The Big Roundup, Phase ll ( also see my
recent diary ) : Dave Neiwert has been watching the US far right for several decades now, and he has been writing an ongoing series on the extreme
hate-speech coming from the US Right.
"Having made two post-election jaunts to the red state hinterlands of Idaho and Montana, I'm back to report that, well, things are getting ugly out there. In some cases, really ugly. I've been talking for some time about the course that eliminationist rhetoric on the right would eventually take by the force of its own nature: pretty soon we'd go from talking about liberals as traitors to overtly wishing for violence to be visited upon them and discussing locking them up, followed in due course by such violence and incarceration becoming a reality....Well, it is now becoming a commonly spoken sentiment on the right to wish for violence against liberals and to simultaneously suggest they and all "traitors" (including Muslim Americans) should be locked away. We're firmly into Phase II now."
( Neiwert, continued )
"Now, you won't hear this talk on the upper levels of the conservative movement. People like William Bennett will call for a "national renewal" aimed at enforcing a new moral code, while Ann Coulter will explain to her readership, a la the title of her most recent "bestseller", that the "preferable" way to address a liberal is with "a baseball bat." [Ha ha. Whatsa matter, you don't think that's funny? Someone should beat you up.]
And if you talk to supposedly "reasonable" conservatives, who will claim that talk like this remains relegated to the fringes and is just so much "hot talk." I've been hearing this for a long time, but I keep hearing more and more of the eliminationist talk. You hear it when conservatives -- especially those red-state cultural conservatives from the working class who are most likely to vote against their own self-interest, and then blame liberals for how lousy their lives are -- get together among themselves for their communal liberal-bashing hatefests. They'll say it when they think no one else is listening. You can hear it from "fringe" radio figures like Michael Savage. Or you can read it in the unpublished letters to the editor that most publications choose not to run. It's the natural outgrowth of the kind of rhetoric we've gotten from the national conservative punditry, manifesting itself on a less sophisticated but more direct and plain-spoken mode. My very clear impression of the rank-and-file American right is that many if not most of them, at the behest of their leaders, now believe that opposing George W. Bush and the Iraq War, as well as his handling of the War on Terror, is an act of genuine treason."
The first step in combatting this is to gather examples of the most vile sort of right hate speech and compare it with the hate speech employs by the Nazis, and in Rwanda and elsewhere. The hate speech of the US right is now very similar or even identical to the hate speech that has preceded some of the great periods of historical violence in World history.
Such speech must be called for what it is : HATE SPEECH, hate-filled speech that seeks to provoke hatred and violence, in others, against certain vilified groups.
Such hate speech is no different - but the for stage we are currently at in this arc of growing American societal hatreds that will eventually erupt into violence if not challenged - from that used by the Nazis in the targeting of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and all opponents of the Third Reich.
In the Christian vernacular ( and in most or all major religions this judgement would be essentially the same ), such hate speech is demonic - of the Devil, that is : not of Christ, nor of God.