The Abyss Beckons
Demonizing the opposition is a conduit to murderous crimes. There is no excuse for it.
I remember hearing Judge Jeanine Pirro refer to Democrats as “demoncrats” and “the enemy within.” Some Democrats accused a sitting president, Donald Trump, of being in league with Vladimir Putin and Russia, a traitor to his country. (Just as Satan was traitorous to God, Trump is portrayed by some as a malevolent force, disloyal to America.)
The result of such malicious rhetoric is obvious: A Democratic official, Melissa Hortman, assassinated in Minnesota along with her husband. Another Democratic official and his wife severely wounded. Two separate attempts on Donald Trump’s life.
Words matter. Viewing opponents in demonic terms, as savages, as terrorists, as “other,” enables and generates violent crimes. In the mind of perpetrators, it even “justifies” the crimes, for who wishes to tolerate the presence of the demonic among us?
A friend and colleague, historian David Lovejoy, wrote a fine paper, “Satanizing the American Indian,” for the New England Quarterly in 1994. It became far easier for European colonists to America to kill indigenous peoples when they viewed them as demonic savages. Especially when this view was allegedly supported, even sanctified by Biblical passages.
Democracy thrives on reasoned discourse and tolerance of dissent. Democracy dies when opponents are viewed as demonic and therefore worthy of the harshest actions, including murder.
Whatever your political, religious, or other affiliations may be, we should all agree to treat each other with respect and dignity. And if you think a person is unworthy of your respect, walk away. Or express your dissent in factual and measured terms. There is no need to reach for the demonic, for that way only opens a door to the abyss, whether in you or in someone else.
Bracing Views 
We have this murder, and we have the murder conducted by Luigi Mangione. Given that there are unlimited weapons in the US and no shortage of angry people, I wonder if we are on the road to routine killings. At one time it would have been unimaginable that someone would go into a school and slaughter children, but not only did that become something that doesn’t surprise, there has been no effort to control guns, just the opposite, this “freedom” to possess instruments designed to kill efficiently considered a precious right by many. America continues to press the limits of bizarre.
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We are a people who believe in violence, Clif.
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WJA – What’s going on with the site, I’ve been trying to submit a comment for hours now, have resubmitted, and nothing appears, even after multiple refreshes. For some reason, a reply to Clif did get through. -XK
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I don’t know. Will check.
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I see it just recently came in, time now 22:21. It was time-stamped 7:03 PM. Go figure.
Thanks.
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“Whatever your political, religious, or other affiliations may be, we should all agree to treat each other with respect and dignity. And if you think a person is unworthy of your respect, walk away. Or express your dissent in factual and measured terms. There is no need to reach for the demonic, for that way only opens a door to the abyss, whether in you or in someone else.”
WJA – Your sentiment is of course spot-on. Trouble is – and this comes from what I’ve learned about the Israelis/Zionists over the past 20 months, and that is the profoundly chilling realization that there are no boundaries whatsoever – legal, cultural, social, moral, psychological, whatever – they recognize in the defense and furtherance of their sordid project. This couples with their self-conception as Übermenschen and denigration of non-Zionists to various iterations as being subhuman. This is discussed as well as elsewhere in Ilan Pappé’s “Ten Myths About Israel.”
In other words, what I’m saying is for all intents and purposes of reaffirming basic decency to civil discourse, what you say falls on deaf ears to a certain opposition.
A trivial but I think related footnote to these parlous times is the recent news item of a woman in a SUV chasing down a kid on an e-bike https://lawandcrime.com/crime/theres-this-lady-trying-to-hit-me-florida-woman-driving-suv-allegedly-chased-down-14-year-old-boy-on-bike-path-so-she-could-speak-to-his-parents-for-riding-e-bike-too-fast/.
RFK, Jr. is openly removing fluoride from the water supply, but what is he surreptitiously adding to it?
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Clif – I too am repulsed that “school shootings” has entered into the lexicon and mosaic of the American legacy. And not just their occurrence, but the perverse “our thoughts and prayers are with the families” – but no further action – as well. I could go into a dissertation.
I maintain it’s more than the availability of guns per se. In part, it’s the laying bare of status of the citizen vis-à-vis society – a valued human being, with all attending rights and privileges as such, well integrated into the lives, the society of others – or an anonymized, disposable individual, whose worth is circumscribed by his/her marketing value? The friction of the latter type trying to fit into, or prevented from being a part of society as a whole, is what can result in these shootings.
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The U.S. was a lousy idea from the start, an apartheid state founded by child-slave owners. How could that lead to anything good?
Now the chickens have come home to roost. The U.S reveals to its people and the world what it has mostly always been: a hyper-predatory, ultra-violent and utterly pitiful excuse for a democracy, No more land of the free and home of the brave. instead. one giant open-air prison ruled by nihilist.
Either it falls to revolution (extremely unlikely) or it falls to ruin (virtually inevitable}. Either way, down it goes, and not only can’t its so-called leaders do anything about, their actions only serve to hasten its decline.
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For certain, from the start… the expulsions and genocides of the Native Peoples, never taught in school, the story of Squanto standing in for that, more widely known, how much reality vs. truth in that? And of course slavery.
Of course more recently we have Noam Chomsky, “It’s official: The U.S. is the world’s leading terrorist state, and proud of it”…
and “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government. I can not be silent.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some would argue that we also have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – I want to think that is “something good” – and that, although more aspirational than universally and consistently applied, at least we have them. Well, not just recent events, but especially recent events, show them both to be diminishing, under assault and undermined.
The United States had it good from August 1945 to the writing of the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971 and the advent of neo-liberalism in the Carter years. Maybe that’s the MAGA-era Trump is referring to, although with his understanding of history, who knows? With the exception of the Marshall Plan in 1948, of geopolitical and economic necessity, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of moral necessity, the United States has always acted as “the indispensable nation,” indispensable to maintaining the global rules of order supportive of its own interests. I came across somewhere, can’t recall where, that “the legacy of America is one of gluttony.”
Yes, whether chickens coming home to roost or Chalmers Johnson’s “Blowback,” the ruin is inevitable, not just the enormity of atoning for the many sins, but because there is no time, the global warming set in place by that gluttony cannot be averted in its trajectory toward irreversible collapse of human civilization. This despite Trump’s banning it through Executive Order.
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