The letter "Democrats have lost mainstream America" from Lisa in Los Angeles sparked several blistering replies. The letter below, sent to Joe, addresses Lisa directly.
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Lisa,
As a fellow Jew, I cannot find the words to condemn you strongly enough for what you have become, and what you have let yourself become. In short, to stand against everything Judiasm stands for, and to serve the party of the grandson of Adolf Hitler's money launderer and Hitler's greatest American ally, Prescott Bush and the Bush Family.
The Bush Family who, if they would have succeeded in 1934, would most assuredly have meant death to you and me and millions like us. (See this BBC report.)
You might not be an Appalachian Redneck, but Joe Bageant's book is surely about you, too. As you sit home and "enjoy the descriptions" (likely code for feeling smugly superior to those you view as unsophisticated, unwashed louts) you have not the self-awareness to notice that you are just as easily sidetracked into nonsensical divisive wedge issues as they.
Politically, I am much closer to the middle than Joe, and if America is ever a Free Country again rather than an Inverted Totalitarianism, I would be opposite him on many issues. But that no longer matters due to the extremity of the situation. There are many things I disagree with the left on, but circumstance has made me their ally unto the end.
You know why, Lisa? Of course you don't. Allow me to enlighten you.
It is not about right and left anymore, it is about RIGHT and WRONG. And yes, I do long for the days when it goes back to being just about political positions and issues again, because that means our nation has stepped back from the precipice of totalitarian tyranny in it's newest, "most advanced" form. And I pray to God that someday it will be so.
An old line from some novel I read long ago sticks in my mind, moreso these last few years because it is so apt a description of you and so many others like you, Lisa. Allow me to paraphrase.
"Your experiences with some unfairness in an emergency room does not justify your embrace of a monster."
Being a decent human being, no matter what part of the political spectrum we reside on, involves much more than intelligence. More important that that are conscience and consciousness. Lisa, like most Loyal Bushies, you may have the first in spades, but it is quite clear you have little to none of the last two.
Such people are those who stand by while millions of innocents are murdered. They avert their eyes. They make up justifications about the awful "undeserving", who apparently deserve nothing but to die. And they will do anything ANYTHING to keep that conscience and consciousness down. The more monstrous the evil they embrace, the harder they will fight to keep the cries of their conscience locked behind steel doors, or feed their Inner Savage-Rush, so that it will play the inner SS Guard to the inner Jew that is the small shrivelled , emaciated thing that passes for your conscience down in it's mental Auschwitz, locked away where no one can hear it's cries, especially not you, Lisa.
Michael Savage, as I am sure you know, is constantly referring to "liberal vermin". Ironically, as Savage-Weiner is a Jew like us, "vermin" is EXACTLY the term the Nazis used to describe us Jews. Go ahead and look it up -- if you dare (here and here).
Yes, I DO judge you. I am no squishy moral relativist. There comes a time when evil is evil, and it must be named and opposed. Either that or yielded to. And as you listen to RushLimbaugh, believe and repeat his lies, so were those who listened to his spiritual antecedent, Juluis Streicher, believed and repeated his lies. (See this biography in the Jewish Virtual Library.)
You are them. They are you. The only difference is that your Bushies have only asked you thus far to endorse only one "invasion of Poland", as well as the torture and murder of one million innocents, instead of twelve million or the fifty million, if you count all who died because of Hitler's Nazi-Bushie madness, who would have lived otherwise. Did you forget about other six million? The six million Poles, gypsies, homosexuals and liberals Adolf Hitler murdered in addition to our people? Of course you did. Of course you did.
Can I make myself anymore straightforward and direct?
Finally, I know we Jews don't believe in hell, but if there is one, you are surely going there. I only hope that you room with others like you, the Good Germans who also allowed themselves to be addled by propaganda and hatred of "the undeserving" into following a monster. Into becoming monsters themselves.
It is an old adage that it is impossible to tell Nazis, Bushies and other evil people from anyone else, that they look like everyone else. That has been hammered home to me in spades these last seven years. But what I didn't know then that I am absolutely certain of now, due to the triad of intelligence, consciousness and conscience that I spoke of above, that there must have been millions of Nazis and Good Germans just like you, who in daily life were "nice people" if you met them on the street or had dinner at their house without knowing what they were.
I wish upon you, Lisa, exactly what you wish on liberals and "the undeserving". You deserve nothing less.
So very sincerely,
Fred
Pennsylvania
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Fred,
From redneck to a Jew, all I can say is: Amen!
Much the same as I can say things directly to rednecks that you cannot, you can say things to Jews that I cannot. Any mention of Jews on my part brings charges of, or at least suspicion of, anti-Semitism. But both of us are on the same page about Good Germans. The only difference is that when you mention Good Germans to fellow Jews they know what you are talking about. When I mention it to rednecks they say, "Huh?"
Like you, the last seven years have impressed upon me the fact that when we look around us at Good Germans, they are behaving as if things were quite normal and accepting the emergence of evil without qualms. Hannah Arendt put it quite well in coining the phrase, "the banality of evil." To me though, it becomes more than banal when ordinary people begin to espouse personal rationalizations for their acceptance of it (usually political ones involving "the left" and "the right," alongside those automatically provided for them by national propaganda. The concepts of left and right in politics is foundational and when Good Germans start pointing across the fulcrum over political power to the left as "vermin" they are no longer just Good Germans. They are well on their way to becoming Brownshirts, or at least Brownshirt supporters.
You summed up our national condition equally well in saying: "It is not about right and left anymore, it is about RIGHT and WRONG."
In any case, if our republic continues on its current headlong rush toward what we both see ahead, I will try to get a bunk next to yours in the camp. ;-)
In art and labor,
Joe
