abortion activism, but it is how the religious right came together, after which they picked up the anti-abortion mantel. This story was spelled out in a Nation magazine article, "Agent of Intolerance" , which I quoted from and discussed in my diary, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 1".
The part of the diary that's relevant here, however, is not concerned with the movement's origins, but with it's fundamental dishonesty, as revealed in its earlier response to anti-abortion terrorism:
In 1994, as now, the mainstream evangelical groups responded to the slayings in Pensacola by saying all the right things -- offering a raft of statements unambiguously denouncing the violence and condemning Paul Hill's actions.
I remember those statements very well because I wrote one of them. In the '90s, I was the staff writer for an evangelical -- and, therefore, anti-abortion -- nonprofit, and so it fell to me to write the first draft of a statement after Paul Hill's killing spree.
The statement we wrote was consistent with what our group had been saying all along. My boss, in whose name this statement was released, was a lifelong pacifist, a devout Mennonite who has, for decades, unfailingly opposed all forms of violence. And as a good Mennonite, his rhetoric too was always studiously nonviolent -- peaceable to the point of blandness, actually.
But at the same time we were drafting and issuing this statement, I was reading dozens of similar statements from other evangelical groups whose rhetoric had never been marked by anything like my boss's Mennonite pacifism. These were groups that routinely spoke of abortion as "murder" or "mass-murder," and that routinely spoke of legalized abortion as an "American Holocaust." They had, for years, been using precisely the same rhetoric and making exactly the same arguments that Paul Hill was now using to attempt to justify his double homicide.
Those groups' condemnations of Paul Hill then -- like their condemnations of Scott Roeder now -- ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?
How indeed? It's a question so obvious that it clearly must take very powerful magics just to make sure people don't ask this question all the time, instantly turning the anti-abortion movement into a pile of dust.
The diary continues:
Paul Hill argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust -- just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups said it was. If that's true, Hill said, then he wasn't merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists. If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler -- as all these groups insisted was the case -- then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.
Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned -- as all those groups suddenly insisted he was -- it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?
What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."
And since they no longer bothered to claim they believed it, I stopped trying to believe it too.
Now here we are again, 15 years later, as the arguments of the anti-abortion movement are again being proved disingenuous by their own self-refuting statements condemning the latest lethal fruit of their rhetoric of "mass-murder" and "Holocaust." Once again some sad, disturbed man has committed the error of taking their rhetoric more seriously than it was ever meant by the people who supposedly believed it to be true.
Didn't Scott Roeder realize that it was all just a game? Didn't he appreciate that all this talk of Holocaust was just a gimmick to get his fellow Kansans to support a repeal of the estate tax? Didn't he understand the difference between really believing that abortion is "mass-murder" and just indulging in the smug posturing of self-righteousness that makes the members of the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition feel a little better about themselves?
No, apparently, he didn't. Apparently he was just crazy enough to believe that these people meant what they said, crazy enough to believe that they believed their own words and that he should believe them too.
So, in short, if Von Brunn can be dismissed by the right because he's a fascist, and therefore a leftist, Roeder can be dismissed because they really don't believe that stuff they say anyway! And only a nut would take them at their word!
Sound good?
I thought so. |
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