Comments Posted By hornswaggle
Displaying 1 To 1 Of 1 Comments
"TELL THOSE DIRTY FASCISTS TO STOP THE NAME CALLING!"
Okay. Well, which side has as its elder statesman a former Grand Beagle or Empirical Wizard or whatever they call those bed sheet fetishists? When David Duke found his Mother Teresa, was it Elizabeth Dole? Nay, he erected his shrine in dedication of Mother Sheehan. She of the “absolute moral authority†who is an anti-American, anti-Semitic worthless mother who traded fame on her son’s grave which she left like potter’s field (while pocketing his $250G life insurance) who is an icon for the Left.
Exactly. That's why the Neiwert guy doesn't try to claim Republicans are fascists or whatever based on their tangential associations with Duke or whoever else. Duke's a douche, he latches on to whoever he thinks will get him attention. Neiwert's point is the same point Umberto Eco makes about the "DaVinci Code" stuff. Before you latch on to some conspiracy theory, be aware of what the political motive for it is, because EVERY conspiracy theory has an ulterior motive.
Is the DaVinci Code guy a Nazi because he propogates the Priory of Sion conspiracy theory, which was created in its current form by a French fascist in the 50s as a tool in his anti-semitic campaign against Jewish real-estate developers? No, he's just using somebody else's pre-existing mythological pantheon as a short-cut in his dumb little book.
Same thing with Republicans and "Welfare Queens". The racists did the work of spreading the legend because it backed up their age-old classic meme of misguided, wimpy white liberals being "used" by devious minorities to hurt the white race. The Republicans noticed that it worked just as well to back up a "big government sucks" meme, so they hijacked it and used it for their own purposes, thus saving them a lot of work. Nothing wrong with that, everybody does it.
Eco and Neiwert's point is that the road to hell is paved with not-overtly-evil intentions. Just because your desire to shrink government isn't racist doesn't mean that you aren't going to play into some racist's plan by advocating it in a certain way. Is that your fault? No. Neither is running over some kid who dives into the road in front of your car, but you're still going to be sorry after it happens. So when operating a dangeous machine like politics or a speeding car, pay attention to what you're doing.
Michael Moore is actually a good example of operating the machine well. Fahrenheit 9/11 plays with the Fu Manchu meme all over the place, the overall structure of the movie is taken from the anti-semitic/ultra-nationalistic "King of the World" pantheon, there's a little bit of underhanded misogyny, and he even plays into the "wimpy white liberals are race/class-traitors" meme a few times, but he KNOWS how he's manipulating political symbolism, so he overeditorializes in such a way to restrict everything he brings up to feed into a relatively benign left-libertarian ideology. If he'd done it badly, like, say, This guy has, he probably could've easily funneled a couple thousand hippy college students right into the Militia of Montana.
Comment Posted By hornswaggle On 23.06.2006 @ 10:22
