There've been several links recently to a nasty little rant against Republicans; whether the author thereof refers to GOP politicians, voters, party apparatchiks or some combination is unclear.
What is clear is once anyone has become so convinced that one of the two halves of the Running Things Party comprises every human vice and ill (and no few I had previously thought limited to the animal kingdom), then there's no further reason to talk. The attitude itself is what gives rise to purges and pogroms, killing fields and death marches -- no matter who espouses it or what virtues they ascribe to themselves and their supposed peers, or even practice. Persons who speak like that will murder you -- or hand you over to be used up and killed -- if they even suspect you might be a member of a group they loathe; and they will sleep soundly that night. Left, right, center; amoral and "practical" or rigidly moral and unworldly, it doesn't matter: once that level of dehumanizing rhetoric has infected someone's mind, they are like an armed landmine. (And at the same time, they are pathetic causal
Intel types talk about "chatter" and reading it for mood and motive. You listen to them -- and keep an eye out for a rising tide.
I can identify at least two people I know who, were they literate enough to write it, would wholeheartedly agree.
ReplyDeleteIn good faith I have to allow them their say. I don't have to listen to it (or read it).
Also in good faith, one could change a few adverbs and apply it equally well to the other wing of the Party of Treason.
Yep.
ReplyDeleteDon't attend a Public University. They give Tenure and Grants to people like that. You wouldn't believe what they are Ranting about in the Classroom, all under the Cover of "Academic Freedom."
ReplyDeleteI saw the "rant" a few days ago. What it made me think of was a toddler messing his pants, and then displaying them proudly to his parents or anyone else available.
ReplyDeleteI'm not impressed.
Before you can kill you must hate.
ReplyDelete"Before you can kill you must hate."
ReplyDeleteOh, I don't know about all that. Some folks, I guess, need to dehumanize their opponents. I feel sorry for them.
Sometimes folks need killing. Sometimes Ol' Yeller needs to be dragged behind the barn. It happens. No need to get all worked up about it.
"Before you can kill you must hate." But that only requires filling out a Form 23-B with the proper documentation and coordinates, but you'd think someone who moved from Indiana to buy property in 1964 Bedford-Stuyvesant instead of selling, might be happy with thieir Uptown New York State of Mind, and fail to glean the concept of location location location.
ReplyDeletekedcon dencedu - some tennis shoes hung over a high wire...
Hate is not so much a prerequisite to killing as it is to ignoring the buses and cattle-cars fulla victims.
ReplyDeleteChe Guevera: "unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine". They haz it.
ReplyDeleteApril 1967, “Message to the Tricontinental”:
There is a book called "Hitler's Willing Executioners" that got a lot of notice back a couple of decades ago. Essentially, documents the preexisting and widely spread mindset, that Hitler and his minions were able to tap into to perpetrate the Holocaust. So good for Roberta X for calling this kind of stuff out.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the recent Breitbart death hatefest* and page after page of cheering-on for the "Troubador" rant suggest to me a troubling turn in the cultural mood, one that bears watching.
ReplyDeleteReally, a clever enough candidate, a left-wing "leveller" type who could incorporate both OWS hate for the successful (or "profiteering") and a law & orderish appeal (perhaps by lumping real & imagined domestic & foreign terrorists and Wall Street/"Bankster" robber barons together as parasites, outlaws and nekulturny) could do very well at the ballot box. Played properly, he could pick up all of the Dems and no few of the Middle Right, too.
Fortunately, thus far Mr. Obama ain't that guy and seems unlikely to become him: he can't fake any fire in his belly. --But look out for the one who can.
Ghu help us, the pallid colorlessness of today's pols is a help here, even though it otherwise gives rise to an Atlas-Shrugged-esque slimy-mediocracy of evil in which fed.gov does great harm while the three branches slither away from any responsibility for it.
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* Not a big fan of his style, but he was *engaged* in the give & take, not frothing about drivin' his enemies out.
Why do you have such a passive take on it? "The country's going to Hell and I can't do anything." Fight back.
ReplyDeleteKen, I am fighting back; that's what this blog post is.
ReplyDelete--But mouthing back more of the same at her (him?) is NOT fightng back, not really; it's fighting for the same miserable outcome. Prolly even mostly the same folks will end up on the sharp and stinky end of the stick.
Nope, if ya wanna fight for the Good Guys, you don't get to up the ante and you can't deal low blows.
That sucks, in any kind of emotionally satisfying way; you can do the ol' Breitbart thing, of bannering their hatred as a badge of pride.
Passive? All my blogging, all the times I have been an out & proud gunnie, passive? 'Cos I don't cuss back? Why, Troubador has every right to say anything he (she?) wants; and commenters there do, too, subject to the site-owners discretion.
...And I have every right to find their tone worrying. It's a trend to watch; it's been forming a long while, among the kids who grow up thinking Bambi was a documentary and Che was a hero.
You takes your time and you picks your fights. At least, I do. Sniping beats brawling, especially for an old maid like me.