Just a Crazy Guy
I have to repeat something which pretty much has to be said after every one of these all-too-common incidents like the white hater today who killed nine black people, apparently because he thought it would start a race war.
We know that any reasoning about this is about to be drowned out in a maelstrom of screaming that this is about nothing but a crazy guy, and maybe some bad parents. This is not true at all. At least since the Russian Nihilists in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a pattern to these terrorist activities, involving two groups of people. The first are the inciters, people with some degree of prominence who preach a gospel of hatred and violence. They will, of course, make perfectly sure that they are never in the line of fire. Among their ranks we find such characters as Gerry Adams from the IRA, and his Protestant alter ego, Ian Paisley, Yasir Arafat, who died a billionaire while the people he incited were blown to pieces, the Serbian generals who stoked the hatred and supplied the weapons to Gavrilo Princip, and our own generation of inciters; Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Pam Geller and their ilk. They enjoy fame and even adulation, while denying that they were in any way connected with the violence they incite.
The second necessary component in this scheme is a plentiful supply of dupes. The vast majority of these suckers will never do anything worse than get in a bar fight or two, or hoard some weapons they are too cowardly to use, or vote for people who regard them as little more than beasts of burden. But a minuscule number of these dupes are just unstable enough to take the words of the haters seriously, and that is what they count on- the small but continuous supply of people like the two jackasses in Las Vegas who returned from the Bundy Ranch standoff, and promptly killed a couple of cops who were sitting in a restaurant eating a pizza, or the Atlanta Olympic Bomber, Eric Robert Rudolph, or the people who kill abortion providers or Sikhs that they mistakenly think to be Muslims.
It is the first group, who know perfectly well that, if they keep up their incitement, soon enough some idiot is going to act on the basis of their words, who really bear the guilt for this. It is time that we find a way to hold them responsible for the evil they generate. I'm not sure how we can do this, but I guess we have all seen enough of the results of tolerating their behavior.
We know that any reasoning about this is about to be drowned out in a maelstrom of screaming that this is about nothing but a crazy guy, and maybe some bad parents. This is not true at all. At least since the Russian Nihilists in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a pattern to these terrorist activities, involving two groups of people. The first are the inciters, people with some degree of prominence who preach a gospel of hatred and violence. They will, of course, make perfectly sure that they are never in the line of fire. Among their ranks we find such characters as Gerry Adams from the IRA, and his Protestant alter ego, Ian Paisley, Yasir Arafat, who died a billionaire while the people he incited were blown to pieces, the Serbian generals who stoked the hatred and supplied the weapons to Gavrilo Princip, and our own generation of inciters; Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Pam Geller and their ilk. They enjoy fame and even adulation, while denying that they were in any way connected with the violence they incite.
The second necessary component in this scheme is a plentiful supply of dupes. The vast majority of these suckers will never do anything worse than get in a bar fight or two, or hoard some weapons they are too cowardly to use, or vote for people who regard them as little more than beasts of burden. But a minuscule number of these dupes are just unstable enough to take the words of the haters seriously, and that is what they count on- the small but continuous supply of people like the two jackasses in Las Vegas who returned from the Bundy Ranch standoff, and promptly killed a couple of cops who were sitting in a restaurant eating a pizza, or the Atlanta Olympic Bomber, Eric Robert Rudolph, or the people who kill abortion providers or Sikhs that they mistakenly think to be Muslims.
It is the first group, who know perfectly well that, if they keep up their incitement, soon enough some idiot is going to act on the basis of their words, who really bear the guilt for this. It is time that we find a way to hold them responsible for the evil they generate. I'm not sure how we can do this, but I guess we have all seen enough of the results of tolerating their behavior.
Comments
Not quite true. Both Ahmed Yassin and Meir Kahane were killed.
Or this