I don't have too much to add to the Giffords debate, but in case these points haven't been made (probably unlikely) or haven't been made prominently enough, let me raise three issues about the Arizona massacre:
Implicit versus explicit eliminationist rhetoric. There has been much justifiable focus on various forms of explicit, or even slightly veiled but still militant/aggressive rhetoric in the political discourse. I think more attention needs to go the implicit calls for violence, usually in the form of portraying adversaries as the extremes of evil, and even direct equation with history's greatest monsters like Stalin, Mao and of course, that Austrian painter who went on to a bad end. The thing about calling Obama Hitler, or Stalin is, you don't fight Stalin by organizing a petition drive, or a peaceful protest. He liquidates his enemies. You fight him tooth and nail in every alley and from every dark corner. By making such comparisons you foment in your supporters a romantic fantasy of being the French Résistance (perhaps the only time right wingers have anything good to say about France). After all, right wingers have spent a lot of effort comparing anyone who wants to negotiate with anyone considered "bad" to Chamberlain giving away Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. So if the enemy is Hitler, what else is there but violence to stop him? He cannot be appeased, it is either total victory for freedom or totalitarianism.
This debate should have happened years ago. While I support this issue being a major debate as the extremity of the crime certainly warrants the attention, I'm not alone in noting that there have been a frightening number of incidents of politically motivated violence, including numerous murders in recent years. While more people died and were injured this time than at some of the others, I fear that the real distinction here as far as Very Serious People are concerned is that actual Villagers or people the Villagers know were hurt and killed. Why didn't this debate erupt say when Dr. Tiller was murdered, or when 2 were murdered at the Knoxville church for being too liberal by the guy who wanted to get everyone in Bernie Goldberg's book? If in six months another madman kills even more people for political reasons but none of them are "important" people as far as Versailles is concerned, will a similar major discussion happen? I hope so but I think not.
Does the right have any actual policy to handle this? Lest the debate careen off into oblivion, some attempt to suggest any serious ideas for how to prevent this sort of thing from happening should occur. As it's clear the right is not going to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness for their rhetorical extremism, they should be challenged to suggest some actual laws that might have stopped this or the other incidents of political violence. It not enough to provide guards to members of Congress at public events; can the government guard every "liberal" Church or IRS office? There's far too many targets for lone lunatics to go after, so what is the right going to suggest we do about that? My suspicion is that they have no ideas for this. The right wing cupboard is bare. As for the left, it's true that the right has succeeded in making all gun control politically toxic, at least liberalism has ideas that might have either prevented this (such as making it easier to bar the mentally unfit from gun possession) to reducing the harm done (restore restrictions on magazine sizes that lapsed in the AWB) to even helping the mentally unsound before they become violent (say by a program that makes it easier to get people into free psychological help). At the very least, forcing the right to say (in effect) "We have no ideas, so America will just have to live with people going on killing sprees every six months..." is important in exposing the limits of their vision for life and society.
And to the inevitable and highly cynical right wing responses to any policy suggestions to this tragedy, let us only heap scorn. We who survive such tragedies have a responsibility to the living to prevent their recurrence. If that requires "politicizing a tragedy" or a "power grab" then I say politicize and grab while asking the critics "so what are you going to say to the next group of bereaved people to explain what you did to prevent this from taking away someone they love from a known threat?" I think people expect a little more inspiration from the political class than "shit happens, carry a gun."
Last night, the first segment on Bill Moyers Journal dealt with rightwing hate radio, using the late July shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Church as the entry point. It was an unusually raw and unvarnished look at what hate radio does--examining specific examples: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh--and yet, there were some significant critical avenues that were left unexplored. Still, the media has been so neglectful of this for so long, it was heartening to see this virulent cultivation of mass hatred finally get a spotlight thrown on it. Rick Karr was the correspondent reporting the story. He began reporting like this:
RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.
RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.
POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.
In the wake of John McCain's belated split with controversial "Word Of Faith"* Christian Zionist televangelist John Hagee, pressure continues to mount on Joe Lieberman to sever his ties with Hagee as well, and to withdraw as the keynote speaker at the upcoming conference of Hagee's organization Christians United For Israel. (Petition from J-Street here.)
Pressure on McCain came to a head when it was revealed that Hagee saw Hitler as an agent of God, a "hunter" sent to chase the Jews back to Israel. Extensive research condensed into a powerful YouTube video by Bruce Wilson of Talk2Action.org was instrumental in finally making this a story that McCain wanted no further part of.
But that's only one facet of Hagee's obsessional belief system, that has deep roots in centuries of anti-Semitism and its putatively more benign twin, dispensational philo-Semitism, which embraces most of the same stereotypical and conspiratorial beliefs about Jews, but see them as an integral part of God's plan for Apocalypse. A new Bruce Wilson video, Hagee: AntiChrist Is Gay, German & "Partly Jewish" (digg it here) highlights another highly offensive aspect of Hagee's belief system-his claim that the anti-Christ is "at least partly Jewish":
A further aspect of their obsessional view of the Jewish people, the other side of their thinly-veiled eliminationist fantasy, is a desire to replace them, to become Jewish-God's chosen people-in place of the actual Jews.
There is a long history of similar thinking along two lines. One is the claim by some to actually be Jewish, by descent from the "lost tribes" of Israel. An historically prominent example of this is the tradition of "British Israelism", most notably used to justify the Church of England's break with Rome. An even more extremist off-shoot of British Israelism, Christian Identity, is a thoroughly racist belief that Europeans are the true Jews, that Jews are not Jews at all, and that only "true Jews" (i.e. white gentiles) are eligible for salvation.
* "Word of Faith" is a form of "prosperity gospel" that stands the traditional Judeo-Christian teachings about charity towards the poor on its head, instead insisting on the need to give money to wealthy "men of God," the better to enable them to squeeze their camels--not to mention their private jets--through the needle's eye.
Bruce Wilson, of Talk2Action, [aka "Troutfishing"] has a diary at DKos, "Clinton & Campaign Float Assassinate-Obama-Kennedy X5 ?" that's a good deal more than just expressing outrage. It presents a timeline of assasination remarks related to Barack Obama-a timeline including FIVE separate incidents involving Hillary Clinton's campaign. The point of the timeline is not so much to point the finger at Clinton as the instigator as it is to call attenion, to clearly illuminate what is going on, and her failure to act responsibly.
Some may think it is even more sinister than that. But all can agree that this should have no place in our politics. And yet it does. In fact, the assasination talk attached to Obama's candidacy are just one manifestation of a much broader sickness afflicting our political culture, a sickness known as eliminationism, which pioneering blogger David Neiwert described thus in his 10-part series "Eliminationism in America":
What, really, is eliminationism?
It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.
More on this below. But first, to Bruce's timeline....
Mike Huckabee won a lot of respect--along with anger from from some of the folks you want to see angry--for supposedly presenting a new direction for the Christian Right... a more Christian direction, in fact, with concern for the economically left behind. Indeed, there's always been substantial sentiment in this direction amongst the rank and file. But he never did figure out how he'd pay for it--it's soooo hard to choose amongst the favored GOP tax scams.
Now, however, the other shoe drops, as he jokes about Barack Obama being assasinated.
Don't know quite what to think about this one. CNN is reporting that while speaking at the NRA this morning, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee responded to a loud noise offstage by making a joke about Barack Obama trying to evade a gunman.
"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. "Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."
Ironically, I am showing "Ghosts of Mississippi" right now to my US History and Government classes.
Jokes about black political leaders avoiding gunfire, from a southern governor. I usually have a pretty good sense of humor, but I don't get it.
They have absolutely no sense of shame. None.
Keep in mind, this is the very best they've got. This is as good as it gets from the so-called "Christian Right."
(Promoted again--it's sort of a prelude to a mini-series whose first installment will follow around 1 PM Eastern. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Over at Orcinus, Dave Neiwert draws attention to eliminationist language in book review at the New York Times--a review by Harvard/Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. I became intrigued by what Dave uncovered, and began to write about it-but then I went beyond the passage he excerpted and read the original, where I found an echo of the topic of Glenn Greenwald's diary today- Ken Pollack's defense of John McCain calling every terrorist in sight "al Qaeda." I must confess, I've read some strange reviews in my time, but Ferguson is out for some kind of record. What's more, the passage Dave excerpted comes immediately after the passage that echoes Greenwald's topic. They are both in the same paragraph.
Lies, Damn Lies...
Because Greenwald's issue is simpler, I'm going to take it up first. For a while now, Glenn has been following John McCain's propensity to label everyone "al Qaeda," along with the media's propensity to give him a pass. What this patterns shows, of course is that (A) contrary to his "foreign policy expert" rep, John McCain is a clueless old coot, and (B) the media loves him anyway, cause they're just as clueless as he is-particularly about doing their frikken jobs.
Which brings us to today's Greenwald column, which begins:
Ken Pollack: Al Qaeda is a great "catch-all" term
The New York Timestoday examines John McCain's very Bush-like propensity to run around slapping the "Al Qaeda" label on everyone we're fighting in Iraq, even though . . . it's completely false to describe them that way. The article, needless to say, asks war cheerleader and Extremely Serious Middle East Expert Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution what he thinks about that and he replies with one of the most striking statements in a while:
Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain's portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a "perfectly reasonable catchall phrase" that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that "does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing," said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Absolutely. Poor John McCain can't be expected to be accurate in describing the identities and goals of all our Enemies while on the campaign trail. That's far too complex to bother the shallow American voter with. So it's "perfectly reasonable" -- that's really the phrase Pollack used -- to just call them all "Al Qaeda," because it's not as though that term packs any sort of emotional punch or is likely to mislead people in thinking about whether we should withdraw. It's just convenient shorthand for "Arabs who think that we shouldn't be occupying Muslim countries" and, notwithstanding the fact that it's completely false, there is no reason whatsoever to object to McCain's efforts to mislead Americans into thinking that Iraqi insurgents are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. They're all just Al Qaeda - so sayeth our Great Middle East scholar Kenneth Pollack.
But, turn out, it's not just Kenneth Pollack. It's Niall Ferguson, too!
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