Hate Mail

THE FIRST "FREE SPEECH" ABSOLUTIST load of crap that I saw for the transparently obvious load of crap it was was in the wake of the ACLU championing the "right" of Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois said to be the home of the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel at the time.  The idea that Nazis had "a right of free speech" that overrode the right of the victims of Nazis to not be re-victimized by Nazis was only the start of it.  The idea that in 1977, a mere 32 years after Hitler shot himself and was burned in a Berlin gutter THAT ANY NAZI ANYWHERE, ANY TRUE BELIEVER IN HITLER'S INSANE, GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY HAD THE RIGHT TO A CHANCE TO TRY TO DO IT AGAIN WAS COMPLETE AND UTTER AND IRRESPONSIBLE INSANITY.  It was only obviously anything else to idiots who didn't believe what had happened once could happen again or, which I believe was the case, that they didn't happen to believe that THEY AND THEIR LOVED ONES were the ones who would be taking the chance on them being wrong. Clearly, the ACLU lawyers who argued the case never for a second believed they and their loved ones might be targeted as a result of their advocacy, those idiots never do, though they are clearly not much bothered by those who are put in danger by their clients.

I never sent another cent to the goddamned ACLU after that, I never said anything good about them, I found out that not only their past but their present and, with time, future, was far from pure and pristine and in line with egalitarian democracy and the quest for a universally decent life for all.  Nor was it anything like entirely distanced from mercenary motives.  

As a reluctant further student of genocidal, oppressive dictatorships, I have come to believe there are two forms of government, egalitarian democracy and government by gangsters, there only being a difference in degree as to the gangsterism of even relatively benign governments. 

The genocidal history of 20th century and now 21st century governments have produced not only the rivals of Nazism but its equals.  Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, various other Marxist and fascist and other regimes have amassed mountains of murder victims and generations of people oppressed and enslaved.  The crimes of many of those are totally documented as having happened, merely the statistics of how many tens or scores of millions so murdered, how many billions oppressed being open to any rational or quasi-rational argument.

To pretend any ideology, Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, etc which have had their test of time SO WE KNOW THAT THEY ARE POSSIBILITIES and which have produced those murderous results, to pretend that in 2021 any of them or their adherents today have a right to try to do it again is the most irresponsible and irrational common received talking point of American liberals and the left and the center.  NONE OF THEM OR THEIR LIKE, APARTHEID IN WHITE SUPREMACIST SOUTH AFRICA OR THE SUPREME COURT SANCTIONED JIM CROW APARTHEID OF THE UNITED STATES HAS A RIGHT TO ANYTHING BUT SUPPRESSION AND EXTINCTION.

It remains to be seen how many Americans the Covid-19 Trumpian-Republican-fascist anti-vaxxers will kill but a body-count that can be avoided is a body count and they already have the record for one year premature death in American history.  For anyone to pretend that because some idiots in the First Congress didn't realize they should make a distinction between true speech and fucking lies we must allow them to lie us into another half million or tens or scores of millions of dead to make Jemmy Madison happy is total and complete insanity that matches anything Trump and his most fevered nutcases have said to get us this far.  

I'm not going to lie about that no matter how extreme people think it is and how unpleasant making they find it.