Right Wing Hysteria & Moral Cowardice

¡Hola! Everybody...
Life is a celebration -- each day is another opportunity to deepen that celebration... or not. LOL

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-=[ Moral Cowardice ]=-

Man, you are a died in the wool dumb ass. Please tell me that you do not consider the killer of DR Teller a move by a right wing extremist.....it was a crime by a CRIMINAL, plain and simple, and ALL efforts to make it into something it was not, the lone action by a lone gunman, not associated with any conservative movement, have failed.

-- An example of “reasoning”

This was the opening salvo from a twat who, when confronted with facts tying recent killings to the White Nationalist Movement, ran crying to his site, wrote a blog about me, and then cried and whimpered that I was mean (and a racist to boot! LOL I just love it that neocons are now experts on racism). I believe this individual and individuals like him are moral cowards...

But before I continue, I must admit to a huge mistake. After some thought, I have come to the conclusion that classifying the perpetrators of recent hate crimes by white supremacists as “mentally unstable,” does a disservice to all those Americans who suffer from mental illness. The vast majority of citizens suffering from mental illness never go out on killing sprees. Most, in the face of debilitating illness, go out and function just as the rest of us, never harming a soul.

These so-called “lone gunmen” are not crazy, psychotic, or mentally imbalanced. They knew exactly what they were doing. They are definitely angry -- but they are angry about very specific things, and in very specific ways. For example, each one picked targets that suited their political goals -- political goals shared by massive movements. They stashed weapons and they carried out their premeditated acts of violence.

There’s a consistency to the ideology of these angry, armed, white males and the common thread that ties them together is white supremacy and right-wing hysteria.

If we heard the exact same story of a black or Latino/a and it was discovered that the individual had ties to a Black or Latino/a Nationalist movement numbering in the tens of thousands, I’m willing to bet this fool and people who think as he does would be shooting black and brown people on sight, no questions asked.

They are not crazy, solitary gunmen and women; they are part of a fascist movement composed of moral cowards. No... These fascists -- America’s homegrown terrorists -- are not unhinged; they are perfectly sane individuals taking neoconservative ideology to its conclusion. In this way, they are an extension of fascist ideology in the same way that groups of Klansmen are extension of that ideology. It is an ideology undergirding a well-organized and sizable political movement in America.

In the coming days, I will show that the neocon movement is predicated on racist notions of white superiority. The core thrust of modern conservatism comes from modern-day pseudo-scientific “research” no different in empirical validity from 19^th century eugenics and head measuring. Furthermore, these attempts to scientifically validate racist ideology have been given almost free reign on the editorial pages of some of the most influential newspapers and journals.

Georges Santayana famously said that those who refuse to learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it, and we ignore the actions from the well-organized far-right at our own expense. One need only take the lessons Santayana was referring to -- the lessons of fascisms and the hell they wreaked during WW II. Hanna Arendt wrote extensively of the symbiotic relationship between propaganda and fascists movements. One cannot breed without the other. Even shit needs flies...

Speaking of which, here’s an interesting response to my link on the White Nationalist Movement (quoted verbatim):

By and large it is liberals who have as much in common nowadays with this guy than do most conservatives. After all it is popular to be anti Israel, and pro hama's. -- An Idiot

I chose this particular nugget of “reasoning” because it is a prominent meme running rampant on the neocon blogosphere these days. It is really quite simple (or simplistic):

Right-wing propagandists are pro-Israel.

The American Left is anti-Israel.

Therefore, a white supremacist is a left-wing extremist!

Or as one responder put it:

All cats die.

Socrates died.

Socrates was a cat.

The dire lack of logical reasoning by the talking heads and their sheeple on the right is par for the course. Limbaugh has made millions using logical fallacies, as has O’Reilly and the rest of their hate talk comrades. Recently Glenn Beck of Fox News stated that, “What they’re missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.”

Actually, Beck has it right: the pot is boiling, but it is boiling because of people like Glenn Beck, ranting hysterically every night about impending apocalypses of various forms -- looming “liberal fascism,” the “economic meltdown.” Obama, every white supremacist’s nightmare, is coming for your guns and a class of inferior people has stolen the America that you once knew. In this way, fascist ideology, interchangeable with neocon principles, gets credence and emboldens those on the far right. Guns sales since Obama’s election going through the roof -- and it ain’t happening in East LA or Brownsville, Cabrini Green, or Harlem.

Propaganda and fascism -- one cannot thrive without the other. In creating the black and brown face of evil, we help dehumanize those faces, making it easier to justify their extermination.

This is taking neoconservative ideology to its logical conclusion. In this way, frequent MSM commentator Pat Buchannan, a Holocaust denier himself, can advocate setting up snipers on our southern borders with nary a whimper from journalists.

Combine hate radio, hate websites, hate podcasts, and a crisis economy where people feel they are losing all they have, and we see the beginning of a perfect storm of hate crimes and murders committed by a significant percentage of millions of stable, hate-filled who have been primed to move from sullen bigotry and anger to violent criminal action

A social security check arrives late. A bounced check starts bank charges that end up costing hundreds of dollars and the movement gains momentum, blaming immigrants, blacks, Jews, gays, war protester-- and the next thing you know we are seeing dead people on national TV. And those millions of other Americans afflicted with fascist hate are seeing one more case of a person letting go, unleashing the hate that the extremist media has built up...

Anti abortion people attempted to put on a “shocked” face, publicly denouncing the murder of Dr. Tiller.

The Washington Post reported that John de Nugent, white supremacist friend of the Holocaust Museum murderer James W. Von Brunn, “called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of ‘a loner and a hothead.’” “The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”

Yeah, right... Sounds like my man up there in the epigraph, doesn’t it?

What it does is it exposes such thinking as the moral cowardice that it is.

Eddie