There is a slow-motion pogrom going on in this country with Liberals as its victims. They are shooting at us. We are being murdered for our beliefs.
On Sunday, July 27, 2008, one Jim Adkisson entered a Unitarian Universalist Church and began shooting. Reports indicate that Adkisson did not expect the Liberals to fight back, and was surprised when he was prevented from finishing his extermination of the group. Adkisson's motive? To kill Unitarians because of their liberal politics and friendliness towards gays.
On August 13, 2008, one Timothy Dale Johnson entered Democratic Party headquarters and shot Arkansas party chairman Bill Gwatney. Johnson had recently told people at the Baptist convention that he had lost his job.
What is the meaning of these events? What's next? Why have they happened? and why now?
My hypothesis on the flip.
Instead of Mein Kampf, these folks are reading Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, and listening to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. To those folks, Democrats and Liberals aren't human beings; they are some "other" who is the cause of misery in our society. They are to blame for the loss of jobs in the heartland, for the permissive society where blacks and gays aren't being put in their place in favor of good old Americans.
There is a long and well documented history of displacing the current economic and social conditions prevailing in America as the result of deviations from some perceived "good old days" where white people were in charge and things were accomplished with hard work, only to be taxed into oblivion by Liberals wanting to permit sexual deviance and pay welfare queens. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas is probably the seminal work on that for the current day.
Amy Chua's World on Fire explores the dynamics across the globe when a national majority is ruled by an economically elite minority. Usually, that majority properly targets the appropriate minority for its woes. I would argue as a sequel to her book, she could have explored even more dangerous situations: where the minority is successful at deflecting blame for the woes of the majority on to other groups.
For centuries, various European princes were able to accomplish the same using the Jews as the proverbial scapegoat. When the Crusades began in 1096, the pathetic mob that headed east to "liberate" the Holy Land—and largely consisted of disaffected men unable to make their way at home—began by murdering the still and silent Jews in their cramped quarter of town. These Jews let them come, and died for the Sanctification of The Name.
In 1348, Jews were blamed for the Black Plague, and anti-Jewish riots occurred all over Europe. Sometimes these riots or pogroms were spurned on by Blood Libel: accusations the Jews ritually murdered Christian children to use their blood in the preparation of matzah for Passover.
On November 9, 1938, after 5 years of Nazi rule and the repeated blame for the humiliation of the proud German people in World War I laid at the feet of the Jews, The Night of the Broken Glass occurred, Kristallnacht. Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes were smashed, defaced, and destroyed across Germany.
We all know what happened next.
For a long time now, Conservatives have been blaming all of our social ills not on Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, or Gays as individuals, but all of them together. Every problem these groups cause has been allowed by "Liberals." Of course the reality is, the kleptocratic society that has utterly undone the middle class society created by FDR being unwound brick by brick is really to blame, but here the blame has been deflected. Just like Germany's belligerency and basically being outgunned lost it WWI, the decline of middle America has been caused by the conservative revolution, yet they have laid the blame at the feet of Liberals, who enable the abortionists, the gays, the "illegal aliens" and the "welfare queens" to preen in their glory.
Just like the disaffected Crusaders, Adkisson and Johnson lashed out at these Liberals. Their motives weren't that different. Liberals too are the victim of a blood libel—namely that we murder Christian children by legalizing abortion. Liberals are also to blame for the invincible American nation's loss in Viet Nam, and now they're at it again, trying to make us lose in Iraq. They hate America. They hate Americans. They want to see us hurt, and their ways are evil. They must be stopped.
They are being shaken loose from their slumber not just by one screaming firebrand with a microphone and a mustache, but an endless cacophony of right wing media—radio, television, books, magazines, websites—all given to the proposition that Liberals are barely human, if at all, and are to blame for YOUR problems.
I would personally opine that Obama's probable rise to the highest office in the land as a black man coupled with the economic conditions have shaken these nuts off the tree due to their own psychotic racism. Probably similar to a Jew, Josef Suss Oppenheimer's, de facto rule of Wurtemburg in the 18th century—which resulted in his death and anti-Jewish riots when his Duke died.
But I don't think it's over. And I don't think that every Liberal in this country will take it lying down to Sanctify The Name, do you? This is not a suggestion that we start shooting back. This is not a suggestion that we should feel fear, but I think it's clear that politics in this country has turned into a shooting war, and the Limbaughs, Coulters, Savages and O'Reillys might as well have their finger on the trigger.
I just can't wait to see the hysteria when one of us shoots back. Something tells me that the reaction won't be that of a routine police investigation the way the recent shootings in Tennessee and Arkansas will be.
What's almost as scary is the silence of The Good Germans the rest of America as this goes on. We all assume that these creeping tyranny will eventually be stopped when it rises to a certain level, but none of us would have permitted the situation of today to pop into existence in 1995. It's the slow boil.
UPDATE: I agree with some of the commenters that two shootings doesn't make a pogrom, so I changed the title to "slow motion." But if you've been listening to talk radio lately, you'll hear stories of people being assaulted, yelled at, and having their cars damaged for having Obama or other "liberal" stickers on their car.
This is not a conspiracy theory. I am not suggesting a hidden hand behind it. Just a slowly boiling kettle.
And P.S. I am a Jew. I do not make these comparisons to diminish the pogroms (which were NOT confined to Russia—another name for Kristallnacht, just by way of one example, is Novemberpogrom.