Conservatives and the Blood Soaked Logic of Religious and Ethnic Division
Read Time:4 Minute, 54 Second
Published with permission of FairandUNbalanced.com
by Burr Deming
It was May 15, 1972. George Wallace had just been shot. It would either be an assassination or an attempted assassination. Whether Wallace would live was still unknown.
President Richard Nixon talked with his advisors, Robert Haldeman and Charles Colson. The shooter was in custody and was, at that moment, being interrogated by police. President Nixon ordered his two assistants to bring Deputy Director of White House Communications, Ken Clawson, into the investigation of the Wallace shooting.
Put a call in immediately to Clawson, or somebody. Somebody do something, to the effect that the first reports from the interrogation indicate that a McGovern/Kennedy person did this, you know what I mean?
Everything’s under control. Rumors are going to flow all over the place. Put it on the left, right away. Can you do that? Who can you put it to, and how can you get it out?
– President Richard Nixon, on tape, May 15, 1972
Throughout the rest of the conversation, the three continued to conspire to put out false reports that the would-be assassin had confessed to having been recruited and put into place by prominent Democrats.
It is hard for me to think about President Nixon without considering an ethical pattern that includes, but extends beyond, Watergate. Their reaction to the shooting of a Presidential candidate was an assassination as political opportunity. They could put out a false report implicating political opponents.
It is not difficult to hear the echo of that ethic amplified in more recent history. After the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, word went out from the office of the Vice President. Richard Cheney wanted evidence, and wanted it now, that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by the dictatorship that was then in control of Iraq.
The any-means-necessary order had to have contributed to the torture techniques that were then put into play.
Torture has never advanced investigation in search of truth. Those tortured can be counted on to say anything to put a stop to pain. Thousands of false leads put leaf-in-the-forest mathematics into play, as valuable time is wasted following blind alleys.
But, as history shows, torture is very effective at obtaining false confessions. The right confession by any means would have satisfied the Cheney demand.
I wonder how the Nixon inner circle would have responded to temptation had they managed to take control of interrogation techniques after the Wallace shooting.
Another thread can also be found woven into the fabric of the 1972 Nixon transcript. Repeatedly, the three conspirators talk about justification. Liberals would be sure to blame the assassination, if it turned out to be an assassination, on conservatives. After all, they had always done it throughout history. We must do it to them first.
Be sure to pin the assassination, just like they tried to pin the assassin…Look. Why don’t we play the game a bit smarter for a change.
They pinned the assassination of Kennedy on the right wing, the Birchers. It was done by a Communist and it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.
And I respectfully suggest, can’t we pin this on one of theirs?
Even as a youngster, I read many theories about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy. Some did indeed speculate about right wing, communist, organized crime, government, and other groups. I do not recall any false confessions or other planted evidence designed to implicate conservatives, or any rumors of such planted evidence.
What I have noticed in online conservative dialogue, in lunch break conversation, in internet comments, is a sort of circular ethic. We know the enemy would do horrible things to us. We know this because we would do horrible things to them. So we have to do horrible things to them before they act against us.
Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us.
That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?
The question to the Republican candidate is still shocking, but not surprising. Also not surprising was the agreement of so many who support the candidate, or the unwillingness of the candidate to disown the reasoning:
Muslims want to kill us. How can we get rid of them?
The shrinking Republican base is approaching a point at which traditional ideological conservatives, at least those with whom I speak, may soon find themselves uncomfortable and unwelcomed. A different, more virulent conservatism is taking hold. It is less classically ideological than it is nativist.
I hope the discomfort of my friends is not my own wishful thinking. I disagree with fellow citizens on voting rights for minorities, on science denial, on torture, and on the social obligation we have toward one another. These are life and death issues and some sad souls have journeyed far to the right.
I hope for limits in their journey.
Our species has always faced the temptation of drawing lines of hatred. We have often changed our vision of those on the other side of those lines from that of human beings into that of abstractions, into “them.” It is the logic embraced by much of what has come to be called “the base.”
I pray and hope my friends do not go so far down into that dark, dark abyss that they find themselves deep in the blood soaked logic of religious and ethnic division that has stained so much of human history:
The perceived necessity of doing unto them before they do unto us.
Photo selection and placement by MadMikesAmerica.com.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Thank you for your kind comments.
Actually, Rachael, I can’t take credit for the headline. It was composed by MadMikesAmerica. It does surpass that originally posted at FairAndUNbalanced, I think.
Burr I agree with Bill. You have managed to sum it all up in a few short paragraphs. I love that headline as well. That was a big draw.
Burr, as always, you get to the base point of an issue. The Republican far right has already pulled many in the party to very dark places they probably never thought they would go. Like you I have friends who have preferred the old Republican party. The one that focused on the country being fiscal conservative and hawkishly strong militarily. That was before Nixon’s Southern strategy which rolled the social conservative movement of the Southern Baptist in with the Republicans. Now the Republican Party represents a group who would probably like to govern the country by Biblical tenants rather than the law. They are becoming quite scary indeed. One of their presidential candidates, Ben Carson, basically invoked a religious requirement for being president. Scary, scary times my friend.