Is American politics becoming a hate sport?
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
06/03/09 2:01 PM EDT
What do John Brown, Scott Roeder and an anonymous poster at Talking Points Memo have in common? All three believe killing those who disagree with them politically is justified.
Brown lived more than a century before and helped incite the American Civil War, but Roeder and the TPM poster are walking among us today. And there is one key point on which Roeder differs from Brown and the TPM poster.
Roeder shot and killed Kansas' infamous abortion doctor George Tlller this past Sunday as the latter ushered in his local church. Roeder has a long history of anti-abortion fanaticism. His terrible deed was immediately and completely denounced as evil and unjustified by every pro-life leader in the country as soon as it was known.
Brown is known today mainly for leading his sons on a murderous and doomed raid on Harper's Ferry, WVA in 1859. He hoped the raid would incite a slave rebellion that would sweep the antebellum South, leaving thousands of slaveholders dead and the hated institution a smoldering corpse.
Let it be noted here that reading the constitution Brown and his cohorts - funded, incidentally, by multiple prominent New England businessmen, authors and public intellectuals - adopted in a convention in Chatham, Canada, before the raid makes it clear that Brown also saw himself emerging from the violence as the military dictator over a prostrate Dixie. But that's a discussion for another day.
What Brown did in Kansas three years before Harpers Ferry is of greater interest for our present purpose. He and his sons went to "Bleeding Kansas" to fight the undeclared war against southern sympathizers from Missouri who sought to turn Kansas into a slave state. Most of the anti-slavery forces favored peaceful resistance. Not Brown.
He and his sons kidnapped five pro-slavery southern settlers near the Pottawattomie Creek in southeastern Kansas in the dead of night and slaughtered them with swords. Brown justified his actions by quoting a passage from Hebrews in the New Testament scripture that says "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin."
Unlike Brown, The TPM poster today doesn't appear to have a sword in hand, yet, but it is clear he or she would like to and would use it against "global warming deniers.' Before TPM pulled the post, it asked "at what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?" Marc Morano at Climate Depot has more details on the post here.
The TPM poster further asked: "So when the right-wing f--ktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn't we start punishing them now?"
Are Brown, Roeder and the TPM poster simply lone fanatics, isolated illustrations of what happens when political concerns become warped beyond reason and combine with unstable personality characteristics to produce gruesome results? That description almost certainly fits Roeder.
But even a cursory examination of Brown's life and writings reveals that he seriously believed from an early age that killing pro-slavery Americans was not merely justified but in fact required of those who numbered themselves among the elect. Not knowing the identity of the TPM poster, of course, it's impossible to say if he or she believes themself to be one of the elect.
But there is another way in which events this week point to an extremely disquieting trend in our political discourse. Playboy.com posted a disgusting rant by a sicko who listed conservative women pundits he would most like to "hatef--k." If you think I am making this up, check out this post on it at Pajamas Media by Ed Driscoll.
Playboy took the post down Monday after a handful of conservative bloggers protested it upon receiving a promotional news release from the magazine describing the post. And talk about bad timing, the post happened to appear the same day as a new CEO took over at Playboy, lured away, ironically, from Freedom Communications, owner of the Orange County Register, home of a long-time conservative editorial page.
Media Lizzy described the Playboy post as a manifestation of an "inner rapist," and it is difficult to see much in the way of meaningful distrinctions between rape and a sexual act whose initiator himself links it with hate and in terms that fall just short of violence and against women because of their political views. To be sure, rape as a political weapon is not a new thing, nor is it uniquely associated with a particular portion of the ideological spectrum.
That said, though, the issue posed by the Playboy post, the anonymous TPM poster and an abundance of evidence from 19th and 20th Century political history is this: Is injurious or lethal violence more or less likely to be used as a political weapon by advocates of the Left or the Right?
Advocates on the Left have for a decade or more been quick to accuse the Right of creating an "atmosphere of hate" that leads to violence. Clinton administration officials used that term within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and variations on the theme quickly circulated on the Left side of the Blogosphere following the Tiller murder.
But, with possible exceptions from South and Central America, violence from the Right against political opponents tends to be sporadic, isolated and, most crucially, not justified as a matter of ideological consistency. The "enemies of the people" trope has been deservedly and uniquely associated with the Left since Lenin and the communist revolution in Russia in 1917, and even before that with the Revolution in France.
Virtually without fail, it is regimes of the Left that create, as a matter of policy, horrors like Lenin's Red Terror, the Gulags of Siberia, and Stalin's death lists, as well as the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia, the "re-education camps" of Mao's China, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Nam and Kim il-Sung's North Korea, the furnaces of Hitler's National Socialism, Castro's death camps, and on and on and on. Indeed, there have been so many milions sacrified on the Left's revolutionary altars that a memorial to its victims was erected in Washington, D.C. in 2007.
So we must ask, what is it in the ideological makeup of the Left that encourages systematic and purposeful violence against political opponents? Is there a unique pathology associated with leftism? Are there signs of its onset - such as advocating hatef--ks or impatience with "global warming deniers" - that others should be wary of? And if there is such a pathology of the Left, what, if anything, can or should be done about it?
UPDATE: Deconstructing the "climate of hate"
Caleb Howe at RedState.com takes a penetrating look at the Left and Sarah Palin, evangelical Christians and Pvt. William A. Long. Not sure who the latter is? He's the young U.S. soldier killed by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. Not sure who the latter is? Interesting, isn't it, that the liberal media has all kinds of concern about the rights of those terrorists at Gitmo, but hardly any at all about a Muslim convert attacking a U.S. military recruiting station and killing a U.S. soldier.
And Michelle Malkin wonders if President Obama is ever going to acknowledge Long's death and sacrifice for his country.
More from Mark Tapscott
- Yankee Institute posts every penny spent by Connecticut state governmet
- Marist Poll finds strong majority favor airing Tebow ad during Super Bowl telecast
- Sunlight memo to Congress: Here's how to do earmark disclosure
- Tebow ad Facebook page draws 160,000 signers and climbing
- Hot Air's Morrissey: Time to demand 'Question Time'
Follow The Examiner
