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Sudden Whackjob Syndrome

Three years ago, a Muslim student at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill drove an SUV into a crowd of pedestrians, injuring nine people. Leading a silly chorus, Daniel Pipes pronounced the incident an example of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," repeating his post-9/11 warning: "Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers."

Every act of violence by any Muslim became part of a pattern of massive (totalitarian!) brutality; add a Muslim, and yesterday's shoving match over the last Xbox in the Wal-Mart became today's sudden explosion of terrorism.

Last week, the journalist Bonnie Erbe pulled her own Daniel Pipes routine, in a blog post at the U.S. News and World Report titled, "Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks." (The post concludes with a call to action that mirrors the headline: "Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?") (Via Radley Balko; see also.)

Erbe's call to round up right-wing extremists before they have a chance to do anything echoes an important piece of history examined recently in Robert H. Churchill's remarkable book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (and less recently by Leo Ribuffo):

Churchill writes that New Deal progressives, offended and frightened by vitriolic far-right opposition to the New Deal, launched "a systematic campaign of public condemnation and state repression." Private liberal organizations "initiated the collection of dossiers on leading figures of the Far Right," while the FDR administration and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI undertook an effort that led to the conviction of dozens of right-wing figures on sedition charges. (Hoover even maintained a "custodial detention index" of right-wing figures.)

Attacking the political right, the political left sawed the floor out from under its own feet. Since "most of those prosecuted during the Brown Scare had not gone beyond the realm of political speech," Churchill concludes, "...at their core these cases involved the suppression of far right political philosophy and the denial of the right of free speech...The institutions and rhetorical tactics of the Brown Scare would come back to haunt the Left after World War II, as a resurgent Republican Party launched a second Red Scare under the leadership of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon."

This description of the roots of the second Red Scare arguably places too many of those roots in one place, but the larger point is sound: the acceptance of repressive premises has a long tail. Embracing the repression of far-right speech, Churchill writes, New Deal liberals "accepted Americanism's exclusionary vision of a body politic to which some Americans must be denied entry."

We've already had enough of that, lately.

Posted on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM | Comments (2) | Return

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