Interesting article in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum, “The Tea Party’s Toxic Take on History,” points out how Tea Party enthusiasts misuse terms from history. “Listen to Tea Partiers on cable news—or read the signs they hoist or their Internet comments—,” Rosenbaum writes, “and you frequently encounter the flagrant abuse, the historically ignorant misuse, of words such as tyranny, communist, Marxist, fascist, and socialist.” He gives examples of signs showing a picture of President Obama photoshoped into a Hitler uniform.
Rosenbaum says it is ridiculous for Tea Party people to use the word “tyranny” — “because one side lost a health care vote in an elected legislative body.” He is amazed that TP speakers call the president a “communist” and says, “For many Tea Party members, the word is not just a vile epithet; it’s a realistic political description.”
Recently, Rosenbaum discovered a rare copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Joseph Stalin — delivered in 1956 to the Communist Party’s 20th Congress in which Khrushchev shocked his listeners by graphically denouncing the crimes of Joseph Stalin. (I found a copy of the speech here.) Rosenbaum says that people in the TP movement should read such material to understand what “tyranny” actually looks like.
Rosenbaum writes, “I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.”
I thought YOU were long-winded Mike, but that speech by Khrushchev makes your posts seem terse by comparison!
“Long live the victorious banner of our Party – Leninism!”
Mike, you are so myopic. Every day someone is on the news calling the tea partiers racist, sexist, homophobes, nazis. Why don’t you complain about these smears from the liberals?
Rick, you make a good point. I will try to be more fair and balanced. I think if the T-Party people are to have the credibility needed to make a positive impact, they need to moderate some of their more outrageous accusations. They have something serous and important to say and the outlandish signs and accusations from some of their members don’t help their cause.
I think the T party people want to be left alone. Freedom of the individual as what I like to think the country was founded on. When someone holds a sign saying Obama is hitler, do you think that is what they believe? Or, do you think that it is a statement confronting and stating the demolishing of individual freedom is a step toward Tyranny?
If someone says that “Obama is Hitler” when Obama is clearly nothing like Hitler, it says that this person is either trying to grab more attention than he deserves or is in an emotional place that the obvious differences between Obama and Hitler mean nothing to him. Nether of these make me respect or want to belong to his movement, or want to see it influence public decisions. If someone says that the demolishing of individual freedom is a step toward tyranny and therefor we should not say a. regulate the derivatives market; b. make people pay taxes and do whatever with the money; 3. put people in Guantanamo Bay and torture them; 4. make people buy health insurance; 5. regulate the sale of assault rifles; 6. have a national day of prayer, 7. stop people with dark skins and ask for their immigration papers, then we have something to talk about.
…Obama is clearly nothing like Hitler…
Good point. Obama leveraged his charisma to unapologetically scapegoat the US Supreme Court, not US Jews. Gosh, some of Obama’s closest advisers are Jewish!
Nothing in America has changed since the Anschluss. Just ask your local Gauleiter.
Mike, why don’t you visit conservative websites now and again such as freerepublic and newsmax or others. You will find examples of vitriol and hate on the left.
Stan, if someone calls the tea partiers teabaggers, and says they are racist, homophobic, Nazis, and write bad checks, do you have anything to say to them?
Let’s see:
There clearly are some mad tea partiers who are racist, homophobic, irrational, confused, and otherwise thoughtless.
Calling all of the mad tea partiers by those names is stereotyping.
Refusing to acknowledge the ones who deserve those names is delusional.
We’ve seen that a mad tea organizer who posts a tweet with the derogatory term “spicks” gets rejected by the mainstream of the movement. I think that’s a fair assessment of the typical tea person; full of anger and distrustful of the government we elected democratically, but not so rude as to tolerate overt racism.
Covert racism–now that’s arguable.
Confusion regarding valid economic theory–ready to take government assistance but critical of those that do–full of slogans but short on detailed analysis–those are valid points of discussion.
I’d prefer if the teabaggers (and if you don’t like the term, get your folks to quit wearing tea bags!) would address real issues and not continue to spout slogans. It’s easy to say “no” to everything; harder to work to make the world a better place. Sarah Palin’s one-liners are not constructive.
I mostly agree with Ruddick. I am not hip enough to have ever heard the sexual innuendo that is supposedly “teabaggers” but if there is such an innuendo they kind of asked for it by taking the tea party name and throwing tea bags as they did in an early rally here, hoping for some patriotic association instead. The role of race in generating anxiety against Obama is hard to quantify considering how much similar grief Clinton got. (There are also interesting questions about if you described Clinton’s and Obama’s life experiences which one you would think likely to be black). Then you see the witch doctor and more ambiguous Joker-shaman posters of Obama that were visible at Tea Parties. Race and its anxieties are always running in background, particularly in our divided community here. Obama’s ethnic background and embrace of African American culture, first generation immigrant status, and mix of high academic hauteur and Chicago political association has generated huge amounts of anxiety, probably helped enormously by the many crises we face. Enough anxiety that huge percentages of people believe he is a Muslim socialist anti-Christ radical born abroad, essentially an emotional rejection of him in the face of evidence. And of course big public events attract the disturbed and needy who draw attention to themselves. Many Tea Party people are the same anti-tax and anti-government spending conservatives and libertarians who supported Forbes for President and the so called “Fair” national sales tax, and are no nuttier or wierder now than they were then. It’s hard to compare Nazis and the political movement that generated them out of economic collapse and military defeat in Germany, in a culture and philosophical worldview much different than our own, particularly given their unique and now totally discredited trappings. I have always thought that Nazis were a penultimate conservative movement that lives on in the hearts of those who fought and defeated them, just as conflict always pushes us to become what we fight against (thus the new boss is often same as the old boss). The trappings of Nazism will not be seen anywhere near power, but the dynamics that happened there can and occasionally get some momentum here. Fortunately we have yet to go there. It’s up to us to keep it that way, particularly when bad times and anxiety call. I’m glad there are lawyers willing to go to Guantanamo and argue that the guilt of people there needs to be proven through a fair judicial process, but that is less a Tea Party issue. Calling anyone who does not mimic real Nazis a Nazi is usually not helpful, and few if any Tea Party people mimic real Nazis. Anyone attached emotionally to guns is scary. As for bad checks, I guess that’s a reference to the local rally leader. No one expects that of all of Tea Party people. That epithet seems better directed us at Wall Street that stuck us with a bad check in the form of toxic overvalued assets that tanked the economy.