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Six months ago if anyone said there could be a civil war in America (again), I would have thought they were being right-wing ridiculous. (Remember the corporate-sponsored Tea Party nonsense?) Now I’m not so sure.
In just a few months, the ultra right has begun to reap the harvest of hatred they so shamelessly seeded during the last presidential election campaign.
Oh sure, they have been at it for years. But I cannot believe the fury of people I personally know who used to care about others, who even used to be liberal, against all of us who still are liberal.
I have seen otherwise seemingly nice people literally snarl at a silent TV screen across a crowded restaurant just because it showed an image of the newly elected president. And I have seen people turn on their own families with an irrational hatred for being “liberal.” (You would think it was a curse word.)
Sure the highly paid right-wing propagandists have always spewed vitriol, but somehow this is different. This is ordinary people who have suddenly turned into snarling, spitting Limbaugh sock puppets.
Interestingly some of these folks claim not to even listen to Limbaugh. But then, they don’t have to listen to him to hear the same nasty lies and perverse prevarications repeated endlessly by the Limbaugh wannabes.
For some reason ordinary folks think the imitators are less vicious because they do not bellow and spit into the microphone the way Rush does. But they are wrong.
You know, blatant racism is horrible. But unacknowledged, subtextual racism is horrible, too.
And selfishness, even short-sighted, ignorant selfishness, where people preach and vote against their own interests in order to keep some other, despised group from being treated fairly, is horrible.
But this is different. There is an anger being expressed that just is not rational even by the the usual irrational logic.
And that brings me back to the civil war angle. I’m seeing people turn against their own family members. We are being treated as heretics.
The angry ones are not listening. There is no conversing with them. Their minds are closed.
They parrot propaganda in an angry tone. And here’s what’s weird: they don’t bother to listen because Rush and his cronies have already told them what we supposedly believe, and exactly where we got our benighted notions.
They claim to be mind readers. They know what we read. They know what we think.
We are credulous dupes and conspiracy nuts who believe anything as long as it is left-wing (and apparently “evil”) enough. Whereas they are paragons of rationality, brilliant intellect, omniscience, and common sense. They know this, because Rush (and company) tells them so.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Um-hmmm. Yep.
Sorry, but turning on your own family that way reminds me very much of another era of demagoguery that filled people with irrational hatred for their erstwhile friends and neighbors.
It was not so long ago as our American Civil War. It was the Nazi era before World War II. Kind of scary, yes?
As part of this whole weirdness, the far-right, the very mouthpieces of corporate greed, are labeling centrists like the President as fascists. The people who listen to them may not know it, but the very definition of fascism (by Musselini himself) was “the merger of business and government”.
Fascism is when business interests take over the government (not, as the Rushites claim, when government takes over a business). So they label Obama as both a socialist and a fascist (two opposite labels, neither of which applies).
You would think the two labels would cancel each other out. But then, you would think.
Are you scared yet? If not, you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening all around you. Things have gotten very, very ugly, and I suspect they are only going to get much uglier between now and the mid-term elections in 2010.
All this slavering hatred is being drummed up for a purpose. And that purpose is to make the world safe for rapacious greed. Again.
There is no compassion and no conscience in it. And that’s what scares me. Again.
Just when we thought Democracy was going to be saved.
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Tags:civil war,fascism,fomenting hatred,mid-term elections,Musselini,Nazism,President Obama,right-wing ridiculous,rush limbaugh
