By Selwyn Duke
Is the right responsible for
inspiring murder, such as that of late-term abortionist George Tiller by Kansas
native Scott Roeder? Some certainly seem
to think so. For instance, the Friday
before last Bill O’Reilly had as a guest on his show Joan Walsh, the editor of
leftist news site Salon.com. She appeared
because she had criticized O’Reilly for engaging in what she called a “jihad”
against Tiller. Her thesis is that
O’Reilly and, presumably, the rest of us who are passionately pro-life are
culpable Tiller’s death.
Of course, this isn’t a novel
idea among the left. If there is any
kind of violent incident perpetrated by someone ostensibly a rightist, they
blame their political opponents for stoking the fires of hatred. You can just count on it every time, be it an
attack on an abortion center, a Timothy McVeigh, or . . . or . . . well,
actually, there aren’t really all that many, are there? But don’t bother ideologues with the facts.
Now, Walsh, a woman of mediocre
intellect and lacking moral fiber — she has lauded Tiller “the baby killer” as
a hero — has been beating this drum hard.
In fact, on June 10 she published a piece titled “Can right-wing hate
talk lead to murder?” In it, she seems to draw a connection between James von
Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who murdered security guard Stephen
Tyrone Johns at the Holocaust Museum, and fairly benign commentary about the
effects of political correctness. She wrote:
In a
debate with Buchanan [Pat Buchanan] a couple of weeks ago, he told me that what
was happening to white men was exactly what happened to black men — he didn't
give me any examples of lynching — and that it was open season on white men.
Wealthy Sen. Lindsay Graham suggested an average white guy like himself
wouldn't get a fair shake from Sotomayor, and now even the new face of the GOP,
Michael Steele, has said the same thing. If I were a marginal, unemployed,
angry, racist white man right now, I'd be hearing a lot of mainstream
conservative support for my point of view. Can that help create a climate for
more violence? I don't know. I hope not, but I don't know.
No, Walsh doesn’t know
much. First, von Brunn isn’t a rightist
— he is a “whitist.” In fact, he is
quite the opposite of a rightist many ways, as Bob Unruh reports at
WorldNetDaily:
The
Moonbattery blog revealed von Brunn
advocated the socialist policies espoused by Adolf Hitler and used Darwinian
theory to support his anti-Semitism.
And
in statements that later were stripped from an anti-religion website, he wrote,
"The Big Lie technique, employed by Paul to create the CHRISTIAN RELIGION,
also was used to create the HOLOCAUST RELIGION … CHRISTIANITY AND THE HOLOCAUST
are HOAXES."
This
probably would come as such a shock to someone as ill-informed as Walsh that
she’d scarcely believe it; it’s just too contrary to her dogma. Yet I could have guessed it. Those who have actually studied the history
of Nazism and the white supremacist movement know that, from Adolf Hitler in
the 1930s to his fellow travelers today, its ranks have always harbored
hostility toward Christianity. The
reasons are simple: Whether you view Christianity as merely an outgrowth of
Judaism or the fulfillment of it, it is the second part of Judeo-Christian. Second, like
the ancient Romans, the Nazis viewed the faith of “turn the other cheek” (counsel
which, mind you, is misunderstood) as an influence that militates against manly
virtue. Lastly, a lie doesn’t find much
acquaintance with the Truth.
Instead,
white supremacists much prefer ancient Germanic pagan religions and even
Islam. Just consider Hitler, for
instance, and his dislike for the heroic Frankish (Germanic) warrior Charles
Martel. What was Martel’s sin? He halted the Moslem advance into Europe at
the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. Paul
Belien addressed this misguided passion of Hitler’s in the Brussels Journal, writing,
“‘Had
Charles Martel not been victorious,’ Hitler told his inner crowd in August
1942, ‘then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism,
that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to
the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the
world.’”
The
Nazis’ dislike for Christianity was so great that, not surprisingly, they
sought to destroy it. Leftists may scoff
at a notion so contrary to their prejudices, but the evidence of this fact is
now overwhelming. And of this evidence,
perhaps the most compelling was uncovered by a Jewish attorney named Julie
Seltzer Mandel, a woman whose grandmother was a survivor of the Auschwitz
concentration camp. I addressed her
discovery in my piece
“Hitler and Christianity,” writing:
While
a law student and editor of the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of
Law and Religion, Mandel gained access to 148 bound volumes of rare
documents — some marked “Top Secret” — compiled by the Office of Strategic
Services (or O.S.S., the WWII forerunner to the CIA).
After
scouring the papers, she published the first installment of them in 2002, a
120-page O.S.S. report entitled “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the
Christian Churches.” Reporting on these O.S.S. findings in the Philadelphia
Inquirer, Edward Colimore wrote: “The fragile, typewritten documents from
the 1940s lay out the Nazi plan in grim detail: Take over the churches from
within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders.
And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith — in Germany’s Third
Reich.” He then quotes Mandel: “A lot of people will say, ‘I didn’t realize
that they were trying to convert Christians to a Nazi philosophy.’… They
wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to
eliminate Christianity.”
To this
day nothing has changed. If you examine
the writings of contemporary white supremacists, you will find much hatred for
Christianity, affection for paganism and sympathy for Islam.
Now, I
ask you: Which is better characterized by this description, the right or left? When answering, remember that those
euphemistically-named censorship bureaucracies of the left, “human rights
commissions,” consistently silence those
who dare criticize Islam, most notably Christians.
Getting
back to von Brunn, we can ask a similar question: Given that he hated not only
Jews but also George Bush and neocons in general, of whom is he more
reminiscent, Newt Gingrich or, maybe, um, Barack Obama’s buddy Reverend
Wright? Bear in mind that Wright’s
serpentine tongue won him the spotlight again with that recent explanation
we’ve all heard for why he is persona non
grata in the White House. To wit: “Them Jews ain’t going to let him [Obama]
talk to me.”
Now
let’s return to the matter of the impact of words. The Walshes of the world say
that many of us rightists are responsible for inciting violence. In response, many on our side will say that
there is only one person responsible for an act of violence, the perpetrator,
be he Scott Roeder, von Dunn, Timothy McVeigh or someone else. As to these theses, the Walsh position is
childish and contradictory; the rightist defense is incorrect and
contradictory. Let’s discuss the Truth.
In
reality, virtually all of us understand that words can seduce, be they a
lover’s syrupy overtures or a hater’s cynical appeals. This is why Edward Bulwer-Lytton said that
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” We
treasure freedom of speech not because words are meaningless, but precisely
because they’re powerful. And we allow
it despite and because of words’ potential to inspire, for the pen of virtue
remains eternally sharp, while the sword of vice’s edge is always dulled by
time.
So
while we’re right to deny responsibility for Roeder, it’s not because, as many
imply, that such a thing is impossible in principle; it’s just that, in this
case, we aren’t responsible in the particular (I’ll address the reason for this
in a moment). And Walsh is right to
imply that such things are possible in principle; her childishness lies in her
silly implication that only the right is responsible for them in the
particular.
Of
course, it’s quite reflexive for a person — even a good one — being tarnished
by guilt by association to deny the reality of indirect culpability, but the
reflexive is seldom beholden to reason
It’s also reflexive for dishonorable people such as Walsh to very
cynically seize upon a violent event and use it to tarnish opponents, and, more
ominously, to provide a specious justification for Fairness Doctrine-like
legislation in the near future and hate-speech laws a bit further down the
road. But whether or not the Walsh set
actually believes their rhetoric depends upon the completeness of their
detachment from reality.
To
understand more deeply the fallacies here, consider the innumerable instances
of leftist violence we’ve seen over the years.
Would Moslem convert Carlos Bledsoe have murdered the army recruiter in
Arkansas had he not been exposed to the anti-white, anti-Western and
anti-Christian rhetoric that prevails in modern America? Would Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, have
perpetrated his acts had he not been weaned on the environmentalist radicalism
so prevalent today? Would all the domestic
terrorists who firebombed fur stores and vandalized SUVs and research
facilities have done so were it not for this ideological force? Would Colin Ferguson have targeted whites in
the 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre had he not been assailed with anti-white
rhetoric from the Reverend Wrights, Jacksons and Sharptons of the world?
Now,
you can take issue with my examples; you can quibble about the
particulars. But many other incidents
could be cited, and the details aren’t really the issue. The point is, would we really deny that the
indoctrination people are subjected to influences their thinking? Are Palestinians born hating Jews? Do madrassah schoolboys have a gene dictating
hatred for the West? As for Walsh, she
may turn a blind eye to the violence authored by her ilk, but an affinity for
relativism doesn’t change reality.
Now we
come to the crux of the matter: If rightist rhetoric can inspire others to
violence just like the leftist variety, what determines culpability? Well, we must ask the only relevant question
about that rhetoric:
Is it
the Truth?
Sure,
you may warn that a new resident in the neighborhood did time in prison for
child molestation, and an angry mob may kill him. But did you do wrong? On the other hand, it’s a different matter
entirely if harm befalls someone after you wrongly and maliciously label him a
child molester.
Thus,
anytime you sound an alarm — whether it contains the ring of Truth or that of
lies — it can serve as a call to violent action for some. But what should we do? Create a Fahrenheit
451 situation in which ideas are roundly suppressed and people are kept
comfortably numb? No one wants that, and
it wouldn’t work anyway.
At the
end of the day, one who speaks the Truth may inspire violence against livers of
lies just as one who speaks lies may inspire violence against the tellers of
Truth. But this isn’t the fault of the
Truth; it simply means that society needs more of it.
So the
moral of this story is that we all can inspire violence with words, but not all
of us speak inspired words. Evil may be
done in the name of good or evil, but it is only those who speak the latter who
have blood on their hands. Paging Joan
Walsh.
© 2009 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
selwynduke.com 
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