The Eliminationists

Two days ago I watched a MEMRI production of an elderly Arab speaking about his meetings with Mullah Omar, who refused to meet with Westerners, and how Al Qaeda had chemical and biological labs tucked away in Afghanistan. The point of his lecture was how easy it would be to deliver a suitcase of anthrax across the U.S. border from Mexico. Three quarters through his speech he said something of real note. He commented on the militia movement in the United States and talked about how they wanted to rid America of blacks, Jews and Muslims and he said Muslims should support this. He claimed the militias were 300,000 strong and could engage in domestic terrorism.

The corporate media now has begun to call out our right-wing on its scare tactics about Obama wanting to take away peoples' guns. In particular, the culprits are seen as commentators for Fox such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. No one has yet been able to focus on a single piece of legislation introduced or any restrictions on the purchase of firearms in the country. Yet, there has been a surge of requests for background checks for firearm licenses and a virtual run on gunstores and a lack of ammunition nation-wide.

If you were concerned about the tone and rhetoric of the McCain and Palin rallies near the end of the campaign, one wonders where the hate and vitriol against Obama came from. Even with the stimulus package and the budget, the size of the federal government in personnel would only equal that of the government under Ronald Reagan. Yet,right-wing commentators and Republicans like Newt Gingrich claim that Obama is leading us into tyranny. John Stewart had a good piece on his show where he said,"You mean tyranny is the same as losing."

But, the old Arab may have more insight into the paranoid elements of our society than we would admit. How do ideas such as a global government under the United Nations, the North American Union and other conspiracies begin to get assimilated into the mainsteam discourse of American politics? Once branded the fantasies of the fringe, strange ideas such as Newt Gingrich's assertion that the Obama Administration is anti-religious are said without hesitatition. Here's a President about to celebrate the first seder in the history of the White House. But, he is anti-religious. Or he is setting up FEMA concentration camps as one Republican congresswomen said. Or as I read the other day he is going to declare martial law because of the upcoming economic collapse.

When George W. Bush increased the power of the executive beyond anything any President had ever done, there was virtually not complaint from Republicans or conservatives. The only formerly conservative voice protesting this was Bruce Fein, the former Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. But he quaintly referred to it as royal despotism, a reference to what the founding fathers fought against. The dismantling of the imperial presidency that divvied out parts of government to the neocons, the theocons and the corporations must be infuriating to the Bush dead-enders.

But the hate of President Obama is beyond the pale. Beside that good old standard racism, what else can account for some of the most bizarre accusations against him? It might help to remember the photos of Sarah Palin reading John Birch Society literature and her warm embrace of the Alaska Secessionist Movement, whose leader blew himself up with conrtraband dynamite. Or the eerie slogan invoking nationalism of John McCain's "Country First". What has happened is that the most incendiary and nonsensical ideas have become mainstreamed into the Republican Party and into what was once a reason-based conservative movement. The dramatic loss of power and the serious dislocating times we live in has produced a hyperkinetic extreme right, which, if left unchecked, could provide the type of violence the old Arab was talking about.

This did not happen overnight. It has been decades in the making. To date, the best book on this phenomenon is David Neiwert's The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. (Polipoint Press, 2009,$16.95) An author and journalist based in Seattle, David Neiwert uses the latest studies of fascism to label this phenomenon para-fascism. He is explicit in how the talk radios and the right-wing personalities act as a transmission belt of ideas from what in an older time would be seen as the lunatic right. From a close-up of the various tendencies in the Patriot movement to the fundamentalist religious right, Neiwert draws out the links with conservative websites and odd Third Parties dotting the American landscape. He urges us to get beyond the old epithets the Left used to use about "fascism" and actually study how this phenomenon forms itself before it become a full-blown mature movement. He talks about how the extreme right aspire to be taken seriously by the mainstream and how under a variety of guises has managed to infiltrate their ideas and concepts into conservatism.

There are several chapters of this book that detail the history of the Eliminationists in the United States as well as an examination of how groups such as the KKK morphed into a group that moved beyond racial hatred to a more encompassing ideology to exclude whole categories of citizens from the American society. He notes how this formula works with the other groups such as the militia movement out West.