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Monday, April 5, 2010

Are Threats of Violence the same Between the "Left" and the "Right?"

From the Rude Pundit:

Right Wing Vs. Left Wing Violence: Conservatives Desperately Try to Justify

Buchanan was raging against those who are upset about violent right wing rhetoric and actions. In essence, Buchanan was saying, you think a few bricks through windows and a bit of spittle and nasty words are bad? He compared the recent actions to the Weather Underground and National Guard post bombings." … That pathetic apologist for all things evil is right. Throwing a brick through a window is not as bad as setting a ROTC office ablaze." Of course, the Obama administration hasn't sent the National Guard to break up a Tea Party protest with batons, teargas, and bullets, but, hey, everything's relative. And then there's that whole Oklahoma City bombing, but, shit, we can't count that, right?

'Cause, see, whenever anyone tries to make some kind of moral equivalence between the actions of leftist protesters in the 1960s and 1970s and those of the teabaggers (or, indeed, the militia movement), they are forgetting context. In that time way back when, people were protesting things like the Vietnam War, which was killing hundreds of Americans a month, the invasion of Cambodia, and the ongoing FBI crackdown against radical groups in America, especially civil rights organizations like the Black Panthers. To oversimplify here: you could be forced to go and fight a war you knew was useless. And if you refused, you faced arrest or self-imposed exile. You could attempt "conscientious objector" status, but that was hard to come by.

Now, you got that? The federal government could seize you and make you kill people under a pretense of "defense" in a conflict that had long ago been revealed to be based on lies and with no effect on the safety of America. How do you think citizens should react to that? How would people react today if Obama had a draft? And while we say that violence is never justified, well, shit, at least in this case it was in reaction to actual violent actions by the government. It was, to say the least, about life and death.

Most of the leftist groups that engaged in violence targeted property, not people. Indeed, the accidental deaths of people caused violence as a tactic to be discredited. What exactly are today's violent protesters angry about? A mandate that all people in this country legally must buy health insurance? That those who can't afford it will get subsidies from the government? Really? Stop being easily manipulated tools. And talk to someone who was at Kent State before you jump on the fascism express. No action that the Weather Underground ever undertook approaches the amount of evil in a single hair on Timothy McVeigh's rotting head. Like millennialists and survivalists, they are fighting phantoms, finding evidence like ghost hunters who see a reflected light as a spirit's orb or some such shit. All lies and delusions.

You see, if you're gonna be violent, if you're gonna commit crimes as protests, at least do it because something real is occurring. Like, you know, vast numbers of young Americans coming home in body bags. Not because some redneck jerk-off or some power-hungry bitch with Bump Ups in her hair told you they can predict the future. Of course, they're just pissed that Obama's a black man.

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