Civil Liberties and the Winds of 'Change'
The latest threat to our freedom is coming from the "progressives"
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 Remember
back in the bad old days, when the Bush administration and its amen
corner in the flag-lapel button-wearing media were riding high,
and Andrew Sullivan was denouncing anyone who opposed Bush's crazed
foreign policy as being part of a pro-terrorist "fifth
column"? The atmosphere of those times is something everyone
or practically everyone would like to forget. Because that's
when all the brave "liberals" and their "progressive"
and even "radical" brethren were cowering over the covers,
and under the bed, silent as the few who dared to speak out Susan
Sontag, Michael
Moore, Phil
Donahue, and, of course, the writers for this web site were
pilloried as being accessories to the murder of those who died on
9/11.
Back then,
it was the left that was being demonized, and the methodology of
the War Party was pretty gruesome to behold: like a wolf pack on
the rampage, they would glom on to some lone wacko, or marginal
group of wackos, who would be held up as exemplars of a broader
tendency within the anti-Bush anti-war opposition. I remember an
account
of an antiwar rally by Andrew Sullivan that homed in on the fact
that someone was hawking the edges of the crowd with copies of The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Aha! screeched
the Inquisitor-in-chief, an office Sullivan appointed himself to
before the smoke had cleared from the ruins of the World Trade Building
the antiwar movement is anti-Semitic!
As unreasonable
and downright weird as this seems, in retrospect there was a method
to this madness: the rhetoric of Sullivan and his fellow "war-bloggers"
was rich with implications of treason. After all, what nation allows
an "fifth column" to operate openly during wartime? Civil
liberties are the first items to be thrown overboard when the ship
of state starts listing, a fact easily borne out by the history
of this country, from the Alien
and Sedition Acts to the PATRIOT
Act. The pro-war right-wing was clearly trying to create an
atmosphere where no one would dare to speak out, for fear of the
consequences and, if anyone did speak out, they were intent on
laying the political as well as the legal groundwork for shutting
them up forthwith.
Times change,
and so does the political landscape, but one universal principle
always obtains: the guys in charge want to silence the opposition,
or, at least, so cow them that they daren't speak above a whisper.
In that respect, in spite of the promise of "change" held
out by the election of Barack Obama, the old pattern is rather quickly
reasserting itself, this time with the ostensible "left"
playing the inquisitor role and the right relegated to pariah status.
Ever since
President Obama took the oath of office, his supporters have been
characterizing attacks by Republicans particularly the "shock
jocks" of right-wing radio as "hate
speech." This was line of attack was going on for months,
coming out of the collective maw of MSNBC's Olbermann-Maddow-Matthews
axis of "progressivism," and it was a calculated use of
language. For "hate speech," so-called, is a legal term,
at least in European jurisprudence, that defines language and views
that are outlawed. In Britain, to question immigration
policy which is generous in the extreme in language deemed "racist"
by some blinkered bureaucrat is to earn a jail
sentence.
For years,
the "anti-racist" opponents of the racist, neo-fascist
British National Party (BNP)
harassed party members with regulations of this kind, shutting down
their publications and arresting their members for violating laws
against "hate speech." Instead of trying to answer the
arguments put forth by the BNP, and stop them in the way one would
in a free society, they simply sought to shut them up and they
wonder why the tide of popular resentment managed to overwhelm such
"safeguards" and elect two BNP'ers to the European parliament.
You made your bed, Brits, and now you're forced to sleep
in it!
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Now, in recent
weeks, the investment of the "progressives" in this "hate
speech" concept is bearing a particularly ugly and vile-smelling
fruit. The horrific
murder of Dr. George Tiller, a provider of late-term abortions,
by an anti-abortion nutso, and, more recently, the rampage
of an 88-year-old white supremacist at the Holocaust Museum, in
which one guard was killed and another person injured has given
the anti-"hate speech" progressives the opportunity they've
been waiting for. Now that they're in the driver's seat, they are
demonizing their political opponents with self-righteous
fury, trying to link mainstream conservatives with the nuts
that cheered the murder of Dr. Tiller and that museum guard and
not so subtly hinting that "hate speech" (as defined by
themselves) needs to be "curbed." They're yelling
that a ridiculous-yet-sinister "report"
[.pdf] issued by the Department of Homeland Security on "right-wing
extremism" was "prescient,"
and that the "threat" from the "extremist" right
must be met with more than mere argumentation. Here is Joan
Walsh, the typical Bay Area liberal, in Salon, bloviating about
the alleged question of "Can Right-Wing Hate Talk Lead to Murder?"
Tooting her own horn about how she was on Chris
Matthews the other day, she writes that she tried to choose
her words carefully, however:
"It's
hard not to think about the extreme right-wing rhetoric, especially
about Barack Obama, and whether it could conceivably lead to more
right-wing violence
"
Well, yes,
it's hard especially if you have a not-so-hidden agenda, but never
mind:
"The
range of crazy ideas about Obama is broad and wide:
He's a secret Muslim, he's going to take our guns, he's even the
anti-Christ! James von Brunn just happened to be a birther,' one
of the nuts who believe that Obama wasn't born here, his birth certificate
is fake, and he thus isn't eligible to be president."
Notice how
a legitimate
fear that the Second Amendment is not sacrosanct in the eyes
of our present rulers is thrown in there, alongside the "secret
Muslim" meme, the anti-Christ meme, and "birther-ism"
(a new bogeyman for leftists equivalent to 9/11 "truther-ism"
in the neocon Index
Librorum Prohibitorum).
Read
the rest of the article
June
15, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
Justin
Raimondo Archives
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