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Date:         Thu, 12 Nov 1992 18:56:28 -0600
From:         "VALENTINE M. SMITH" <CDELL@UMKCVAX1.BITNET>
Subject:      A response to A. Freeman's 12 November post ...

Date: 12 Nov 1992 14:06:27 -0800
From: Andy Freeman <andy%SAIL.STANFORD.EDU@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Subject: RE: "11 November"

As a quick aside, I'm not going to respond to Andy's first post, in
which he criticizes publicly what I was willing to discuss privately
on the matter of Masters Eucolano and Crews from Lehigh. I was a
catalyst, period, and my motives are my own.

>>Now, let me take to an aside here, about that grand and glorious
>>institution called "hatred." My friend Liese, over there on that list
>>POLITICS, asked an eloquent question at the end of her overwhelmingly
>>intellectual post today (and she's always one of my heroes, that
>>woman can write!), which was directed at the POLITICS rightists,
>>"What does it feel like to hate so much?"

>I don't know what "it feels like to hate so much", but as a politics
>rightist, I know why some politics rightists do hate.

But, then you don't explain that, but blame rightist "hate" on
leftism - which is one of my true complaints of rightism, it demands
a scapegoat. (see below)

>They hate because hate is one of the most effective tools for
>leftists.  They hate because they think that it might work for
>rightists too.

Rightist hate behaviors may well be as old, or older, than any "left"
crime, as "leftism" may really only be 150 years old - but, rigid,
status quo, conservatism has often manifested itself in VERY hateful
form. My EXAMPLES, not provided in Andy's post, might be the
anti-Semitism of Europe from the Crusades period forward to World War
II and even to a degree to today in Russia, or the Long manifestation
in the Thirties, which *I* and many scholars call a "rightist"
phenomena, and of course, the rightist who made fascism the dirtiest
word of this century - Hitler. Again, most analysis of behavior
describes him as a rightist, favoring state control with leadership
from the top, unbridled industrial development (and rapine during the
war years), a return to "emperor rule," though he styled himself
Fuehrer instead of Emperor. Leftist hate HAS occurred, but I think it
unwise to say one occurrs as a consequence of the other, or that
"leftish hate activity" justifies rightist hate activity. Without
specific examples, it is hard to tear into this argument very far.

>In some sense, they're wrong.  Hate isn't as effective for rightist
>goals as it is for leftist goals.  That's why it's so obvious when a
>rightist tries to use it.  In another sense, they're correct.  Even
>ineffective hate is useful to rightists; while relatively ineffective
>hind-brain appeals do lose to more effective hind-brain appeals, they
>always beat fore-brain arguments.

I think this is a crock, without a bit of substantiation, and all
this "brain" stuff is a specious argument in an irrelevant direction.
Make a case, and not by assertion.

>One of the reasons I'm a rightist is that I don't like hate or to
>hate.  As a rightist, I can hate, but I don't have to; leftists don't
>have that choice.

I consider myself a centrist, with beliefs from both spectrums, and
again I say this is assrtion without a shred of proof. I contend that
hate CAN be indiginous to either spectrum, and what we in the US are
seeing in the Eighties and Nineties is rightist hatred, such as in
the utterances of Buchanan this year, highly exclusionary, jingoistic
stuff. In the Sixties, what we had was leftist hate crimes, in the
form of bombings of military structures. Earlier in the Sixties, we
had rightist hate crimes in the murdering and injuring of "liberal"
civil rights folks. And if you call "civil rights activity" leftist
hate activity, then we've no grounds for discussion, for then you are
looking at World A, and I'm looking at world B.

-
>andy
--

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