From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Subject: Re: Help stop the KKK
Organization: Northeastern Law, Class of '93
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 11:25:40 GMT


In article <1992Apr13.003127.12285@cs.ubc.ca>, 
manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) said:

> The issue here is not expression of a repugnant opinion (I have
> not, for example, suggested, and would not support, the drowning
> out of a Pat Buchanan or David Duke). It specifically consists of
> fighting back against an act of intimidation.

> The Klan originated as an attempt to deprive newly-liberated
> blacks of their civil rights.  KKK rallies are an attempt to
> frighten those who are for racial, ethnic, or sexual reasons
> powerless. They don't so much propose specific programs, but
> simply display their (assumed) power.  That's why they generally
> pick black areas (the Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, because it
> had, at the time, a very high percentage of Jewish Holocaust
> survivors).  As such, the issue here is to discredit that claimed
> power.  By drowning them out, one is responding not to their
> perverted ideas, but their attempt to present themselves as a
> power elite.

(1) You're mixing past and present.  There is not necessarily any
real connection between the Klan's origins in the late 1860s-early
1870s and its status today.

(2) If your goal is to show that the Klan does not intimidate you,
there are ways of doing so without violating the Klan members'
rights.  STella suggested laughter; I myself think that simply
turning out in large numbers would do a fine job of saying "Hey,
look, we're so scared of the KKK that we're standing out here in
front of them, holding placards with anti-Klan slogans, not wearing
a mask or otherwise hiding our identities from them.  Yup, they've
really got us terrified..."

(By the way, please don't confuse my "There are other ways of
sending your message" position with the similar-at-first-blush
reasoning used by William Rehnquist et al in their [thank god]
minority opinion in the recent flag-burning cases.  The Rehnquist
doctrine was that (a) as political speech, flag-burning was nothing
more than an "inarticulate roar" and therefore nothing was lost by
its suppression and (b) people who want to express their dislike
of the United States have lots of other ways of doing it, so they
don't really lose anything by being forbidden to flag-burn.  The
distinction between that and my position is that Rehnquist wanted to
allow the outlawing of an act of speech which did not violate the
rights of any persons; whereas the type of "drown out your opponent"
speech I oppose _does_ violate that opponent's rights, as well as
the rights of his potential audience.)

> This most emphatically does not include violence (which would
> lower the protestors to the level of the Klan), but simple chants
> like `Hey, hey, hey/KKK/we want you/to go away.'

Frankly, from a purely pragmatic, amoral standpoint, I'm not sure
that trying to drown out the speakers at peaceably assembled Klan
rallies _doesn't_ lower the protestors to the level of the Klan.
Looks to me as if the message that most observers would get would be
something along the lines of "Hey, look -- we can be even more
assholic than the KKK!"

-- William December Starr <wdstarr@athena.mit.edu>

  Hey, hey!  Ho, ho!
  Stupid chants have to go!
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d