Tag: Hate Speech

cross-posted from ProgressiveBlue.com

(and no, not about the book though I am thinking of rereading it.)

Beginning in September, look for the launch of a new weekly column at Progressive Blue called “War & Peace.”

When I first thought about coming back with a regular column, I realized there are so many issues I care about, want to write about, that it was hard to narrow it down.  While my personal passions are human rights and civil rights, international development and education, these aren’t always what get me revved up.  So how to pull together all the many different topics I want to write about into a focused, coherent vein?  War and Peace.

Some things fit neatly into the War theme: they are destructive, negative, usually deliberate and always get my blood boiling.  Others fit into the Peace theme: positive, compassionate, progressive, and always get me to smile even in difficult subjects.

I’m still figuring out exactly which day of the week I’ll publish “War & Peace”, probably Tuesdays — do feel free to chime in.  And let me know what areas you’re interested in exploring: I have a list but it’s definitely not exhaustive so pile on.

Progressives are very reluctant to talk about the possibility of Obama’s assassination, they don’t even want to think about it.  Well we’d better start thinking about it, we’d better start talking about it, we’d better start doing something about it, because right wing talk radio thugs are inciting assassination, they’re inciting it every day, they are not only inciting violence against the government and the President of the United States, they are glorifying it, they are sanctifying it as a moral obligation, as a patriotic duty.  They are telling the rabid RePug base that violence against the government is justified, that President Obama is the enemy, that he’s a tyrant, that he must be stopped.

These talk radio thugs aren’t directly inciting assassination, but they don’t have to.  When they compare Obama to Hitler, when they condemn him as a fascist, when they denounce him as a tyrant and brand him a traitor, kill him is the message being sent and received, kill him is the message being heard and acted upon.  Assassination threats against President Obama have increased 400 per cent. He is being threatened with assassination 30 times a day, 300 times a month, and the number of threats is increasing as the incitement escalates and the reaction intensifies and the compulsion to kill him spreads like a plague through the batshit insane Republican base.

What else do progressives have to see before they call this what it is?  

I don’t have to see any more of it, I’ve seen more than enough to call this what it is.

The Supreme Court found in favor of the nutcase haters from the Westboro Baptist Church and its fundamentalist (and fundamentally unhinged) founder, Fred Phelps.  This is a difficult post to write, but we that love the First Amendment must honor this proper decision.

These folks are, in my opinion, fundamentally hatred filled and also love the spotlight.  But, as much as it grieves me, they have their right to spew their toxic bile.

I would like to take an opportunity to recommend a piece from a friend of mine, William Cormier who has written today on the role of the mouthpieces in the fascist propaganda machine in the crimes that they so eagerly encourage. Such an essay is especially important to bring awareness to with the $40 million a year ‘populist’ spokesman for the anti-American virulent Republican party form of dead-ender fascism that is the last bastion of scoundrels trying to save their think tank paymasters, the malefactors of great wealth who have subsidized their careers and purchased the media from which they belch their hate and bile. Now with the paymasters of the extremist right in The Homeland doing their damn level best to incite violence, revolution and a crusade against the hated libruls, brown-skinned devils, commies, gays and every other scapegoat that could be invoked at the snakepit of sin and stupidity that was this week’s CPAC bund conference it is imperative that we ask the forbidden question.

How complicit are the establishment hatemongers in the crimes that they have done so much to endorse and in many cases encourage? In my personal opinion, and I have brought this up recently in my own writings – the propagandists and the whores in the media should no longer be able to cower behind the defense of free-speech as a shield as they and the oligarchy that employs their sordid services use the First Amendment as a shield from behind which they can use their money as ‘free speech’ while seeking to destroy the rights of everybody else.

So without further adieu, I present the following with the request that it be taken into account just how complicit that the purveyors of hatred are in the crimes of those that they encourage to commit.

Denial is no excuse, not any longer, not when the stakes are this high. The smell from those smokestacks downwind from Auschwitz wasn’t from freshly baked apple pie.