On The So-Called Link Between ‘Rightwing’ Political Rhetoric And Violence

See my previous article, “On the Malicious Connection Between Conservatives And Hate.”

Having documented that the left’s demonization of conservative “rhetoric” was nothing more than a hypocritical and immoral attempt to politically exploit a tragedy, I would like to go a little further and examine whether the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech should be denounced – as the Democrats have clearly tried to do in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting.

Should angry political rhetoric be suppressed?  Our founding fathers clearly didn’t think so.  And, truth be told, they freely let a fair amount of “rhetoric” fly themselves, during their day.  Furthermore, they codified that belief in the Bill of Rights.

But that isn’t the question I intend to examine.  Rather, I want to go further and ask, “Does angry political speech – call it ‘rhetoric’ if you want – lead to violence in a democracy?”

Let me repeat what I wrote when I first learned of this tragedy on Saturday, January 8:

Whoever did this terrible thing, and for whatever reason he did it, we have to be able to disagree in America without resorting to violence.  Or our entire system of government will collapse.  There can be no democratic republic in a police state.

Pray for Gabrielle Giffords.  Pray for her staff, some of whom were terribly wounded or even killed.  Pray for the safety of every single politician in America.  And especially pray for the safety of those politicians with whom you most disagree.

And later in that same article:

This event is something that should transcend the political arguments and the debate over which party should run America that constantly goes on.  Because ANY act of violence which accompanies a political statement of any kind undermines our freedom and liberty.

Because, like I said above, you cannot have a democratic republic in a police state.  And the more politically violent any group or individuals become, the more police powers become necessary to impose order.

All that to point out that I, as someone who can easily be identified by the pejorative “right winger,” would in fact NEVER call for acts of violence.  And I do not oppose political violence in spite of the fact that I am a conservative, but rather BECAUSE I am a conservative.

The fundamental tenant of political conservatism is the belief in limited government.  Conservatives are not “anti-government” any more than are leftists.  The far-leftist communists overthrew the current government in Russia in 1917; American liberals were opposed to the government of the Bush administration just a short time ago.  Conservatives don’t want NO government, but rather they want a federal government which is limited in size, sphere and power.  The debate isn’t between “pro-government” versus “anti-government,” but rather small government versus expansive government.  And my point is that as a conservative I don’t want a Big Brother state.  I don’t want the police on every corner.  I don’t want myriad laws restricting my freedoms.  I don’t want government imposing its will on me in order to “restore order” or impose “social justice.”  And frankly, if any political ideology in this country wants those things, it is the left.

I would further point out that the reason we do not need to resort to violence in our American democratic system is because we have the ability to use persuasion in place of and instead of violence.  But if you take away the ability to use persuasion to change society, all that is left is violence.

For the record, it is not conservatives, but liberals such as former SEIU president Andy Stern (among many others) – who have repeatedly said things like, “If we can’t use the power of persuasion, we will use the persuasion of power” – who have an unfortunate record of conflating persuasion with the raw exercise of “power.”

But let me go even further than that.  Let me take the most visceral political issue of all – abortion – and examine that issue in light of the possibility of rightwing violence.

Let me state my position on abortion clearly: it is nothing short of murder.  It is the unjustified killing of an innocent human being.

When President Obama gave his speech at the memorial service in Tucson, which shooting victim did he single out for the greatest attention?  It wasn’t Rep. Gabrielle Giffords; it was the youngest victim, nine year-old Christina Taylor.  What did Obama say?  “I want America to be as good as she imagined it.”

For someone who is pro-life, it is no surprise that the president would have focused on the youngest victim.  Because 9 year-old Christina had so much unrealized potential, so many dreams that would never be fulfilled, so much life that was taken away from her.  And it is precisely that deprivation of potential that makes her death so much more tragic and heart-wrenching than the 79 year-old victim – whose murder was obviously also a tragedy.

Allow me to consider the fifty-three MILLION innocent human beings who likewise should have had their entire lives ahead of them but instead had their lives violently and ruthlessly snuffed out.  Entire lifetimes of limitless human potential were ripped and dissolved away with surgical scissors and saline solutions.

Let me say even more: Adolf Hitler treated six million Jews as being “less than human” and ruthlessly exterminated them.  One of the greatest monsters in human history, and he is only one-NINTH as murderous as the Democrat Party in the United States of America.  There’s a term the Nazis used – Lebensunwertes Leben (“a life unworthy to be lived”) – that with all due respect is every bit as much an ideology of the Democrat Party as it was of the Nazi Party.

I think of Democrats who call themselves “Christians” celebrating Mary the Mother of Jesus’ “right to choose” to kill “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) in her womb, and I want to puke.  Your theology would murder Jesus in His mother’s womb; your “god” is abortion.

And I believe that one day Democrats will stand before a just and holy God, Who will send them to burn in hell for voting in election after election for untold millions of the most innocent of all human beings to be slaughtered for the sake of convenience.

I agree.  These are pretty strong words.  And yeah, they’re harsh.  Truth isn’t always warm and fuzzy.

And yet I’ve never killed anyone, or ever even once advocated the killing of anyone, who was pro-abortion.

Do you want to know why?

I earlier mentioned Adolf Hitler.  Let me return to him now for a thought experiment that will help me make my point.

Suppose that I could go back in time and assassinate Adolf Hitler.  Would I do it?

Well, first let me ask, would you do it?  Take a moment and think about it before reading any further.

My answer is yes, I believe I would do so.  I believe that I would kill Adolf Hitler.  Not for sake of revenge; but for the sake of all living things.  I would kill Adolf Hitler to save millions of human lives and prevent human misery and suffering beyond imagination.

Ah, you say.  So why not apply that reasoning to abortion doctors, and prevent the murders of untold babies?  Wouldn’t that be consistent?

And I would answer no, it isn’t.  Because in the case of Adolf Hitler, we have the benefit of 100%, 20/2o hindsight.  We have the record of Hitler’s entire life.  We know what he did, and we know what he intended to continue to do.

Now consider abortion doctor George Tiller, aka “Tiller the baby killer.”  He was murdered – in a church, no less – by someone who said that “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”  And yet it is important to recognize that the pro-life movement immediately denounced the murder.

Let me tell you what I don’t know about George Tiller’s life that I did know about Adolf Hitler’s life.

Just like every single one of those fifty-three million innocent human beings who were murdered in abortion mills, I don’t know what George Tiller’s future would have been.

Would George Tiller have changed his beliefs on abortion if he hadn’t been murdered?  It certainly isn’t impossible that he would have.  Take the case of former head abortion nurse and former active member of N.O.W. Joan Appleton.

What would have happened if had I killed Joan Appleton while she was still performing abortions?

Think of the potential for good that she has since done with her life that would have been snuffed out.

And, neither I or the murderer of George Tiller or anyone else knows what would have happened in George Tiller’s life had he not been murdered.  Imagine the testimony that the world could have heard had the most notorious abortion doctor in the country come out condemning abortion.

In point of fact, the man who murdered George Tiller in his moral ignorance committed the very same crime that abortionists commit which makes abortion so evil; he failed to consider the very essence of what he professed to stand for.

In effect, George Tiller’s murderer committed a retroactive abortion.  He put aside Tiller’s humanity, personhood and Imago Dei; he dismissed Tiller’s “right to life”; he ignored Tiller’s “potential.”  And he killed him.

Paradoxially, all the murderer of George Tiller did – condemned as he was by the pro-abortion movement – was use the exact same mindset that the abortion movement employs every single day.

I point out in a previous article:

And there really is no doubt, once we truly consider the issues. Ever hear the argument that fetuses aren’t human beings, so it’s okay to kill them? Think again. Both science and logic assure us that – from the moment of conception – that thing in the womb of a human mother is fully a human being. Take a moment and consider the taxonomic system by which every living thing is rigorously categorized and classified. By that system a human embryo is of the kingdom Anamalia, of the phylum Chordata, of the class Mammalia, of the order Primate, of the family Pongidae, of the genus Homo, and of the species Sapiens – same as any other human being. Put even more simply, that embryo is a human by virtue of its parents, and a being by the fact that it is a living thing: it is a human being.

I’ve heard the Nazi argument that Jews weren’t human beings.  I’ve heard the argument that unborn babies aren’t human beings.  Wrong, and wrong.

I’ve heard the declaration that conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Michelle Bauchmann don’t deserve to live.  I’ve heard the declaration that babies growing up in their mothers’ wombs don’t deserve to live.  Wrong, and wrong.

So, yes, I will be a voice crying out in the wilderness about the vicious evil of abortion.  I will cry out in despair about the tragedy of millions upon millions of little Christina Taylors who were eradicated as if they were diseases before they got any chance to live out the potential that they should have had.  But I won’t kill.  Because I believe in human life.

Governments have what St. Paul described as the power of the sword to carry out justice (see Romans 13:1-4).  But I, acting on my own authority, don’t have the right of either vengeance or vigilantism.  Because vengeance is not mine; and because justice for criminals is not mine to carry out.  It is for God and for the governments which He has ordained on this earth to carry out those tasks.

Let me now also say that there is no connection in a healthy mind, in a healthy society, between rhetoric and violence.  None whatsoever.

And what of an unhealthy mind?

I made the point in a previous article that I once had a mentally ill woman literally come unglued on me as I held a sign that merely said, “YARD SALE.”  And I concluded then what I point out here: that if we’re going to ban or condemn “angry political rhetoric” for its possible effects upon sick minds, we’re going to have to condemn far more than just political speech.  Because literally anything can set off a sick mind.  Even a yard sale becomes dangerous.

If we banish everything that could set off a diseased mind, we necessarily must become the Big Brother totalitarian state which I earlier described fearing.  Because what couldn’t set off such a mind, which would then mean what sphere of life would the government not need to control?

I believe that I have explained why a consistent conservative would never employ violence to advance a political cause.  I also believe I have done so by employing a worldview and an argument that Democrats not only don’t acknowledge, but frankly don’t even understand.

Which is why it is the political left – and not the political right – which has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of global political violence.  Whether it be Marxist or Maoist communist socialist violence or Nazi fascist socialist violence, whether it be union violence, or whether it be radical group violence (in the 1960s the FBI nearly exclusively identified leftwing groups as being violent even throughout Democrat administrations).  The political hatred and violence that we have seen has almost invariably been leftwing.

[For those who would like to see more regarding the relationship between Nazism and the political left, see my article on the connection between leftist thought and fascism; please see my comment on the connection between “fascism” and American liberalism, and see my articles on the connection between postmodernism and fascism here and see also here, especially before you post a comment trying to argue with me].

So it is long past time for liberals to stop denouncing conservatives and finally turn their examination upon themselves.

Leftist Thought Led To Fascism – And Is Doing So Again

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler’s Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

The Proof Of Planned Health Care Rationing And Denial Of Care To Senior Citizens

People are being told that the crowds of people who are going to town halls to angrily protest the Democrat health care plan are “un-American” as well as being swastika-carrying fascists.  It is terribly malicious and hateful demagoguery.  It is amazing that Democrats demonize tactics that they themselves are pursuing and have been pursuing for YEARS.  And then we come to learn that not only are Democrats organizing, but they are in fact literally PAYING people to show up and fight for the Democrat health care plan.  Talk about “manufactured outrage“!!!

The Speaker of the House decided to make this a debate about who is more Nazi.  I welcome that argument.  Just look at the Democrats’ own tactics!

But there is a far deeper issue at stake when we talk about “Nazism” than mere political rhetoric.  There is a very real issue of life and death at stake.

Mike Sola angrily confronted his Congressman over his fear that the Democrat system would not cover his son, who is in a wheelchair suffering from cerebral palsy.  He has since received death threats and vandalism at his home from Democrat supporters.

Should people fear for their lives under ObamaCare?  Should people like Mike Sola fear for their loved ones’ lives?

Let’s get away from the rhetoric, and reflect on the words of key Obama health care architects.

Consider a New York Post article:

Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

So, yeah.  Mike Sola has every right to be fearful of what will happen to his son.  Just as I have every reason to be afraid of what will happen to my parents.

When Dr. Emanuel says “communitarianism,” it is impossible for me – given the man’s writings – not to think “communist” plus “totalitarianism.”

And Obama appointed this man.  How can he distance himself from a guy who he himself appointed?  As Glenn Beck put it, “I wouldn’t let these people bring me a can of Coke, much less allow them to write a national health care plan.”

In January of THIS YEAR, Dr. Emanuel – who is a principal architect of the Democrat’s health care plan – wrote:

“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”

“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.”  Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care.  Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:

When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.

Take Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulatory Czar, who wrote in the Columbia Law Review in January 2004:

“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar explains:

“If a program would prevent fifty deaths of people who are twenty, should it be treated the same way as a program that would prevent fifty deaths of people who are seventy? Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”

Which very much jives with what Obama told a woman concerning her mother:

“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”

As I wrote in my last article, “Don’t let the coffin lid hit your face on the way out, Grandma and Grandpa.”

Incredibly, that’s not all.  There are other writings that President Obama’s appointed architect Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel have said.  I thank Jeff Head for bringing his own blog citing other statements by Emanuel to my attention:

Is the “Final Solution” wording that was added to this revamped Obama Health Care graphic warranted? Some might see it as a simple play on words.

But before you decide how to consider that wording, please read the following shocking quotes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief health-care policy adviser to President Barack Hussein Obama, and (not coincidentally) the brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

From: Principles of allocation of scarce medical interventions, January 31, 2009
Also see: Deadly Doctors, New York Post, June 24, 2009

“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”

“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

“Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ‘classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,’ but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.”

“When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated”

“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”

From: Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008

“Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others”

From: Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008

“Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,”

From: What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide? New England Journal of Medicine, July 1998

(These quotes add new context to the “End-of-Life” Counseling sessions required every 5 years for all seniors over 65 in Obama Care.)

“There is a widespread perception that the United States spends an excessive amount on high-technology health care for dying patients. Many commentators note that 27 to 30 percent of the Medicare budget is spent on the 5 percent of Medicare patients who die each year. They also note that the expenditures increase exponentially as death approaches, so that the last month of life accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the medical care expenditures in the last year of life. To many, savings from reduced use of expensive technological interventions at the end of life are both necessary and desirable.”

“Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. One commentator observed: “Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better.” Some of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court expressed the same logic: “Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide” and “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.”

“Although the cost savings to the United States and most managed-care plans are likely to be small, it is important to recognize that the savings to specific terminally ill patients and their families could be substantial. For many patients and their families, especially but not exclusively those without health insurance, the costs of terminal care may result in large out-of-pocket expenses. Nevertheless, as compared with the average American, the terminally ill are less likely to be uninsured, since more than two thirds of decedents are Medicare beneficiaries over 65 years of age. The poorest dying patients are likely to be Medicaid beneficiaries. Extrapolating from the Medicare data, one can calculate that a typical uninsured patient, by dying one month earlier by means of physician-assisted suicide, might save his or her family $10,000 in health care costs, having already spent as much as $20,000 in that year.”

“Drawing on data from the Netherlands on the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and on available U.S. data on costs at the end of life, this analysis explores the degree to which the legalization of physician-assisted suicide might reduce health care costs. The most reasonable estimate is a savings of $627 million, less than 0.07 percent of total health care expenditures.”

From: Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet, Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec.1996

“This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

[….]

Do not fall for the platitudes and the revisionism or assurances of the people pushing this plan.  It is a radical plan and it will lead to single payer, complete governmental control of health care.  A command economy of health care much more akin to what someone like Karl Marx would implement to go hand and hand with his political philosophies.

The president, in a less-guarded moment before running for the Presidency outlined his true goals with respect to Health Care, and now he has the congress and the advisers he thinks will lead him there.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”

When you see “angry mobs” of Democrat health care plan opponents, realize that they aren’t angry because of “disinformation” or “fishy” emails; they are angry because of what they KNOW.  They are angry because of what Obama’s own architects have STATED.

Some of what we have seen here has far more in common with Dr. Mengele than with medicine.

The Nazis had a term, Lebensunwertes Leben, that meant “a life unworthy to be lived.”  The Nazi agenda was not about goose-stepping soldiers; it was about a complex of ideas that de-valued individual human life and exalted the power of the state to control the lives of the people.  And those who were deemed unable to produce sufficient societal benefit were deemed unworthy of life.  And the men who created this system did not regard themselves as evil men; they regarded themselves as doing what was necessary to implement their vision for their country.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel would never agree that he is a Nazi.  He would point out that he is Jewish; how on earth could he be a Nazi?  But his plan comes right out of the heart of Nazi ideology; it is Lebensunwertes Leben rearing its ugly head all over again.  Does he want 6 million Jews to die?  Of course he doesn’t.  But my question is, “Does he not want 60 million senior citizens to die?” And the only difference is that he would prefer to kill them by neglect due to rationed medical care, or due to a more humane but every bit as evil death by suicide.

The Nazis’ “final solution” was to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating the Jews; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s “final solution” is to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating unhealthy children and senior citizens.

And, again, if Barack Obama doesn’t want this vision himself, then why on earth did he appoint Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel – who has been arguing for this “Complete Lives program” for YEARS, and who has an article urging for it as late as January of THIS YEAR – to write large swaths of the health care bill?  And any of Obama’s protestations to the contrary only fly in the face of what he himself has said and what he himself has done.  Don’t trust him.

A video montage explains precisely how the Democrats have organized behind the scenes to use the currently-proposed plan to necessarily lead into the kind of system that will produce the kind of “care” outlined by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel above.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein tell us what government health care will ultimately look like; and the video explains in Democrat health care strategists’ own words how they propose to get us to that point.

Watch it – and then join the fight against this monstrosity.