By all means, hate your neighbor. Please, feel absolutely free to do so.
Let’s pretend your new next-door neighbors are Muslims. You don’t know them all that well, perhaps you’re even suspicious of them at first, but gradually, over weeks and months and years, you begin to get a sense of them as just, well, neighbors, neighbors who happen to be Muslims. The mother never goes out without a headscarf, even when she hurries to your house to tell you your dog is loose and running toward the highway, or that your son just went ass over teakettle on his bicycle. The father smiles through his beard when he rings your doorbell and hands you a piece of mail that got mixed in with his, and he makes a comment about the expected snowfall. On the fourth of July, you all stand out in your respective backyards oohing and aahing at the fireworks display, and when it’s over there’s that sense of shared pleasure in a moment, shared pride in your community, your country. Your daughter and their daughter play together regularly, and their little girl is a frequent visitor in your house. The father gives you a can of Fix-a-Flat when you come out one day and find your rear tire is low, and when you take a new can over to pay him back, he waves it off as unnecessary. Perhaps you don’t watch the Super Bowl together, but they are good neighbors.
And then one day the government announces it is going to summarily execute all Muslims. Not arrest, not deport, not round them up and incarcerate them, as FDR did with the American citizens of Japanese descent. Just…execute.
It would take one of those rare and sick individuals with a severely psychotic anti-social personality not to rise up in horror, but perhaps, for other reasons, you won’t.
When Hitler started working his way to power on (among other things) a wave of anti-Semitic feeling, he carefully spent years making sure the press, his press, and his minister of propaganda, demonized all Jews. Not only were all the economic ills of Germany blamed on Jews (instead of the mentally negligible and megalomaniacal Kaiser who had led Germany into World War One and so destroyed his own country), but the blood libel about ritually sacrificing Christian children to make matzos (a libel that had its genesis several centuries before the birth of Christ, making it even more ridiculously offensive) was resurrected, discussed openly in newspapers as if it were a matter of course not even to be doubted, let alone argued.
It was, as the world knows all too well, an effective technique, but it required the collusion of the press. And more, it required the active and willing participation of the press, because as Saul Alinsky taught in Rules for Radicals, “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Or, to put it another way, as Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, taught, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
And those two simple statements bring us to what we laughingly refer to today as journalism.
In order to make the average, normal, healthy human being rise up and kill his neighbor, or sit back passively as his neighbor is slaughtered by others, there has to be a process of demonization that convinces the masses that the selected group, whatever group it is that has been selected to be the enemy, is evil. This is what Hitler did with the Jews. (It is also what Hitler’s actions ultimately and unintentionally did for the Nazi’s, actions that were in fact so atrocious they caused first Great Britain and eventually the United States to oppose him.)
But if the selected group is not evil (and has not committed any atrocities) the process must be started more slowly by first dehumanizing the selected group. To dehumanize you must first portray the group’s beliefs or religion or ethnic practices or skin color, or some other quality that is integral to them as a whole, as being wrong, unhealthy, bad for everyone who is not a member of that group, perhaps even evil. And how do you do that? Easily enough if you control the language. You claim the moral high ground.
Claiming the moral high ground for your ideology equals dehumanizing all who disagree with you, which will eventually lead to demonizing all who disagree with you. “It’s the right thing to do,” was used by Obama to dehumanize everyone who disagreed with him. (If they disagree with me, they, the others, must want to do the wrong thing, the evil thing, which makes them, ipso facto, wrong and evil.) It was used that way in a clunkingly awkward moment in Star Wars: the Force Awakens when the hero (played by John Boyega) takes off his helmet and reveals he is not a robot (as I had assumed all clone troopers were), but a human, and since he is covered with the blood of a fellow clone trooper, we immediately realize, hey, these guys are actually humans in white outfits, not robots, which makes their destruction a little less abstract, a little less impersonal, a little less entertaining. To assuage any qualms the viewers might have about the wholesale slaughter of living, breathing, sentient entities—and by way of homage to Obama—the hero solemnly tells the pilot he has just rescued he has done so because, “It’s the right thing to do.”
Oh, okay. Now it’s alright to mow down clone troopers en masse.
It’s a technique that has been employed throughout all of history: dehumanize first, then demonize.
Consider the controversy a month or so ago involving The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. Another Missouri newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, published an op-ed piece by a purported journalist and professor emeritus of the Missouri School of Journalism named George Kennedy. The article, entitled, The NRA’s influence is a danger to us all [sic: no caps], compares the NRA to ISIS. There are statistical inaccuracies and falsehoods I won’t bother to enumerate, but the thrust of Mr. Kennedy’s article is that more Americans are killed by other Americans wielding guns than are killed by Islamic jihadist terrorists, and that because the NRA supports the Second Amendment, and because the NRA pressures politicians to uphold their oath of office and support the entire Constitution, which happens to include the Second Amendment, that makes the NRA more dangerous than ISIS. First you dehumanize, then you demonize.
It’s Mr. Kennedy’s sick opinion and since he writes a weekly column for the Columbia Missourian, they have a right to print any opinion piece they want, if that’s their ideological belief. It is fundamentally dishonest, because it places the responsibility for America’s murder rate on guns and the NRA, rather than on drugs and gangs, but that’s not the point. Mr. Kennedy has the right to express any dishonest and hateful view he wants. What he does not have is the right to demonize well over five million of his fellow Americans simply because they hold a different point of view.
And this is where the story gets interesting. A conservative woman, Stacy Washington, wrote a column in another paper to which she was a contributor, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which she blasted Mr. Kennedy’s assertions on a variety of levels, factual and ideological. Her column was promptly suspended by the Post-Dispatch, and the column was removed from the paper’s online site. The reason for the suspension and removal given by the Post-Dispatch is that Ms. Washington had failed to disclose that she is a supporter of the NRA; not a paid employee or—to use the Post-Dispatch’s word—a “shill” for them (“shill” implies secrecy and clandestine actions, and Ms. Washington has never made a secret of her support for the NRA), but just a supporter.
So what you have here is a professor who quotes a biased, factually incorrect anti-gun organization (“Gun Violence Archive”) who is allowed to not only express his opinion, but also to demonize America’s oldest gun-rights organization and its members by comparing them unfavorably to an extreme “religious” organization that believes in killing anyone who does accept their beliefs, that beheads men, burns them alive in cages, throws gays from rooftops, believes rape is perfectly fine and sanctioned by their prophet, teaches supporters online how to make bombs, slaughters countless thousands of men, women, and children, sells children as sex slaves, crucifies children who don’t wish to join them, and commits more inventive and nauseating tortures than I’m willing to chronicle. That’s considered acceptable by the press.
But if a conservative objects to the demonizing of a pro-Second Amendment organization that supports the Constitution, and that has done more to promote gun safety and to reduce accidental gun deaths than the federal government and all anti-gun organizations put together, that kind of opinion is immediately silenced.
The message sent clearly by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is that the First Amendment is only applicable to people who think the way the Post-Dispatch wants them to think (“control the language”), and demonizing your neighbor—in ways that would get them put out of business if they had said such things about Muslims—is perfectly acceptable if your neighbor is a member of the NRA. After all, it’s the right thing to do.
The next time you watch the news or read a newspaper demonizing the NRA and its well over five-million members (I am one), or the roughly 100-million gun owners in this country (I am one), remember that unless you live in a progressive enclave like San Francisco or New York City, where guns are effectively banned, Second Amendment and the Heller decision be damned, you probably have an NRA member or a gun owner living next door to you, and we deserve better than to be compared to ISIS barbarians.
