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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (45614)	9/7/2010 12:07:23 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Who is responsible for Warmabomber's violent agenda? By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds Contributor September 5, 2010 Filthy. Parasites. Disgusting, overbreeding candidates for sterilization and extermination. Possessed of false morals and a “breeding culture.” Hitler talking about the Jews? Nope. This is Discovery Channel hostage-taker James Lee talking about ... human beings. Compared to Lee, Hitler was a piker, philosophically: Der Fuehrer only wanted to kill those he considered “subhuman.” Lee considered all humans to be subhuman. Lee was a nut, an eco-freak who said he was inspired by Al Gore’s environmental scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” His badly written “manifesto” underscores his craziness. He hated “filthy human babies.” But, of course, Lee’s not alone. Looking at the environmental literature, we find terms like those used above -- the currently stylish description is “eliminationist rhetoric” -- used widely, and plans for mass sterilization are fairly common. And, as Mark Hemingway pointed out in these pages a few days ago, one need only look to the writings of President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren to find something similar. Seeing humanity as destructive, Holdren wrote in favor of forced abortion and putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water, and in particular of sterilizing people who cause “social deterioration.” Holdren has since distanced himself from these views, but still. Lee was a violent nut, but not a scientist. Holdren is a scientist (who held nutty views, at least at one point) but he’s not a violent nut. But here’s what worries me: What if we get the two in combination? There are plenty of nuts out there. There are also a lot of scientists. So far, we’ve been pretty lucky that there aren’t more scientists who are also nuts. Though the “mad scientist” is a staple of literature, they’re fortunately pretty rare in real life. But biotechnology is getting more common and -- thanks to folks ranging from Paul Ehrlich (Holdren’s coauthor) to Al Gore -- so are apocalyptic environmental views that treat humans as a cancer upon the earth. How common are these views? I typed “Humanity is a” into Google and the top three suggestions were “Humanity is a virus,” “Humanity is a disease,” and “Humanity is a cancer.” With such views spreading, and with technology making it steadily easier for individual or small groups to try creating their own viruses or diseases to, in their mind, level the score, perhaps we need to hold the environmental movement responsible for its frequent use of eliminationist rhetoric. Policing the science is likely to prove difficult. But policing the rhetoric -- as American society has long done with expressions of racial hatred or genocidal sentiment -- seems well within reach. In contemporary America, no respectable person would advocate, say, the involuntary sterilization of blacks or Jews. Why, then, should it be any more respectable to advocate the involuntary sterilization of everyone? Or even of those who cause “social deterioration?” Likewise, references to particular ethnic or religious groups as “viruses” or “cancers” in need of extirpation are socially unacceptable, triggering immediate thoughts of genocide and mass murder. Why, then, should it be acceptable to refer to all humanity in this fashion? Does widening the circle of eliminationist rhetoric somehow make it better? I don’t see why it should, and I don’t see why we should pretend -- or allow others to pretend -- that hate-filled rhetoric is somehow more acceptable when it’s delivered by those wearing green shirts instead of brown. Our leftist friends have told us for years that right-leaning public speakers must watch their language with exquisite care, or be held responsible for any violence that occurs. This degree of responsibility has had its effect -- virtually all of the violence associated with the Tea Party movement, for example, has been perpetrated by leftists, while Tea Partiers have been remarkably restrained -- but now it’s time to recognize that responsibility cuts both ways. The environmental movement needs to bring its hate-filled rhetoric under control, before it’s too late. There are too many potential James Lees out there, and some of them may be more competent than Lee was. Don’t encourage them through over the top rhetoric. I would say “it’s for the children,” but I’m afraid they’d hear “the children” as “the filthy human babies.” Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, hosts “InstaVision” for PJTV.com. He blogs at InstaPundit.com. washingtonexaminer.com