Author: Bryant

Yeah, I’m feeling flamingly political this week. So: the Guardian claims that some of the Guantanamo Bay defense team was fired. If the report is accurate, and it might not be, a few of the selected defense lawyers objected to the rule that says the government can listen in on conversations between the lawyer and the defendant. They were fired immediately.

The question is obviously not whether the government can fire lawyers who aren’t willing to work under the procedures outlined. The question is whether or not the procedures are reasonable. When you pick a team of lawyers who know in advance that they’re working as part of a military tribunal, and they still object to the procedures once they see them, there is perhaps something wrong with the way you want to do things.

The BBC notes that both the Guardian and Vanity Fair are reporting this story, despite DoD denials.

Ginger pointed out that I didn’t mention the violence committed by the anti-abortion crowd. She’s right; it’s another example of extremist right-wing violence that at the very least verges on terrorism. So let’s talk about that some.

Start out at Abortion Violence, a site run by anti-abortionists. (Brant, this is one of those links. You’ve been warned.) About five seconds into reading it, I realized that the tactics were incredibly familiar. It’s the same stuff I talked about in my previous post on right-wing terrorism.

They’re quick to claim that pro-choice activists are more violent, and provide charts to make the point. However, when you drill down into their state by state numbers, it becomes clear that their stats are hopelessly biased. For example, in Massachusetts, they count the following case as a pro-choice murder:

On October 31, 1999, allergist and part-time abortionist Dirk Greineder murdered his 58-year-old wife, Mabel, during a walk at a Wellesley pond after she discovered his secret life of prostitutes and pornography.

What’s the connection? Well, he performed abortions. By that standard, you have to count every murder ever committed by an anti-abortion activist, though, and they don’t. They also count deaths during abortions; they do not count (or even mention) deaths in childbirth.

The arguments are the same. “We’re not so bad when you look at them.” The arguments are also equally false.

The links between these terrorists and right-wing extremism have been documented for nearly a decade. Eric Rudolph is a great example. So is John Burt. So is Donald Spitz.

Note also the last paragraph in this article on Stephen Jordi — Pastor Ruckman knows what’s going on in his community. Jordi had hopes of killing Clinton and Bush. And the Patriot movement is happy to embrace Jordi as a sympathetic figure. (Scroll down, and if you thought abortionviolence.org was bad, you really don’t want to read that link. But this is what’s happening in our culture and I kind of think it’s better to know.)

It’s all part of the same fabric; it’s all part of the same culture of violence.

Last week, Lawrence Haws wrote me to point out this post, which is — well, it’s what it is. As best I can untangle the logic, Lynxx Pherrett thinks that right wing talk radio isn’t creating a culture of violence because Andrew McCrae was a leftist. There’s also a lot of really flawed rhetoric about how our colleges are producing left-wing assassins by the boatload…

OK, I’m going to digress here for a moment. I experienced Harvard’s General Education program, as it happens, and not only did I not become a brainwashed leftist cop-killer, I remember what General Education courses I took. One of these, which was and is the largest course at Harvard, was Michael Sandel’s Justice. Michael Sandel teaches an unrepentantly communitarianist theory of justice; a large portion of the course is dedicated to refuting the theories of John Rawls, patron saint of modern liberalism. It is difficult, to say the least, to reconcile the popularity of a course which preaches the importance of society with claims that Harvard’s General Education curriculum is a breeding ground for dangerous loners.

Also exceedingly popular: Roderick MacFarquhar’s course on the Cultural Revolution. It was an unstinting look at the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I find it very hard to convince myself that MacFarquhar’s stinging condemnations of Mao cause fond affection for Communism.

Digression over. That wasn’t actually the point of the post; I just couldn’t help but point out that the Harvard curriculum of the late 1950s may not actually accurately model today’s Harvard curriculum.

What I did take out of Pherrett’s post is that there are, in this country, left-wing terrorists. But I already knew that. There are fanatics on both sides of the political spectrum, and some percentage of them are inclined to kill. I wrote back to Lawrence with some extended musings on this topic, and let the topic kind of percolate for a bit.

Then, on Monday, I read the latest post on Orcinus. It exposes his personal reasons for his crusade; I found it remarkably open, exposed reading. Worth reading just for the integrity. It also got my thoughts back on this longwinded post I’m constructing here.

One of the things he talks about, after acknowleding that there are fanatics on the left, is the preponderance of violent right wing rhetoric. He knows, as do I, that there are repellent people on the left — “In my view, Stalinist Communism is the epitome of the blinkered, anti-personal ideology of the left, and I’ve always been a fairly severe anti-Communist.” I suspect he would acknowledge that the rhetoric of groups like ANSWER influenced Andrew McCrae. But McCrae is only one person.

A single loner doesn’t mean the left is as dangerous as the right. I’ll see your McCrae and raise you a Carl Drega. Have an Eric Rudolph. Remember the murder of Alan Berg. Look up Buford Furrow. Read about these forty men.

The right doesn’t have a monopoly on hatred in this country. Thirty years ago, our domestic terrorists were the left-wing Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Thirty years from now, radical environmentalists may embrace terrorist tactics wholeheartedly.

But that’s then. This is now. I am a minarchist, and I have great sympathy for those who feel the government has too many tendrils in private life. This does not stop me from thinking that violence is the wrong solution for the problem as it exists in America today. And when I look around to see where the violence comes from — today, now — I see the terrorist right.