Yesterday I asked whether batshit-crazy 25th LD Republican nominee Hans Zeiger agrees with me and the Seattle Times that, in their words, “loathing of Muslims … humiliates Christians and demeans their beliefs in the eyes of the world.”
Of course, it was a rhetorical question, as Zeiger’s extensive written record makes it clear that he does not.
For example, in a December 2006 column in the online wingnut mouthpiece WorldNetDaily, titled “The right must unite against Islam,” Zeiger actually makes the extraordinarily cynical and prescient suggestion that opposition to Islam should replace anti-communism as the organizing principle that unites the conservative movement:
When conservatism began its popular resurgence in politics and ideas in the 1950s, the thing that tied together the intellectual camps … and made their adherents a collective force, with time, for Ronald Reagan was the spirit of anti-communism. Conservatives, after all, are generally trying to conserve something good in the face of something bad. Conservatives need not agree about the ultimate good (the good could be liberty, or equality, or truth, or tradition). But they must agree about what is bad (communism was bad).
Today, as in 1964 and 1980 when communism was pulsing and the right was united, there are different views among conservatives about what constitutes the good. However, unlike 1964 and 1980, conservatives today are divided about what constitutes the bad. Some say that terrorism is the great enemy; others say that war is the great enemy. Some say that government is our undoing, others that the popular culture is evil. It is possible to hate terrorism and war and government and popular culture all at once, but it is not likely that a winning political movement can come together on all these themes.
It’s actually a pretty cogent if simplistic reading of history. According to Zeiger, even though the various flavors of American conservatism couldn’t agree on a single agenda, they were ultimately united in their opposition to communism. That was the organizing principle on which social conservatives and neo-cons and free market libertarians et al were able to join together into a united, disciplined and effective political movement. That was the unlikely coalition at the core of a resurgent Republican Party.
Huh. It’s as good a thesis as any. I’ll give him that.
But with the Soviet Union collapsed and communism vanquished as a meaningful threat, the conservative movement and its party lost it’s way.
Indeed, there is no winning conservative movement. Even if the Republicans are still a force in politics, what passes for the conservative party today is hardly conservative, because it is more driven by special interests than a resistance to something bad.
Zeiger’s solution? Find a new bugbear… a boogeyman… a scapegoat against whom conservatives can reunify into a dominant political force. It is a strategy straight out of Mein Kampf, all the way down to the semitic origins of this new enemy and the disturbingly unselfconscious turn of phrase Zeiger chooses to describe the threat they pose:
But there is evil in our world that will destroy souls and nations if conservatives don’t unite against it. Whatever arguments are to be made for the war in Iraq, the fact is that Iraq in the equation of public opinion and practical statesmanship has distracted from the realities of Sept. 11. It has moved conservatives away from what could define their calling at the launch of the 21st century. Our response to the problem of Islam cannot mainly be war, though it may include war. We must respond with a renewed culture. We must counter the rise of Islam with a faith of our own.
Understand that Zeiger is not simply advocating that conservatives and Republicans unite in their opposition to Islamist terrorism, he is arguing that they need to unite in opposition to Islam. You know… the Islamic Problem.
And Zeiger’s Hitlerian rhetoric doesn’t end there…
That is not to say that conservatives must be Christians, but conservatives must understand that the only defense against Islam is a vibrant Christian culture. Politics is a contest of opinions about how best to protect a culture; while culture has to do with ideas and relationships, politics has to do with force and order. Our politics need not be immediately religious, but our culture must be.
I mean, I hate to drop the F-bomb… but that bit about “force and order” is a fascistic political sentiment if I ever saw one.
And there’s no reading between the lines here. Zeiger goes on to clearly demonize “the cult of Islam,” while reiterating his call for conservatives to reunite in opposition…
The cult of Islam repudiates self-government and all we hold dear. If we are to continue to be a self-governing people, we must be a people of strong character, and strong character is founded in the Christian faith.
[…] If conservatives are to be reunited, we must first unite against Islam. From there we can renew our determination to be a self-governing and Christian nation.
Perhaps Zeiger truly believes that Islam is as “evil” as he says it is. Perhaps he doesn’t. Cognitive dissonance can yield strange results. But in his call to exploit opposition to Islam as the organizing political principle of the American right, one can’t help but hear a chilling echo of the German anti-semitism of the 1930’s, and its transformation of old fashioned, church sanctioned Jew hatred into an organizing political principle that would ultimately lead to the slaughter of millions. Thus as clever or as prescient as Zeiger’s call to action may be, there is little in it to distinguish his political instincts from those of the fascists… or even al-Qaeda for that matter.
—
Unfortunately, while young Zeiger fashioned himself a reputation as a sorta right-wing prodigy, based purely on his prolific portfolio of wingnut commentary, our local media seems prepared to dismiss it all as mere youthful indiscretion… even batshit-crazy columns such as this one, written less than four years ago. So if 25th LD voters are going to learn the truth about Zeiger, they’re going to have to learn it directly from his Democratic opponent, Rep. Dawn Morrell. So you might want to throw her some change.
I guess we should give him props for not hiding his wish to create a theocratic state.
Michael @1,
Well, we could, if he hadn’t tried to scrub so much of his written record from the Internet.
I see the reasoning behind wanting a new ‘enemy’ to galvanize the Republican Party, but the world is dramatically different now. Many of the Republican big money people have business ties to the Middle East and Indonesia, etc. and might think twice about alienating the owners of all that precious oil. Islam isn’t hiding behind a wall of secrecy the way the Communists did. And Muslims aren’t limited to the USSR and China and Cuba. It’s pretty simplistic to think that Islam is ever going to rise to the level of bogeyman that Communism did. The world is far too interdependent and porous, perhaps in part because Communism no longer controls such a significant segment of the population.
It’s sad really that the only way the Republican Party can unite is against some perceived evil. By stark contrast, the Democrats managed to unite FOR progress and hope.
3- Well, we are talking about people who very angrily demonstrated against the very notion that they deserved health care.
Of course, to these simpletons “Muslim” equals “terrorist”. And “terrorist” was invented to do exactly what Hans says; a substitute for commie, et al. Have a look at the wealth and transfer of power that has occurred through the war on “terror”. It’s a lucrative affair.
It’s obviously a faulty paradigm. Humans have relished this us vs them shit for too long. It creates a circling of the wagons reaction. The gig should be up on that particular Pavlovian behavior one of these first days. Human consiousness is still incredibly immature, but has to evolve past this infantile shit pretty quickly, one would think.
The Republican/conservative consiousness should evolve pretty quickly, I should say.
Once you start reading things like “party purity” and after things don’t get instantly better by praying to thin air in the 2006 election they would need to find a focus of blame, and some ultimate solution.
How is he not a Nazi?
Maybe it is the color of his shirt?
http://www.voccoquan.com/ephemera/zeiger%201.htm
golstein, you crack me up. you loathe christians, (unless that was your body double on oreilly admonishing against christmas celebrations). does that humiliate you?
Islam? Please, Zeiger and the rest of the Republican party will burn forever in torment because they don’t follow the true church, the only church, the Catholic church. They don’t think the Pope is gods word on Earth and infallible. Like all sinning Baptists they think just “anyone” can climb up on stage, preach the gospel and save souls. Sad they won’t be saved.
Opps, did I say the Catholic church? I meant to say they’re all doomed because, unlike Mitt Romney and Glen Beck, they don’t recognize the Book of Mormon as God’s last orders to us, and his last profit Joseph Smith. I don’t think the Republicans are getting their planet when they die!
Opps, did I say Mormon? I mean Unitarian. Amish. Quaker. Jew. Hindu. Buddhist.
What cracks me up about the insane wingnuts (Republican party now a days) is that going after the “evil religion” is tricky, because you likely belong to it…that is whatever you believe is evil/confused/made-up to everyone else. Going down this road is a horrible ugly hike that will never end well. The “my god can beat up your god” rhetoric is pathetic. Every culture, religion and country has it’s ups and downs. We’re a good “Christian” nation…founded on murdering an entire indigenous population (native Americans) and stealing their entire land because, well, we wanted it…building our cities on their graves and then acting morally superior to other cultures who would invade and try to take others land. I mean can you imagine!? Think of the Muslims trying to take Cordoba! Of course that was 700 years ago…where we murdered this nations original inhabitants and established our Christian (slave trading) nation only 2.5 centuries ago. And then there was the inquisition, holy wars, witch trials, etc. Just saying…those who live in glass houses and all.
To sum up: “Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone.”
All of theses conservatives love good ol 20 mule team Reagan, do they know that when Afghanistan was in a state of collapse as the Russians decided to leave, The head of Russia, Gorby, went to Reagan and Shultz and told them in six months they would be out of Afghanistan, and that they needed the help of the U.S. to keep Afghanistan from becoming a “Radical Islamic” State, Reagan and Shultz gave the Russians the finger, and Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban, this all could have been stopped by the Republican Administration, another piece in the puzzle of 911. Thanks a Lot REAGAN
@8
alki
if there is no religion, no god, then we are all just atoms that, through the brute force of eons of evolution, became what we are. so, realy, there is no good, no bad, just every man for himself, cause really, we’re nothing but energy. capish?
re 11: Sounds like a perfect description of the social Darwinism preached by the free market fraudters.
@12
re 11: Sounds like a perfect description of the social Darwinism preached by the free market fraudters.
but don’t ya see, if we’re all just atoms, accidentally evolved, then freddie mercury was right…nothing really matters, anyone can see.
re 13: It is a rare man o’ truth that takes the musical ruminations of Freddy Mercury to account in his cosmology.
We who are about to rock salute you!
If nothing really matters, are you energy?
Alki,
Some corrections are in order.
Colonists, and then Americans, didn’t murder an entire indigenous population. A vast majority died of disease, a terrible but accidental tragedy. Some died in war, which they lost. All of the BS treaties we signed shouldn’t have been. They lost, we won and they should have integrated into the conquering population like any other people so situated in history. We tried to do it the other way, and the nonsense of dual citizenship and the rest are the idiotic result. But the point is, we tried to do it the other way, a historical first and a marker of the people we would become.
We liberated Europe, twice, from their own stupid wars. What land did we claim? What monetary compensation for the incredible cost in lives and treasure to save Europe? Oh, right, we actually spent money in the Marshall Plan rebuilding the place. We claimed not one acre of land for the United States. Yet people like you refer to us on equal footing with the former USSR and their aggressive takeovers of most of Eastern Europe.
We were to our shame a nation which tolerated slavery a century and a half ago. Who do you imagine sold those slaves to Europeans and Americans. That’s right, Africans. Most of the ports which supported the markets for and exportation of slaves were Muslim. The slaves arrived at these ports through tribal warfare and the sale of conquered people to those ports as slaves. Most of the slave trade was inter-African, but the left is curiously silent about this, as is the NAACP and all the other groups who wish to use past slavery as a cudgel to beat the country up. No, we are eternally and unavoidably guilty forever for the sins of, not our fathers, but their great great grandfathers.
The witch trials were less about faith than small town politics in one town in New England. Yet any leftist brings this up all the time, as well as the 600 year past Inquisition, as a contemporay indictment against Christianity. Pathetic.
Critical review of our past to do better is both needed and patriotic. Lying about our past to make us look worse is dishonest and treacherous.
Re 10
Care to prove that assertion?
You prove the horseshit you spew first.
what religion views jesus as a special emissary from god and views his mother mary as having given birth through divine and virginal means?
Too bad most Americans believe the same self justifying lies that lostinaseaofblue spews. The Cherokees had printing presses, newspapers, plantations and slaves. They didn’t resist when they were forced onto death marches to the death camps, where most died of starvation and disease. Seminoles were granted the same rights as any white male citizens and farmed and hunted as well as any US citizen in Florida. But they stood in the way of the Slavoracy and had to die. It’s hard to adapt when the law didn’t allow Indians to testify against murders, rapists and thieves nor to allow Indians to legally defend themselves against them. Parallels could be draw to the time before Stonewall.
Too bad you get all your information from Howard Zen, instead of real historians.
I don’t point to our experience with Indian cultures as a high point in American history. But the experience of native peoples was hardly original or unique to the Americas. Except that we instituted farcical and unworkable treaties instead of treating the natives as the conquered people they were. And we still try with idiotic notions of dual citizenship.
I know many on the left try with every fiber of their being to believe it a bad place filled with men of ill intent. What I don’t get is why you don’t move where you would be happier.
Re 20
Honestly this seems to be the position you and your ideological friends take-
America is a malign influence historically. We were a slave owning nation, and treated the native people of the land badly. (Insert lies about smallpox blankets and every other myth here. This will take us from being benighted to being actually evil, an inexplicable but undeniable goal of many on the left.)
America is a malign force economically. Every financial problem the world has ever experienced is due either to us or to the theories which informed our economic system.
America is socially backward. Wealthy people are allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor and good habits. Poor people are allowed the consequences of poor choices and bad habits. In a ‘truly civilized’ environment all wealth would be equally shared no matter the individual effort which generated it.
Americas culture was informed by Christian Europe and the Christian traditions of 2 millenia. But Christians are the only group not deserving even of basic respect. Muslims? Great people. Hindi? They enlighten the world. Pretty much anyone other than Christians are given credit for what they’ve contributed to this culture.
The Constitution missed all this. No provision allows for the theft of one mans property to give it to another. No provision allows for the federal government to spend a single dime on the food, housing, or other specific needs of individual citizens. We can’t change the Constitution, so we’ll lie about or misinterpret what it says or the men who wrote it said about it.
The Socialist democracies of Europe do all of this much better.
So, really and with no malice, why not move to those places and leave this country to those who love it?
If this guy is looking for a bugbear to unite the right, then why not consider the whole American culture of debt. Both public and private debt. Even a few of the tea partiers get this. Has it ever occured to Zeiger that American Muslims have a lot at stake in reducing the National Debt and the personal bankruptcy rate?
As for the South Sound MSM letting Zeiger get away with spewing his theo-fascistic garbage and defining himself as a sensible mainstream candidate: yes, it is fucking disgraceful. Both the Olympian and the News Tribune have an editorial policy that prioritizes local-boosterism over finding and reporting facts– you know, the stuff that newspapers are supposed to do. Exposing Zeigers’Christianist fanatacism would reflect poorly on the South Sound political culture, and we can’t have that, can we? Fundmentalist Christians and sympathetic Republicans might cancel their subscriptions.
The importance of Zeiger’s identity as a fundamentalist christian cannot be understated when discussing the nature of the MSM’s coverage of him. Fundies are the new victim-identity group, and we have to treat them with pc-sensitivity, you see. If you don’t take Zeiger or Sarah Palin– the Jesse Jackson of the white-rural-christianist-right– at their word when they purport to be mainstream, then you’re an anti-chrisitian bigot. You’re “lamestream.” Don’t like the fact that Palin believes in witchcraft and end-times theology? Have doubts about the desirability of a Palin presidency? Have serious concerns about an end-timer having access to nuclear launch codes? Well, you’re just an insensitie bigot– how dare you insult her religous beliefs! This is PC taken to the last degree, to its logical conclusion. Mainstream newspapers and television newsreporting fears PC offensiveness. Offended people might ditch the MSM for blogs and radio, right?
The people on the left who where championing PC twenty years ago should step up and put a stop to this nonsense. (Yes, lefties, you created the slippery slope that has led to the Hans Zeiger-Sarah Palin problem in American public life.) The people on the right who profess to hate PC and identity politics should denounce the Christianists as poseurs. (I mean, seriously, if these people get in we will get big government at its worst.) The so-called liberal media should grow some balls and do some reporting. Why can’t outlets like the Olympian and King 5 see that their puss-journalism drives more people to alternative sources than offenses to PC propriety?
lostinaseaofblue:
What can people not see about the fact that if one wants to improve something one must face its flaws? And don’t assert your baseless claptrap that the entire goal of pointing out such flaws (correctly assessed or not) is demonization–consider perhaps that if people earnestly believe certain criticisms of the United States, they believe it their responsibility as citizens to fight and remedy once and future wrongs. If one really believes the extremist caricature you paint, what makes the most sense–go somewhere else when you believe something smells rotten in the state of Denmark (Denmark, WI, IA, ME, NY or SC perhaps)–or to stay here, from where you believe the problems emanate?
Should MLK, or Thomas Jefferson, or William Wallace or Gandhi or Mandela simply have gone someplace else to live? Or should they have done as they did, and stayed where they were to fight for what they believed in, however far off it seemed and however wrong, backwards, and evil the regimes ruling their respective countries appeared to be or actually were?
The country is our collective offspring; we’re responsible for trying to clean up its shit and teach it how to behave. It’s tough to do with a couple hundred million fractious parents, but that doesn’t mean we abdicate our responsibility to shape it up, and it doesn’t mean we abandon it, even if it is demonstrably a reprobate. Ultimately, its bad behavior reflects on us and our stewardship, and is our responsibility, wanted or not.
Obviously you don’t think *everything* the government does is right. Why is it fine when you criticize something but not when someone on the Left does? What makes your criticism patroitic but theirs whiny? Because you disagree with it? Because you think it’s too harsh? Does that mean that, no matter what happens, we shouldn’t fight our own government too hard? Or does it just mean that you don’t agree with the left’s complaints and wish they’d go away? If it’s the latter, seriously, you gotta man up and admit you disagree with the left–that doesn’t mean that they should leave any more than it does you should. They think you’re wrong, you think they’re wrong, you think you have the facts, they think they do–welcome to reality, where it’s not actually easy to figure out who’s right. The fact that you fervently feel the facts prove you right doesn’t mean you actually get to arbitrate who’s critiques are genuine, who’s are whiny or faked and who should just go away. You just gotta keep arguing and thinking and learning like everyone else.
RE 24
I actually wrote that criticism can be a patriotic duty somewhere in this thread. Twain mocked the ‘My country, right or wrong!’ mindset, and was correct in doing so.
For me the difference is that conservatives mostly believe this a great country with flaws. They believe that with some minor tweaking we can continue to be great. Rational conservatives know that all governments are flawed and can be made better. But they fundamentally believe that this country comes closest to the ideal.
From outside it seems that liberals believe more in the flaws than the country. From outside, the admiration of other countries that do it right, while we don’t indicates that the person would be happier elsewhere.
Nor do I buy that I have personal responsiblity for the actions of my remote ancestors. Slavery was evil, but was abolished (in the US) a century and a half ago. The treatment of the Japanese in WW2 was appalling, but few alive were personally impacted by it.
If you’re saying that the civil rights violations under the Patriot Act are a concern, I’m with you. If you’re saying that the economic situation in the US can’t help but impact the rest of the world, fine. These are issues right and left can agree need addressed.
But if someone thinks every aspect of the country, past and present, is ill conceived, that I can’t agree with.
“Honestly this seems to be the position you and your ideological friends take-”
No, it’s only what you pull from your ass and attribute to the left. It has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
“So, really and with no malice, why not move to those places and leave this country to those who love it?”
Yeah, we’re always talking about moving to a villa in Italy. Oh, wait, you’re the one who does that. Repeatedly. In fact, you’re the only one here who ever talks of leaving America because you don’t love it anymore. You see, that’s what projection is all about. You take what you hate about yourself and you project it onto somebody else.
“From outside” “From outside”
No, it comes from inside you, Lost. These statements of yours reveal what resides inside of your head, not ours.
Steve,
“From outside” “From outside”
Exactly. From my perspective as a conservative with libertarian overtones, that’s what I see. I’m sure from inside of the worldview it looks entirely different.
The place in Italy isn’t a villa. Wish it was. It would be if I was a rich engineer who played golf all the time. But it’s a small village house of around 700 square feet. (Title is in meters and Italian to boot and I caint unnerstand that socialist metric system. Buncha damn commies came up with it, and real Americans don’t cotton to it no-how.)
Lost, I think there is something lost in your analysis. In as much as certain atrocities (slavery, Triangle Shirt fire, Jim Crow, The Great Depression, et al) have occurred in the history of America, they have been committed by status quo worshiping conservatives such as yourself. In as much as we as a nation have progressed past those atrocities, it is because of status quo questioning people such as me. You may thank us at your leisure.
Getting back to the original post: It seems that Zeiger read “1984”, and mistook it for an instruction manual.
@27 The issue isn’t square footage, it’s your hypocricy. You suggest that we don’t love our country and that we should move somewhere else and leave this country to those who do love it.
“So, really and with no malice, why not move to those places and leave this country to those who love it?”
And yet you’re the one here who repeatedly tells us how much you dislike our nation and how you give thought to moving to Italy to get away from it. Nobody here on the left talks that way. By your own measure, you make the case that you love this country far less than we do.