I ordered the book, and like others I ordered is still waiting to be finished. But this kind of thing has been going on in one guise or another in this country for ages. The focus may be on abortion providers, or perhaps gays, or maybe immigrants. However one thing is in common, no matter what the name of the group. They want their opponents censored...or just plain gone.
Wikipedia's
definition of eliminationism:Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents are "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation".<1>
In David Neiwert's book, The Eliminationists, he tells about an event from 2008 in Tennessee.
In July of 2008, a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville suburb of Powell, Tennessee, sat down and wrote out by hand a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”
When he was done, Jim David Adkisson drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. A few days before, the church had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Leaving the manifesto on the seat of the car, he walked inside the church carrying a guitar case stuffed with a shotgun and 76 rounds of ammunition.
..."When Adkisson stopped to reload, a group of men, who had already begun closing around him, tackled him and wrested away his gun. Adkisson complained that the men were hurting him. “The only thing he said was he was asking us to get off of him, that he wasn’t doing anything,” said Jamie Parkey, one of the men who tackled him. “We just looked at each other incredulously, like ‘How dare you?’ ”
And guess who had influenced him. No, not the liberals, not the left. Here is what was found in his home:
When detectives went to Adkisson’s home in Powell, they found—scattered among the ammunition, guns, and brass-knuckles—books written by leading conservative pundits: Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor by Bill O’Reilly, among others. Adkisson’s manifesto, released some months later to the public, was largely a distillation of these works, ranting about how “Liberals have attack’d every major institution that made America great. . . . Liberals are evil, they embrace the tenets of Karl Marx, they’re Marxist, socialist, communists.” Progressive Reader There was an interview given by Neiwert to Buzzflash which pointed out that though many of these groups are not connected physically, the language they speak is transforming them into like entities.
Buzzflash interviewBuzzFlash: If someone such as Sean Hannity on a widely watched television network calls liberals the enemy -- as he did again and again during the so-called "war on terror" -- doesn’t that impart the message to FOX true believers that "liberals" are actually a threat to their lives because "liberals" are "the enemy" and enable terrorists, according to Hannity and his colleagues?
David Neiwert: In a word: Yes. This is precisely how eliminationist rhetoric works: The opposition must not simply be opposed, but our very survival depends on his utter destruction and removal as a threat. This is, of course, not merely not discourse, but the very death of it. There is no exchange of ideas, only the destruction of the opposition.
But hey – they’re only entertainers, right? I remember the title of Hannity’s book: "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." It not only clearly declares liberalism is “evil,” but is an evil on par with terrorism and despotism. You could buy that book in drugstores and at the airport, and even if you never even picked it up, let alone read it, you’d get the message right there by merely glancing at the cover. How many people absorbed that message unthinkingly, you have to wonder.
And this very important point by Neiwert. It's an important statement because even at Democratic forums we are being argued with that the shooting yesterday was based on right wing issues. In the long run it most likely was...same issues, same intolerance..just a group with a different name.
David Neiwert: Well, from my perspective -– I am a reformed conservative, someone who grew up Republican in Idaho -– it was always possible to distinguish between the right-wing extremists, the Aryan Nations and militias and assorted backwoods survivalists I covered as a journalist in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and mainstream Republicans. The American Right generally was not radical, just this component of it. Well, in the past decade, that distinction has been gradually diminishing, in no small part because of movement conservatism’s avid absorption of the extremists on the right who always held themselves apart from the mainstream, which I spend a bit of time documenting in the book.
I know what he means by that statement. I have often pointed out that I grew up surrounded by a Republican family, with my parents being the only Democrats for generations. They were never like the ones we have had to deal with since Bush was elected in 2000.
Bush used the right wing extremists to win, especially in 2004. And the party has continued to use them rather than fight.
All the more harmful to our country, since our Democrats are equally hesitant to cross the right wing. They have no such problems with standing up to us, the left.
The reaction of the two parties allowed the continued rampant growth of this type of discourse.
The Democrats are still doing it after the Giffords incident, allowing the other side to control the talk and allowing the left in their own party to be painted as equally dangerous.
And I strongly resent it.
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