This started while I was listening to
Thom Hartmann's commentary, posted to Political Videos earlier today. Some of the comments from wingnuts like Glenn Beck ("I'm a progressive hunter!") and Michael Reagan brought back memories of a conversation I had, years ago, with a psychologist who had counseled refugees from Kosovo (This was back in the late 1990's!). He stated that the stories he had heard were reminiscent of the Holocaust: People awakened in the middle of the night, given 15 minutes to grab a few belongings, then huddled onto trains that took them to camps.
During the discussion, my psychologist friend got around to discussing a book about the beginning of the Holocaust: "
Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen. The premise of the books is, that: 1) More of the German people knew of and participated in the Holocaust than we usually believe, and 2) the Holocaust resulted from: "a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in the German identity."
Before the big camps and the gas chambers, there was a period when volunteers from the police and military hunted down individual Jews, including whole families, and shot them. There was a horrible passage about "good Germans" returning home to their families in the evening, with uniforms splattered with blood and brains. What made this insanity possible? Again, years of eliminationist rhetoric to demonize and dehumanize Jews.
Author Dave Neiwert has published his series on
Eliminationism in America on the
Orcinus blog. What is eliminationism? In Neiwert's words:
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.
the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.
And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.
But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.
What distinguishes eliminationist rhetoric from other political hyperbole, in the end, are two key factors:
-- It is focused on an enemy within, people who constitute entire blocs of the citizen populace, and
--It advocates the excision and extermination, by violent means or civil, of those entire blocs.
Which brings to mind again, Glenn Beck's insane rants about being a "progressive hunter," among others.
Neiwert is quick to point out that eliminationism is not new to America; witness the history of lynchings of black people, the genocide of Native Americans and the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans in WWII. Hatred, racism and anti-semitism are there, just below the surface and they can come up. The movie: 'Borat' brought some of this darkness to the surface. Sasha Baron Cohen posed as a bigot to get Americans to voice their darkest hatreds:
In one scene, Borat sings a song that was commonly called Throw the Jew Down the Well, which incited hatred to Jews as the cause of all of Kazakhstan's problems. The song was wildly supported and cheered when it is played in a bar. Another Borat scene involves his visiting the Serengeti Range ranch in Texas, where the owner of the ranch reveals himself to be so anti-Semitic as to believe that Hitler's 'Final Solution' was a necessity for Germany. He further implies (with the egging on of Borat) that he would have no problem running a ranch where people can hunt, in Borat's words, "deer... then Jew."
Creepy? Yeah, but it's there. I remember all the hateful, racist jokes and comments I heard growing up in Oklahoma. My sin was that I didn't speak up - I sat in frightened and embarrassed silence. These days, I do speak up.
Before long, someone is going to invoke
Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1," and state that the situation in the US isn't anywhere as bad as 1930's Germany. That's not the issue! As someone pointed out in another post: "The Nazis didn't look that bad - at first."
The important point is: There are certain roads you don't start down without ending up in an analogue of Nazi Germany or Kosovo or Rwanda. Rent a copy of the movie:
Hotel Rwanda and listen to the hate radio voices calling the Tutsis "Cockroaches."
When people ask me, good listeners, why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say, "Read our history." The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists, they stole our Hutu land, they whipped us. Now they have come back, these Tutsi rebels. They are cockroaches. They are murderers. Rwanda is our Hutu land. We are the majority. They are a minority of traitors and invaders. We will squash the infestation. We will wipe out the RPF rebels. This is RTLM, Hutu power radio. Stay alert. Watch your neighbours.
Does this sound reminiscent of US hate radio/TV?
I need to point out that another driver of this extremist, eliminationist rhetoric is fear, genuine fear. People are afraid; most of us are afraid to varying degrees. We're losing our grip on middle class status. We're afraid we won't have a job tomorrow, or next week; we're afraid of losing our homes and ending up in the street; we're afraid we won't be able to retire with dignity, let alone any comfort.
It's no coincidence that the biggest faction in the Tea Party movement are older Americans, who by and large grew up in the days of America's greatest prosperity: the 1950's through the 1960's. They've seen their world crash around them. Yeah, part of what drives them is their anger at the fact that a black man is president; but, a great deal of that is anger and fear at loss of security. Something like this drove people to the Nazi party in the 1930's. Our economic crisis isn't as bad as Weimar Germany; but, yeah, it could get that bad.
In both Weimar Germany and 21st century America, there are demagogues to direct people's anger and hatred away from the corporations and financiers who engineered the collapse (1930's or 2000's) and toward scapegoats. There's a plethora of scapegoats for today's hatemongers: Muslims, blacks, intellectuals, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, the peace movement, and last-but-not-least, the hated liberals.
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