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Friday, January 16, 2009

Something Evil This Way Comes...: Grendel's Mother

It seems that evil is just there, no reason, no cause, or perhaps all the reasons in the world and all the causes also - so many and so inextricably entwined that it is computationally impossible to find singular and simple strains of evil that worked in concert to procreate this abnormality. There just is evil.

In World War 4 Report
 http://www.ww4report.com/node/6603  
CZECH REPUBLIC FROM VELVET TO VIOLENT  
 Neo-Nazis Prepare Pogroms Ten Years After Revolution
by Gwendolyn Albert, World War 4 Report

This is a story about a political party that has a focus of the "inadaptable" Roma, or Gypsies, and their malign effect on Czech society

...This past fall, the Czech authorities were caught completely off guard by the activities of a small extreme-right political party, active since 2003 and calling itself the Workers' Party (Delnicka Strana—DS). In recent Senate elections, the party garnered 29 000 votes—not enough to bring them anywhere near parliament, but the most support they had ever received and a number they are fond of quoting. The DS announced that it had received a "plea for help" from what it called the "decent citizens" of Litvinov, a town in North Bohemia not far from the German border, and that the party would therefore be "patrolling" the Janov housing estate in the town due to complaints about the behavior of "inadaptable citizens" there... After announcing their intention to "patrol" on the web, the DS members came to the housing estate dressed in uniforms of their own design. The event marked a turning point in Czech-Roma relations. The usual response of Roma communities throughout the Czech Republic, when faced with organized right-wing aggression of the sort that has resulted in murder and violence against them and other minorities ever since 1989, is to disappear indoors, if not to flee the country altogether. In Litvinov, however, the local Roma turned out with makeshift weapons and made it very clear that they would not submit to being "patrolled."...



Talk about the roots of racism or the causes of social unrest all you will, by now we should be growing aware that Fascism of the Nazi type is a gift of the 20th century that keeps on giving. We should no longer wonder at the causes, we should end the growth process. Why? Because there is evil sometimes. And particular species of evil grows well in Western society. I do not know why. But I do know this: by the time I divine the causes of Authoritarianism, I shall run the risk of a good probability of being in a concentration camp somewhere. Or dead. Which brings us here to our point: Ann Coulter. No. This is not an Alexander Pope type irony. where I speak of weighty and ponderous things, then switch to the nonce topic of a buffoon. Not at all.
2005 TIME
Ann Coulter is as vile as Grendel's Mother. Her most obvious prototype is Julius Streicher, the rabid anti-Semite who sat in the dock in Nuremberg. Although Ms. Coulter does not rave on antisemitically, she does rave. Although she does not rant about Jews, she does rant. To what purpose? 

The purpose of such invective has always been to incite the less stable of one's hearers to acts of violence. period. full stop. I repeat, the purpose of such invective has always been to incite the unstable to violence - nothing else. Its purpose is to diminish the invective's target, imputing to them a less than human status, and to inflame the passions of one's hearers to take up cudgels against the beast so cleverly identified as being outside the group.
What is Ann Coulter? She is a caricature of the rich: well-dressed, wraithlike thin, blond hair...the stiletto conservative. However, she does not speak to the rich, at least, not to the rich and educated, for her words are seen by conservatives to be something like weapons, but weapons that are outlawed by most human conventions. She speaks to an unstable group most easily moved to violence. She speaks to that which grows from the rich loamy soil of hatred, and gives birth to the new Brown Shirts. In 2005, Time Magazine had her on the cover, and fatuously asked whether she was serious...or just having fun? Just having fun. Imagine that. 

Have no illusions. In the present time of economic stress, one may wonder what possible good her speech does. One may well wonder why she is given a public podium from which to speak. The answer is that EVIL just sometimes is............... especially if a society has shown itself to be too cowardly and lazy to oppose it, because the best way to oppose evil is not merely to deny it a podium, nor to meet its rowdies in the streets; the best way for a society to oppose evil is to transform itself! And it is this moral imperative we slink from, just as we have done for over half a century. Before I wrote about the evil of arrogance and greed.

Now I write about the the coming storm of our debased cowardice. It is not enough to elect a man to the Presidency. We must transform ourselves. If we do not, one night we shall find ourselves and others - as numerous as snakes and slithering vermin - getting up from our beds of the past, going to the bathroom, and looking into the mirror of the future as we put on the attire of the Neue Sturmabteilung: the new Brown Shirts. (Most readers will think me quaintly out-of-date with this. Wrong. Evil is never out-of-date. If not Ms. Coulter, then some other that comes after her will be the fuse of discord. )

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