The "eliminationist" rhetoric from the right wing does not stop. Bishop Jackson at Values Summit.

madfloridian

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Mon Sep-21-09 11:01 PM
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The "eliminationist" rhetoric from the right wing does not stop. Bishop Jackson at Values Summit.

The term comes from David Neiwert's book called "The Eliminationists".

The full title from the Progressive Book Club is The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

McCain and Palin shortly began ratcheting back their rhetoric, especially after polls showed that such tactics were losing rather than gaining votes. But the fuse had been lit: threats and intimidating behavior continued to be reported around the country. In Ohio, a barn covered with pro-Obama signs was vandalized twice, the first time with racial epithets. In Sacramento, vandals scrawled “White Power,” “KKK” and “Nigger” over the front of a large homemade Obama display. In Idaho Falls, a large Obama sign had a Nazi swastika painted on it. In Tennessee, two neo-Nazi “skinheads” were arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama; according to federal agents, they planned to kill 102 black people in a murderous spree that would culminate in a suicidal attack on Obama.

As of the date of this writing, nothing indicated that the election’s outcome would put this fuse out. Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that it had recorded more than 200 hate-related incidents sparked by Obama’s election in the weeks immediately following.

These seemingly disparate incidents—the shooting in Kentucky and the increase of hateful speech in the campaign—received prominent coverage in the national news, but few noted the deep and significant connection between them. After all, what does yet another random “lone wolf” shooting spree in a public venue have to do with election-year rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail?

What connects them is that they are both manifestations of one of the most troubling aspects of modern American politics: the impulse to demonize our political adversaries, and the consequences of that demonization on our discourse and our body politic.....But more particularly, both episodes reflect a trend that has manifested itself with increasing intensity in the past decade: the positing of elimination as the solution to political disagreement. Rather than engaging in a dialogue over political and cultural issues, one side simply dehumanizes its opponents and suggests, and at times demands, their excision. This tendency is almost singularly peculiar to the American Right.

If you don't like them, get rid of them. Get them out of your sight. Eliminate them.

At the recent "Values Voters Summit" which really has more to do with hate than with values....Bishop Harry Jackson mentioned some others who should be eliminated....liberals and gays in particular.

From Right Wing Watch:

Harry Jackson reached some new personal lows of offensive rhetoric.

1) Gays and liberal Christians are enemies of God who deserve to be struck down. Jackson cited verses from Psalm 68 saying “let God arise, let his enemies be scattered….let the wicked perish at the presence of God.” He described God striking dead a person who wasn’t following instructions about how the Ark of the Covenant should be moved. Who are the wicked? Gays, certainly, but also “folk who are Christians in name only” but are just asking to be struck dead by God for not following His ways.

How dare he, a man of God supposedly, call for the elimination of those who don't agree with him? How did we get to this point in our country. How did we get to the point that this guy who pretends to be a spokesperson for American Americans says they are in an "ideological plantation."?

2) Jackson said repeatedly of people who don’t support his agenda that “there are people in our culture who are easily led.” Do you remember the outcry from the Religious Right when the Washington Post said the same thing about them? But nobody batted an eye when Jackson suggested that African Americans who don’t support him are “in an ideological plantation” and “easily led” to believe the worst “character assassination” about white conservative evangelicals. That’s why, he said, right-wing activists need to tone down their attacks on Obama. In the fight to keep same-sex couples from getting married, he said, he “can’t win if my own black brothers see me as a traitor.”

From Neiwert at Alternet...how we got to this point.

Eliminationist Rhetoric Poisons Our Discourse

terrorists. But it doesn't take a Dalai Lama to recognize that this kind of dehumanization is part of what brought us to this pass in the first place. And it only takes a historian to point out where it is likely to take us.

This is, in fact, classic eliminationist rhetoric: speech designed not merely to dehumanize and demonize other human beings, but to create the conditions for, and ultimately provide permission for, the actual elimination of those elements from society. As Kalkaino points out, Ferguson's description of Middle Eastern terrorists is nearly indistinguishable from from Nazi prewar propaganda about the "filthy Jewish vermin."

Of course, there is an essential difference there as well: the Jews in reality posed no threat to Germany whatsoever, and so any danger they represented was concocted almost entirely in the imaginations of anti-Semites. Middle Eastern terrorists, of course, are very much a real threat, though almost certainly not the dire existential threat that the Fergusons of the world make them out to be.

But Nazi Germany hardly provided the only example of eliminationist rhetoric and its toxic effects -- the American historical landscape is littered with them as well: the genocide of Native Americans, the lynching era, "sundown towns," and perhaps most tellingly in this case, the campaign against Asian immigrants and its culmination in the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

Manzanar...seldom spoken of now...but it should never be allowed to happen again in this country.

Neiwert is quoted at American Prospect as to how this movement has developed so strongly, and how the hate is part of our mainstream now.

From the American Prospect:

How hate groups went mainstream

We can guess who facilitated their rise.

But Neiwert argues that these tall tales are not confined to (or spread by) the fringe. "Transmitters" like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media figures circulate such conspiracy theories to a wider audience. The result is a feedback loop of paranoia and hysteria, as the transmitters "inject extremist ideas into the mainstream and … bring the two sectors closer together."

He offers the example of the Patriot movement, which thrived in the Northwest in the 1990s. According to Neiwert, the movement "provided most of the early audience for The Clinton Chronicles," a conspiracy documentary about Bill Clinton's alleged involvement in the death of his aide Vincent Foster as well as drug-running and murder in Arkansas. Although easily debunked, the wild accusations bounced around in the right's outer reaches long enough "that the claims obtained currency in the mainstream." That symbiotic relationship between shadowy fringe and conservative mainstream has only deepened in recent years, thanks to the rise of the Internet, a more entrenched right-wing echo chamber, and an even more rigidly ideological GOP caucus.

"The Eliminationists" attempts a grand theory of the right-wing mentality. "What motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: a politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination," he writes. Calling eliminationism "a signature trait of fascism," Neiwert offers a deft and scrupulous synthesis of academic research on fascism, which has been drained of its meaning from both liberal overuse (as Neiwert admits) and conservative up-is-downism.

Neiwert's commentary is depressingly timely. While paranoid and anti-intellectual rhetoric has long defined conservative media, the latest strain seems to be louder, meaner, and more pervasive. Where once the kind of hate talk Neiwert describes was confined to the fringes, it's now part of daily programming at Fox News.

The scary part is that much of it arises from groups that are supposedly Christian in background. They are using it to push a narrow agenda. I doubt some of them meant for it to be that way...but they allowed their religion to be co-opted by radicals.

Neiwert had a great post up at Crooks and Liars in June. He called it Eliminationism on Parade

He speaks of Coulter, Joe the Plumber, and a military chaplains' leader wish for the deaths of four senators. The chaplain wished for "four US Senators should be be "arrested, quickly tried and hanged!!!"...

He also featured the words of Anne Coulter.

I'm not justifying it, but I understand when you take democracy away from people, some of them will react violently. The total number of deaths attributable to Roe were seven abortion clinic workers and 40 million unborn babies.

... I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?

Following the moral precepts of liberals, I believe the correct position is: If you don't believe in shooting abortionists, then don't shoot one.

and Joe the Plumber.

Wurzelbacher has a reputation for being a blunt, politically incorrect speaker. Referring to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., more than once, Wurzelbacher asked, "Why hasn't he been strung up?