"Actual Violence"

[paft.livejournal.com]

Some of you might remember something I posted four years ago about right wing thug Mike Vanderboegh and his blog call for loyal patriots to smash the windows of Democratic Party Offices. The result -- surprise surprise! -- was the smashing of windows in several Democratic Party Offices. Mr. Vanderboegh opined that he wasn't promoting "actual violence." “How ambiguous is it if I say break windows? Am I saying kill people, absolutely not,” he said.

As I pointed out, the comments section on his blog didn't exactly jibe with his insistence that, oh mercy no, he wasn't talking about KILLING people. They included:

“Today it was bricks, tomorrow it will be ???? The fuse has been lit.”



“We need to track these highly respectable representatives (cough) down to their residences.
Where we can then present them a Hallmark card (cough) kindly requesting they consider the Contitution when they vote..
Rocks and bricks are optional but torchs, pitch forks, tar and feathers are encouraged!!”

“As we know, our society has its roots in broken windows - not to mention tar-and-feathers (always horrible, often fatal) and bullets!”

“I wonder if the brain dead socialist in Washington would get the idea if it happened a lot more often. 
Would a wrist rocket and some ball bearings help get the idea across?”

“I bought a pistol belt and load bearing harness at the Army/Navy surplus store today. Haven't worn one since 1981. Fits real nice.”

“Good thing 223 ammo is still cheep and available. just bought another 1000 rds for 'target' pratice. these clowns are the best gun and ammo salesman in the world.”

“4" PVC Pipe
End Cap
Portable Compressed Air Tank
Hose
Pipe Fittings
Valve
Expanding Foam for Sabot 
Brick

Paint, Scope, Laser Rangefinder, and compensator optional.

Use of above parts left to the imagination of the reader.”

“They're all whining about bricks......

Just wait until it turns to bullets.”


I was assured by Sandwich warrior that what ol' Mike REALLY meant was not "do what we say, or we'll kill you," but "leave us alone or we'll kill you." "Leave us alone," meaning, "don't vote for or pass any legislation we dislike."

The old dear is in the news again, and that bit about "absolutely not" advocating killing people...? Well, let's just say Mr. Mike has recently confirmed pretty much what a lot of us already know about what "Open Carry" is really all about. While making a speech at an Open Carry Rally he made the following comments:

...“We like to think that all our fellow Americans, even those who plainly state that they are committed to stealing our liberty and our property and attempting to control our very lives, are merely suffering from differences of opinion that can be overcome by the right mix of persuasion or electoral politics,” Vanderboegh said.

“Yet how many of us have tried such methods with every fiber of our being and fallen short?” he continued. “Not because we were wrong, but because those of the other side were impervious to such arguments, to such tactics, for they believe completely in their right to their appetites for our liberty, our property, and our lives with all the religious fervor of a pagan worship of naked power wrapped in a catechism of lies."

These "fellow Americans" who have been unaccountably unconvinced by his earlier "arguments" of hurling bricks through windows, are therefore, he told the crowd, “domestic enemies of the Constitution,” and as such we need to told:

"that failing all other appeals to peaceful means, that the founders’ solution to such tyranny is still available, still potent, and still waiting, for when democracy turns to tyranny, the armed citizenry still gets to vote.”

i.e. "be CONVINCED by our arguments, dammit, or we'll shoot you."

I wonder what rationalizations I'll hear from certain quarters if one day one of these maniacs opens fire with his "bullets/votes" on a Democratic Politician -- or just a Democratic voter.

Comments

[paft.livejournal.com]

If the people saying this have been buying up guns, walking around in public waving them, displaying signs about watering the tree of liberty with blood, forming organized groups and declaring their intention of using those guns on people who disagree with them, then yes, it's wise to see the expression in that case as more than a mere metaphor.

Your entire argument here rests on ignoring reality.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Reality tells us that these situations, with very few exceptions (and even those are questionable), do not result in violence, so yes, metaphor is the reality.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Uh no, reality tells us they quite frequently do, as anyone who has actually studied violent propaganda will tell you. Examples abound from the lynching epidimic, to the holocaust, to the Rwanda massacre, to the Peekskill riot, to the rise of the Klan in th early 20th century, to the attacks on abortion providers and physicians, etc. etc.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose if we look years in the past, or in places that are effectively years in the past, it's a little more prevalent.

Today? Come on.

[paft.livejournal.com]

What is it you imagine has changed that would make the lessons about violent rhetoric leading to violent acts from 100 years ago, 70 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, 5 years ago, no longer valid?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

That the sort of widespread action that you use as an example doesn't happen?

[paft.livejournal.com]

The violence against abortion providers hasn't happened? Rwanda didn't happen? the attacks on Freedom Riders didn't happen? The Peekskill riot didn't happen?...

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Pay attention to what I've already commented to you. using 70 year old examples, or third world countries, to try to make a modern first world point doesn't help your case.

[paft.livejournal.com]

The attacks on abortion providers didn't take place 70 years ago (neither did the attacks on Freedom Riders.) Nor did they take place in the third world.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

And those attacks are exceptionally rare, and show little, if any, relationship to rhetoric.

[paft.livejournal.com]

What have you read about that kind of propaganda? I ask because pretty much every work I've read on the subject by people who've studied it come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and draw a very strong, well defined line between the relationship between political violence and that kind of rhetoric.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I've read plenty. There's no link, and the attacks are rare. You show it yourself by being forced to rely on third world attacks, or situations from generations ago.

[paft.livejournal.com]

What have you read? And I hate to break it to you, but the Peekskill riot, the KKK, the attacks on Freedom Riders, and the murder of Dr. Tiller did not take place in the Third World.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

No, but they are rare occurrences.

[paft.livejournal.com]

I'll ask more slowly.

What

Have

You

Read?

Titles?

Authors?

Admit it. You've read nothing on the subject of propaganda and its relation to political violence. If you had you'd have cited it by now.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Admit it. You've read nothing on the subject of propaganda and its relation to political violence. If you had you'd have cited it by now.

Or I know where this game goes, and I don't have some sort of memory out of the thousands of books I've read over the years.

If this wasn't rare, you wouldn't be going to the well with the same few situations and wouldn't be relying on third world/long-ago-historical examples to try and make a case about 2014.

[paft.livejournal.com]

LOL! I knew it!

You've read nothing on the subject. Zero. Bupkes.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Judging by the commentary, this appears to be projection more than anything else.

But please, share more instances that show this is a regular, rather than rare, modern occurrence. If you can.

[paft.livejournal.com]

I've already cited instances.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Yes, you have. But you've shown it to be a rare occurrence, yet claim it to be something more.

With the amount of "right wing hate speech," how on earth are we not seeing an all-out war complete with militias roving the streets of Cambridge, of Amherst, of Berkeley? Could it be because there's basically no relationship between the two as claimed?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The attacks on black people by savages in the South weren't exceptionally rare. They were what passed for civilization in an area nursed on the idea that cousin-humping rednecks incapable of counting to 21 without playing with themselves were superior to blacks who often worked harder than they did while bitching less and not attributing all misfortune to society being against them because they knew if they did they'd be strung up from a tree.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I agree, but we're talking about 2014.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Who says I was talking about the 1960s? The South is still a society in need of some Iraq-style democracy, and racial violence has hardly disappeared. It might not be the kind of large-scale domestic terrorism conservatives get a woody watching, but it's still there.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Funny, I seem to recall the violent acts marching in lockstep with the rhetoric. Hitler's first major violent acts preceded his rise to power, and he was the one who initiated the tradition of purging enemies by the revolver. Perhaps that's because I'm looking at actual history, not a shaded and distorted version of the truth that neglects that Hitler was openly shooting his opponents in 1929-33 and that his pattern of terror at home *was* real *before* his troops started bringing mass graves to Poland.

Stalin's brutality didn't proceed in lockstep with rhetoric on his part, either. In fact, in *his* rhetoric he was always the innocent party, it was always local people and various conspiracies of all-consuming nature that committed the real violence.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You raise vastly different comparisons in every single case. Lynching was conducted by the kind of people who your analysis would have spreading propaganda and pulling a Henry II. Lynch mobs were affluent whites killing affluent blacks to keep the rest of the blacks down.

The Holocaust was primarily done in Eastern Europe and was done by people who didn't need indoctrination to hate Jews after spending years in Germany massacring people and after being told to starve to death or shoot Jews (which they already were quite happy to do anyway and had shown this to be the case a generation prior). The OUN, those 'anti-Communist heroes' never shot anyone who'd shoot back until the Nazis were driven out.

The Rwandan Genocide wasn't due to propaganda, it was far too well organized to be spontaneous or engineered by hate speech on the radio, the moreso given a prior cycle of violence between the two peoples in question.

The early 20th Century Klan is an odd example here when the 1860s-1870s version would be more appropriate but still wrong because Confederate soldiers didn't need propaganda to view blacks as subhuman apes.