From: sgoldste@aludra.usc.edu (Fogbound Child)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.theory,soc.culture.usa,alt.conspiracy
Subject: Re: Kulturkampf
Date: 21 Aug 92 17:03:11 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

silva@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Holly Silva) writes:

>>silva@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Holly Silva) writes:
>>| [Earth First!, animal-rights terrorists]
>>| 	While neither Earth First! nor the animal-rightists are liberals
>>| in the classic sense, the general worldview they share springs from the New
>>| Left philosophies of the 1960's. These New Left philosophies were 
>>| originally expounded by classic liberals, and hence the inheritors or heir-
>>| apparents of such philosophies are still commonly regarded as 'good
>>| liberal' by John Q. Public.
>>
>>Would you care to draw a rational connection between Earth First!
>>and the animal-rights terrorists, on the one hand, and any of
>>classical liberalism, modern liberalism, or the Democratic party
>>on the other, and thus relieve me, and I suspect many, of the
>>impression that you have written something fantastic and absurd?

>	Mr. Fitch, the connections do not have to be rational to 
>exist. My paragraph above is fairly clear on the tenuous nature of
>the connection between true liberalism and eco-terrorists. That 
>there appears to be a connection in both the minds of the terrorists
>(main PETA types, Earth Firsters! are fairly anarcho-Libertarian) and
>in the minds of the public and newsmedia, that is enough to forge 
>such a connection.

I like this logic.

In my mind, Holly Silva is clearly one of those ____________ (fill in the
blank). Now, if I just call up my good friend over at the paper (who happens
to value my advertising dollar highly) and mention that those evil _________
are at it again, and look, Holly's leading them along, dammit! So my good
friend writes a short article about the reprehensible  ________-like tendancies
of the Holly Silva-ites. Voila! There's confusion in the minds of the
public, in the media, and so on.

Aha! Now we have an indisputable connection between Holly Silva and the
infamous ideology of the _________s. All it took was one crackpot (me), and
one gullible journalist.

To say that Earth First! or ALF-types are connected to classic liberalism
through this tenuous association is frightening only in as far as Holly
may be right. What this says about the ignorance of the average American
(and how easy it is to throw labels about ... Richard Nixon and Jerry Voorhis
spring to mind) is not encouraging.

However, the argument that Earth First! or the Animal Liberation Front draw
their "general worldview" from the New Left of the 60s is ridiculous.
The New Left didn't invent demonstrations, protests, nor radical actions. The
concept of people going to extremes (ie, violating the law) over special
issues or interests is far from new, and certainly not restricted to the Left.

One could argue that these organizations share as much a philosphical
background with the Ku Klux Klan as they do any New Left group. After all,
the Klan has also acted outside of the law when they believed that the
government was too corrupted by special interests to act in a "correct" manner.
[don't read this as support of the Klan! I'm just trying to point out the
 similarities in rationale between radicalism of the Left and the Right].


>--
>======================================================================
>|| Holly Silva			I have nothing terribly clever to say||
>|| Applied Earth Sciences	today.  You're in luck.		     ||
>|| Stanford University						     ||

___Samuel___

-- 
_________Pratice Safe .Signature! Prevent Dangerous Signature Virii!_______
Guildenstern: Our names shouted in a certain dawn ... a message ... a
              summons ... There must have been a moment, at the beginning,
              where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,ca.politics,ba.politics