Quite a few TZP posts since the first of the year have looked at bigotry against Jews. It’s dangerous. It’s growing. And unfortunately it’s no surprise.
But there’s one good thing about hatred of Jews: decent, educated human beings in the Western world know how wrong and deadly it is.
There are other kinds of bigotry, on the other hand, that are becoming acceptable. Worse, they’re becoming especially acceptable to the very people who ought to know better: young, well-educated Americans.
Take, for example, Ms Andrea Grimes. Earlier this month this lefty ‘zine editor and prolific social media user advocated taking firearms away from all white men.
Her long-term goal is to take away everybody’s guns (I invite you, Ms Grimes, to come to my house and try it). But for now, just white males.
She envisions all the white guys weeping as they line up to turn in their weapons. (Apparently a desire to make men cry is somewhat of a meme among feminists. And apparently Ms Grimes has no freakin’ clue as to who’d end up crying — and bleeding — in the future she envisions.)
Unfortunately, she’s not just part of some uninfluential fringe. Everywhere on the left, bigotry against some group or another is being not only excused but justified. The respected “progressive” journal, The Daily Kos is one of many that has twisted reality to “prove” that only whites can be racist. A prominent Georgetown University professor teaches the same bilge
In this thinking (if I may call it thinking at all), if a black or Hispanic or Asian person hates whites, it’s somehow okay. Or at least not as bad. (Never mind that every form of racial hatred can be deadly.) The idea is that only powerful people can be racist, and somehow all whites (even blue-collar bottom-of-the-heapers) are powerful, while all chosen minorities (even professors, lawyers, lobbyists, and journalists) are powerless. Basically, the whole notion boils down to “if any designated minority has hateful thoughts, white people, especially white males, caused it.”
Of course, this very broad brush of bigotry against white people or white males also encompasses most Jewish people and most Jewish males. But the real problem isn’t which group it’s “okay” to hate and who is included in the target group.
The problem is the mainstreaming of bigotry — and more scarily, the mainstreaming of bigotry in influential media and in the academic world.
People are so willfully short-sighted! When they want to smear a particular group — whether it be blacks or males or Jews or women or redheads or whatever — they choose not to see that the very act of hating people just because they belong to some group by birth or culture is wrong. It’s wrong no matter what group you choose to revile.
Justifying your own bigotry on the grounds that someone else was bigoted first just perpetuates the vicious cycle. And educated people should know this.
Once you’ve said “group hatred is okay” you’ve declared on principle that bigotry is acceptable. That discrimination is okay.* That depriving entire classes of people of their rights is just fine. You have, in short, opened the gates of hell — and you’d better not be surprised at what comes pouring through.
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* This was really a terrible word choice on my part and has led some readers to believe that I’m against freedom of association. For the record, it’s obvious to me that in a free society individuals and individual businesses have every right to discriminate in any way they wish and others have a right to respond. I’m upset that this one ill-written, ill-thought sentence appears to have demolished the real points I was attempting to make in this post.
IMHO, the denigration of white people is an offshoot of “Liberation Theology” which in turn is an offshoot of “Black Liberation Theology”. This “religion” needs bad guys, just as Hitler did. Here is an interesting link with some explanation.
http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2008/04/02/marxist-roots-black-liberation-theology
Serious consideration also has to be given to the complete difference between hateful bigotry (trying to force people to do or not do things and/or harming them) and the absolute right of association – or not associating. These are too often and too easily misunderstood. “Hate speech” phobias all too quickly cross over into mind control tactics.
We discriminate with each and every choice we make, but only the use of force and intimidation on others to drive a particular choice – or deprive people of any choice – is the problem here. Maybe we need a different word…
People who speak and write about this need to be careful, I think, to distinguish the two.
Wow, how freaking childish! “He /she/ they/ it started it! Ma-a-a-a-!” Damned whiners, STFU!
But I’m flattered. I had no idea I had so much power over other people that I could make them hateful by merely breathing. (Full disclosure here – white male, possibly Jewish but that particular fact was left in Europe 100 years ago.) So I must be pretty doggoned powerful to have affected the lives of someone else’s great-great-grandparents 150 years before I was even born. Or the life of someone I’ve never met in some town I’ve never been in. I had no idea being white was SO awesome!
“Once you’ve said “group hatred is okay” you’ve declared on principle that bigotry is acceptable. That discrimination is okay.”
Well, it is, sorta.
This is a fine point that is difficult for people to get right, and that demagogues on both sides take advantage of.
Governments (while they exist) should never discriminate. The farther we are from “equality before the law”, the worse off we are.
Individuals, on the other hand, should discriminate as they please – and should also suffer the consequences, if any, of doing so. As MamaLiberty says, we do it every day. We can’t avoid doing so, since where individuals are concerned, “discrimination” is just a euphemism for “choice”. There is nothing wrong with someone hanging a sign out in front of his shop saying “no Jews”. It’s ugly and stupid, but ugly things are not necessarily wrong things. A Jewish shop owner responding with “no Gentiles” is no different. Responding to either of these with violence is not legitimate.
As to Andrea’s opinion, thanks for the chuckle.
“Individuals, on the other hand, should discriminate as they please – and should also suffer the consequences, if any, of doing so. As MamaLiberty says, we do it every day. We can’t avoid doing so, since where individuals are concerned, ‘discrimination’ is just a euphemism for ‘choice’.”
Once again I see that I must have expressed myself very poorly. You are the third person (second here, one at Living Freedom) who seems to think that somehow I’m saying that individuals shouldn’t have the freedom to choose with whom they associate.
I deliberately avoided terms like discrimination because I’m very aware (and I consider it obvious) that in a free society people can and do choose all the time who they like and who they don’t and who they want to associate with and who they don’t. That was never, ever even the subject of this blog, and I’m at a loss to see how people are interpreting my words in that way.
I was attempting — obviously unsuccessfully — to address the perils that arise from hating entire classes of people based on accidents of birth or culture. I was trying to point out that the self-righteous leftists I’m writing about are a) threatening the freedoms of those classes that they loathe (e.g. wanting to take firearms from white men) and b) so blind that they can’t see that their hatreds are not superior to the hatreds of those they sneer at.
I understand that ML says she didn’t believe I was writing against freedom of association. Got that.
What I don’t get is why so many people are bringing that subject up — and treating it as THE central issue! — when it’s completely aside from the subject I was actually writing about.
Well, it must be too subtle for me then.
You did in fact use the term discrimination. You also talked about something only governments could do (depriving entire classes of people of rights). But that is different than individual hatred. It’s not even in the same page, as I tried to point out in my response.
There is no shortage of defenses against bigotry out in the world, but freedom of association is usually left sucking the hind tit these days. Even if you did not intend to attack it (never thought you did), you still employed the language the Ministry of Propaganda normally uses to do the job. Maybe that’s the source of the confusion.
As to your point b above, sure the leftists are hypocrites. But who cares? Whether they get our guns is not up to them. It’s up to us.
Paul — Yes, you’re correct that I did use the word discrimination once in the piece and I see how that might have helped trigger negative responses from so many people. I chose my words poorly and sabotaged the other, entirely different point I was trying to make.
Unfortunately, the issue you addressed is thoroughly confused with the other – deliberately by our enemies, so much so that an awful lot of people seem to accept “laws” and aggression by individuals and the state as a good/right response to the issue you intended.
I don’t see how pointing that out is somehow not understanding the issue you wrote about.
“I don’t see how pointing that out is somehow not understanding the issue you wrote about.”
It may or may not be ‘not understanding’ the issue I wrote about. Given the number of commentors focusing on that one issue, it does boil down to ignoring the issue I was actually writing about.
But as I said, mea culpa. I left myself wide open for exactly that response.