If the only possible cultural truth claim that is unimpeachable is the universal condemnation of hatred, then all individual assertions not made in response to hate, are vulnerable. For example, the desire to see the office party called the “Christmas” Party is vulnerable to the charge of “Christocentrism”. How can one defend any unique, parochial practice, when attacked? You can’t. Every unique cultural claim is intrinsically a claim to cultural superiority, since why do things one way rather than another, unless you feel that way is better?
This is the logic of Egalitarianism, upon which Socialism is based. Although very few of its exponents look that far into the future, the end goal can only be cultural leveling in which all people look, dress, and behave the same.
Now, this is not intrinsically a bad goal. We can posit, for example, alien races that are much more advanced than us, in which all look the same, and communicate with their minds.
Yet, there are two ways to get to this point: sharing commonalities, and eradicating differences. Put only slightly simplistically, through Love and Hate, through Good and through Evil.
How were all those corpses created in the 20th Century–some 100 million or so–created by the “Scientific Socialists”, aka the Communists? Simple: they didn’t fit the Procrustean Bed of the egalitarians. The task the Nihilists set themselves was destruction, the destruction of difference. From this, through some sort of Deus Ex Machina, devised by SOMEONE ELSE was, in theory, supposed to flow the proverbial Millenium. If you destroy enough, the “logic” went, sooner or later all the bad things will have disappeared, and that will mean only good things are left.
This is patent nonsense, at utter odds with common sense humanity. The horrors which flowed from it, though, were and are quite real. People were kept in doghouse sized cages and fed rice with sand in it for years. They were systematically tortured, as for example John McCain in a modified rack, which more or less explicitly mimicked the bed of Procrustes, making a metaphor literal.
It is interesting to me–and sad–to watch the Left’s reaction to the shooting in Tucson. Plainly, this was not PRIMARILY an assassination attempt. He kept shooting. He didn’t just shoot Giffords. He shot, I believe, 16 total people, 15 of whom were not Gabby Giffords.
He plainly did not follow Fox News, Sarah Palin, or the Tea Party. He is a stupid kid, with incoherent views, whose big idea was to go out and shoot a bunch of people and “let the bodies hit the floor”. Psychologically, he seems to fit the mold well of the shooters at Columbine. This was a mass murder, plain and simple, and I think he chose Giffords because she was attractive, successful, and close in terms of geography to him.
Yet, a sychronizing signal has been sent out. Hate has been enabled since the chief propagandists on the left has indicated that a hater has been identified: Sarah Palin and the very loose coalition she sort of leads.
The inability to assert any stable identity claims is enormously frustrating. Who you need to be is a matter of constant change. You have to change whenever the “science” changes. You have to hew to whatever the current political causes is. Your ONLY sense of identity is belonging in that group which has NO stable sense of identity, whose very sense of self is something created in opposition to those who have non-mutable senses of self. You are not a Christian because you are a leftist. You are not a homophobe because you are a leftist. You are not a “richist” because you are a leftists. You are not an imperialist. You are not a racist. You are not a capitalist (actually, you always are, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?).
What are you? You are a NON-HATER. You are the one who heroically opposes all those people out there who are presumed to wake up hating, eat lunch hating, and go to bed hating, because that is what THEY do.
But the problem is that the haters don’t always hate as openly as you would like. Sometimes they try to trick you by sounding conciliatory. Glenn Beck cries, as if he were capable of human emotion. Bill O’Reilly pretends he is telling both sides of the story.
So the opportunity to fight in the cause of anti-hating is not always what you would like.
This is why the chance to hate Sarah Palin, with explicit permission from your thought leaders is so wonderful. Once she’s a hater, you are fighting the heroic fight by threatening her, right? You are defending someone, even if you are not sure who.
And to the point, and switching back into my own voice, no evidence AT ALL exists to link Sarah Palin with this mass murder. To the extent there is ANY evidence, it points to the music Loughner listened to, and to his being to the political LEFT of the very moderate Giffords.
So I ask: why the hate? Why so much viciousness, dehumanization, and depersonalization of what would be a debate, if the Left were capable of it?
Why not ask basic questions like: is there any evidence linking ANYONE to the shooting? And having failed to produce any, why does this charade go on?
The answer is quite basic: leftists hate anyone not like them. This shooting created an opportunity to vent some of that hatred in what at least superficially appears to some to be a valid context.
They hate people who retain any of their residual culture and sense of self, in much the way that fat people hate skinny people who can eat donuts and not gain weight. They resent people who are culturally confident in the way that self pitying losers hate self reliant successes.
They resent them, for having something they don’t. That they themselves chose to submit to this sort of tyranny is an irony they cannot permit themselves, without losing the “faith” entirely.
There is nothing surprising in all this. This basic pattern is no different than that that to unspeakable atrocities throughout the world over the last 200 years or so.
What is surprising is that so few leftists wake up and realize how awful they are. That we are all human beings on this planet together, and that any process in which ANY groups is villified as a whole is intrinsically bigoted.
And please note here that I am quite willing to engage in rational debate with any person on the left who wants to. Over the last 6 years or so, I have sought out leftists all over. As an example, I posted, for a time, on the Daily Kos what I felt were reasoned pieces relating to how to solve problems we share in common. Yet, with few and notable exceptions, what I faced was unreasoning hatred. I have been called every name imaginable. For most of them, it was simply inconceivable that anyone could take offense at being called “teabagger”, despite the fact that that term was plainly meant to wound, if possible.
The path forward, however, remains the reconciliation of difference. This is quite different than the ERADICATION of difference. This is gradualistic process, conducted in peace, in which we slowly learn to love one another as unique human beings. This can only be done when we SEE each other as individuals, and eradicate the method of collective guilt by association, and reckless accusation.
What is needed, regretably, is patience. What is needed is something like what Martin Luther King practiced. One could say it is ironic that the methods of MLK would be needed with respect to the Left–which has tried to coopt his memory–but not really: he was a lifelong Republican, having been possessed of both common and historical sense. First the Democrats tried to destroy the black community through Jim Crow and segregation. Now, what they have in fact done is destroy the black community by making them dependent on the ebb and flow of political tides.
We can do so much better. I feel very deeply at times a sense of how tragically UNNECESSARY so much modern suffering is and has been. I can only wonder how Churchill kept his sanity, watching the development of what he always called the “Unnecessary War”.
I’ve said this before, but reading history for me is often like that feeling you get watching a horror movie, when you know what is about to happen, but the person on the screen does not. Had a slightly different decision been made, a life would have been saved.
Our future depends on clear thinking. That is quite impossible to do between the Left and the rest of us right now. This mass murder in Tucson, and the use they have made of it, shows this quite clearly.
3 replies on “Hate and the Tucson shootings”
It does seem as if politics among the 'noisy neighbours' to the south of us has taken a turn for the worse. I recall seeing a young black boy ask president Obama in real distress, "Why do people hate you so much?" He gave an offhand answer, but I am sure that he must wonder himself at times.
The polarization of political views and the lack of mutual respect among politicians and their supporters that we see taking place in America is a most disturbing trend; far more corrusive and destructive than even your idiotic gun laws or your inept forays into post-colonial imperialism.
Inevitably, if you can't find a way back from the abyss, you are headed for civil disorder on a massive scale; perhaps not out-and-out civil war, but someting close to it, and equally damaging.
Your is a nation forged and formed in violence, and you don't seem to have either the insight or the will to get beyond it.
The reason people dislike and distrust Obama has nothing to do with race. It has to do with his life-long association with extreme leftist radicals, starting with his own idealization of his bioligical father, who was a Communist. His mother and father met at a Russian language class, and again at Marxist study groups.
His maternal grandfather, who raised him after his mother in effect abandoned him in Hawaii, set him up with Frank Davis as a de facto "Big Brother". Davis was a MEMBER of the CPUSA, and supporter of the Stalinist terror. Obama's grandfather and Davis, on at least one account, used to enjoy smoking weed together and discussing politics.
On his own account, when he went to college, Obama sought out the radical feminists socialists, and racial agitation groups. He went to Columbia, which was then, as now, a hotbed of leftist agitation. It was the locus of the Weather Underground, and SDS.
He went to Chicago to do community organizing, and trained with two men who had been the direct proteges of Saul Alinsky himself, who was a de facto moral nihilist, and exponent of the intentional use of ad hominem and personal attack for political gain. Obama liked the method so much, he became a trainer.
And now the people around him are pretending they have EVER taken the high ground. It is farcical beyond belief. Obama got elected demonizing Bush. If you want to see how "fair" the Left is, go to any sample leftist blog and type in "I believe everyone should own a gun", or "I like Glenn Beck". What you will see is not contextualized, reasonable efforts at evaluating differing truth claims. What will happen–and I know since this has happened to me 100 if it has happened once–is you will be attacked personally. There will be only enough relevant rhetoric offered to sustain the illusion of substantive debate.
Take gun laws. Why is the first thing totalitarians do to ban private gun ownership? Under Lenin, for example, owning a gun was a capital offense.
Why is that pattern ubiquitous throughout history? Why were the samurais the only ones allowed to own swords in feudal Japan? Why were non-Muslims prohibited from owning swords or horses in the various parts of the Islamic Empire?
The simple fact, readily seen by our Founding Fathers, was that tyranny is much easier if only the tyrant has weapons.
And practically, the empirical, statistical reality is that as rates of gun ownership go up, crime goes down. You know who has the most guns? People living out in the country. We lived in the suburbs, but we had: a .38 revolver, a 30/30, a double barrelled shotgun, a single shot .22, and a semi-automatic .22. None of these were ever used in anger against anyone.
If you want to find high rates of crime, all you have to do is find a city or country with gun control. In Britain, knife violence is through the roof.
And to the point of Loughner, there is NO evidence that "rhetoric" had anything to do with this. This is a straight ahead Alinskyan attack on opponents, seeking to shut down rather than conduct debate.
Loughner listened to violent music ("Let the bodies hit the floor"), was an atheist and probably nihilist, and probably just did this because he thought it would be fun, and nothing really matters anyway.
As far as violence, can your own nation be seen as anything but a part of the British Empire, carved out of what were previously independent Indian nations, and possessions claimed by the French, and taken from them in war?