Reddit reviews Eliminationists

And this is why Democrats get to be grumpy when Republicans talk about "eliminating" them. Conservatives say stuff like that all the time, and sometimes act on it.

>someone should gas that bitch

Stop. That's eliminationist rhetoric -- on the far side of the bright line demarcating civil discourse from incitement to violence. This is what they do -- the sort of language that Bernard Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin et al. spew that leads to tragedies like the Knoxville church shootings, the Holocaust Museum shootings, the murder of Dr. George Tiller, etc. David Neiwert's new book should clear up any illusions that using this sort of language is "just talk". We can do better.

Democrats have been so demonized by the right-wing media, that Alabamans find it a moral dilemma to choose between a Democrat and a Sexual Predator/Nutter.

https://www.amazon.com/Eliminationists-Hate-Radicalized-American-Right/dp/0981576982

I wish I could upmod you more. I'm about done reading The Eliminationists; I highly recommend it to anyone taking notice (or not taking notice for that matter) of the extremism---bordering on fascism---emanating from the "right".

Trying to catch stuff that hasn't been mentioned here already:

Films:

Bob Roberts (1992)

Bulworth (1998)

Primary Colors (1998)

Documentaries:

The War Room (1993)

The Century of the Self (BBC)

The Power of Nightmares (BBC)

Books:

Anything by Al Franken

Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

The Truth (with Jokes)

Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations

Other authors:

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right
by David Neiwert

Read David Neiwert's Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right which features Robert O Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism which Paxton defines as:

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
  
  
• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
  
  
• the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
  
  
• dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
  
  
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
  
  
• the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;
  
  
• the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;
  
  
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;
  
  
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

They're called Eliminationists.

Thank you! I hope yours is going well.

For added reading, I'd recommend The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

https://www.amazon.com/Eliminationists-Hate-Radicalized-American-Right/dp/0981576982

Fascinating and terrifying read.

>And neither is "white culture", right? It's not like all those right wing
>conspiracies and racism are a massive part of traditional culture of white
>people. Right?

What are you suggesting I said? I went on to identify the ideologies that led to attacks like Oaklahoma City. I took a keen interest in the rise of militia groups and right-wing anti-government ideologies in the '90s; heck, I read every word of the transcript of McVeigh's trial as it came out. I also watched the rise of right-wing talk radio and how these radio programs stoked the flames of dissent until the inevitable result.

There's even a term for what some of these programs preach today: eliminationism.

Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

>The Eliminationists describes the malignant influence of right-wing hate talk
>on the American conservative movement. Tracing much of this vitriol to the
>dank corners of the para-fascist right, award-winning reporter David
>Neiwert documents persistent ideas and rhetoric that champion the
>elimination of opposition groups. As a result of this hateful discourse,
>Neiwert argues, the broader conservative movement has metastasized into
>something not truly conservative, but decidedly right-wing and potentially
>dangerous.
>
>By tapping into the eliminationism latent in the American psyche, the
>mainstream conservative movement has emboldened groups that have
>inhabited the fringes of the far right for decades. With the Obama victory,
>their voices may once again raise the specter of deadly domestic terrorism
>that characterized the far Right in the 1990s. How well Americans face this
>challenge will depend on how strongly we repudiate the politics of hate and
>repair the damage it has wrought.

We saw this in the Unitarian Church shooting in 2008. Adkisson said he was motivated by Goldberg's "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America". The far right doesn't recognize that there are fellow Americans who disagree with them; instead they preach that these people enemies, traitors that are destroying the nation and that they have to be eliminated. There is no peaceful co-existence. Ann Coulter's books are a prime example; she even wrote one book titled "Traitors". Like the Pizzagate shooting, if you take this stuff seriously and literally, it justifies violence and murder and we continue to see this play out.

Do you want me to go on, because I can discuss the rise of the militia movement in depth if you want? Or you can stop trying to paint me as some sort of ignorant white supremacist.

By the way, there is no such thing as a singular "white culture". As I've pointed out before, we have as many as 11 cultures in America based on region. The forces that shaped the rise of the Michigan Militia group would not, for instance, exist in Southern California.



>> And Islam is to blame for what happened in London twice in two weeks.
>Except, it's not.

Sigh.

> There is no verse in Qoran that says "go commit mass murder against
>children with guns". Or one that says "run over them with trucks".

So where do these ideas come from when THE TERRORISTS THEMSELVES often say they're doing it because of Islam? Are they lying? And as pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of verses calling for violence against infidels. And since guns and trucks are modern inventions, your statement is simply ridiculous. It's no easier having a rational discussion about this topic with those on the left as it is with those on the right apparently.



>> Why must we pretend to be so politically correct that we can't say the
>>words?
>
>First of all, why the fuck being "correct" is something negative to you?

It isn't. But in this case, Hillary is blatantly incorrect - and downvote me all you want, she tweeted something stupid. And she did it because of politics. On the other hand, she might just have been baiting Trump.

> Why do we have to fall into false rhetoric and say ignorant and blatantly
>wrong shit?

That's what I want to ask Hillary Clinton.

> The ideology of Jihadism is evil, but the religion itself, is not. At least not
>anymore evil than your average religion.

I can't agree with this. We don't see Quakers blowing themselves up. We don't experience horse-and-carriage bomb attacks from Amish. Catholics don't proscribe the death penalty to those who leave the faith. Unitarian Universalism doesn't have the concept of "jihad". There are lots of bad ideas in lots of religions. But we have to be honest and say that there's something particular to Islam going on here. I can go on at length about what that is although people a lot smarter than me have done so before. Islam is particularly resistant to modernization and moderation. Catholics can say "Oh, this part of the book isn't to be taken literally (anymore)" when secular morality runs ahead of scripture. Islam can't - it proscribes the harshest of penalties if even one syllable of the Koran is changed. That means 800-year-old thinking gets dragged around by Islam into the modern day. Also, Christianity at least has "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's....". This was quite possibly added later (the Christian Bible has been literally as well as figuratively changed, unlike the Koran), but it serves its purpose. Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. There's also the death penalty for apostasy, the concept of jihad, etc. These unique facets of Islam make it, as Sam Harris put it, a "motherload of bad ideas".

But again, no one wants to discuss this. The right wants to call the left terrorist-lovers and the left wants to call the right bigots and no one wants to look at the big, complicated problem we have and call it such with no easy answers to be found.

>The religion says "thou shall not kill" and "don't force the faith onto others".

And you know I can pull verses that say the opposite, right? There's an old saying, "Even the Devil can quote scripture."

> At which point people like you will stop trying to shove overgeneralized
>bullshit and recognize there are other problems at play? Hımm?

There are lots of problems at play - religion is one of them.

> Corrupted by religion my ass. Excessive majority of Muslims don't commit
>any crimes let alone terrorism,

True. Most Muslims aren't terrorists. But most terrorists are Muslim. Most people don't follow the rules of their religion anyway and the fundamentalists are actually the most honest - they assume the religion means exactly what it says. It's because of secular morality that most Muslims aren't raising Jihad and most Christians aren't murdering abortion doctors, not because of theology.

> Let this basic fact sink in: Islam is no worse than Christianity.

When a 50,000 strong army of Christians try to take over parts of the Middle East and decapitate and burn people alive, I'll buy that. Of course, they did do just that, but several hundred years ago. Since then the religion has been watered down and more importantly the Enlightenment stripped the Catholic Church of its temporal power. Islam has not been watered down and it still rules countries and armies. Turkey was able to achieve so much compared to other majority Muslim nations precisely because Ataturk enshrined the concept of a secular government in the Constitution and the army has stepped in in the past to remove any leader who tried to change that.

Maybe in a single instance, reframing would be a debating tactic. But as a concerted effort by the GOP, right-wing media, etc., it's like a hostile takeover of the media space or propaganda/censorship campaign.

Look at how on-message GOP reps and operatives are. You'll hear the same catch-phrases used all across the media spectrum in response to some current political/news item: in media interviews, talk show host chatter, newspaper quotes, congressional floor speeches, etc. And then look at the origins of some of their ideas -- they come from radical right-wing sources, like former spokesmen for the KKK or ultra-rightwing talk radio hosts. The politicians and their operatives will often acknowledge the crazies under the guise of disavowing them, or saying things like "well, I can certainly understand how someone would get that angry" or similar downplaying statements.

Journalist Dave Neiwert has done a fair bit of work documenting this process of the GOP's mining radical speech and then normalizing it for mainstream consumption.

There are a couple of trends going on that overlap enough to push things way out in batshit crazyland. Some of these political forces include eliminationism, dominionism, neoconservatism and a network of media that deliberately and intentionally deceives its audience.

The media network is Murdoch's. Several changes had to be made in American laws to allow him to own such a large concentration of newspapers, radio and tv stations. Other changes, such as the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine ensured that it was only his voice that could be heard on those stations - no rebuttals could take place. All these changes, including granting Murdoch an unearned US citizenship (on Reagan's orders) were done during Reagan's term of office.

Things that used to be considered totally insane years ago have become perfectly normal to talk about. This is how the Overton Window works. In practice, some of the major transmitters of right-wing messages (Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck among others) say crazy things for long enough that their audiences end up considering them to be perfectly normal.

For a background of the history of eliminationism in America, I recommend reading some of David Neiwert's writings (check out some of the longer documents linked on the left hand menu).

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/The%20Rise%20Of%20Pseudo%20Fascism.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Eliminationists-Hate-Radicalized-American-Right/dp/0981576982/

For an understanding of where some of the dominionists are coming from, I recommend reading some of Fred Clark's and Brad Hick's blogs:
http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/
When people talk about "the taliban wing of the republican party" they are referring to the dominionists. These are people who want to instill a theocracy in the US. The book A Handmaid's Tale has such a theocracy as one of the major plot points.

The neoconservatives have become very influential in right wing politics. The founder, Leo Strauss, believed that an elite should govern the country, deceiving the public as necessary to keep the country going in the "correct" direction. The documentary The Power of Nightmares showed the rise of the neoconservative movement and how eerily it paralleled the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (who were the intellectual creators of the Taliban and Al Qeda).

There is more to it, but that's all the time I have to discuss it today.

"Eliminationism" as a concept just means that you have to push one group out of your society. Either by killing them, imprisoning them, or "tossing them out" back across the borders or what have you.

It's most prevalent on the right (get rid of the liberals, traitors, muslims, gays, whatever) and I don't want it to be part of "my" side too.

Some good books about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Machete-Season-Killers-Rwanda-Speak/dp/0312425031/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318024167&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Eliminationists-Hate-Radicalized-American-Right/dp/0981576982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318024184&sr=1-1

and a good bill moyers segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ3ap-BK0e0