Barack Obama has become a metaphor for those who are considered culturally different. Disturbingly, we have been down this road of hatred and divisiveness before. Who can forget the chilling memories of America's civil rights leaders being slain, segregation being fostered, synagogues being burned, black citizens being lynched, and law-abiding Muslims being shot and killed after 9/11.
This is the dark side of America that I'd rather forget, but once again has reared its ugly head through the campaign discourse of John McCain and Sarah Palin. McCain and Palin’s campaign rhetoric directed against Barack Obama has fueled the basest instincts of many misguided Americans.
McCain's effort to link Obama to a terrorist Muslim script is rooted in the most despicable form of hatred and bigotry. The fire has been stoked, and now his supporters are cheering McCain and Palin with chants of… "Obama is a terrorist, kill him!" Having crossed that ugly line, even the candidates themselves have been unable to stave off the damage they have wrought.
This pattern of inflaming the bigotry of the masses through divisiveness and venom is frighteningly reminiscent of the Nazi regime during World War II. Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis, under the elitism of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, sought and successfully slaughtered those who they perceived as ethnically and racially different. As Germany fell on hard economic times during the global depression, they looked for scapegoats to explain their financial decline. It wasn’t long ago that the Jews, those associated with Jews, Russians, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, artists, and the intelligentsia were sent to concentration camps and murdered. The mob mentality had worked and "cleansed" Germany of those who were perceived as funny looking and different.
John McCain and Sarah Palin have sought out the politics of personal destruction. They have willingly tried to demonize Barack Obama by painting him as an evil outsider who is a threat to the security of our democracy. Amazingly, some Christians have made this a personal vendetta by suggesting that Obama is the anti-Christ. On the other hand, other so-called God-fearing Christians have suggested that he portrays himself as a messianic figure.
The myth of moral superiority is that those who lay claim to know it all by smearing and hatemongering behavior, are the ones who need to "take the log out of their own eye" as Jesus suggested. As Sarah Palin lays claim to being the moral compass of the McCain campaign, she has opened herself to scrutiny as a result of unethically abusing her power as governor of Alaska.
When McCain finally called Obama "a decent" candidate, he was jeered by his own supporters. It is this vitriolic venom that should remind us all that this is a country filled with the beauty of diversity, and that we must never allow such mindless people to create another Holocaust, because we turned our back and ignored those who would perpetuate a lie. As we have seen in recent days on the campaign trail, the hate-filled, spiteful mobs are still there to remind us all that we must be vigilant. We must speak out against the threats and fears generated by those who have the power to create the conditions for another genocide.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Did you GO to any McCain rallies? I did. Not once did I hear "kill him" or any other threat of any kind. IF this sort of behavior occurred--and I'm not sure it did--why would an intelligent individual such as yourself use it as a generalization against all McCain supporters? To tar all McCain supporters with this evil brush is, in itself, an unfair characterization. It is "hateful fear-mongering" to portray those who opposed Obama as genocidal maniacs. You should be ashamed of yourself.
As a conservative who votes mostly Republican, I am amazed at the suggestion that Obama's presidential candidacy is a breakthrough in race relations. Where were you when I was voting for Alan Keyes since 1996? You didn't help conservatives elect HIM, I see.
I didn't vote for Barack Obama because he's a socialist who cut his teeth on Marxist ideology via Saul Alinsky's tutelage in "community organizing." I believe his economic policies will be bad for the country. I believe the pro-abortion movement is genocidal, as Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger intended it to be. I know that Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, the American terrorist, is close--in fact, Ayers probably ghost-wrote Obama's "Dreams." (Do a little research and textual analysis on that...) Any Republican who had an association like that would be undone politically, yet Obama should get a pass? How is is OK to criticize the PEOPLE WHO QUESTION this association, but it's not OK for them to criticize the association? That's the height of hypocrisy, don't you think? Nothing, it seems, is unacceptable if this guy thinks it or does it--and he did PLENTY of Republican-bashing (or hateful fear-mongering, as you like to call it.)
Regarding your criticism of McCain's supporters, where is your indignation at the fact that Obama's supporters decorated campaign offices with posters of Che Guevara and celebrated Obama's election with the Soviet flag? How is it that this doesn't bother you? You suggest that Republicans were on the verge of Holocaust because of the behavior of a few, yet you neglect to mention the outright embrace of Communist symbolism among Democrats and say nothing of the tens of millions who have died and are dying under that system. Are you not embarrassed at the betrayal of your own bigotry?
I suggest you brush up on your political and racial history. "The Truth in Black and White" is a documentary that may be of some help in this regard. It is proof positive that the Democrat Party is only a recent adherent to the value of racial equality. If it weren't for the abysmal state of public education (run into the ground by Democrat policies, by the way), we'd all know better than to believe that the Democrat Party is the friend of free people--black or white.
Post a Comment