From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: RE-FRAMING DISSENT AS CRIMINAL SUBVERSION (part 4 (last))
    "Homosexual politics is a moral cancer eating at  
    the fabric of America. It is an unholy, satanic movement must be
    stopped.!" <29>
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 05:57:10 GMT

    "The radical animal-rights wing of the environmental movement has
    a lot in common with Hitler's Nazis." <21>

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talk.environment,soc.motss,and alt.save.the.earth
Have been added due to examples below. The other parts of the article
are available in alt.activism and talk.politics.misc 
--Harel
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Topic 45        Repression & Paradigm Shift Frame       Response  4 of  4 
cberlet 
Public Eye Network      10:12 am  Jul 25, 1992 
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ENVIRONMENTAL EXAMPLES 

As Johan Carlisle pointed out in a recent issue  
of Covert Action, "the two environmental groups  
under the heaviest fire are Earth First! and  
Greenpeace." <12> Right-wing publications have  
been re-framing the environmental movement for  
several years and current articles in mainstream  
media are beginning to reflect this paradigm  
shift. For instance <USA Today in April of 1992  
ran two oppossing views on Rachel Carson's book  
>Silent Spring> published thirty years ago last  
April. <13> After claiming Carsons's warnings  
about DDT were unfounded, author Patrick Cox, "an  
associate policy analyst for the Competitive  
Enterprise Institute," went on to frame Carson  
and the anti-toxics movement as hysterical  
ideologues. An analysis of Cox's polemic results  
in the following: 


FRAME ESTABLISHED FOR ANTI-TOXICS MOVEMENT: 

Persons who oppose pesticides and believe DDT is unsafe: 

  --Reject science. 

  --Are inflicted with "environmental hypochondria". 

  --Circulate "apocalyptic, tabloid charges."  

  --Have "no evidence" to back their "hysterical predictions." 

  --Use "gross manipulation" to fool the media. 

  --Are "unscrupulous, Luddite fundraisers." 

  --Suffer from "knee-jerk, chemophobic rejection of pesticides." 

  --Create "vast and needless costs" for consumers and farmers. 

FRAME ESTABLISHED FOR PRO-PESTICIDE INDUSTRY: 

Pesticide supporters who believe wide use  
globally of DDT is safe: 

  --Are pro-science and pro-logic. 

  --Have support from the "real scientific  
    community--the community of controlled studies,  
    double blind experiments and peer review." 

  --Are on the side of U.S. consumers and farmers and  
    save them money. 

The rhetoric attempting to frame the  
environmental movement is vivid. "Willing to  
sacrifice people to save trees," <14> "We are in  
a war with fanatics...they will go to any  
extreme." <15> "Behind the Sierra Club  
calendars...lies a full-fledged ideology...every  
bit as powerful as Marxism and every bit as  
dangerous to individual freedom and human  
happiness." <16> "Blinded by misinformation,  
fear tactics, or doomesday syndromes." <17>.  
"The core of this environmental totalitarianism  
is anti-God." <18> "An ideology as pitiless and  
Messianic as Marxism." <19> "Since communism has  
been thoroughly discredited, it has been  
repackaged and relabeled and called  
environmentalism." <20> "The radical  
animal-rights wing of the environmental movement  
has a lot in common with Hitler's Nazis." <21> 

OFFICIAL GAY BASHING 

There have been centuries of discrimination  
against persons who challenge the heterosexual  
majority, but a recent wave of physical attacks  
on and harassment of those trying to raise  
awareness about AIDS, or seeking human rights for  
lesbians and gay men, reflect classic patterns of  
political repression. <22> 

Articles in the right-wing press have been  
escalating hyperbolic rhetoric concerning  
homosexuals for several years. In the early  
1980's Enrique Rueda of the Free Congress  
Research & Education Foundation was asked by Free  
Congress president Paul Weyrich "to research the  
social and political impact of the homosexual  
movement in America." <23>  

The result was a lengthy 1982 book, <The  
Homosexual Network,> in which Rueda concluded  
that "The homosexual movement is a subset of the  
spectrum of American liberal movements." <24>  
Rueda was alarmed by "the extent to which it has  
infiltrated many national institutions." <25>  
One jacket blurb writer gushed that Rueda had  
revealed "the widening homosexual power-grab in  
our society." From civil rights to power-grab  
in one volume. 

In 1987 Rueda joined with co-author Michael  
Schwartz to produce <Gays, AIDS and You.> The  
introduction warns "The homosexual political  
agenda represents a radical departure from what  
we as Americans believe...a terrible threat--to  
ourselves, our children, our communities, our  
country...a radical, anti-family agenda." <26>  
From power-grab to terrible threat. The authors  
suggest the movement for homosexual rights is  
different from movements involving "legitimate"  
minorities, and using conspiratorial phrases,  
write:  

"This movement is stronger, more widespread, more  
skillfully structured than most Americans  
realize. It reaches into our media, our political  
institutions, our schools, even into our mainline  
churches....And now this movement is using the  
AIDS crisis to pursue its political agenda. This  
in turn, threatens not only our values  
but our lives. <27>" 

Back cover blurbs include snippets from Senator  
Bill Armstrong, "An urgent warning," Beverly  
LaHaye, "reminds us of the necessity to reaffirm  
our civilization's Biblical heritage," and  
Congressman William E. Dannemeyer, "failure to  
affirm our heterosexual values not only is  
unhealthy, but could result in the demise of our  
civilization." From terrible threat to  
end of civilization. 

An order form for <Gays, AIDS and You> circulated  
by the Free Congress Foundation includes a  
picture of a man at a desk, his face in shadows,  
and the headline: "This Man Wants His 'Freedom'  
So Bad He's Ready To Let America Die For It." The  
text adds, "Our civilization stands in the path  
of his fulfillment as a freely  
promiscuous homosexual." <28> 

Dr. Ed. Rowe, author of <Homosexual Politics:  
Road to Ruin for America,> goes further in  
outlawing the targetted movement, stating that  
"Homosexual politics is a moral cancer eating at  
the fabric of America. It is an unholy, satanic  
crusade...this evil movement must be  
stopped.!" <29> Senator Jesse Helm's  
introduction to Rowe's book also raises the theme  
of non-rational zealousness: "Homosexual politics  
continues in fanatical pursuit of its goal of  
carving out a new 'civil right' based on the  
sexual appetite of its adherents." [30] 

Neo-fascist hatemonger Lyndon LaRouche was among  
the first in the paranoid right to move the alarm  
into the political arena. LaRouchians spawned  
restrictive propositions placed on the California  
ballot that were successfully defeated only after  
broad-based organizing efforts reversed early  
polls showing passage of measures that  
essentially called for firings and quarantines  
for persons with signs of AIDS. LaRouche even  
obliquely suggested murder as a tactic, writing  
that history would not judge harshly those  
persons who took baseball bats and beat to death  
homosexuals to stop the spread of AIDS. One 1985  
pamphlet published by LaRouche's National  
Democratic Policy Committee was titled "AIDS is  
more deadly than Nuclear War," which turned out  
to be a repackaged attack on the International  
Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve. <31>  

There are dozens of books and pamphlets that  
marginalize and frame the lesbian and gay men's  
movements as threats to the American way of life,  
and fit the pattern for paradigm shift. <32> 

CONCLUSIONS 

Whether or not paradigm shift is causative,  
predictive or merely anecdotal, for the activist,  
paradigm shift should be seen as a warning signal  
that political repression and government  
intelligence abuse may soon become major factors  
in a group's tactical and strategic decisions. 

                   -30-  

Chip Berlet watches ornamental goldfish swimming  
in his garden pool to unwind after a hard day of  
watching creeping domestic authoritarianism as an  
analyst for Political Research Associates in  
Cambridge, MA. 

----------------------------------  

Author's Note: The author wishes to thank Sheila  
O'Donnell, Brian Glick and Ann Mari Buitrago for  
the discussions which informed the thesis  
presented here. 

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For a large collection of primary and secondary  
material illustrating paradigm shift, send $10 to  
Political Research Associates, 678 Mass. Ave.,  
Suite 205, Cambridge, MA, 02139. Ask for the  
packet "Corporate Roots of Attacks on the  
Environmental Movement," or "Re-Framing the  
Lesbian and Gay Men's Movements as a Threat to  
Civilization." 

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Conf?