Thursday, August 17, 2017

It Is Stupid To Believe You Can Safely Allow Nazism To Propagate Because It Can Happen Here Just As It Can Happen Anywhere

Given what they are, what their history of terrorism and murder here as well as in their main place in history in Germany, Austria and the rest of Europe was, given that their definitional ideology is based on genocides that will leave one poorly defined ethnicity the master race......

Tell me why anyone who is willing to make a bet on allowing them to exist as a group and to propagate their ideas WHEN WE ARE SEEING THEM GAIN STRENGTH AS THEY DID IN GERMANY IN THE 1920s AND 30s is not insane.  We have a regime in the White House which not only covers for them, it hires them to work in the government.  How much more ascendent does a horrible idea have to be before such idiots realize we've got a mighty big problem here and now?

As I answered one of the Nazis useful idiots last night about their useful idiots in the ACLU and the "free speech absolutist" industry,  anyone who holds that it is necessary or safe to allow genocidal ideologies with a history of the kind of success the Nazis have had in producing murders, maimings and terror here and elsewhere even as that long bet on them never gaining the upper hand does, is insane.

It would be useful for such "free speech" absolutists to look more closely at what really motivated the man around who a myth, somewhat less gaudy but no less unreal and hypocritical was raised around, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and his "free speech" ideology.   His reasoning included one of his favorite ideas, the idea that Darwinian struggle, even that which endangered the further existence of democracy was invigorating because he really did believe in the survival of the fittest, on that we have his own words and the testimony of one of his closest confidants and his secretary,  Judge Francis Biddle*, the chief American judge at the Nuremberg trials.  The Nazis defense lawyers used the words of Oliver Wendell Holme jr. in making their defense before the court.   Just as, no doubt, the ACLU and the Rutherford Institute and others arguing before courts might make recourse to his ideas which are based in the same eugenics that the Nazis, certainly the American Nazis have claimed give their racism, their anti-Semitism, their claims of the socially salubrious effects that killing off those they deem inferior to them will have.  As I have pointed out this past week, there is no doubt about today's American Nazis basing their racism in Darwin and his inner circle and today's Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, because they claim the scientific nature of their Nazism on that basis.

You can make the excuse for Holmes, who died in 1935, that he didn't live long enough to see where Nazism would take the ideas of the fittest surviving a violent struggle for existence.  Though he, no doubt, saw Nazism rising in Europe as he was in his last years.  He didn't see the possibility of such an ideology in its full horror and evil.   He certainly must have known about another anti-democratic ideology at work in the Soviet Union, he lived well into the reign of Stalin and, no doubt, kept abreast of developments under Lenin.

We don't have that excuse.   The idea that American democracy, egalitarian democracy will always prevail and so we must allow Nazism to have a chance to propagate and flourish and kill a few people here and there, and there and there.... and a lot of people in places like the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building... is safe and some kind of perverted virtue - a virtue which does, actually, get people killed - is insane and one of the most disgustingly irresponsible negligences of moral responsibility ever taken by legal professionals and an allegedly educated class.

That the men gathered to write the Constitution had no idea that such ideologies as Nazism and Marxism could be invented, gain power and murder tens of millions of people, overtaking nascent attempts at democracy, such as in the Weimar Republic and the post-Czarist, pre-Soviet period in Russia and brutally imposing dictatorial rule doesn't merely give them an excuse from moral short sightedness, it is a danger sign that their expression of rights doesn't fit our far different times.   They had no means of foreseeing a United States ruled by men who had no sense of honor and that the institutions they created could be so gamed and corrupted so as to leave a Donald Trump in office for even six months, put there by the efforts of a foreign despot who made George III look positively level headed and benevolent.  Their "First Amendment" is, like their Second Amendment dangerously inspecific because they had no idea how courts and lawyers would twist it in accordance to ideologies that hadn't been invented yet.  But we don't have that excuse of ignorance.   Nor do we seem to have the courage or stamina or moral responsibility to come up with language that will keep us safe from Nazis or fascists or white supremacists.  As I also pointed out last night, Marxists, on whose behalf so much of the recent "free speech absolutism" seems to have been invented were never any practical danger because there was never any way they would benefit as they hoped to from that ideology - which, like Nazis, they would have swept aside without blushing if they'd gained power.

Oh, yes, don't forget white supremacists, many of whom wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which Constitution led us directly, through slavery into a civil war and under which for 76 years Black people were held as chattels as slaves,  subjected to a denial of equal rights and lynched for many, many more years than that,  Native People were slaughtered and robbed of their lands, women denied the vote, and many other minority groups deprived of their rights.  That white supremacist ideology was and still is embedded in that Constitution which we also don't have the moral character to change to make a document truly and honestly one which produces egalitarian democracy.  White supremacy is and has been our domestic form of something like Nazism all through our history.  To believe that can't make a comeback in an even more oppressive and destructive form is sheer idiocy and or moral depravity, especially among those with university and advanced degrees.   To ignore that pre-Nazi form of domestic, American danger to equality and its history among us is even more evidence of the stupidity and dishonesty and moral irresponsibility of these Constitutional ideologies, today.

White Americans are just beginning to understand that the interpretations of our Constitution which enable Nazis can, actually, be used to deny our rights in the way that is no shock to Black Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and others, including the largest group of the subjugated of all, women.   The last group to learn that will be the affluent White Men who are the majority in the legal profession, the law school faculties** who train them,  the courts, who control and staff the media and who impose the limits within which ideas are to be deemed acceptable.

* We also have the observations of one one of Holmes other friends though, in this case his ideological opponent, one of the greatest American philosophers in our history, William James, who tried to talk his friend out of his extreme faith in Darwinism and, especially the eugenic form of it which Holmes based his infamous Buck v. Bell decision on.   As I've pointed out before, Holmes believed that allowing the propagation of even the most anti-democratic ideas was healthy, he didn't, though, believe there was any reason for a woman - who was, actually of normal intelligence - to make the decision to have a baby.   That was because Holmes, as a disciple of Darwin, didn't believe in that level of equality.

** The training of even those lawyers and judges who are members of groups which have been the target of our domestic white, male supremacist ideology acculturates them into a set of ideological positions which effectively bans the idea that the current ideologies in the law are not sufficient to protect Americans from ideas such as Nazism.   The conservative nature of the law retains the effects of affluent, white, male supremacy as a matter of course.   I think one thing the case that allowed the Nazis to name the venue and time of their rally which led to the carnage of last weekend shows that people with practical experience in policing and administering a city or state government will often have more realistic ideas about the consequences that such judicial-legal theorizing leads to.  The Supreme Court, staffed by those trained and rising in the conservative culture of the law are probably, in most cases, the least equipped level of government to be realistic about this danger. And they set the ideological boundaries.  And many of them sitting on that court, now, have proven records of partisan manipulation of those boundaries.

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