DANGEROUS CLOWNS

Very interesting articles comparing the work of Julius Streicher and his role in Nazi Germany with the right wing bloggers and other operatives. As we have seen with the evolution of Rush Limbaugh, et. al, from our point of view they be a joke, but look at where they've brought us and the power they wield.

DANGEROUS CLOWNS
By Pamela Troy

PART I

His blood carries not honor, and honesty, rather criminality, fraud, hypocrisy, lies, the lust for defilement, and the lust for murder ... a race that has drives toward the unnatural and toward criminality cannot recognize natural moral laws. -- Julius Streicher, on the Jews

... the Democrats – far too many of them – are evil, pure and simple. They have no redeeming social value. They are outright traitors themselves, or apologists for treasonous behavior. They are enemies of the American people and the American way of life. -- Joseph Farah, "Baghdad Bonior," Worldnet Daily 10/8/02

Liberalism is a mental disorder that has undermined our families, our society, and our national security … -- Michael Savage, Newsmax.com interview 2/1/03

Look up the name “Julius Streicher” in the index of most recent books on the Third Reich and you’re likely to be referred to one or two brief mentions. He was a lout whose anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, was so crude that he’s sometimes called “Hitler’s pornographer.” He is usually described as a squat thug with a paltry talent for harnessing the combined power of ignorance and malice, someone who intelligent people could safely ignore with a contemptuous laugh.

Many of those who watched the rise of the Third Reich as it happened weren’t that dismissive. In 1936 Time Magazine referred to him as "One of Nazi Germany’s Most Dangerous Clowns." Hitler himself considered Streicher’s ability to mobilize the masses to the cause of Nazism invaluable and Himmler was quoted in Streicher’s newspaper Der Sturmer, "In times to come when the story of the reawakening of the German people is written, and when the next generation will be unable to understand how the German people could ever have been friendly with the Jews, it will be said that Julius Streicher and his weekly newspaper were responsible for a good part of the education about the enemy of mankind."

The tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945 agreed. Part of the indictment against Streicher read:

In the early days he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated, in the Ghettoes of the East, he cried out for more and more.

The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they never would have been had it not been for him and for those like him.

For the past twenty years, Streicher’s voice has been most faithfully echoed in the pronouncements of people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and countless other less well-known "clowns" who frequent cable TV, talk radio and the Internet. Like Streicher, they are often dismissed as so obviously ridiculous that they’re barely worth the attention of well-informed citizens.

And while they are not anti-Semites and their rhetoric is unlikely to lead to the mass murder of those they target, it has, like Streicher’s, made mindless hatred not just acceptable in the minds of many people, but downright virtuous.

There’s a saying about the sleep of reason and what it produces. For far too long, thinking Americans have treated the irrationality steadily bubbling up from the far right as if it were a harmless amusement, unlikely to impact ordinary citizens. We have been unwilling to look at the extent to which the mediums of right-wing talk radio and the Internet have popularized the agenda of influential people who are not stupid, but who are willing to foster and use stupidity and hatred as a means to an end.

“Undesirable Impulses” and The Tactic of Delegitimization

The relatively recent successes of New Left ideas in law and legislation have only been made possible because their proponents were able to capture the cultural institutions--e.g., the media, academia, publishing houses, advertising agencies, Hollywood--some years earlier … We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them.-- Eric Heubeck, The Integration of Theory and Practice

Substituting contempt for reason is not a new phenomenon in this country, nor is it a vice confined to the far right. A thorough search of the Internet will uncover leftist sites containing gross, sometimes threatening statements about conservatives. This kind of mindless garbage has always to some degree been present in political commentary in every time, belief, and nation. It only becomes truly dangerous when it mirrors the aims and tactics of powerful interests.

In the years immediately preceding the Third Reich, political violence by right-wingers and left-wingers was a fact of life on the streets of Berlin. Unlike their leftist counterparts, however, the Nazis came to enjoy widespread, if often tacit support of wealthy industrialists and influential members of the military, many of whom, as educated people, saw Hitler’s more outrageous statements as a form of political theater. “In fact to a certain extent, Hitler succeeded because he was dismissed as being more ridiculous than dangerous,” write James and Suzanne Pool in their 1978 book, Who Financed Hitler:

The man who shouted crude anti-Semitic slogans in public could, to the amazement of those who met him in private, discuss complex political and economic issues with logic and penetrating insight. He was able to convince his financiers that he was not a rabble-rouser at heart but had to act that way to attract the masses away from the Communists.

The resulting infusions of financial support to the Nazi Party helped make Streicher more than an individual crackpot ranting from a soapbox on a street-corner. He was a hatemonger promoting a political party that had generous financial backing and friends in very high places. Whether or not it was taken seriously by most Nazis, Streicher’s language of dehumanization, by sheer repetition, ceased to shock Germans and helped prepare the ground for the policy of annihilation Hitler enacted not only against Jews, but against all who opposed him.

By the same token, Coulter, Savage, and other such commentators are not merely obscure bloggers or occasional posters to Internet bulletin boards. They are commentators who have been given greater access to the media than most leftist pundits, and thus greater leeway when it comes to outrageous statements. It would be hard to find a writer for a prominent liberal publication who had, for instance, suggested that the Bush twins should be executed, as John Derbyshire did about Chelsea Clinton in the February 15, 2001 issue of National Review Online.

There are, of course, differences. Streicher embraced the notion of Jews as genetically evil, so inherently corrupt that their moral "taint" could be spread through rape. So far no prominent modern American right-winger has claimed that a conservative woman who has sex with a liberal man is "irredeemably lost" to conservatism, as Streicher claimed about Gentile women who had even nonconsensual sex with Jewish men. The National Review has stopped short of claiming that liberals drink the blood of conservative children in unholy rites.

But the similarity in language remains. If they don’t present liberalism as an inherent genetic taint, they do present liberalism – or even membership in the Democratic Party – as an irrefutable sign of an inherent moral or mental malaise. “"Liberals are in my estimation, just not bright people. They don’t think deeply, they don’t comprehend, they don’t understand …" said Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 2002. “They don’t seem to have a fundamental understanding of good versus evil in the world, and the need to destroy those that would otherwise destroy innocent life,” said Sean Hannity on Pat Robertson’s "700 Club." In short, to be a liberal is to be “evil,” “not bright,” afflicted with a “mental disorder.”

And as with Streicher’s propaganda, whether or not everyone who uses this kind of language actually believes it is beside the point. In 2001, an essay appeared online that briefly garnered attention on the Internet. “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement” was written by someone named Eric Heubeck for the Free Congress Foundation.

It’s important to note that the Free Congress Foundation is not merely an obscure right-wing blog but a well-funded conservative think tank headed by right-wing strategist Paul Weyrich. An article about Karl Rove in the April 30th, 2001, issue of Time Magazine (“The Busiest Man in The White House” by James Carney and John F. Dickerson) mentions the influence the foundation wields:

Each Wednesday Rove dispatches a top administration official to attend the regular conservative-coalition lunches held at Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation … When Weyrich heard a few weeks ago the Bush’s budget slashed funding for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives scholarships and training to police cadets, he complained to the White House. To Weyrich’s surprise, Rove called back. “We’ve taken care of it,” Rove said. "The problem is solved." Weyrich, who says his memos to the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses were rarely read, was impressed. "That," he gushes, "is what it means to have friends in the White House."

Heubeck’s essay outlines a strategy for a grassroots movement of “cultural conservatism,” one that, as Heubeck put it, “must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes.” An example of these “undesirable impulses” can be found in the following quote:

We must always operate based on this cardinal principle: Leftists are never morally responsible for the evil they commit; but we as conservatives are morally responsible for not having done more to prevent them from committing that evil. We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs.

One does not debate natural disasters or rabid dogs, or even treat them as if they were capable of framing an argument. Both are problems to be prevented, if possible and if they occur, contained or destroyed.

This is not to say that Heubeck and others like him relish the idea of liberals being physically destroyed. It is to say that they would like to destroy any rational public discourse on the subject of anything they label as “liberalism.” They want any liberal or anyone labeled as such to be dismissed out of hand no matter how valid their arguments might be, denounced as mad, stupid, or evil.

That an inevitable byproduct of this approach is a significant number of people believing that liberals are the equivalent of natural disasters and mad dogs and relishing the idea of liberals being physically destroyed is apparently unimportant to them.

The tactic of delegitimization promoted in Eric Heubeck’s piece has been echoed in Bush administration statements, most notably those made in the wake September 11th. One of the most well known of these is then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s comment at a press conference, in which he both implied that administration critics were irrational or dishonest, and equated dissent with giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies.

… to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends. (December 6, 2001)

Even opposition within the context of an opposition party is increasingly depicted as illegitimate. Not content with control of both the Executive and Legislative branches, the Republican Party has attacked some of the most basic tools of dissent within government. The judicial filibuster has been denounced by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as “radical. It is dangerous and it must be overcome.” This kind of language, the use of terms like “dangerous” and “radical” to describe a tactic that Republicans – including Frist -- have used in the past, should be at least startling to Americans. Unfortunately, the quality of modern political rhetoric has been so lowered that it doesn’t seem that unusual. Compared with some of the comments about Democrats and liberals heard regularly on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, it seems downright benign.

If reasoned debate is eliminated as the way to deal with dissenters, even those who dissent as members of the opposition party within the halls of government, how does one respond to those who refuse to be silenced? How does one deal with the “problem” of those liberals and Democrats who are, with increasing frequency, being referred to as dangerous, radical, as traitors, lunatics, rabid dogs, and haters of America?


“OUTRIGHT TRAITORS”

… the day will come when the German people will awake … and that day will be sealed in blood. -- Julius Streicher 1924 DS #22

If the Christian people work together, they can succeed during this decade in winning back control of the institutions that have been taken from them over the past 70 years. Expect confrontations that will not only be unpleasant, but at times physically bloody … -- Pat Robertson, Pat Robertson’s Perspective, October/November 1992

When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors. -- Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 2002.

If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot liberals? -- Originally a quote from State Sen. Mike Gunn. It is now a popular bumper sticker.

Early in 2005, Americans were offered a working illustration of the extent to which those often dismissed as irrelevant crackpots have a direct pipeline to the mainstream media, all the way up to the Washington Press corps. At a January 29th press conference, a “reporter” using the name Jeff Gannon asked Bush the following question:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work – and you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

Most readers are probably familiar with the resulting tempest, which resulted in “Jeff Gannon” being exposed as an online writer named James Guckert whose journalistic credentials are skimpy to the point of being nonexistent. To be fair, "Gannon’s" soft-ball questions were not much more eccentric and biased than those of the venerable Les Kinsolving, who up until his recent health problems, had been a regular if rather weird feature of White House Press conferences.

But Kinsolving, unlike Guckert, has solid chops as a reporter, and Guckert has some embarrassing connections to gay websites uncovered by liberal bloggers. So “Jeff Gannon” resigned his post as a “reporter,” with much eye dabbing on the part of his right-wing fans and regretful sighs on the part of deliberately obtuse mainstream commentators like Howard Kurtz, all of whom helped to paint Guckert as the unfortunate victim of liberal bigotry and harassment.

In fact, a truly interesting, but overlooked aspect of Guckert is not his sexuality or his affiliation with Talon and GOPUSA, or even the undeniably fascinating question of how he got access to White House briefings using an alias, but his connection with a popular right-wing website called Free Republic, to which Mr. Gannon frequently contributed.

Free Republic is more than just a forum where like-minded people can post their opinions. It is used as a contact point for mobilizing right-wing activists on a grassroots level in a manner that sometimes goes beyond simply campaigning for a favorite candidate or pushing for changes within the context of our legal system.

Bands of right-wing toughs are not physically beating up the opposition, as was the case in Striecher’s Germany. After all, in the 1920s and 30s, there was no mass media as we know it. Political expression more often took the form of a speaker communicating directly with an audience in a hall. In such a society, one silences the opposition by physically preventing them from speaking, breaking up the meeting, making people afraid to either speak at such gatherings or attend them.

Today, in a world with television, an Internet and widespread access to computers, silencing the opposition can be done more indirectly, through attacks not on the body of the person making a speech in an auditorium, but on the show, and more directly on the web site or discussion board where they are expressing their opinions. The right wing web site and forum Free Republic early on established a reputation for fomenting organized efforts among their members to skew national polls, flood discussion boards, and bring down websites they deem too “liberal.” In fact, they ended up coining a term for this kind of activity – “freeping.”

From the standpoint of physical safety it’s obviously preferable to be figuratively rather than literally elbowed aside, silenced not by having your ribs cracked but by having your web site brought down or your poll skewed or your online forum over-run. It remains, however, a disturbing symptom in a free society, particularly given that the Free Republic forums have shown a tendency to target not just polls and websites, but individuals. And the language used about these individuals often does more than merely border on the violent. David Brock’s Media Matters pointed out the reaction on Free Republic to the reporter who had filmed an American soldier shooting to death an injured Iraqi.

"Turn [Reporter's name] over to the terrorist."

"Fragamundo."

"No need for anything overt. Unfortunate things happen in combat zones, and if the reporter fails to hear someone yell 'Sniper!!', well, c'est la guerre.”

"I don't want the punk killed, I'd just like to see his hair mussed. Jaws wired shut for a few months, food through a straw, that kind of thing."

It might be argued that, as an embedded television reporter, the reporter was a public figure, and thus inevitably prone to harassment and death threats. In some cases, however, the individuals targeted for “freeping” have not been public figures at all, but ordinary Americans who have marched, signed petitions, or posted web sites about their opinions. In this eagerness to target ordinary citizens as well as in its virulent language about those whom they target, Free Republic and other right wing websites increasingly parallel Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer.

As Randall Bytwerk notes in his biography of Streicher, “in 1933 Streicher began the pillory column, giving the names and addresses of German women purportedly having relations with Jewish men … The very popular brief items section of the paper served similar functions. Perhaps the best way to understand the despicable nature of such material is to summarize the twenty items from a typical 1937 issue:”

Bytwerk goes on to cite the items, which include “In a village, the populace is concerned because a well-known Jew-lover has been given the guardianship of a farm; A town councilman lets his daughter date a Jew; A printer is represented by a Jewish attorney; A German attorney represents a Jew …”

“In each case,” Bytwerk continues, “the names of the accused and their towns or districts are given … And in addition many longer letters were printed, and interior articles were based on materials supplied by readers … those who feared appearing in the Sturmer had good reason. Even if most were not officially prosecuted, they could lose friends and business … in 1934 a reader reported that a German married to a Jew had been expelled from an organization after the Sturmer published the marriage …”

In the summer of 2001, after Jenna Bush was carded at an Austin Texas restaurant and arrested for underage drinking, the name of the restaurant manager who had turned the girl in was posted on the Free Republic web site, as well as personal information about the manager and her infant son, her social security number, her telephone number, and her home address. Free Republic forum members suggested ways of “dealing with” the manager, from vandalism, to arson, to identity theft, and other crimes.

To give at least minimal credit to those who run Free Republic, the messages containing the woman’s personal information and those advocating outright crime were quickly removed, but not before they had been greeted with vociferous approval from many Free Republic posters. There were Free Republic members who disapproved and said so, but the overwhelming response on Free Republic was venom. The messages that were not removed include the following:

“FWIW, a call place to [name of the restaurant] yesterday confirmed that [name of the manager] was still employed as of 1700 hrs. CT.”

“If we have to destroy [restaurant] and [name] to send you the message to cut it out, so be it. If we have to destroy ten, a hundred or a thousand more leftists to make the point, that is OK too.

“the health dept. HAS been alerted and are going to go check 'em out. i got "sick" there eating last friday and HAD to report that fact to the health department ...”

“I haven't heard of any husband, so I suppose that she's unwed ... I wonder if she knows who the father is? That being said, I wonder if she's a fit mother… I wonder if child protective services shouldn't get involved, in order to make sure that there is an appropriate, stable environment for the child?

Free Republic itself became so alarmed at the level of vituperation that a planned demonstration by local Freepers in front of the restaurant was called off. The story was picked up by Salon and several other outlets, and resulted in such bad publicity for Free Republic, that one would think its administrators would have learned some caution when it came to targeting private individuals.

But in March of 2004, a member of Free Republic posted what he described as an “Enemies List,” triumphantly announcing, “Here you are, FReepers. Here is the enemy. Working in conjunction with A.N.S.W.E.R., they have given us their names.” What followed was a list of signatories for an online petition posted by ANSWER. The obvious purpose of posting this list on Free Republic was for “Freepers” to target individual names on the petition for harassment, and the original post made this plain by adding, “How about this one --- [Name Omitted], U.S. Coast Guard, [Location omitted]. Well, sailor, I guess it is time for me to call your commanding officer and see what he thinks about this.”

Responses included:

“Don’t forget [Name Omitted], Military/Navy, [Location omitted] while you’re at it.”

“You already made the call? Good work…by his name is he probably a Muslim. The CO will love to have a disgruntled Muslim in his unit.” “The poor moron is never going to know what hit him.”

And it was not only members of the military who were targeted. Some Freepers were apparently poring over the list in search of names from their own areas.

“Here’s an Enemy in the County – [Name Omitted] Roman Catholic Priest, [Location Omitted]”

“Well shiiiite! None of this pond scum live [City name]. Too bad, I was looking for something to do this evening.”

“Ah, too bad we don’t have some pictures, so we could make a rogues gallery of some of the individuals.”

“I sure do hope to see a round of hangings soon. After a fair trial of course.”

This zest for going after individuals is by no means confined to Free Republic. During the controversy surrounding the Dan Rather/George Bush Memos, a university professor posted to his web site the first draft of an examination of the memos and his cautiously worded opinion that they were genuine. He was denounced as a “liar and a charlatan” on a right wing web site, his name, the university where he worked, his email address, as well as that of his employers was posted online. It ended, fortunately, in his university threatening legal action against the web site that had spearheaded the campaign and a rather half-hearted apology by the web site’s manager, but not before the professor and the university had been inundated with Internet hate-mail, attacks and demands that he be fired.

Apologists for the right-wing blogosphere often claim that it’s all hyperbole, that the people who describe Democrats and liberals as traitors worthy of beatings, imprisonment, and execution don’t really mean it. This good-natured assumption is undermined by the fact that right-wing posters on forums like Free Republic, Lucianne.com, and Little Green Footballs are unfazed by genuine tragedies involving liberals and leftists. In April of this year, a young activist named Marla Ruzicka was killed in Iraq when a suicide bomber attacked a convoy. Ruzicka’s work in Iraq was strictly humanitarian, but her affiliation with Medea Benjamin’s CODE PINK made her the enemy in the minds of many right-wingers.

There were some lonely voices raised on the right wing Internet in respectful acknowledgement of Ruzicka’s humanitarianism, courage, and accomplishments, but they were drowned out by a roar of chest-thumping contempt:

I am trying to muster up some tears – but it just ain’t happening.

She hated this country and everything about it. She played with matches and got burned. Good riddance to the idiot gene pool I would say.

She wasn’t one of their victims; in her case, it was ‘friendly fire’ that did her in.

Good riddance to this piece of filth,

Because the Bush administration validates this kind of language by conflating dissent with disloyalty it’s not surprising that these “jokes” and “hyperbole” have morphed more and more into organized actions.


TAKING NAMES

We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. -- Eric Heubeck, The Integration of Theory and Practice

I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough around so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for. -- Rush Limbaugh, quoted in TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORDS, by Bruce J. Miller with Diana Maio

A pattern that has become more and apparent on both the official and grassroots level is that of conservatives compiling lists of dissidents, or individuals perceived as dissidents. Activists have found themselves on “no fly lists” or even the subject of “preemptive” arrests. Attendees at events where Bush or Cheney speak have been carefully vetted, with those identified as liberals or Democrats turned away as if their political affiliation alone qualifies them as security risks. In Fargo, North Dakota, about forty people were listed as barred from Republican events for such radical activities as expressing criticism of George W. Bush. Recently in Denver, three people were denied entrance to the event because someone had spotted a “No Blood for Oil” bumper sticker on their car.

The use of blacklists, of course, is nothing new. It was the hallmark of the Red Scare, and those of us who are old enough and well educated enough to be familiar with the history of the HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities] and the career of Joseph McCarthy are also familiar with how and why the use of such blacklists are a detriment to an open society.

Unfortunately, like the lessons of the Second World War, the lessons of the Red Scare are falling from living memory, and cynical conservatives have been quick to take advantage of this historical amnesia. The Bush administration might be somewhat cagey about its lists, blaming overenthusiastic Republican volunteers and computer database glitches, but younger conservatives seem to be less aware of the implications of the lists they compile, and therefore more transparent about the attitudes and motives that drive them.

For that reason, one of the most blatant examples of this penchant for taking names is David Horowitz’s right-wing organization euphemistically named Students for Academic Freedom. SAF has inaugurated a campaign in which Republican Student organizations at American universities are invited to keep dossiers on individual faculty members’ political affiliation. Their web site links to a document entitled HOW TO RESEARCH FACULTY PARTY AFFILIATIONS, which advises students on how to compile a list of school administrators and tenured or tenure track professors and set up an excel spreadsheet that includes the individuals’ first and last name, party affiliation, department, address, age, and gender. They are instructed to match these spreadsheets to voter registration records, record the party affiliations and send the spreadsheets to Horowitz’ organization via email. Horowitz’ organization is compiling a database of University employees and their political affiliations.

How that information might be used by these youthful zealots was illustrated recently at Santa Rosa Junior College in California, when ten instructors came to work in February of 2005 to find flyers decorated with red Soviet stars affixed to their office doors. The flyers’ text was a quote from an obscure California law, which forbids “the advocacy or teaching of communism” with the intent to indoctrinate, communism being defined as “the political theory that the presently existing form of government of the United States or of this state should be changed, by force, violence, or other unconstitutional means, to a totalitarian dictatorship which is based on the principles of communism as expounded by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”

The Santa Rosa Junior College Republicans shortly afterwards confessed to posting the flyers. Molly McPherson, the organization’s president first said that “we did this because we believe certain instructors at SRJC are in violation of California State Law,” then, more vaguely a few days later, that “there have even been accounts of JC teachers openly advocating Communist and Marxist theories,” then even more vaguely, that “The opinion of the far left is presented as fact, with no alternative.”

What’s especially striking about the Santa Rosa incident is the apparent naiveté of the students involved. The SRJC Republicans seemed unable to distinguish between liberal opinions and the advocacy of Communism. McPherson not only described the faculty reaction to having stars anonymously posted on their doors along with accusations of criminal behavior as “of a magnitude that I didn’t expect,” but made the incredible assertion that the red stars had not been meant as a personal attack against the individual instructors. There was no evident comprehension on the part of the SRJC Republicans of the historical and political implications of what they were doing.

There was also an odd attitude of either impunity or cognitive dissonance, in which claims were made about merely wanting to promote “fairness” even as liberal instructors were denounced as communist law-breakers and California College Republicans gloated over silencing the opposition through dirty tricks and intimidation.

A look at the California College Republican message boards linked to the JRJC-CCR web site contradicts the claim that the CCR is in any way interested in ensuring fair-mindedness on campuses. The folder entitled “Lefties on College Campus” contains a single message enthusiastically promoting a Horowitz wannabe site in which students are urged to submit the names of liberal professors. Another folder, entitled “College Republican Triumphs” contains two threads, one entitled “How to Kick Liberal Groups off Campus 101” the other by the same author entitled “Students First! Triumph 2003,” and consisting of a long, repulsive description of how the College Republicans at UCSD used dirty tricks to destroy a “communist” organization on that campus. (An example of how this College Republican defines “communist” is instructive. “While ‘communist’ is a very strong term, it is a deserved one, this guy was a ‘Dean-iac’ watching precincts for that moron.”)

One passage from this posting describing the writer’s behavior at a debate is especially worth reproducing here.

Robert and I decided to grab front row seats in order to debate the communist [the “Dean-iac”] … So we sat down with a couple tall glasses of beer and got ready for our oral assault. What was great was that the sound system was crappy at best. So nobody could really hear what the candidates had to say. So when the communist [name withheld] began to speak, Robert and I launched our attack. ‘COMMUNIST!’ ‘YOU’RE A GOD DAMN LIAR! BULLSHIT!’ and “STOP LYING COMMUNIST!’ were just some of the many different phrases we yelled. Since the sound system was total rubbish, no one heard what [name withheld] had to say.

That someone would boast about this kind of behavior on a public board is, for a reader familiar with the history of the Third Reich, a bit staggering. The image it conjures up of Brownshirts swilling from steins and shouting down Social Democrats in a German beer hall is inescapable.

And it’s in this atmosphere that college Republicans are being encouraged to compile lists of college employees and their party affiliations.

Taking the names of individuals and their political or religious beliefs serves, not only to earmark the listed individuals for future punishment, but to notify anyone who might consider expressing or acting on similar religious or political beliefs that they are being watched. If this trend is allowed to continue Americans may find themselves thinking twice about what most of us consider the normal expression of political beliefs. We may end up on a list somewhere if we wear the “wrong” shirt or drive with the “wrong” slogan on our bumper. College instructors may hesitate before challenging students even in the normally acceptable venue of classroom discussion, not because it would be inappropriate (it would not), but because they cannot afford the professional or personal consequences of an angry student adding them to David Horowitz’ database.

We are in danger of descending into the kind of political environment only Streicher and his spiritual descendants could want, in which one side has succeeded not by convincing, but by intimidating into silence everyone who has opinions outside a narrow range of beliefs. There is no arguing with people who simply yell, “shut up,” so loudly that you can’t make yourself heard. There is even less argument possible with people who yell, “Shut up or we’ll hurt you.”


The Sleep of Reason

“Why do the French make war on us?” she asked.

“Why do you make war on the Poles?” I said.

“Hum,” she said, a blank over her face. “but the French, they’re human beings,” she said finally.

“But the Poles, maybe they’re human beings,” I asked.

“Hum,” she said, blank again. -- From William Shirer’s Berlin Diary

The far right was the first to establish a beachhead on the Internet in the early ‘90s, taking advantage of what was, for them, a promising demographic of mainly young white male techies from the middle class. An examination of exactly how this happened is the subject for another article. For the purposes of this piece, it’s enough to simply state the early right-wing/libertarian dominance of the Internet as a given.

The resulting right-wing online echo chambers, which have dramatically sped up and broadened the dissemination of talking points, rumors, and grassroots campaigns, might not have invented the tactics of disinformation and personal attack, but they did help amplify their effects, while at the same time making them less obvious to a population still used to getting its news from television, the radio, and newspapers. Talk Radio has often been invoked as a detriment to intelligent discussion, and it certainly bears some responsibility for the decline in 21st century political discourse, but the effect of the Internet is just as often underestimated, perhaps because unlike radio, it’s less evident in the physical world. And the effect of these online and radio echo chambers on how their often youthful participants think about issues and grasp important elements of discussion like logic and context has been ignored, perhaps because the implications are too disturbing.

Julius Streicher was guilty of many sins. Insincerity is not one of them. However cynically his rhetoric may have been used by Nazi intellectuals, he seems himself to have been a mentally limited man who was honestly brutal, inconsistent, and hateful and who truly saw his own actions as just. Because it was passionate and sincere, and disseminated and backed by powerful interests, Streicher’s moral and intellectual obtuseness spread like an epidemic through an entire generation of Germans. What seemed to be mindless posturing and hyperbole became not just political theater, but political action, and eventually political policy.

Today, many of us who have followed politics for more than two decades are dismayed by the inability of some Americans to coherently or rationally discuss political differences. It’s bad enough that many conservatives seem unable to distinguish between liberalism and Communism. Many are apparently also unable to distinguish between a political disagreement and personal attack. Not only do they offer invective in lieu of argument, but they interpret the statement of disagreement as an intolerable insult and a violation of their own freedom of speech. The notion that a liberal has the right to argue with them, the right to disagree with the president, the right to demonstrate is treated as if it were foreign to them and a bit shocking. This should not surprise any of us in a society where, for twenty years, Right-Wing Talk Radio and discussion forums have been the primary vehicles for political debate. Streicher’s methods have proven effective once again.

The purpose of this piece has been to use Julius Streicher not to predict, but to warn. We’re unlikely to see a straight re-enactment of Nazi Germany, with minorities and liberals herded into gas chambers, but there is plenty to fear in the long stretch between where we are now and outright genocide.

Speaking of entire groups of people in a violent and dehumanizing way fosters an illusion of strength and purpose more appealing than rational argument. When it’s done on a mass scale, it becomes especially dangerous. Legal and extra-legal persecution, beatings, fire-bombings, blacklists, even the arrest and imprisonment of dissidents can come to seem understandable to people used to hearing dissidents described as America’s enemies. It’s not even necessary to directly advocate the repression of those presumed enemies. Just point them out and call them dangerous. Readers and listeners will know exactly what they are expected to do about it.

When the end came for Streicher, he insisted that what had happened in Germany was not really his fault at all. "During the whole 20 years I never wrote in this context, ‘Burn Jewish houses down; beat them to death,’” he said, in his closing statement at Nuremberg.

Streicher may very well have been technically correct in his claim that he never directly pointed at a people and ordered his readers to physically attack them.

He didn’t have to.