Standing Up To Face the Applause
“Never write a memoir,” intoned my undergraduate professor as we discussed selections of the Gulag Archipelago. “If you’ve got to write something of the sort, make it a confession. But not a memoir. Never a memoir. If I ever find out that any of you has written a memoir, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
Good advice, that. But somehow I doubt that the sort of narcissistic self-flagellation that’s become the boringly predictable output of one Frank Schaeffer was what he had in mind. Indeed, this sort of stuff has likely got Solzhenitsyn vomiting in his grave:
The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I’d like to say that I, and the people I worked with in the pro-life movement, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.
I am very sorry.
And I, too, am glad that I am no longer like that publican …
But anyway. Mark Shea – whose brilliantly-titled post is the inspiration for this one and is so the winner of Post Title of the Week – has got more on Schaeffer, and Brendan O’Neill and the ever-indispensable Jesse Walker have similarly illuminating takes on the “Blame the radical rhetoric” meme that’s been trotted out with disturbing but oh-so-foreseeable frequency since the horrible events of this past Sunday. Read on, and if you ever advance your career as a pundit by patting yourself on the back and dishonoring the memory of your dead father, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.
Filed under: abortion, media/culture
O.M.G. John. I can’t believe you posted this.
One of the factors of the genocide in Rwanda is media propaganda. That propaganda is considered to have played a crucial role in fomenting genocide. Is there a significant difference between media personalities then in Rwanda and media personalities now in the US? I doubt it.
If you continually call those who disagree with you “murderers”, you can fully expect that some of your fellow travelers will take the law into their own hands.
This dissembling, by Shea and others, is little more than whistling in the dark, hoping to scare of the boogeyman of consequences for inflammatory speech. If you must bring it up at all, at least have the grace to separate yourself from the murderer, the agent of evil, and the apologist.
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” If you speak hatred, hatred shall be returned. If you desire respect for your beliefs, accord others respect for theirs.
Jake
Just to be clear, I don’t call people who disagree with me “murderers”. I call murderers (like Tiller) “murderers”. Stick scissors in a baby’s brain, earn the title “murderer”. It’s only complicated if you want it to be (and boy do pro-aborts want it to be complicated). In this, they remind of nothing so much as people like Newt Gingrich, who is perpetually baffled at why anybody would call the defense of waterboarding “being pro-torture”. Nothing a sophist hates more than clear language about obvious facts.
What Mark said. The idea that one should abstain from ever saying controversial or potentially incendiary things lest his words be misinterpreted by a lunatic is the worst sort of foolishness; obviously it’s important to be truthful and charitable in what one says and how one says it, but mainstream pro-lifers are no more responsible for the Tiller murder than MLK deserves blame for the violence committed by the Black Panthers and their ilk.
Truthful? Mark and John, I appreciate that you stand by your convictions, but your convictions are not shared by me an not by many others. Your clear facts, Mark, in this instance are not clear at all, and nor are they facts. They are conjectures based upon your religious beliefs, no more.
Tiller performed therapeutic abortions, not abortions of choice. In choosing him as the poster child for the evil of abortion, you have chosen the wrong end of the spectrum. He performed abortions, killed fetuses after viability, because either the fetus or the mother, or both, would not survive the birth as functional human beings.
And John, you are wrong when you say we are not responsible for our words. Roeder did not “misinterpret” your words – he took the law into his own hands because he believed that Tiller was condemned as a murderer by people he trusted. The law couldn’t act, so Roeder did.
Our words are a special kind of act, and when we use inflammatory language, we invite inflammatory acts. You may disagree with my beliefs, and speak against them with passion, but you cannot then disavow your acts, the special acts that are speech, when the natural and predictable consequences of your words are acts of violence.
If you call someone a murderer loud enough and long enough, someone will follow your lead and do the violence you forswear.
Jake
OJ Simpson was a murderer, Jake. You gonna go off and shoot him?
John,
First, I am not susceptible to the speech of rabble rousers. Second, there are no rabble rousers inciting hatred of OJ.
It is not a comparable situation. Now, were OJ to continue to murder innocents, then likely he would become a victim himself.
Having said all that, you bring up an interesting conundrum. There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that OJ is a murderer. There is no political or social divide on this issue. Yet the public is content to let the law work, imperfect as it may be.
Now, with abortion, you believe the law to be imperfect in the same sense as it was imperfect for OJ – it protects someone you believe is a murderer. What is the difference? Add in the hate speech, and suddenly there are 8 dead abortion providers numerous other violent acts, including non-fatal shootings, bombings and various kinds of intimidation.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but it sure looks like it might be true here.
Jake
I’m pretty sure it’s not worth discussing these points with you any longer, Jake, but let me try one more time:
1. While “the public” may be “content to let the law work” in the OJ Simpson case, I imagine they also think the law’s got it wrong, and that a more perfect legal system would have found him guilty.
2. I’m quite sure that it’s not true that “there are no rabble rousers inciting hatred of OJ”; think for example of the right-wing talk radio host that David Foster Wallace profiled in the Atlantic some years ago. To the extent that there’s “hate speech” present in the pro-life crowd, there’s undoubtedly much of the same among anti-OJ extremists.
3. Calling someone a murderer isn’t hate speech; it’s just a statement of what is sometimes (believed to be) a cold, hard fact. I don’t hate OJ Simpson any more than I hated George Tiller.
4. Martin Luther King preached prayer, passive resistance, and nonviolence in the civil rights movement, while still calling out the grave injustices of racism for what they were. The vast majority of pro-life leaders have called for exactly the same response in the face of the horror of abortion. In each instance, there have been some – indeed, I’d confidently vouch, many more in the case of the civil rights movement – who’ve ignored these calls for restraint and turned to violence and hatred. In the face of such excesses, should MLK have put his inflammatory rhetoric aside and instead resorted to saying, gee, racism isn’t really my thing, so try not to do it, but let’s not get all up in arms when we witness it? Hardly. So how is your diagnosis of the supposed dangers of pro-life “extremism” any different from Richard Nixon’s attempt – see the Jesse Walker post I linked above – to blame social upheaval on professors, civil rights leaders, and clergymen?
I think the law is perfectly appropriate with respect to abortion. That difference is fundamental, John. If you cannot accept that my beliefs, though different from yours, are as fully found, then we are unlikely to resolve anything. Which is not a problem to me, necessarily, as I seek first to understand.
MLK’s inflammatory rhetoric. Another interesting comparison. In MLK’s case, the most inflamed were in fact not MLK’s followers but his opponents. The victims of that speech were his followers. I believe that is the point of non-violence. “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” MLK, as did Ghandi before him, inspired his followers to hang on long enough to win.
To my knowledge, no anti-abortionists have been victims of violence carried out by pro-choice extremists. The victims of anti-abortion rhetoric have been exclusively pro-choice.
Again, thank you for pursuing this discussion as far as you have. I appreciate it.
Jake
Yes, but I don’t. The difference is indeed fundamental, which is exactly why we’re having this discussion; my point was just that your attempt – or at least what I thought was your attempt – to use the case of OJ Simpson as a reductio of my view was a failure.
As to the MLK analogy, I’d say that pro-choice people are very often “inflamed” by pro-lifers rhetoric as well, no? But in any case that’s irrelevant, since there were many people on his own side of the issue who were also moved to violence by his rhetoric and those of other civil rights leaders; the key point is just that the mere possibility of inflaming a few people, on one side or another, is no reason to refrain from speaking (what one takes to be) the truth.
This is false. For example: http://blogharrisburgpa.blogspot.com/2008/01/abortion-protester-gets-clobbered.html.
John, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you read my quote you will see that I carefully constructed my phrase to allow for your finding examples. I did not have knowledge of this incident, nor do I have knowledge of any other incidents.
This incident in my estimation had nothing to do with pre-planned violence specifically against an anti-abortionist, but rather simple human anger at being the target of disrespectful language.
That this thin soup was the best you could find on short notice makes my point.
Wrt to the OJ discussion, that gives us at least two things about which we fundamentally disagree. :)
Jake
Here’s more, Jake: http://abortionviolence.com/VIOLENCE.HTM.
So when Vincent Bugliosi publishes a book that calls George W. Bush a murderer, we should hold Bugliosi accountable if some nutter goes off tomorrow and shoots W. at his ranch? The anti-war movement too? For a great many people, Jake, Bush is directly responsible for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq. And these people are probably quite aware that Bush will never ever face justice do to the settled interpretations of American law. So should people refrain from directly calling out what they see as Bush’s crimes simply because one wacko might get a murderous idea from it?
I looked at Oklahoma, because that is where I live. I read several entries, but the first 3 entries are typical. I found these crimes listed:
1) murder of a pregnant gf
2) abuse and murder of a baby
3) arson at the Elk City Crisis Pregnancy center
The first two are hardly anti-abortion violence, but the third is interesting – none of the local newspaper archives (or the intertubz in general) mention such a fire, much less that it was set by anti-abortionists. The reference listed in the index is no longer available.
This is a random sample, and a small one. But 3 bad references out of 3? Not looking good for that source. The rest of the Oklahoma data is just a shaky.
You probably can find some acts of planned violence against anti-abortionists by pro-choice extremists. You haven’t yet done it.
And it is beside the point. No O’Reilly, or any pro-choice demagogue speaking in similar though counter vein, has been on cable TV (or anywhere else) inveighing against Randall Terry (for example).
Jake
CEK, GWB has full time security for exactly those reasons. If you want to provide full time security for abortion clinics and providers, I think that would be a step in the right direction.
Jake
Somehow I find that verrrrrrrrrrrry hard to believe. But anyway. This:
… is entirely beside the point, since the question is whether those – like me! – who criticize Bush in harsh terms are responsible for the actions of those who might succeed in doing harm to him. And of course we do provide security to abortion clinics, as well we should (so long as they’re allowed, as they shouldn’t be, to operate).
All this really boils down to is “Shut up about things I don’t want to hear about.”
I’ve heard precious little about ceasing to condemn the Iraq War because some nutjob killed a soldier in Arkansas. Does it not follow that the entire antiwar movement must not longer use “incendiary language” about “unjust war” or “Bush lying and people dying”, lest some other nutjob open fire on a soldier somewhere?
(And please, hold your horses, if you think I support the Iraq war or Bush/Cheney. I don’t. I just recognize leftist hypocrisy and selective outrage when I see it.)